It is anticipated that those turning out to protest Bush’s visit will dwarf the hundreds of protestors who turned up to campaign against a visit by former US Vice President Dick Cheney in Vancouver last month, where the “Vice President for Torture” was addressing diners who had paid $500 a head for the privilege. As CTV News noted, however, “The numbers at the Bush rally could dwarf those at the Cheney event because many protesters from the Occupy Vancouver movement camped out at the Vancouver Art Gallery are planning to head to Surrey to take part.”

Amnesty International got the ball rolling last week, calling for Bush’s arrest for war crimes and torture. In a press release, Susan Lee, Americas Director at Amnesty International, explained, “Canada is required by its international obligations to arrest and prosecute former President Bush given his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture. As the US authorities have, so far, failed to bring former President Bush to justice, the international community must step in.  A failure by Canada to take action during his visit would violate the UN Convention against Torture and demonstrate contempt for fundamental human rights.”

Amnesty International “submitted a memorandum to the Canadian authorities on 21 September 2011 that makes a substantial case for the former president’s legal responsibility for a series of human rights violations,” and a further submission has been made by Lawyers Against War (see here for the letter by Gail Davidson to the Crimes against Humanity & War Crimes Section of the government’s Citizenship and Immigration department). Furthermore, on September 29, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) submitted a 69-page page draft indictment to Attorney General Robert Nicholson, along with more than 4,000 pages of supporting material, setting forth the case against Bush for torture.

All of these entreaties were ignored, but today, as George W. Bush arrives in Canada, the four Guantánamo prisoners — Hassan bin Attash, Sami el-Hajj, Muhammed Khan Tumani and Murat Kurnaz (all released, with the exception of bin Attash) — will lodge a private prosecution in Provincial Court in Surrey, British Columbia against George W. Bush. Further details of this submission, by CCR and CCIJ, are below, and I congratulate them for their tenacity.

In February this year, George W. Bush cancelled a planned visit to Switzerland, after CCR and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights announced that they would be submitting a torture indictment and asking the Swiss government to arrest him when he landed on Swiss soil. I cross-posted that complaint here, and, as CCR’s Executive Director, Vince Warren, explained, although Bush cancelled that particular visit, the Preliminary Bush Torture Indictment, prepared by CCR and ECCHR, “provides a strong factual and legal basis to hold Bush accountable — in any of the 147 countries which have ratified the [UN] Convention Against Torture (CAT) — for having authorized torture.”

It seems that the former President accepts that he is not welcome in Europe. What a shame that the Canadian government has not made it clear that he is also unwelcome in Canada.

Torture Victims to Initiate Private Prosecution against George W. Bush on His Arrival in Canada

Canadian Government Has Legal Obligation under UN Convention Against Torture to Prosecute Alleged Perpetrators of Torture, Rights Groups Say; Prominent Individuals and Organizations Sign on in Support.

October 19, 2011, Surrey, BC — Tomorrow, four individuals who allege they were tortured during George W. Bush’s tenure as president of the United States will lodge a private prosecution in Provincial Court in Surrey, British Columbia against the former president, who is due to visit Canada for a paid speaking engagement at the Surrey Regional Economic Summit on October 20. The four men will take this step after repeated calls to the Canadian Attorney General to open a torture investigation of George Bush went unanswered. Human rights groups and prominent individuals will sign on in support of the effort.

The four men — Hassan bin Attash, Sami el-Hajj, Muhammed Khan Tumani and Murat Kurnaz — each endured years of inhumane treatment including beatings, chaining to cell walls, being hung from walls or ceilings while handcuffed, lack of access to toilets, sleep, food and water-deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, sensory overload and deprivation, and other horrific and illegal treatment while in U.S. custody at military bases in Afghanistan and/or at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. While three of the plaintiffs have since been released without ever facing charges, Hassan bin Attash still remains in detention at Guantánamo Bay, though he too has not been formally charged with any wrongdoing.

“I lost my family, my father, my health, my education because of George Bush. Although I was completely innocent, I lost nearly 10 years of my life,” said former Guantánamo detainee and torture survivor Muhammed Khan Tumani. “I suffered greatly while detained at Guantánamo, and continue to suffer. I have restrictions on my travel and cannot travel to see my father who is ill. George Bush must face justice and be held accountable for his actions, which continue to cause me and so many harm.”

On September 29, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) submitted a 69-page page draft indictment to Attorney General Robert Nicholson, along with more than 4,000 pages of supporting material, setting forth the case against Bush for torture. The indictment, incorporated into the criminal information lodged today, contends that by Bush’s own admission he sanctioned and authorized acts that constitute torture under the Canadian criminal code and the Convention Against Torture (CAT).

Katherine Gallagher, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) who is assisting the plaintiffs, said, “George Bush’s brazen admission to authorizing torture techniques and unlawful detentions, including enforced disappearances, must not be met with indifference. His years of impunity must come to an end. Even if the United States has failed to meet its obligations to hold torturers accountable, Canada has an opportunity and a legal obligation to position itself on the right side of history and the law.”

Matt Eisenbrandt, legal director of the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ), who will submit the filing on men’s behalf, added, “Canadian law could not be clearer. If an alleged torturer is present in Canada, the government has the power to prosecute. As a signatory of the Convention Against Torture, Canada has an obligation to initiate an investigation when Mr. Bush sets foot in this country.”

More than 50 human rights organizations from around the world and prominent individuals signed on to support the call for George W. Bush’s prosecution, including former UN Special Rapporteurs on Torture, Theo van Boven and Manfred Nowak, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the Canadian-based International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group. A number of the human rights organizations which signed on are facing the on-going harms of the “counterterrorism” policies advanced under the Bush administration and then adopted or employed in their own countries.

Former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said: “The main aim of the UN Convention Against Torture was to eradicate safe havens for persons who commit, order, or participate in acts of torture worldwide. States parties to the Convention, including Canada, have a legal obligation to arrest all persons suspected of torture with the aim of bringing them to justice. There is plenty of evidence that President Bush authorized enhanced interrogation methods against suspected terrorists, some of which clearly amount to torture, such as waterboarding.”

Last February, the Center for Constitutional Rights, along with other human rights organizations, attempted to initiate criminal proceedings against Bush during a private speaking engagement in Geneva, but he canceled after news of the planned prosecution came to light. Following the cancellation, CCR and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights released the “Bush Torture Indictment,” which can serve as the basis for country-specific indictments against Bush in any of the 147 countries that have ratified the UN Convention Against Torture or have universal jurisdiction laws for torture.

Prior to the filing of this case, CCR and the CCIJ twice (on Sept. 29, 2011 and Oct. 14, 2011) petitioned Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Robert Nicholson by letter to launch a criminal investigation against Bush during his October 20 visit to Canada, but received no response. George Bush and former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney both recently made trips to Canada, without any legal consequence.

A copy of the filing can be viewed in full here. The Letter of Support is available in English and French.

*****

The Canadian Centre for International Justice works with survivors of genocide, torture and other atrocities to seek redress and bring perpetrators to justice. The CCIJ seeks to ensure that individuals present in Canada who are accused of responsibility for serious human rights violations are held accountable and their victims recognized, supported and compensated. For more information visit the website.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, in addition to filing the first cases representing men detained at Guantánamo, has filed universal jurisdiction cases seeking accountability for torture by Bush administration officials in Germany, France and submitted expert opinions and other documentation to ongoing cases in Spain in collaboration with ECCHR. The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change. Further details regarding the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Bush Torture Indictment can be viewed here, and also visit the 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) 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.

Please support my work!

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

This is Part 21 of the 70-part series. 271 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also see Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten.

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

Zia Ul Shah (ISN 15, Pakistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 9 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Zia Ul Shah, from Karachi, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan to look for work, and was employed by the Taliban as a driver. Able to stipulate his own conditions, because the Taliban was in desperate need of drivers and he had his own truck, he refused to transport fighters to the war zone and mostly delivered food to a school in Kunduz that was used as a Taliban base.

Denying an allegation that he surrendered to the Northern Alliance in Kunduz, he explained, “I did not go to surrender. They asked me to take these [other] people to surrender and then they said I could go home. I took them to surrender and dropped them off, and then I left. There were a lot of other drivers that they let go, but they arrested me because I was the only Pakistani.” He said that this was only the beginning of his problems, and that his truck was then fought over by different factions of the Northern Alliance. Abandoned during the wrangling over the truck, he was taken in by an Afghan who offered him food, asked him where he was from, and kept him captive for five days before selling him to another Afghan, who promptly sold him to another Afghan who “was beating me up everyday.” This man then sold him to the Americans who “beat me up a little bit also [and] broke my nose. You can see that the bone is fractured. Then they took me to Kandahar.”

In 2008, he was interviewed by a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers for a major review of 66 released Guantánamo prisoners, when as was noted, there was little in his tribunal transcripts to suggest that he was anything but a truck driver for the Taliban.” Ul Shah (identified as Zia Khalid Najib) reiterated that he was seized “after he’d driven a load of Taliban fighters to surrender,” and explained that he’d “made the trip between his home on the outskirts of Karachi to Afghanistan on a regular basis since 1999, often doing jobs for the Taliban,” such as “transporting troops, food and blankets.” He added that he “did the work more for money than out of conviction.”

Although he “may or may not have come in contact occasionally with low- to mid-level Taliban leaders and ‘possible’ Pakistani intelligence agents inside the Taliban,” as the transcripts suggested, for that he was, as McClatchy pointed out, “imprisoned at Guantánamo for more than four years, longer than many top Taliban leaders and men accused of being Al-Qaida militants.”

McClatchy’s reporter concluded that “Najib and many more like him were detained for years not because of their actions on the battlefield or their links to terrorist groups, but because they tangled with guards at Guantánamo. There were exceptions, but some militants who behaved well in their cells were released relatively quickly while men at the bottom of the Taliban pecking order or those such as Najib who appeared not to be Taliban members were held far longer because they’d gotten into fights.”

Confirming this, Afghanistan’s attorney general, Abdul Jabar Sabit, said after visiting Guantánamo that “he was struck that detainees were classified into groups, marked in descending order from orange to white garb, by how well they behaved and not by whether they were suspected of terrorist or anti-American activities.” “This division did not have anything to do with the crimes attributed to them,” he said. “Only their behavior in the prison was taken into account.”

Najib said that, when guards “teased him by dropping a copy of the Quran or flipping through its pages,” or when they “got into confirmations” with other prisoners, he could not contain his anger. “I could not bear it, so I reacted violently,” he said, stating again, “I would react violently.”

As a result, he spent most of his time in solitary. “They would say they were taking me to isolation for three days, and then leave me there for three months,” he said. “Then they would bring me back to a cell, and three or four days later take me back to isolation … I would say, and this is a guess, I spent 15 days a month in isolation.”

Turning to his interrogations, he spoke about how he had been obliged to deny an allegation that he had been a driver for Osama bin Laden, and explained, in a succinct description of the pointlessness of these sessions, “The interrogators spent entire sessions asking me why I was staring at them and yelling at me that I should look at the floor.”

Speaking about a review board hearing before his release, he further highlighted the absurdity of his predicament, telling the board of military officers that “many of the reasons listed for keeping him at Guantánamo — that he knew various militants and their organizations — were the result of his telling interrogators that he knew of the men.” As he explained, “When they asked me if I know of them or did you hear about them I said yes,” he said. “[T]hese people have big banners hanging all over Karachi and in Pakistan. Of course I heard of them.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Zia Ul Shah was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated April 22, 2005, in which he was identified as Zia Ul Shah (not Zia Khalid Najib), born in January 1976, and it was noted that he was assessed as being eligible for “Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country (TR)” on November 20, 2003, but that new information had led to the revision of this recommendation, so that it did not involve the possibility of release.

To reach this conclusion, the Task Force had reassessed him, and, perhaps because of his behavior, had gone to great lengths to dress up a driver — who, at most, “support[ed] the Taliban against Coalition forces on the front lines by transporting food, supplies, weapons and personnel” — as someone more significant. He was assessed as being a member of the Taliban with “ties to” or “institutional knowledge of” four Pakistani militant groups — Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islami (HUJI), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM), Harkat-ul-Mujahidin (HUM) and Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LET) — described as “Tier 1 Terrorist Target[s],” which “are defined as terrorist groups, especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests.”

Due to what was described as his “extensive knowledge” of Taliban, HUJI, JEM and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) operations as well as his placement and access to key figures and front line positions,” it was claimed that it was “most likely [he] was an active participant against US and Coalition forces,” who was “concealing his true affiliations with Pakistani Islamic extremist organizations and his support of the Taliban in Afghanistan,” and that he was therefore “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.”

Seeking to justify this exaggerated analysis, the Task Force explained how, after Ul Shah left Karachi for Afghanistan, he met a Taliban member in Kabul, who “told him if he went to Kunduz, AF, he could start driving a truck immediately for the Taliban,” and who “wrote [his] name on a piece of paper allowing [him] authorization to board a plane to Kunduz.” In relating the work he did, the Task Force claimed that “he acquired knowledge of the JEM and HUJI terrorist organizations, Taliban communication security procedures such as code words and simple encryption techniques, as well as observed Taliban and Al-Qaida leadership to include Senior Al-Qaida Commander Abdul Hadi Al-Iraqi [later captured and sent to Guantánamo], the leader of Osama Bin Laden’s (UBL) Arab Brigade in Kunduz, AF, region.”

To be honest, this doesn’t seem to constitute anything more than would be required of a driver doing his job, although it undoubtedly involved some information that would be useful as intelligence, as, presumably, was an additional claim that he “interacted with what he believe[d] to be Arab members of the Pakistani ISID that would spy against the Northern Alliance and report to Taliban/HUJI commander Sajjad and Taliban commander Ayubi.” However, if intelligence was what was being extracted, then it was somewhat dishonest to dress it up as information that contributed to the threat level he posed.

In addition, some of it was also of distinctly dubious provenance. An allegation that he was a member of HUJI, for example, was made under unknown circumstances by a fellow prisoner, Abdul Sattar Safeezi (ISN 11, identified as Abdul Sedar Nafeesi), and another implausible sounding claim — that he told Isa Khan (ISN 23, identified as Isaka K Bannu) that “he had four brothers, who were Taliban truck drivers as well” — was, according to an analyst, supposed to “add validity to the assumption [that his] family supports jihad and likely provides insight as to [his] true motives for going to Afghanistan.”

In detailing the circumstances of his capture, the Task Force noted that he “drove a truck full of Taliban soldiers to surrender to General Dostum’s forces,” and that a Northern Alliance soldier “boarded [his] truck and told him to drive to a prison near Mazar-e-Sharif,” from which he subsequently “escaped, but was recaptured by Northern Alliance soldiers.” Apparently handed over to US forces on November 26, 2001 (although the US had no general detention facilities at that time), he was sent to Guantánamo on May 13, 2002, allegedly to “provide information on the following: Punjab foreign fighters from the Punjab region who supported the Taliban operating north of Konduz, Punjabi leaders, Commander Qari Saleem and deputy, Bayee Moogheerah [and] Punjab recruiting practices, to include madrassas used as recruiting places in Pakistan.”

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

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

In conclusion, Ul Shah was assessed as being of medium intelligence value (as well as a medium threat risk) and Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood recommended his transfer for continued detention in Pakistan. He was not actually released for another 17 months, although there is no evidence that, on his return, he was subjected to further detention, as the US authorities wished.

Mohammed Al Zayla (ISN 55, Saudi Arabia) Released December 2006

In Chapter 5 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Mohammed al-Zayla, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture, admitted, in Guantánamo, that he had received military training at the Al-Farouq training camp (the basic training camp for Arab recruits), but said that he didn’t fight the Northern Alliance because he wouldn’t fight other Muslims. He said that he went to Afghanistan because he wanted to fight in Chechnya, and an ex-Chechen fighter told him he should first receive some training in Afghanistan, and added that he was in Kabul, on the back lines, when the US-led invasion started, and that everyone in the house that he was staying in decided to leave for Pakistan via Khost.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Zayla was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated March 3, 2006, in which he was identified as Muhammad Yahya Muhsin Al-Zaylai, born in July 1977, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although “Behavioral Health ha[d] seen him for personality disorder and outbursts,” and it was also noted that he had “a history of gastroenteritis,” and “a history of episodes of orthostatic hypotension due to dehydration from the hunger strike, which was resolved after hydration with IVF.” It was also noted that he “was on a hunger strike in March 2002 and August 2005,” and that he had scars “on his right bicep, mid abdomen, lower back and right knee.”

In assessing al-Zayla, the Task Force provided a detailed version of his story, noting that he said that, in February or March 2001, he bought and watched a video about the “atrocities being committed by the Russians against Muslims in Chechnya,” and “then made the decision to travel to Chechnya to join the jihad.” This was a reason given by many of the prisoners, and there was, to be honest, no reason to doubt it necessarily, especially as numerous sources confirm that, to have a chance of getting to Chechnya, volunteers needed first to undertake training in Afghanistan. This, al-Zayla said, is what friends told him, and he was then put onto a facilitator, who arranged his visit to Afghanistan.

After arriving in Kandahar via Pakistan, and the Taliban’s office in Quetta, al-Zayla said that he was taken to a guest house (Al-Nebras), where “he was asked his name, asked if he was anxious to begin his training, and offered a safe to store his personal belongings.” He said that he “stayed in the guest house for two days, accepting the offer of safe storage, before going to Al-Farouq in mid-April 2001,” where he “trained under Abu Saliman, a Filipino.” However, when he “became sick and another trainer took over, [he] decided to leave Al-Farouq.”

He and another recruit then stayed in the “Arab House” in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul “for two or three days before heading to the front lines,” where he was part of a group commanded by Abu Obeida. He said, however, that he “was never involved in any direct fighting, but did drill for an attack and was trained on the AK-47.” he also said that he “learned of the events of 11 September 2001 while on the front line.”

Al-Zayla also said that, in November 2001, he “and twenty others retreated from the front lines to Kabul,” where he “spoke with his family and decided to return home.” His personal belongings were in Kandahar, however, and when he tried to get them back, he was told that they had been sent to Khost for safekeeping. He then traveled to Khost, but was told that they had been sent on to a small village in Pakistan. He then traveled to Pakistan with approximately 28 others, split into two groups, each led by a guide. However, on arrival in Pakistan, the Pakistani authorities were waiting, and he was taken into custody, and was transferred to US custody in Peshawar on December 27, 2001.

He was sent to Guantánamo on January 11, 2002 (the day after the prison opened), on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Al-Farouq training camp [and] Guesthouse in Kandahar, AF.”

Of interest in his file are the statements made by his fellow prisoners, as they reveal the extent to which the authorities relied on the prisoners to incriminate each other, or to provide exculpatory information. In most cases, however, the reliability of these witnesses can, and should be called into question. In al-Zayla’s file, for example, after stating that he had been “photo-identified by known and assessed Al-Qaida members,” the Task Force revealed that those “known and assessed Al-Qaida members” included the Australian David Hicks (ISN 2), who was not an Al-Qaida member, and who is credited with having “photo-identified [al-Zayla] as someone he last saw in the Madafa in Kandahar” (which an analyst assessed as being a reference to the Al-Nebras guest house), and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul (ISN 39, still held), identified as Ali Hamza A Ismail, who was an al-Qaeda member, and who “stated that [al-Zayla] was in his group upon capture.”

Other dubious claims were made by Abd Al-Malik Abd Al-Wahab (ISN 37, still held), a probable Taliban fighter identified as an “[a]ssessed Al-Qaida operative and UBL [Osama bin Laden] bodyguard,” who “identified [al-Zayla] as Mahmoud from Saudi Arabia,” and said that he “knew [him] from the road fleeing Afghanistan,” but “did not know why [he] was in Afghanistan” (which does not sound very convincing), the British prisoner Richard Belmar (ISN 817), described as an “[a]ssessed Al-Qaida member,” who “stated [al-Zayla] and many others looked familiar when asked to review the photos of suspected UBL bodyguards,” but who “provided no further information on where he may have seen [him] before” (which is a particularly weak claim), and Sami El-Leithi (ISN 287), identified as Al-Muntasir Billah Ahmad Al-Bibr, and described as an “[a]ssessed jihadist” (which is ridiculous, as he was a teacher), who “photo-identified [al-Zayla] as a Saudi named Mohammed Omar aka Grandfather, who [he] knew from JTF GTMO” (which is also a very weak claim, as he did not claim knowledge of al-Zayla from anywhere except at Guantánamo).

Further information, which played in al-Zayla’s favour, as it involved repeated claims that he was not a bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, also came from numerous other sources, revealing the extent to which prisoners were plugged for information about each other. Those who did not name al-Zayla as a bodyguard were: Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63, still held), who was tortured in Guantánamo, Abu Zubaydah (ISN 10016, still held) and Walid bin Attash (ISN 10014, still held), who were tortured in secret CIA prisons, Abdu Ali Al-Haji Sharqawi (ISN 1457, still held) and Sanad Yislam Al-Kazimi (ISN 1453, still held), who were also tortured, Salim Hamdan (ISN 149, released in November 2008), a driver for Osama bin Laden, and Mohammad Hashim (ISN 850, released in December 2009), an Afghan fantasist who claimed to have escorted bin Laden out of Afghanistan (and was believed by the US authorities).

In analyzing his case, the Task Force assessed that he was “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] occasionally been both non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff.” In terms of the threat he reportedly posed to the US, he was assessed as “a jihadist who traveled to Afghanistan for training,” and as “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” He was also assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Hood recommended him for continued detention. However, it was also noted that, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, he can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).” Nine months later, he was indeed transferred out of Guantánamo, to take part in the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Salim Al Harbi (ISN 57, Saudi Arabia) Released December 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (3) – ‘Osama’s Bodyguards,’“  I told the story of Salim al-Harbi, who was 33 years old at the time of his capture. His story was unknown while I was researching and writing The Guantánamo Files, and was not made available until the Pentagon released a batch of documents relating to the prisoners in September 2007.

As I explained in the online chapter, al-Harbi’s story provided a break from most other narratives with its bold statements that he “left Mecca to get away from debts he owed from his failing business,” sold his automobile and decided to go to Afghanistan “to make a profit from the drug trade,” or, as he put it elsewhere, because he wanted “to get away from everything and stay high,” as opium and hashish were “very cheap in Afghanistan.” He was apparently no stranger to drugs and jails, as it was stated in his Unclassified Summary of Evidence that he was jailed in Mecca “after some financial problems with Interpol in 1998-99,” that he was also jailed — both in Riyadh and the UAE — for defrauding a telephone company, and that he also “spent two years in prison for stealing and possession of a controlled substance.”

Al-Harbi claimed that he stayed with a drug dealer in Khost, and “had access to the drug trade,” and he also seems to have come into contact with the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi, who, he pointed out, were “known to pay off the debts of members willing to travel for the group,” and, it should be noted, were also more than likely to want to “save” a drug addict who came into contact with them. Although the US authorities doubted his story that he was taken to the Pakistani border and apprehended either after being injured in a motorbike accident or while traveling in a bus that was hit in a US bombing raid, they secured little in the way of allegations against him, other than a claim that his trip was facilitated by a man who later became a jihadist martyr, and, bizarrely, that his alias was found “in the pocket litter of a Mujahedin [sic] traveling from Bosnia to Croatia in 1996.” It is unknown whether his stated aim on his return to Saudi Arabia — to “build a house and open a restaurant” — came true.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Harbi was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated February 3, 2006, in which it was noted that he was born in November 1968, and also had an extensive medical history at Guantánamo, in which it was noted that he “was on a hunger strike in July 2003 and August 2005,” had a “history of latent TB but refused therapy,” had “a history of low Body Mass Index last recorded at 19.4%,” had “a history of chronic bilateral knee pain,” had “a documented episode of atrial fibrillation in 2002 that ha[d] now reportedly converted,” and had “a history of hypothyroidism but [had] refused all jabs and medications.”

Despite al-Harbi’s story about his drug history, and his intention in traveling to Afghanistan, the Task Force assessed him as “a probable jihadist,” who claim[ed] to have traveled to Afghanistan (AF), for a drug consumer holiday.” It was also noted that, while in Afghanistan, he “resided in several guesthouses and associated with members of a known Al-Qaida affiliated organisation, Jamaat al-Tablighi,” which was an outrageous distortion, as Jamaat al-Tablighi is a vast apolitical missionary organization, and that he “resided in known Al-Qaida and Taliban havens for extended periods of time,” although it was added, crucially, that he had “no documented attendance at training camps” — and, it should have been added, there was no evidence that he had engaged in combat against the US.

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that he began using drugs at school, at the age of 15, dropped out of school, and was then imprisoned after “defrauding a satellite cellular phone company.” In prison, he met a man who suggested that he should go to Afghanistan “because the drugs were abundant and cheap,” which he did. Although he took a familiar recruitment route — from Karachi to Quetta, and then to Kandahar and Kabul, he denied ever participating in any armed conflict while in Afghanistan,” and said that he stayed in Khost (one of the “known Al-Qaida and Taliban havens” referred to above) for four months, where he decided to kick his drug addiction.

After the US-led invasion began, he traveled to Peshawar, via Miram Shah, with two Afghan members of Jamaat al-Tablighi, where he “and another six or seven Pakistanis and Arabs were stopped and then taken to jail.” He was transferred to US custody on December 27, 2001, and was sent to Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, although “no reasons for transfer” were documented.

The Task Force stated that his account “appears to be a cover story; however, there is limited additional information with which to counter his claims.” It was noted that he “fail[ed] to mention his previous participation in jihad and his association with Bosnian mujahideen,” but although it was difficult to be suspicious of the information from the Saudi Ministry of Interior General Dlrectorate of Investigations (Mabahith), which stated that he “went to Afghanistan in 1990 or 1991 for jihad,” there was no evidence that he had been in Bosnia, as it relied on a very thin claim that a “variation of [his] alias” was “found in the pocket litter” of a Saudi and a Pakistani who entered Croatia from Bosnia as mujahideen in January 1996. In addition, although at one point it was stated that the Mabahith “identified detainee as a high priority detainee,” in July 2002, “a delegation from Saudi Arabia visited JTF GTMO and interviewed detainee, [who] was identified as being of low intelligence and law enforcement value to the US, and unlikely to pose a terrorist threat to the US or its interests.”

In conclusion, al-Harbi was assessed as “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behavior ha[d] been both non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff,” although, in terms of the threat he reportedly posed to the US, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence,” and as “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and, as a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he should continue to be held. However, it was also noted, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, [he] can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).” In addition, “A visiting Saudi delegation indicated that the Government of Saudi Arabia would be willing to take custody of detainee for possible prosecution.”

Musa Al Wahab (ISN 58, Saudi Arabia) Released June 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (3) – ‘Osama’s Bodyguards,’“  I described the thin set of allegations leveled against Musa al-Wahab, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture. By his own account, he “received a fatwa to conduct Dawa activity [providing religious guidance] in Afghanistan,” and “used his own money to pay for his trip,” but he was, typically, the brunt of other, unsubstantiated claims. Although he was not specifically accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden — it was noted, instead, that he was “captured with a group of 30 individuals that include some of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards and a weapons trainer” — he “was reported to have attended a known terrorist training camp,” and to have “been in Tora Bora,” where it was additionally “reported” that he was “an Emir of a group of fighters.”

Apparently jailed in Saudi Arabia for theft (with two Nigerians who were later deported), he was variously — and confusingly — described as being on a foreign government watch list for a supposed trip to Chechnya (not mentioned elsewhere), regarded as a “high priority” detainee by the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, and regarded by a foreign government service (the Saudis again, I presume) as being of “low intelligence or law enforcement value to the United States and also unlikely to pose a terrorist threat to the US or its interests.” His release, of course, suggested that the latter was true.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Wahab was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated January 21, 2005, in which it was stated that he was born in July 1977, he was also identified as Musa A. Al-Hawsawi, and it was noted that he had “a history of a depressive disorder and a personality disorder not elsewhere specified.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted his own version of events, whereby he left Saudi Arabia on July 27, 2001, traveling to Afghanistan via Karachi, to meet an Afghan friend, and, unsuccessfully, to seek a wife. When his Afghan friend returned to Saudi Arabia, he then traveled to Khost, hoping to meet other Arabs, but ended up, as the US-led invasion had begun, traveling to Pakistan with about 30 other people, led by Afghan guides. Seized by the Pakistani military in Parachinar, on December 15, 2001, he was imprisoned in Peshawar, and then handed over to the US authorities on December 27, 2001. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 16, 2002, although his “file [did] not indicate why he was sent to JTF GTMO.”

The Task Force assessed al-Wahab as part of “the Dirty 30″ — mostly regarded as bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, despite problems with these claims — although no one claimed that al-Wahab was actually a bodyguard. Instead, a variety of unreliable witnesses claimed that he trained at Al-Farouq: torture victim Mohammed al-Qahtani (ISN 63), the notorious liar Yasim Basardah (ISN 252), and the British prisoner Richard Belmar (ISN 817), who was also subjected to abuse. Basardah additionally identified him as being in Tora Bora, and Mohammed Hashim (ISN 850, released in December 2009), a notorious Afghan fantasist, “identified [him] as an individual he had been seen with [at] the Abu Hasan Arab Military division in Kunduz, AF, while they were standing outside of their building.”

In conclusion, he was “assessed to be a low-level member of Al-Qaida and its terrorist network,” because of the unsubstantiated allegations outlined above, and it was also noted that, although he had been “erroneously tied to” Amran al-Hawsawi (ISN 368, released in September 2007), “there [was] a possibility that [he had] familial ties with ISN 368 and his brother,” who, it was stated, was “in Saudi custody.” It was also noted that the Saudi Ministry of Interior General Directorate of Investigations (Mabahith) had stated that al-Wahab had been in Chechnya, which was considered significant by the Task Force, although it was not corroborated elsewhere. As a result, although he had “not admitted to being in Tora Bora or attending an Al-Qaida run training camp,” he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended him for transfer to continued dentition in Saudi Arabia.

Murat Kurnaz (ISN 61, Germany) Released August 2006

In the history of Guantánamo, only a handful of former prisoners have become prominent in the media after their release, helping to publicize both the injustices of Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” and also the complicity of other governments. One of those is Murat Kurnaz, who wrote a book about his experiences, Fünf Jahre meines Lebens: Ein Bericht aus Guantánamo, which was published in 2007, and who has made frequent media appearances since his release. His book was then published in English in 2008, as Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo.

As I explained in Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, Kurnaz, who was 19 years old at the time of his capture, was an apprentice shipbuilder who was born and raised in Bremen, Germany. The son of Turkish immigrants who had moved to Germany in the 1970s, he was accused of being “a member of Al-Qaida who had been trying to reach Afghanistan to fight against US forces.”

In fact, he went to Pakistan to study with the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi, and was captured on a bus in Pakistan in November 2001. Transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airport, he experienced many of the brutal methods of treatment described by other prisoners, as Amnesty International explained in a case sheet dealing with his predicament in May 2005. He said that “interrogators repeatedly forced his head into a bucket of cold water for long periods” and “gave electric shocks to his feet,” that he was “held for days shackled and handcuffed with his arms secured above his head,” and that on one occasion an officer loaded his gun and pointed it at his head, “screaming at him to admit to being an al-Qaeda associate.”

What I found disgraceful about Kurnaz’s case was that, initially, the German government washed its hands of him, even though it had been established early on in his detention that he had no connection to terrorism. As the Washington Post explained on his release, “By early 2002, US military intelligence and German law enforcement authorities had largely concluded there was no information linking Kurnaz to al-Qaida or terrorist activities, according to declassified records in his case.” These were made public in January 2005, when US District Court Judge Joyce Hens Green “criticized the military for ignoring evidence in Kurnaz’s favor and ruled that his detention was illegal,” as the Post explained, noting also that her ruling “was stayed while the government appealed.”

The German government ignored Kurnaz’s plight for four years because, although he was born in Germany, the status of his parents as gastarbeiter (guest workers) meant that, like all gastarbeiter, they were not allowed to claim German citizenship for themselves or their children, and his fate was left in the hands of the government of Turkey, where he had never lived. It was not until Angela Merkel became Chancellor in November 2005 that moves were made to secure his release, which took place nine months later.

In 2008, he was interviewed by a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers for a major review of 66 released Guantánamo prisoners, in which McClatchy confirmed that investigators had found “no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with al-Qaida or making any specific threat toward the US,” and Kurnaz explained — as he has so many times before and since — that when he was seized (in December 2001, in his account), “he was on his way to the airport after a month of studying in madrassas,” as part of “an effort to become a better Muslim man for his new, conservative, Muslim wife from Turkey.” He said that “his primary fear at first was that he’d miss his flight,” but that this changed when “Pakistani police handed him over to American forces for a $3,000 bounty” and he was sent to the US prison at Kandahar airport.

As he explained, “The closest I came to death, I believe, was when they hung me by my hands for five days. It may have been longer. It seemed an eternity.” This type of punishment is more commonly associated with the abusive regime at Bagram, the other prison used to process prisoners for Guantánamo, and it is clearly a form of torture. Describing it further, Kurnaz said that “his wrists were handcuffed together, a chain was connected to them and he was hoisted up with a pulley. The guards took him down only to check his vital signs.”

Kurnaz has also explained that, in Kandahar, another prisoner subjected to the same treatment died. He did not mention this to McClatchy’s reporter, but it is discussed in his book, and in an article published in the Washington Spectator in 2007, he said, “They were hanging me and pulled me up higher than the other times. I could see the man in the other room. He was hanging, too. Maybe they lifted him higher that time, too, I don’t know. I had heard him moaning and breathing; this is the first time I saw him. He was dead. The color of his body was changed and I could see he was dead.”

On another occasion, “he was questioned while he was being dunked in cold water,” and he explained that “when his American questioners kicked him in the stomach while his head was submerged, he began to fear that he’d inhale water and drown.” This story — again, one that Kurnaz has often repeated — was recently picked up on by the psychologist and reporter Jeff Kaye, for an article on the types of water torture used in the “War on Terror,” which I cross-posted here.

After he was moved to Guantánamo, Kurnaz has maintained, his ordeal continued. In his book, he wrote powerfully about the perils of surviving solitary confinement, where those who were regarded as uncooperative were held for at least a month, and often longer, in isolation cells with so little oxygen that it was an effort just to survive. Kurnaz also claimed, as McClatchy described it, that “he was beaten frequently, blasted with pepper spray, shackled to the floor for long periods and sexually molested by three female interrogators.” He added that his weight dropped from 220 pounds to 140.

In the article in the Washington Spectator, he “theorize[d] that much of the torture was a result of the failure of the American soldiers and agents to capture any real terrorists.” As he explained in his own words, “They didn’t have any big fish. And they thought that by torture they could get one of us to say something. ‘I know Osama’ or something like that. Then they could say they had a big fish.”

Speaking to McClatchy about his release, and his life since, he said that, although he learned that his grandfather and his favorite uncle had died and that his wife had divorced him, he thought he had “adapted well to normal life.” He was working as a city researcher in Bremen, had “bought a red sports car and a fast motorcycle, and he dream[ed] of finding a new wife.” As he explained, in conclusion, “Of course, I can never forget my life in prison. But I hold nothing against the people of America. What was done to me was done by their government. I understand most Americans had no idea what was happening to me, or the others, in that horrible place.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Kurnaz was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated May 19, 2006, in which he was identified as Murat Kunn, Murat Karnaz and Mourad Kournaz, born in March 1982, and, in defiance of a lack of evidence, was “assessed to be a member of Al-Qaida’s global terrorism network with membership in the Bremen Al-Qaida Cell and Jamaat al-Tablighi (JT) and probable associations with Lashkar-E-Tayiba (LET).” With the exception of Jamaat al-Tablighi, which is a vast apolitical missionary organization, despite the US authorities’ attempts to dress it up as an organized front for terrorism, Kurnaz had no involvement with the other organizations — Al-Qaida and LET, and the Bremen cell that didn’t even exist.

Despite a lack of evidence of any wrongdoing or planned wrongdoing on Kurnaz’s part, the Task Force persisted in claiming that he “traveled to Pakistan intent on receiving training and participating in hostilities against US and coalition forces operating in Afghanistan in preparation for the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom,” which, I believe, reveals primarily how, once in Guantánamo, and the longer prisoners were held, the more the supposed evidence against them was often little more than an accumulation of unsubstantiated allegations.

Repeating Kurnaz’s own story, the Task Force noted that, in the mosque in Bremen, he met two Jamaat al-Tablighi members, and, after speaking to them, “decided to travel to Pakistan to learn Arabic and increase his knowledge of Islam.” After he “stayed at a series of JT guesthouses and mosques before settling in Peshawar, PK, to teach the Koran,” he was then seized near Peshawar on a bus, after traveling to Miram Shah, on the Pakistan/Afghan border, with an associate, Mohammed, who was “helping him change his plane ticket for his return to Germany.” Transferred to US custody on December 27, 2001, he was sent to Guantánamo on February 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to provide information on the following: Jamaat al-Tablighi in Pakistan [and] Jamaat al-Tablighi at the Quba Mosque in Bremen, GM.”

After claiming that Kurnaz was “deceptive in answering questions and contradict[ed] himself on several occasions,” the Task Force also claimed that he was “standing by his cover story to avoid revealing his connections to extremists,” and assessed him as “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” drawing in particular on a claim by former CIA “ghost prisoner” Mohammad Haydar Zammar, described as “the Al-Qaida recruiter of 9/11 lead pilot Mohammad Atta,” who, it was conceded, was being held in a Syrian jail, where torture was rife. Zammar had apparently stated that he had “sent [Kurnaz] to Afghanistan in the days following 9/11,” and an analyst had added that “Zammar’s comment that detainee was sent by him to Afghanistan for terrorist training ‘just like Atta’s group before him’ suggest[ed] that [he] was to possibly be groomed as a suicide operative.”

This was a horrible example of what happens when people who are tortured are shown photos and obliged to identify the people in the photos, and there were other examples in Kurnaz’s file: a statement by Mohammed al-Qahtani, tortured at Guantánamo, who “photo-identified [him] as a German who was captured at Tora Bora,” even though he was not captured at Tora Bora at all.

Despite the lack of evidence against Kurnaz, and the creativity required to conjure up a case against him, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr., the commander of Guantánamo, recommended his continued detention.

For further information about Murat Kurnaz, see this article in Der Spiegel about Kurnaz’s initial claims that German operatives abused him in Afghanistan, this Al-Jazeera interview in 2008 (when I was also interviewed), this article featuring Kurnaz’s thoughts about the alleged triple suicide at Guantánamo in June 2006 (also see the story of Yasser al-Zahrani (ISN 93, below)), this article featuring his comments to interviewers from the United Nations, this article discussing a Human Rights Watch report about the complicity in torture of Germany and France, and this interview with Kurnaz on Russia Today in August 2011.

Abdel Hadi Sebaii (ISN 64, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In Chapter 5 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdel Hadi al-Sebaii, a police officer who was 31 years old at the time of his capture, went to Pakistan “for charity purposes to build houses,” as he said in Guantánamo, but decided he would be able to do more in Afghanistan. He explained that he “didn’t only go to build houses but anything that would help the poor and needy,” and added that it would cost him up to $300,000 to build a mosque in Saudi Arabia, whereas in Afghanistan it would only cost about $2,000. Speaking of the circumstances of his arrest, he raised the issue of prisoners (himself included) being sold to the Americans. He said that when he entered Pakistan and asked to go to his embassy, having shown the border guards his passport and travel tickets, he was told he would first be required to fill out some forms:

We were getting along famously. They didn’t put me in prison or place any restrictions on me … Suddenly, I was turned over to the United States. I don’t know why I was turned over to the US … My only problem was with the Pakistani government. Why did they do that? Pakistan is the reason I am here. Pakistan was greedy and wanted money, so they sold me. This might have put the US in a very precarious position.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Sebaii was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated May 13, 2005, in which he was identified as Adl Al-Hadi M. Al-Subay and Abdel Hadi Mohammed Badan Al-Sebaii Sebaii, born in August 1971, and it was noted that he had “food allergies to include: wheat, peanut and potato-based products.”

In assessing his story, it was noted that he had been previously assessed as “Retain in DoD [Control]” on January 10, 2004, but his case had been reconsidered, and he was “assessed as a low-level member of Al-Qaida’s terrorist network,” who, in response to a fatwa, “traveled along a known jihadist route to Afghanistan for jihad,” but “used the cover story of traveling to Afghanistan to help build mosques.” Even so, despite his apparent repudiation of his story about traveling to build mosques, it was odd that he was not captured with any fighters, but with two Kuwaitis, Adel Kamel Haji (ISN 60, released in November 2005) and Omar Rajab Amin (ISN 65, see below), who “were traveling together.” He “spent five weeks in their company,” and was captured by Pakistani authorities on December 20, 2001, held in prison in Peshawar, and then transferred to US custody on December27, 2001.

He was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, although no reason was provided. Instead, the Task Force noted that “Bagram processing documents indicate[d] detainee was transferred to JTF GTMO to provide information on the training and tactics of the Saudi Governmental Police Department; however, [he] may be able to provide information on facilitators that aided him in his travels to Afghanistan and Al-Qaida terrorist connections.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that a man he had stayed with in Afghanistan prior to meeting the Kuwaitis, Mohammed al-Afghani, “was actually Majid Bin Muhammad Bin Sulayman Abal Khayil aka Arsala Khan,” described as “a known Al-Qaida and Taliban facilitator that was captured and [was] being held in US custody,” although I have been unable to discover any information about him, and he was never held at Guantánamo. Nothing else of substance was put forward, and, as a result, Sebaii was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended his transfer to Saudi Arabia for continued detention.

Omar Rajab Amin (ISN 65, Kuwait) Released September 2006

In Chapter 5 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Omar Rajab Amin, who was 34 years old at the time of his capture, had studied at the University of Nebraska and then spent seven years heading a Kuwaiti charity in Croatia and Bosnia, which supported orphans from the war zone. In October 2001, as he explained in Guantánamo, he was inspired by the plight of the Afghan people, and set off for Afghanistan with 3,000 Kuwaiti Dinars (about $10,000) donated by himself and his brothers and sisters. After traveling to the Iranian border, he didn’t find any refugees, and then decided to enter Afghanistan, traveling to Kabul to find people who might need his help, secure in the knowledge that the Americans had stated that the war would be “a political war, an economical war, an information war and an intelligence war.” “The Americans were not stupid,” he added. “They were not going to commit all their troops to go into Afghanistan to die, like the Russians and the British.”

In Kabul, he found an interpreter, and said that they were “working every day from the morning until the sunset … meeting the poor people and the orphans,” until one day his interpreter advised him not to return to the city because it was about to fall to the Northern Alliance. He then began trying to escape from Afghanistan, eventually meeting up with a group of Afghans and other Arabs, who were heading to the border — and giving a lift to Adel Kamel Haji (see “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005 (Part One of Five)“), where they turned themselves in and were sold to the Americans. He added that he would never have entered Afghanistan in the first place if he had known that the Americans “were not going to apply the Geneva Convention, especially to people who worked in charity organisations.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Amin was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated January 6, 2006, in which it was noted that he was born in June 1967, and was “in good health,” although it was also noted that ”[h]is inprocessing Body Mass Index on 12 Jan 02 was 21%,” that he had “a history of latent TB for which he ha[d] refused treatment,” that he “was diagnosed with GERD [Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease aka Acid Reflux or Heartburn] in May 2002,” and that he “had a hemorrhoidectomy performed in July 2004.”

In relating his story, the Task Force noted that he had traveled to the US on a family visit in 1981, when he was 14, and also that he had studied in Arizona and Colorado from 1985 to 1987, and had attended the University of Nebraska from 1987 to 1992, where he “received a bachelor’s degree in agriculture.” These visits undoubtedly counted against him in detention, as anyone who had visited the US was regarded as a possible — or probable – member of an al-Qaida sleeper cell.

From 1994 to 1999, he worked for an NGO, the Kuwaiti Joint Relief Committee (KJRC), in Croatia and then in Bosnia-Herzegovina, providing aid and humanitarian assistance to those affected by the war, and he then returned to Kuwait, where he was employed by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor.

In 2001, “[i]nfluencedby the media, [he] decided to travel to Afghanistan for two months,” and, “[i]n light of his experience at an NGO, [he] stated he wanted to try and help the orphans and refugees.” After collecting money from his family and his local mosque, and traveling to Iran and taking a taxi to Afghanistan, Amin “stated he had only been in Afghanistan for two or three days before the coalition began bombing near Kabul,” and that, “after approximately a month, conditions become perilous and he was advised to leave the city.” He said that he left his passport and other documentation with “his government-provided translator,” who “promised [him] that he would forward it to him at a later date,” and that he then traveled to Pakistan with Adel Kamel Haji (ISN 60, described as Adil Kamil Abdullah) and Abdel Hadi Sebaii (ISN 64, see above, described as Abdel Hadi Mohammed). The three men, it was noted, “traveled on foot to the Pakistani border,” were arrested by Pakistani forces in mid-December, and transferred to US custody in Peshawar on December 27, 2001.

He was sent to Guantánamo on January 11, 2002 (the day the prison opened), on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: The inner workings of the governmental ministries, which coordinated relief efforts with the KJRC [Kuwaiti Joint Relief Committee], in both Bosnia and Croatia [and] The refugee community in Bosnia and Croatia between 1993 and 1999, as well as specific information on the civil war in Afghanistan.”

Although there was no reason to doubt Amin’s explanation of his activities, the Task Force assessed him as “an Islamic extremist who used his management position with the KJRC for over six years in Bosnia and Croatia to help facilitate mujahideen activity.” This analysis was based on a claim that his “narrative of his time as Deputy Director of the KRJC is basically empty, devoid of his responsibilities and personalities he met while in Bosnia and Croatia,” which actually means nothing, as he may have been unwilling to name names, knowing that to do so would only endanger any innocent people he had ever met in his travels.

It was claimed that he was “associated with known Kuwaiti terrorism financier Jabir Jalamah,” although this claim came from “a source with direct access but undetermined reliability,” who alleged that Jalamah was “a sheik in Kuwait who collect[ed] money from lesser financiers and funnel[ed] it to the Al-Qaida terrorist network, as well as the Zarqawi and Ansar al-lslam groups.” This was a spectacularly unreliable claim, although there was also little weight that could genuinely be attached to other claims: that “Kuwaiti Intelligence link[ed] detainee to Sulayman Abu Ghayth,” who worked for the Saudi-based humanitarian aid charity Al-Wafa in Afghanistan, but was “listed as the ‘official spokesman for the Al-Qaida organisation’ by Kuwaiti State Security,” and that Amin “possibly assisted in delivering funds to the director of Al-Wafa.”

The Task Force alleged that Al-Wafa was a front for terrorist-related activities (although this was never proved), and that the organization’s director, Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi (ISN 5, released in December 2007) had stated that “a group of six Kuwaiti nationals visited him in Afghanistan during late September 2001.” This may be true, and it may also be true that Amin was one of them, but nothing proves that any of these men had any purpose in mind beyond providing donations to support Al-Wafa’s humanitarian work, or that any of them actually knew about Abu Ghayth’s purported connections to Al-Qaida.

What was most significant, in the list of “Reasons for Continued Detention,” even though it was indicative of the exact opposite was the following note:

During a Kuwaiti delegation visit in January 2004, the Kuwait State Security (KSS) interrogated detainee. The KSS believed Amin was not dangerous and would release him directly if he was returned to Kuwait. Amin admitted he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and does not blame the United States for arresting him.

Despite this assessment, which should have led to Amin’s immediate release (although he was not freed for another two years and eight months), the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and as posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Maj. Gen. Hood recommended him for continued detention, even though it was also conceded that he was “a low threat from a detention perspective,” as he was “mostly well behaved while in Camp Delta and ha[d] not taken part in any voluntary total fasts, made any jihadist statements, and ha[d] only rarely conducted PT in his cell.”

Yusif Khalil Nur (ISN 73, Saudi Arabia) Released June 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (1) – The Qala-i-Janghi Massacre,” I explained how Yusif Khalil Nur, who was 19 years old at the time of his capture, was a survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, which took place in an ancient fort in northern Afghanistan, where hundreds of Taliban foot soldiers (and some civilians swept up by mistake) were taken after surrendering as part of the fall of Kunduz, the last Taliban-held city in the north. Most of these men died after some staged an uprising, which was put down with savage force, and the survivors huddled underground in a basement, as the Northern Alliance and their US allies bombed them, attempted to set them on fire, and finally flooded the basement.

Nur, who was wounded in the uprising, said in Guantánamo, “I didn’t fight. I was just sitting there, and I got injured.” In his review board hearing, he insisted that he had not traveled to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, telling the board, “When I went to Afghanistan it wasn’t in my will to go and fight for the Taliban. I went there to visit my brother … The main reason was my brother, not the Taliban or the Northern Alliance … It doesn’t make any difference to me who is the Taliban and who is the Northern Alliance.” He did, however, admit that he traveled to Khawaja Ghar and received training in the use of hand grenades, and also admitted that he had traveled to Afghanistan previously, when he had been trained to use a Kalashnikov.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Nur was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated December 11, 2005, in which he was also identified as Yusef Khalil Abdullah, born in March 1982, who had “a history of malnutrition as a result of hunger striking and a gunshot wound to the abdomen upon detainment,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

Nur’s brother, according to the Task Force’s account, was Abdul Rahman Abdullah Nur, described as “a known Taliban member and assessed Al-Qaida recruiter,” and it was clear that Yusif was under his spell. Having traveled to Afghanistan in 2000, with his brother’s help and financial assistance, when he studied as the Malik Center in Kabul (described as “an Al-Qaida training facility”), he left to attend the Hajj, returning in March 2001, where he was reunited with his brother on the Taliban’s “secondary line” near Kabul. The two then stayed in a guest house while awaiting transportation to the front lines at Khawaja Ghar, which was where Nur’s brother trained him to use hand grenades, and then traveled to the front lines, where he stayed for six months.

The Task Force noted that, according to Nur, “When the coalition bombing campaign began, [t]hey decided to depart Afghanistan,” but were informed that the borders were closed. They then retreated to Kunduz, where they stayed in a guesthouse “until a deal was made between the Taliban and General Dostum, for safe passage to Kandahar.” Instead, however, “Dostum’s men told Taliban forces to surrender their weapons and took them to the fortress in Mazar-E-Sharif” (actually, Qala-i-Janghi, where the massacre took place that left only 86 survivors). In the file, the only mention of the massacre was that Nur “was wounded in the stomach during the uprising.”

From Qala-i-Janghi, he was taken to the brutal, overcrowded prison in Sheberghan, run by General Dostum, and then transferred to US custody. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 20, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Abd Al-Salam Al-Hadrami – a former senior ranking Arab fighter supporting the Taliban and senior Arab officer who commanded over 150 fighters, Gharib Al-Sunai — a senior ranking Arab fighter supporting the Taliban who assumed command of the Arab element after Al-Hadrami’s death, Abdul Rahman Khalil Abdullah Nur — A known recruiter and suspected trainer of Arab fighters supporting the Taliban [and] Combat operations involving his Arab element of the Taliban.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as “a member of Al-Qaida” who served in Osama bin Laden’s 55th Arab Brigade, and “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” He was, however, noted as being “of low intelligence value,” and “a medium threat from a detention perspective,” who had “recently been somewhat compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff,” but “did provide moderate support to the 2005 voluntary total fast by refusing 33 meals in August, as well as 9 meals in September.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Hood recommended him for continued detention.

Najib Lahcini (ISN 75, Morocco) Released February 2006

in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (1) – The Qala-i-Janghi Massacre,” I told the story of Najib Lahcini, who was 23 years old at the time of his capture, and was, I thought, probably a survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, although no mention of it was made in the available documentation. It was alleged that Lahcini, who, it was stated, had entered England illegally and had been persuaded to travel to Afghanistan “by a man he had met at the Baker Street mosque” in London, lived at a Taliban guest house in Jalalabad, “near the Taliban intelligence center,” attended a Taliban training camp for a month, and then spent another month in the mountains near Jalalabad, digging trenches with the Taliban. It was also stated that he was sent to Khawaja Ghar, but was forced to retreat by US bombing, and that he subsequently surrendered to General Dostum’s Northern Alliance forces near Mazar-e-Sharif. More vaguely, it was alleged that he “may have trained” at al-Farouq, and “was possibly in charge of a group of 20 fighters in Zormat,” in Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan, although both these allegations, I thought, sounded suspiciously like confessions obtained from other prisoners under duress.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Lahcini was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated June 3, 2005, in which he was identified as Najeb Lahassini (or Lahassimi or Lahassihi), born in September 1978, and it was noted that he was “in good health with the exception of chronic traumatic orthopedic injuries,” and was “followed by Behavioral Health Service for Personality disorder.”

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that he had repeatedly tried to leave Morocco from 1999 onwards, and had finally managed to reach the UK in January 2001, via Spain and France, where he sought asylum. In London, he met a Sudanese man, Hamed, “who offered him food and a place to stay,” and he then “became a devoted Muslim,” and, in May 2001, agreed to travel to Afghanistan with Hamed to live “as a true Muslim.” In Jalalabad, they stayed for five months with a man named Abu Mohammed Al-Jazeeri, who Hamed had fought with against the Russians, and who, in July and August 2001, apparently provided weapons training to Lahcini, Hamed and “others who stayed at his home.”

After September 11, 2001, Lahcini said, he “was “sent to the mountains outside of Jalalabad, AF, along with Hamed and approximately one hundred other Arab fighters,” where they reportedly “prepared defensive positions,” and in late November 2001, he “and the others in his fighting group were told to retreat to Mazar-e-Sharif, AF, where they would surrender their weapons to the Afghan Duston (aka Dostum) Army. Thereafter, they would travel to Kandahar, AF, and be allowed to return to their home country.” Instead, of course, he and “approximately three hundred fighters” (other reports suggested, convincingly, that there were at least 450 prisoners) were taken to Qala-i-Janghi, where the notorious massacre took place, which was described in his file as follows:

Sometime throughout the detention process, some of the prisoners broke free and overpowered several troops. These prisoners took over the prison’s weapons and engaged Dostum’s troops. Detainee was untied by one of the prisoners as the fighting broke out. Shortly after being untied detainee claims an RPG round severely damaged his left arm. After being hit by the RPG he laid in the courtyard while the gunfight continued between the prisoners and Dostum’s troops. Detainee advised the fighting continued for five days. Some time during the fighting all the injured prisoners were placed in the basement of courtyard house number two (Analyst note: this was done by the Arab fighters). Detainee claims on the seventh day Dostum’s troops began pumping water into basement and between one hundred to one hundred and thirty prisoners drowned, including his friend Hamed. On the eighth day of fighting, the surviving prisoners were taken out of the basement and placed on stretchers, then taken to a Red Cross shelter.

He was then “taken to a hospital in Sheberghan, AF, where he remained for thirty days,” and was then turned over to US forces and taken to Kandahar. He was sent to Guantánamo on February 7, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Arab foreign fighters.”

In the Task Force’s assessment, what was missing from Lahcini’s account was a confession that he had been part of Osama bin Laden’s Arab Brigade, and had fought in Kunduz, where he was reportedly identified as having been seen by other prisoners. However, as he had what was described as an “extreme uncooperative disposition,” he had not provided the information the Task Force desired, and had also not responded to allegations made by other prisoners, including extremely dubious claims made by torture victim and CIA “ghost prisoner” Abu Zubaydah (ISN 10016), who said that he “might possibly be a Yemeni national who may have trained at Al-Farouq camp” (he was a Saudi), and who was also responsible for the claim that he “was possibly in charge of a group of 20 fighters in Zormat.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as “a member of Al-Qaida,” who was “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour pattern” had been “one of hostility and aggression directed towards the guard force and staff.” He was also assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and as “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” As a result, it was perhaps surprising that Brig. Gen. Hood signed a memo that updated a recommendation to “Retain in DoD [Control],” dated November 11, 2003, and, instead, recommended his transfer to continued detention in Morocco.

In November 2006, Lahcini and the other two Moroccans released with him in February 2006 — Muhammad Hussein Ali Hassan (ISN 123, see Part Two of this series), and Mohammed Laalami (ISN 237, also identified as Suleiman al-Alami, see Part Four of this series) — were sentenced by a criminal court in Salé. As Jurist described it, Laalami (identified as Mohamed Slimani) was “sentenced to five years in prison for his alleged role in creating and participation in a ‘criminal gang, practice of activities in a non-recognized association and organization of un-authorized public meetings,’” and Lahcini (identified as Najib Houssani) and Hassan (identified as Mohamed Ouali) “each received three year sentences for falsifying administrative documents.” Jurist added that the charges were “related to the men’s connection with Salafia Jihadia [an offshoot of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group] and unrelated to their detention at Guantánamo Bay.”

However, in May 2007, Laalami (described as Mohamed Slimani Alami) had his sentence quashed, and was acquitted of all charges, and Lahcini and Hassan had their sentences reduced to one-year suspended sentences.

Ilkham Batayev (ISN 84, Kazakhstan) Released December 2006

In Chapter 2 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ilkham Batayev, who was 28 years old at the time of his capture, was another survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre. In Guantánamo, he said that, after traveling to Tajikistan to sell apples, he was kidnapped by thugs working for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and transported to Kunduz, where he was forced to work as an assistant to a Taliban cook. In the chaos surrounding the fall of Kunduz, he saw his chance to escape, and hopped in a car with some other men who were hoping to escape to Iran, but was captured by Northern Alliance soldiers and taken to Qala-i-Janghi. Sick with malaria, and in pain from a recent operation to remove his wisdom teeth, he decided to leave the basement behind everybody else on the Sunday morning, when the massacre began, but was injured by a grenade as soon as he emerged, and then crawled back underground, where he spent the next six days hallucinating because he had lost a large amount of blood.

Batayev was also subjected to one of the most risible claims in the whole of Guantánamo’s history, which is full of implausible allegations, as I explained in Chapter 15 of The Guantánamo Files, in a section dealing with false confessions, when I noted that he “was reportedly caught smuggling $600,000, which, if true, suggests that he managed to keep the money safe while trying not to drown in the basement of the Qala-i-Janghi fort.”

In 2008, he was interviewed by a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers for a major review of 66 released Guantánamo prisoners. Interviewed in Abay, a “small town on the Kazakh-Uzbek border, a 12-hour train ride and a three-hour car trip from the nearest large Kazakh town,” Batayev “refused to talk about how he — a coach at a sports clinic, the son of a supervisor at a state-run cotton business — got from his home in rural Kazakhstan to the badlands of Afghanistan,” telling the reporter, “This is ancient history … I don’t want to say anything about it.”

As a result, McClatchy’s team was left with what was regarded as Batayev’s implausible story about traveling to Tajikistan to sell apples, which, as was noted, would have involved him “hav[ing] to travel all the way through another country, Uzbekistan, to go sell apples in Tajikistan, a country that has plentiful apple orchards of its own.”

This doesn’t mean that the US authorities’ version of events was true — that he wasn’t kidnapped by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan whilst on a trip to sell apples, but was a willing volunteer — and it is not necessarily persuasive that, as was asserted in Guantánamo, representatives of a foreign government — presumably Kazakhstan, whose agents visited Batayev in Guantánamo — confirmed his membership in the IMU,” as the Kazakh authorities may have lied, and it was impossible to be sure what the truth was when that absurd claim about having $600,000 on him was contained in the allegations.

However, it was noted that, while he was imprisoned in Afghanistan in 2001, before his transfer to Guantánamo, he was interviewed by a Kazakh journalist, and, in that interview, “said he was hiking in the mountains in Tajikistan with some friends when a gang of men loyal to Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan leader Juma Namangani kidnapped them.” It was also noted that he later told his American lawyer, Thomas R. Johnson Jr., that “he’d gone to Tajikistan to buy goods to bring back to Kazakhstan and sell,” but that, in the market in Dushanbe, “he met a trader who invited him to his orchards.” Once there, however, “a group of armed men kidnapped him” and took him to Afghanistan.

Although there are different points of view about whether or not the Taliban-linked IMU kidnapped people and took them to Afghanistan to fight, Johnson told McClatchy, “I never saw any credible information anywhere linking him” to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, adding, “I would feel completely confident going into a court of law in the United States and getting an acquittal based on the information in their files.” He also spoke about the absurd allegation regarding the $600,000 he reportedly had in his possession, calling it “ridiculous,” and explaining that “the first time that he was ever interrogated somebody said $600 … the amount has only grown.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Batayev was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated July 25, 2005, in which it was noted that he was born in July 1973, and it was revealed that he had been initially identified as an Uzbek, and had previously been recommended for “Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD) on 23 February 2004.”

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that he “graduated from a physical training college in Kazakhstan in 1992,” and then “worked as a youth sports instructor and a fruit vendor” prior to allegedly joining the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), supporters of the Taliban identified as “a Tier 1 target, which is defined as terrorist groups, especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests.”

In explaining how he ended up with the IMU, the Task Force shed light on the earlier discrepancies between versions of Batayev’s story, stating that, although he initially claimed he was kidnapped by a man named Makhmudzhon Kirgizov, he “later changed his story under questioning from the Kazakhstan National Security Committee (KNB) in early October of 2002.” He was then flown to Kunduz in January 2001, “by civilian helicopter,” ending up in an IMU training facility near Mazar-e-Sharif, where, he said, he “declined to participate in the training and did not participate in any military activity.”

Instead, he said, he “worked as a cook’s assistant in a guesthouse” until July 2001, when he was hospitalized with malaria (until September 2001). He then reportedly contracted pneumonia in October 2001, and was then taken to Qala-i-Janghi, where he “was wounded during the battle at the prison.” He was then held for a month in Kandahar, and was sent to Guantánamo on February 7, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Prison uprising at Mazar-e-Sharif.”

In assessing his story, which involved detailed claims about his involvement with the IMU, the $600,000 became $60,000 in counterfeit money, which was apparently discovered in 2000 in the possession of a group of men (of which Batayev was one) by the Tajik Ministry of Internal Affairs,” and which apparently led to the Task Force’s bold claim that he “was involved in money laundering and counterfeiting operations with the IMU,” even though this had not been proved. Other claims were that he had been involved with the IMU since 1998, and, as a result, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although it was also noted that, in Guantánamo, his “overall behaviour pattern ha[d] been compliant and often respectful to the operations of the Camp and the guard force.”

Yasser Talal Al Zahrani (ISN 93, Saudi Arabia) Died in Guantánamo June 2006

As I explained in Chapter 19 of The Guantánamo Files, Yasser al-Zahrani was one of three prisoners who died at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006. having allegedly hanged themselves in a coordinated suicide pact. The other two were Ali Abdullah Ahmed al-Salami, a Yemeni, and Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi.

As I discussed in two articles, “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo” and “WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo,” al-Zahrani was just 17 years old when he was seized, and was, therefore one of at least 22 juveniles at Guantánamo who should have been rehabilitated rather than punished, according to America’s obligations under 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 on December 23, 2002. However, only three juveniles were ever treated differently from the adult prisoners (as described in “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Ten of Ten)”), whereas al-Zahrani and the others were treated as harshly as all the other prisoners — or, in al-Zahrani’s case, worse than most, as he was a long-term hunger striker, who had been force-fed on a daily basis for many months before his death.

The administration’s response to the deaths was extraordinarily callous. Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the commander of Guantánamo, said, “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us,” and Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, described the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention.” Stung by international criticism, the administration rapidly back-tracked, and Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, was put forward to say, “I wouldn’t characterize it as a good PR move. What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life, because as Americans, we value life, even the lives of violent terrorists who are captured waging war against our country.”

In an attempt to stifle further dissent, and to bolster their view that the three men were hardened terrorists, the Pentagon released details of the allegations against them, which served only to highlight almost everything that was wrong with the system at Guantánamo. Al-Zahrani, who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, was accused of being “a front line fighter for the Taliban who facilitated weapons purchases for offensives against US and coalition forces,” even though this scenario was highly unlikely (to say the least) for a 17-year old who had only recently arrived in Afghanistan. Similarly deluded and/or heartless allegations were also levelled against the other two prisoners.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Zahrani was a “Recommendation for Continued Detention Under DoD Control (CD),” dated March 20, 2006, in which it was confirmed that he was born on September 22, 1984, and was therefore, just 17 when he was seized. It was also noted that he had “a history of rheumatoid arthritis,” and that he “went on three hunger strikes in the past, most recently in July 2005,” although it was not noted that he maintained this hunger strike until his death (or shortly before his death), and that, although he weighed 118 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, his weight dropped to just 87 pounds in January 2006.

The Task Force also noted that he had “a history of dehydration due to hunger strike treated with intravenous fluids,” that he “had surgery to remove a cyst from his lower back while detained,” that he had “a history of recurrent Pilonidal cyst,” and that he “suffered a gunshot wound to his right calf prior to his detention.”

In telling his story, the Task Force noted that his father was a senior official in the Saudi Interior Ministry, and that, after completing the eleventh grade in June 2001, al-Zahrani stayed at home for two months until, after “hearing that sheikhs from neighboring towns were saying jihad in Afghanistan (AF) was a religious duty, [he] decided to travel to Afghanistan.” He reportedly “financed the trip himself with savings he had earned selling perfumes to hajj pilgrims,” and “intended on returning in approximately October/November 2001.”

On arrival in Karachi, Pakistan, after being met by a go-between, he was apparently taken to Kunduz, where he received weapons training in a place call the Talban Center, and “was then assigned a guard position at a second line post between Kunduz and Tallogan.” He and his group then retreated Kunduz which fell approximately nine days later, when “a deal was struck with General Dostum of the Northern Alliance allowing fighters to leave with their weapons and travel to Mazar-e-Sharif, AF, where they would surrender.” They were then taken to the Qala-i-Janghi prison,” where al-Zahrani was one of 86 survivors of the uprising and subsequent massacre. As was explained in his file:

The day after they arrived at the prison, detainee and others were taken to a square in the prison yard. Detainee heard gunfire and explosions coming from the prison and then a firefight ensued injuring detainee in the leg and foot. He fell to the ground and remained in the same position until nightfall, when other prisoners retrieved him and carried him back to the underground prison. They remained there for seven days before they were forced to surrender. Detainee was removed from the prison, taken to a prison/clinic in Sheberghan, AF.

After a month, he was transferred to US custody, and was initially screened on December 29, 2001. He was sent to Guantánamo on January 20, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Taliban training center in Kunduz [and] Taliban training center outside Kunduz used as a rear operating base.”

In assessing his story, it was noted that he had “provided a fairly consistent timeline that ha[d] been corroborated (for the most part) by other detainees,” and this was indeed the case, as he was identified by John Walker Lindh (the US citizen who was seized at Qala-i-Janghi, but was never held at Guantánamo), who said that he “was approximately 17 years old and was always joking and talking.” Lindh also said that he “was involved in food services,” along with Ghaleb al-Bihani (ISN 128, still held, who lost his habeas corpus petition for being a cook).

Al-Zahrani was also identified by Ali al-Tayeea (ISN 111, released January 2009), who was the source of unbelievable claims that he “trained at Al-Farouq, that he “purchased weapons for the Taliban,” and that he “was a money courier and a man with a suspicious nature.” Al-Tayeea was known as a notoriously unreliable witness in Guantánamo, and it was noticeable that an analyst had noted that his identification of al-Zahrani “as attending training at Al-Farouq [was] a contradiction to detainee’s story in which he indicate[d] he attended training outside Kunduz with seven others for one month,” and also noted that “[n]o other reporting identifies detainee as a money courier or weapons broker,” even though the latter claim was shamefully used by the Pentagon after al-Zahrani’s death.

It was also noted that, “When shown detainee’s picture, senior Al-Qaida detainees were unable to identify detainee,” and, as an analyst explained, “While not conclusive, this suggests that detainee lacked both experience and rank within the organization,” which was, of course, true as far as it went, although it stopped far short of recognizing that, in analyzing Al-Qaida, there was a big difference between the leadership interested in pursuing acts of international terrorism, and the much bigger military side of things, which was only concerned with supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed al-Zahrani as “a high threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] been non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff,” and amongst the behavior noted was a description of him as “a major participant in the voluntary total fast of 2005-2006.” He was also “assessed to be a jihadist who traveled to Afghanistan (AF) to fulfill what he perceived to be a religious duty,” and was described as being “of low intelligence value,” and as “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.”

It was also noted that, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allows access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, detainee can be Transferred Out of DoD Control (TRO).”

That, of course, never happened, as al-Zahrani died less than three months after this updated assessment was completed. However, the claim that the men committed suicide was doubted by the men’s fellow prisoners at the time, and also by other commentators, although it was not until December 2009 and January 2010 that serious doubts were expressed in a concerted and thoroughly researched manner.

In December 2009, the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey published a 136-page report, “Death in Camp Delta” (PDF), which comprehensively undermined the conclusion of the official investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and in January 2010, Harper’s Magazine published an extraordinary article by law professor Scott Horton (which I discussed here), revealing the story of Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, and a number of other soldiers — the tower guards who “had the responsibility and ability to observe all activity in the camp, [but] were not interviewed” by the NCIS — who suggested that, earlier in the evening on which the men allegedly committed suicide, they had been taken from the cell block in which they were held to a secret facility outside the main perimeter fence of Guantánamo — known to the soldiers as “Camp No” — where they had either been deliberately killed, or had a died as the result of particularly brutal torture sessions. “They didn’t die in their cells,” Sgt. Hickman explained to me in March 2010.

Despite these claims, the Justice Department shut the door on a proposed inquiry in November 2009, and an attempt by family members (including al-Zahrani’s father) to pursue accountability in the US courts was turned down in September 2010, and is currently being appealed.

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

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

I’m delighted to discover that people remain interested in the Bush administration’s use of torture, and questions of accountability that have been brushed under the carpet by President Obama, not just because terrible crimes have been committed and no one has been held accountable, but also because the topic of America’s torture program has generally slipped off the media’s radar (as has that other abiding topic of interest of mine, Guantánamo, and the 171 prisoners still held).

Jeff has done a great job in pulling together examples of prisoners who were subjected not to waterboarding, but to other forms of torture using water that the Bush administration largely managed to avoid mentioning or being asked to justify, including Murat Kurnaz, who discussed having his head held under water in his book, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, first published in 2007, Mohammed al-Qahtani, the most notorious torture victim at Guantánamo, and others — the Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was, notoriously, “broken” by torture at Guantánamo, and who had water poured over him to “enforce control” and “keep [him] awake,” the British resident Omar Deghayes, the Algerian Djamel Ameziane (still held, desperate being cleared for release many years ago), and Mustafa Ait Idr, an Algerian living in Bosnia-Herzegovina, released in 2008 after winning his habeas petition, whose torture using water I mentioned in The Guantánamo Files, and in my article, After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims. Also of interest are examples from Iraq, which have also not been publicized widely.

Despite New Denials by Rumsfeld, Evidence Shows US Military Used Waterboarding-Style Torture
By Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, August 5, 2011

In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Sean Hannity recently that “no one was waterboarded at Guantánamo by the US military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantánamo, period.”

In his memoir, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld maintained, “To my knowledge, no US military personnel involved in interrogations waterboarded any detainees, not at Guantánamo or anywhere else in the world.” But as we shall see, Rumsfeld was either lying outright, or artfully twisting the truth.

Others have insisted as well that the military never waterboarded anyone. Law and national security writer Benjamin Wittes wrote in The New Republic last year that “the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody.” Harper’s columnist Scott Horton also noted last year, “There is no documentation yet of waterboarding at Gitmo, but the case book is far from closed on that score, too.”

Yet, though not widely reported and scattered among various articles and reports on detainee treatment by the military, including first-person accounts, there are a number of stories of forced water choking or drowning, both at Guantánamo and other US military sites.

In little-known testimony in May 2008 before Congress, former Guantánamo detainee Murat Kurnaz testified he endured a form of simulated drowning. In his testimony before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Kurnaz said that under US military captivity at Kandahar, Afghanistan, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, his head was “dunked under water to simulate drowning.”

Asked by Republican Congressman Rohrabacher if he hadn’t then been waterboarded, Kurnaz responded, “No, it’s not waterboarding. It’s called ‘water treatment.’ There was a bucket of water.”

ROHRABACHER: Was a cloth put over your face and you were put on a board?

KURNAZ: There was a bucket of water. And they stick my head in it and at the same time, punch me into my stomach.

Rohrabacher reportedly commented, “The CIA is claiming that that only three people have been waterboarded. And this may be a loophole that they’re suggesting that’s not ‘waterboarding.’”

According to a report on Kurnaz’s testimony at the time by The Christian Science Monitor, Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon replied to the torture charges: “The abuses Mr. Kurnaz alleges are not only unsubstantiated and implausible, they are simply outlandish.”

Whether implausible or not, waterboarding was one of a number of “counter-resistance techniques” requested for use at Guantánamo by Maj. Gen. Mike Dunleavy, commander of Task Force 170. In an October 2002 memo from Dunleavy’s intelligence chief requesting use of a number of techniques, including sensory deprivation, isolation, stress positions, forced nudity and death threats, there was also a proposal for “Use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.”

In a follow-up memo approving most, but not all of the requested techniques, Department of Defense (DoD) general counsel William J. Haynes II said of the “wet towel” and other so-called “aggressive” “Category III” techniques, “While all Category III techniques may be legally available, we believe that, as a matter of policy, a blanket approval of Category III techniques is not warranted at this time.” (Emphasis added.)

Water Torture at Guantánamo

Evidence regarding waterboarding or other forms of water torture by suffocation or choking at Guantánamo has been reported, but this article is the first collection of the various reports in one place.

Last April, a report by two doctors who were allowed to examine “medical records and relevant case files … of nine individuals for evidence of torture and ill treatment,” found at least one case of “near asphyxiation from water (i.e., hose forced into the detainee’s mouth)” and another case where a detainee’s head was forced into a toilet.

The report, by doctors Vincent Iacopino and Stephen N. Xenakis, was published at PLoS Medicine. Dr. Xenakis is also a retired brigadier general in the Army, who has worked as a medical consultant on a number of Guantánamo legal cases.

Additionally, accusations of military waterboarding turned up in a Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) report on “FBI Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations” that was released at almost the same time as Kurnaz’s testimony (May 2008). The IG noted that the chief of the FBI’s Military Liaison and Detainee Unit at Guantánamo told DoD Assistant Attorney General Dave Nahmias, “one of the planned or actual techniques used on [purported 9/11 would-be hijacker, Mohammed] al-Qahtani was simulated drowning.”

In fact, the military admits the use of pouring water over al-Qahtani’s head, as is discussed below.

At another point in the report, the IG describes one FBI agent who “once heard a discussion at GTMO when someone mentioned using water as an interrogation tool and someone else in the group said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen that.’” According to the IG report, no FBI agent actually reported seeing waterboarding or water torture him or herself.

Whether or not waterboarding was observed by FBI agents at Guantánamo, we know from the minutes of a “Counter-resistance Strategy meeting” at Guantánamo on October 22, 2002, that waterboarding (called the “wet towel” technique) was discussed (see Tab 7 at link). The meeting included legal officials from the CIA, DIA, the Guantánamo intelligence chief, as well as members of the Guantánamo Behavioral Science Consulting Team (BSCT).

At one point, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantánamo, asked whether SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) employed “the ‘wet towel’ technique.” Jonathan Fredman, then chief counsel to the CIA’s counter-terrorism center, replied:

If a well-trained individual is used to perform [sic] this technique it can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function. It is very effective to identify phobias and use them (i.e., insects, snakes, claustrophobia). The level of resistance is directly related to a person’s experience.

At this point, a BSCT psychiatrist noted, “Whether or not significant stress occurs lies in the eye of the beholder. The burden of proof is the big issue.” Fredman replied, “These techniques need involvement from interrogators, psych, medical, legal, etc.”

Fredman continued, “The CIA makes the call internally on most of the types of techniques found in the BSCT paper and this discussion.” In a reference to the approvals for waterboarding and other techniques given the CIA by Office of Legal Counsel memos a few months before, he added, “Significantly harsh techniques are approved through the DOJ.” There was no indication in the minutes from the meeting that waterboarding was not allowed for Defense Department use.

Waterboarding of Mohammed al-Qahtani

Mohammed al-Qahtani was a Saudi Arabian citizen brought to Guantánamo in early 2002. Ostensibly believed to be a part of the 9/11 plot, when interrogators became frustrated at their inability to get information out of him, or force his compliance, they turned to methods of interrogation that the Guantánamo Convening Authority Susan Crawford would later herself conclude amounted to torture.

By November 2002, al-Qahtani had become the “first subject of a Special Interrogation Plan,” which relied heavily on the military’s SERE torture school techniques, including isolation, stress positions, sexual humiliation and apparently, a form of waterboarding. SERE was created to provide US military personnel with training to resist torture.

Even years before Crawford’s admission, DoD’s Schmidt-Furlow report, looking at early allegations of detainee abuse, concluded that “the creative, aggressive and persistent interrogation of the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan [al-Qahtani] resulted in the cumulative effect being degrading and abusive treatment.” No one has ever been charged for such crimes committed against this or any other Guantánamo detainee.

The Schmidt-Furlow report details the use of water torture on al-Qahtani, an aspect of his torture that has been little reported:

On seventeen occasions, between 13 Dec 02 and 14 Jan 03, interrogators, during interrogations, poured water over the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan['s] head …

There is evidence that the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan regularly had water poured on his head. The interrogation logs indicate that this was done as a control measure only.

Time Magazine published al-Qahtani’s interrogation logs in 2005. The use of water to drench al-Qahtani’s head does not appear to be a “control measure” when it is discussed in the logs themselves.

On December 23, 2002, a log selection describes how interrogators hung pictures of swimsuit models around al-Qahtani’s neck. Then the lead interrogator “pulled pictures of swimsuit models off detainee and told him the test of his ability to answer questions would begin. Detainee refused to answer and finally stated that he would after [the] lead [interrogator] poured water over detainees [sic] head and was told he would be subjected to this treatment day after day. Detainee was told to think about his decision to answer questions.”

The day before, when al Qahtani had refused to look at “fitness photos,” saying it was against his religion, interrogators had “poured a 24 oz. bottle of water over detainee’s head.” The log notes dryly, “Detainee then began to look at photos.”

In their investigation of detainee abuse, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) noted in a 2008 report that the Navy limited waterboard demonstrations to two pints (32 oz.) of water. A January 13, 2003, memo, described in the SASC report, underreported how much water was poured over Qahtani, saying that “up to eight ounces of water” was poured over Qahtani’s head as a “method of asserting control” when Khatani exhibited ”undesired behavior.”

The SASC report also said that the interrogation plan for another Guantánamo detainee, Mohamadou Ould Slahi, included the practice of pouring water over Slahi’s head to “enforce control” and “keep [him] awake.”

Three More Guantánamo Detainees Report Suffocation by Drowning

Besides Kurnaz and al-Qahtani, at least three other detainees have reported being tortured at Guantánamo by application of water meant to cause suffocation, choking or the sensation of drowning.

A 2009 article by Jeremy Scahill outlined the torture and abuse endured by former Guantánamo detainee and British resident Omar Deghayes. Scahill mentions two incidents where the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF, sometimes called the Emergency Reaction Force, or ERF) used forms of water torture on Deghayes. In one case, the detainee was shackled, his head put into a toilet. The IRF team “pressed his face into the water. They repeatedly flushed it.”

The IRF or ERF team also came into Deghayes’ cell on another occasion and conducted a simulated or partial drowning:

The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. [Deghayes] was totally shackled and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present and they would join in.

According to Scahill, the IRF team conducted this form of waterboarding three times on Deghayes. Note that the presence of medical staff is consistent with the use of medical personnel under CIA descriptions of how they conducted waterboarding.

Another example of water torture involving Guantánamo guards appears in a document related to the case of Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian Berber who has been held at Guantánamo for over eight years, despite the fact he never received military or terrorist training, nor fought against the US. According to a 2008 legal filing for Ameziane by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):

In another violent incident, guards entered his cell and forced him to the floor, kneeing him in the back and ribs and slamming his head against the floor, turning it left and right. The bashing dislocated Mr. Ameziane’s jaw, from which he still suffers. In the same episode, guards sprayed cayenne pepper all over his body and then hosed him down with water to accentuate the effect of the pepper spray and make his skin burn. They then held his head back and placed a water hose between his nose and mouth, running it for several minutes over his face and suffocating him, an operation they repeated several times. Mr. Ameziane writes, “I had the impression that my head was sinking in water. I still have psychological injuries, up to this day. Simply thinking of it gives me the chills.” [Emphasis added.]

In March 2008, six Guantánamo detainees filed suit against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for failure “for many years to take any steps to negotiate and secure the men’s release from Guantánamo.” One of the men, Mustafa Ait Idr, who had been rendered to Guantánamo and “taken from his pregnant wife in violation of a Bosnian court order to free him,” also reported use of water torture in a manner remarkably similar to that of Ameziane.

A CCR report on “Torture, Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” said that on one occasion prison guards demanded to search Idr’s cell. Idr cooperated, but they came in, sprayed him in the face with a chemical irritant and put him into restraints.

According to the CCR report, “Guards then slammed him head first into the cell floor, lowered him, face-first into the toilet and flushed the toilet — submerging his head. He was then carried outside and thrown onto the crushed stones that surround the cells. While he was down on the ground, his assailants stuffed a hose in his mouth and forced water down his throat.” As a result, Idr’s face was paralyzed for several months.

Other threats to use waterboarding on DoD prisoners, or to rendition detainees for water torture, are also on record. According to journalist Robert Windrem in a 2009 story at The Daily Beast, then-Vice President Dick Cheney requested the waterboarding of Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, the head of the M-14 section of the Mukhabarat. According to the article, the official in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials at the time, Charles Duelfer, declined the request.

According to the SASC detainee report, the lead agency for SERE, Joint Forces Personnel Agency, constructed a CONOP (Concept of Operations) plan for use at a Special Mission Unit Task Force interrogation center in Iraq. The CONOP recommended use of the “water board.” Military legal figures reportedly objected to that and other techniques, but it is not known whether Special Forces in Iraq used waterboarding or other water torture techniques and the SASC report does not enlighten us on that point.

In another case, former Italian resident and Guantánamo detainee, Tunisian-born Saleh Sassi, reported that in late 2002, Tunisian agents came to Guantánamo and interrogated him. They “left no doubt about what awaited ex-Guantánamo inmates back in Tunisia: ‘water torture in the barrel’ and other horrors.” Sassi was released and sent to Albania in 2010.

Finally, the DOJ IG report on FBI interrogations referenced earlier describes how an Abu Ghraib prisoner, Saleh Muklef Saleh, was restrained and had cold water poured over him on more than one occasion. One time, according to Saleh’s own testimony, “They gave me one or two bottles of water and they asked me to drink it while I was hungry and they forced me to drink it and I did and I felt vomiting, then they ordered me to drink again and they were looking at me and laughing” (pp. 279-280).

Back in 2008, during the Congressional meeting where Murat Kurnaz testified to the use of water torture upon him, Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee commented, “It seems that we have a new definition … If you were wedded to the language of waterboarding, now we have new language called ‘water treatment,’ which may bear on being torture as well.”

To date, there has been no investigation that specifically has looked at the use of types of water torture, including waterboarding or water treatment, on detainees. The military’s current Army Field Manual on interrogation forbids the use of “waterboarding.” It is the only “prohibited action” term that is described with quotation marks around it.

A Human Rights Watch report issued on July 12 called for President Barack Obama “to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials.”

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.

I have met Murat Kurnaz (once, at the launch of his book, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo), and I also appeared once with him on Al-Jazeera (in 2008). I have also discussed his case, in my book The Guantánamo Files, and in my articles, Murat Kurnaz: Five Years in Guantánamo and Former Guantánamo detainees speak: Murat Kurnaz, Mamdouh Habib and Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost (in 2007), and in 2008 I reported his opinions about the deaths of three men at Guantánamo, in mysterious circumstances, on June 9, 2006, which the authorities described as a triple suicide. He is also mentioned in a UN report on secret detention that I worked on (which was published last year), and in a Human Rights Watch report on European complicity in torture, which I discussed last July.

In the interview, Kurnaz explained that the American government has not apologized for his years of wrongful imprisonment, and that he doubts they ever will. The question of liability — and compensation — is hugely important, but it is, of course, absolutely certain that lawyers will always advise US government officials never to admit responsibility for wrongdoing, and it is therefore probable that the struggle for compensation — or even a simple apology — will take many years.

Running through the story of his capture, Kurnaz explained that he was seized on a bus in Pakistan, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, where he had been visiting a school run by Jamaat al-Tablighi, the vast missionary organization that has millions of members worldwide and does not involve itself in politics. Kurnaz added that the organization was actually despised by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban for its non-political stance, even though, at Guantánamo, it was regarded as being a front for terrorist activities, and he explained that he had become aware of the organization in Germany, through its assistance to homeless people and young people with drug problems.

Describing how he was seized on a bus, he said that the Pakistani forces who singled him out for particular attention didn’t initially tell him what was going on. “They didn’t tell me that they were looking for terrorists or whatever. They said we’re just going to check your passport,” he said. “I didn’t know at that time they get a bounty of $3,000 for each person. Not under my name, but for anyone turned over to the Americans as a terrorist they get $3,000, and $3,000 in Pakistan is a lot of money.”

After he was transferred to US custody at Kandahar, Kurnaz said, he witnessed all manner of things that can appropriately be described as torture. “I saw many killed under torture,” he said, adding, “I was one of those who survived those kinds of torture. They used electroshocks on me because I would not sign papers. I was forced to agree I was a member of the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda and I said I’m not. Really I didn’t know at that time what Al-Qaeda was, I didn’t know about Al-Qaeda. So when they asked me about Al-Qaeda and Taliban, I said I’m not a member of them. And they brought me papers, forced me to sign. I refused.”

“That’s why they tried to make me sign by electroshocks,” he added. “And another time they forced me by waterboarding [probably repeated dunking in water as a form of drowning, rather than waterboarding as such].”

“Another time,” he said, “they hanged me on chains. I was hanging on the ceiling. They were pulling me on the ceiling with the chain, and until my feet were over the floor. After a few days I started to pass out, because in that situation I couldn’t eat or drink and it was freezing cold. It was during wintertime and I had no clothes on.”

Kurnaz also explained that he was he was fascinated by animals, and that, in Guantánamo, there were animals he had never seen before, but he added that when he fed an iguana (famously a protected species in Guantanamo, with soldiers liable for a fine of $10,000 if they accidentally run one over and kill it), he was punished for feeding one. “I was hiding a piece of my bread,” he said, “and I was feeding them. When they [the guards] saw it, I got punished by 30 days of isolation in the darkness because I was feeding animals.”

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.

The trigger for this article was an announcement by the British government that the terms of a judge-led inquiry into British complicity in torture — first announced by foreign secretary William Hague on May 20 — have been agreed. This is welcome news, as it indicates that the UK may be the first Western country prepared to conduct an official inquiry into the whole of its post-9/11 policies, as they relate to torture — although it was worrying to hear that Prime Minister David Cameron had “suggest[ed] that the inquiry would examine only one case — that of Binyam Mohamed — and, in addition, that he “had already concluded that the country’s intelligence agencies were guilty only of errors of omission, not commission.” The official announcement of the inquiry this week has done little to alleviate these fears, with David Cameron explaining that most of the inquiry will be held in secret, and adding, “Let’s be frank, it is not possible to have a full public inquiry into something that is meant to be secret.” As Reprieve stated in response to the announcement:

The scourge of the last government was the fact that they tried to cover up all the facts relating to torture complicity cases. In particular, the Binyam Mohamed litigation revolved around the government claiming public interest immunity in materials which were simply embarrassing. Now, the Prime Minister is saying that much of this inquiry will be held in secret. The only way in which public confidence is going to be restored in the intelligence services is if the public is able to see this inquiry functioning properly.

A second trigger for the article last week was the publication of a report by Human Rights Watch, “‘No Questions Asked’: Intelligence Cooperation with Countries that Torture,” which not only covered the UK, but also Germany and France, and in this second article, I examine Human Rights Watch’s timely reminder that, although the UK may well have been the Bush administration’s closest Western ally in the “War on Terror,” the involvement of other countries also deserves detailed analysis, and calls for accountability and the reform of currently flawed systems that fail to conform to those countries’ obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment.

German complicity in torture

German complicity in the dubious practices of the “War on Terror” has long been apparent, primarily through the involvement of the intelligence services, the security services and/or law enforcement personnel in the detention in Afghanistan and Guantánamo of the Bremen-born German resident Murat Kurnaz, the kidnap in Macedonia and imprisonment in CIA “black sites” in Afghanistan of German citizen Khaled El-Masri, and the detention and torture of German citizen Muhammad Haydar Zammar, seized in Morocco in October 2001 and then transferred to Syria, where he was reportedly “interrogated by a group of German intelligence and law enforcement personnel while he was detained in the notorious Palestine Branch (Far’Falestin prison) in Damascus.”

These cases have received widespread coverage over the last few years, and one notable organization that has maintained a focus on the Germen government’s activities is the United Nations, which, in a major report on secret detention, published in February this year, included Germany as one of at least 40 countries who were “complicit in the secret detention” of prisoners seized in the “War on Terror.”

Among the damning allegations against the government, as described in the Human Rights Watch report, are Kurnaz’s claim that “he was mistreated by members of the German Special Forces Commando (Kommando Spezialkräfte, part of the German Army) while in US custody in Afghanistan prior to his transfer to Guantánamo Bay” and that two soldiers “forced him to lie on the ground with his hands tied behind his back, while one pulled him up by the hair and then hit his head on the ground,” El-Masri’s claim (denied by the government) that “he was visited during his detention in Afghanistan by an official with the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA),” and the conclusion of the UN, in its report on secret detention, that “the German government was complicit in Zammar’s secret detention in Syria because it knowingly took advantage of the situation to obtain information.” This follows up on a claim, in the European Parliament’s 2006-07 inquiry into European complicity in the US extraordinary rendition program, that the BKA provided information to the FBI that facilitated Zammar’s capture in Morocco.

Moving beyond these high-profile cases, Human Rights Watch is to be commended for conducting a far more sweeping investigation, demonstrating how, as in the UK, the government both actively seeks and passively receives intelligence information from regimes that systematically use torture, and then justifies using this information for operational purposes, and also in judicial hearings, despite being a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, and, since December 2008, a signatory to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, which “creates an international system to monitor places of detention worldwide, and a parallel domestic monitoring system in each country that ratifies it.” In Germany, this led to the creation of a Federal Office for the Prevention of Torture in November 2008.

The most disturbing revelation of the Human Rights Watch report on Germany is the extent to which the government works closely with Uzbekistan, where, as the UN has repeatedly explained, the use of torture is “systematic” and “routine.” Nevertheless, apparently concerned by the possible activities in Germany of the Uzbek Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), the German government has maintained close ties with the Uzbek government, having “worked actively to ease EU sanctions imposed in the wake of the May 2005 massacre in Andijan, in eastern Uzbekistan,” and allowing generally despised figures in the Uzbek government to visit Germany.

Most importantly, German law enforcement officials directly interrogated at least one detainee in Uzbek custody — Sherali A., who was questioned about the IJU in a prison in Tashkent by BKA officers In September 2008 — and also questioned another Uzbek suspect, in a prison in Astana, Kazakhstan, in July 2008.

Moreover, these interrogations were not only used for operational purposes, which is itself dubious, as it “bring[s] into question Germany’s commitment to the prevention and eradication of torture worldwide” and “can create demand” for information obtained through torture. The information was also used in preliminary hearings against four men — the so-called “Sauerland cell” — whose trial took place in 2009, as was information extracted from Aleem Nasir, a German citizen of Pakistani origin.

Nasir, who received an eight-year sentence in July 2009 for providing support to a terrorist organization, had originally been seized in Lahore, Pakistan in June 2007, and was then held for two months in the custody of Pakistan’s notoriously brutal Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), where, he claims, he made a false confession after being repeatedly beaten. Nevertheless, in this two-month period, he was “visited and questioned by a German consular official” (and has also claimed that he was interrogated by British and American intelligence officials), and he later told journalists that his Pakistani interrogators had been “fully briefed” by the German authorities, and that he was “repeatedly shown” photos of one of the men accused of being part of the “Sauerland cell.”

Although Nasir’s release was ordered by the Pakistani Supreme Court, he was arrested on arrival in Germany in August 2007, and subsequently put on trial. It then transpired that the ISI had sent the German authorities three reports of Nasir’s interrogations — headed, “From: Friends, To: Friends,” and tagged, ‘We assure you our fullest support, with best regards” — but although these were excluded in court, on the basis that they contravened Article 15 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which obliges signatories to “ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made,” the trial did include evidence from the consular official who visited Nasir in ISI custody, and also from a house search, undertaken while Nasir was held in Pakistan, which “appears to have been based on information from the ISI and the report of the consular official.”

In Human Rights Watch’s analysis, the most blatant example of manipulating Article 15 of the Convention Against Torture took place in the trial, in 2005, of Mounir El-Motassadeq for complicity in the 9/11 attacks, when the court’s interpretation “place[d] an undue burden on the individual against whom the evidence is invoked to demonstrate that the statements were in fact obtained through torture.” Disturbingly, the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg allowed as evidence summaries of the interrogations of three men — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Mohamedou Ould Slahi — who were held in US custody, even though the US “refused to disclose the whereabouts of the detainees or anything about the circumstances under which the interrogations were conducted.”

This is, of course, deeply alarming, given that the court acknowledged that KSM and bin al-Shibh were “held in secret, incommunicado detention” (both men were among the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 — bin al-Shibh had been held in secret detention since September 2002, KSM since March 2003). Slahi, who was seized in Mauritania in November 2001, was held in Jordan for eight months, where he has claimed he was tortured on behalf of the CIA, before his transfer to Guantánamo, where, as has also been established, he was one of a handful of prisoners subjected to a torture program devised specifically for him.

Nevertheless, the Hamburg court twisted the meaning of Article 15, accepting the men’s statements on the basis that it was “UN impossible to establish that torture had been used,” which provoked the following criticism from Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture:

[T]he Hamburg Court failed to shift the burden of proof to those Government authorities who actually invoked the contested evidence. In light of well-founded allegations of the torture and enforced disappearances of the witnesses in United States custody, it was the responsibility of the Prosecutor (or the Court) to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the testimonies were not extracted by torture, rather than to prove that they were actually obtained by torture (emphasis added).

French complicity in torture

If the situation in Germany resembles that in the UK, where information obtained through torture is actively sought or passively received, and then makes its way into operational practices and judicial proceedings, the situation in France — although involving fewer allegations of complicity with the US — is even more worrying on a domestic level because of the relationship between judges and the security services, and because of what Human Rights Watch describes as the “aggressive prosecution of alleged terrorist networks before specific acts are committed or even attempted.”

As the report explains, despite signing up to the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture in November 2008 (and establishing a national mechanism for its enforcement, as in Germany), the French government’s “preemptive approach to countering terrorism rests on continuous intelligence gathering” with countries “with poor records on torture,” including former colonies Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Following recent concerns about “returnees from combat or training in countries such as Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Human Rights Watch also notes that France has engaged in “close intelligence and judicial cooperation with countries in the Middle East, and Central and South Asia.” Bernard Squarcini, the head of the Central Agency for Domestic Intelligence (Direction central du renseignement intérieur, DCRI), has “characterized intelligence services in Yemen, Turkey and Syria as ‘friends’ from whom the DCRI receives valuable information.”

Disturbingly, despite requests for an interview, Squarcini never responded to Human Rights Watch, whose researchers were therefore “unable to ascertain whether French intelligence services have written or oral guidelines regarding information-sharing arrangements with services with records for torture, appropriate evaluation of information where there are reasonable grounds for believing it may have been obtained under torture, or participation in interrogations abroad.”

A counter-terrorism official explained that information obtained through torture was “unacceptable because [it] is not reliable and will ultimately be ruled inadmissible in court,” but in fact the particular set-up in France — whereby investigating judges initiate cases, using DCRI agents as a “judicial police force,” in addition to their role as an intelligence-gathering agency — leads to “a continuous exchange of information and joint strategizing between the investigative judges and security service agents,” in which, as Human Rights Watch explained:

The specialized investigating judge may authorize any number of investigative steps, including arrests, on the basis of intelligence information alone. In doing so, the judge will normally not know — or take any particular interest in — the sources or methods used to acquire the information. The goal is to acquire corroborating evidence through judicially-authorized acts. French counterterrorism prosecutor Philippe Maitre has said, “There is no judicial control over the intelligence services.  It’s the judicial procedure that verifies the information that begins as intelligence … The origin of the intelligence is not important.”

Human Rights Watch also noted, “This approach, in which intelligence material is uncritically used for operational purposes in order to collect other kinds of evidence, embraces the possibility and legitimacy of using the fruits of the poisoned tree: information collected as a result of investigations prompted by statements obtained under torture.”

Understandably, Human Rights Watch was alarmed both by the ease with which material obtained through torture enters the judicial system, and also by the conflicting rules of the DCRI — “the fact that agents can perform both intelligence-gathering for operational purposes as well as judicially-authorized investigations with a view to producing evidence.”

In an illustration of the first problem, the report looks at the case of two men arrested in October 2005, on the basis of information extracted in Algeria from M’hamed Benyamina, an Algerian living in France, whose arrest in Algeria in September 2005 may have involved the cooperation of the French security services. Given the notoriously poor record of the Algerian secret service when it comes to torture, it is disturbing that information extracted from Benyamina would have been credited as trustworthy at all.

On the conflicting roles of the DCRI, the report noted that questions regarding these conflicts of interest arose in the trials of five men held in Guantánamo and released in 2004 and 2005. The case of these men, which has already led to a conviction overturned on appeal (with another trial ordered by a higher court in February this year), has focused on whether “the interrogations conducted at Guantánamo Bay were illegal because the agents had acted in their capacity as judicial police, collecting information later used to justify and substantiate the judicial investigation against the men” — and, along the way, has also revealed that the DCSI agents failed to “disclos[e] the material [from the interrogations] to the defense as required.”

In further analysis of how information obtained through torture has been incorporated into trials, the report cites the case of Djamel Beghal, an Algerian, who “was convicted in March 2004 of membership in a terrorist organization, based in part on statements he made under torture and ill-treatment in the United Arab Emirates, where he was arrested in September 2001.” Despite recanting his tortured confessions on arrival in France, the French court allowed these confessions to be used as evidence, apparently on the basis that “statements made under coercion have value insofar as corroborated by other elements, including statements made to the French investigating judge” (an Appeals Court later excluded the UAE confessions, but upheld Beghal’s conviction anyway).

In a final example, Human Rights Watch focused more sharply on the problems — as also seen in the UK and Germany — of rebutting information derived from torture in other countries, which, again, reveals how the French courts have “allowed as evidence in some cases statements allegedly made under torture by third persons, without taking steps to evaluate the circumstances in which they were obtained.” This final example involved the 2006 trial of the so-called “Chechen Network,” 27 people accused of undergoing training in Georgia for attacks in Europe, and key evidence came from statements made by a Jordanian, Abu Attiya, while detained in Amman. Despite the fact that torture in Jordan is well-known, a statement made by Abu Attiya — which, he said, he was not even allowed to read before signing — was used in the trial.

Even more alarmingly, the investigating judge actually traveled to Amman and submitted questions for Abu Attiya to the Jordanian authorities.  When confronted by Human Rights Watch, who informed the judge that Abu Attiya had alleged ill-treatment in Jordanian custody, he simply replied, “I don’t know anything about that.” As Human Rights also noted, “The same French judge also traveled to Syria with a list of questions for a man named Said Arif, who would become one of the main figures in the Chechen Network trial. These questions were presented at the trial accompanied by ‘answers’ in parenthesis. All of the evidence emanating from Arif’s detention in Syria was eventually excluded from trial because the court accepted Arif’s claims that he was tortured throughout the year he spent in the custody of the Syrian secret service.”

Given Syria’s truly abysmal human rights record, this should also have come as no surprise, but in common with the other dealings with untrustworthy regimes exposed in the Human Rights Watch report, and described in these two articles, it is a sign of what happens when, in the rush to safeguard national security at all costs, pillars of the European establishment, like the UK, Germany and France, forget their obligations to resist any involvement with torture whatsoever, arguing that information derived from torture cannot be ruled out, allowing it into operations and trials, and, as a result, finding ways to avoid asking difficult questions about whether it is reliable, and whether its use is creating a market for more information derived from torture.

It remains to be seen how Germany and France will respond to the Human Rights Watch report, and whether, in the UK, the promised inquiry into complicity in torture will lead to an honest evaluation of how flirting with torture is incompatible with morality, justice, and — perhaps most practically — the need for accurate information. Those of us who abhor the use of torture, its corrosive effect on notions of civilization, and its global web of victims, inspired by America’s post-9/11 flight from the law, need to hold firm to our demands that our governments change their ways of operating, and no longer seek to justify the use of torture under any circumstances.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Eurasia Review, The Public Record, Uruknet and United Progressives.

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

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

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

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

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

B. CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones

131. Although it is still not possible to identify all 28 of the CIA’s acknowledged high-value detainees, the figures quoted in a memo of the Office of Legal Counsel of 30 May 2005 written by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury [PDF] indicate that the other 66 prisoners in the CIA programme were regarded as less significant. Some of them were subsequently handed over to the United States military and transferred to Guantanamo, while others were rendered to the custody of their home countries or other countries. In very few cases were they released.

1. Afghanistan

132. Outside of the specific “high-value detainee” programme, most detainees were held in a variety of prisons in Afghanistan. Three of these are well-known: a secret prison at Bagram airbase, reportedly identified as “the Hangar” [See also the interview with Murat Kurnaz (annex II, case 14)], and two secret prisons near Kabul, known as the “dark prison” and the “salt pit”. During an interview held with the experts, Bisher al-Rawi indicated that, in the dark prison, there were no lights, heating or decoration. His cell was about 5 x 9 feet with a solid steel door and a hatch towards the bottom of it. He only had a bucket to use as a toilet, an old piece of carpet and a rusty steel bar across the width of the cell to hang people from. All the guards wore hoods with small eye holes, and they never spoke. Very loud music was played continuously. He also indicated that he had been subjected to sleep deprivation for up to three days and received threats. Binyam Mohamed provided a similar account to the experts [see annex II, case 18], as did the lawyer of Khaled El-Masri [annex II, case 9] and Suleiman Abdallah [annex II, case 2]. The experts heard allegations about three lesser-known prisons, including one in the Panjshir valley, north of Kabul, and two others identified as Rissat and Rissat 2, but it was not yet possible to verify these allegations. Of the prisoners identified as having been held in secret CIA custody (in addition to the above-mentioned high-value detainees), seven were eventually released and four escaped from Bagram in July 2005, namely Abu Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan; Omar al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti, captured in Bogor, Indonesia, in 2002; Muhammad Jafar Jamal al-Kahtani, a Saudi, reportedly [re-]captured in Khost province, Afghanistan, in November 2006; and Abdullah Hashimi, a Syrian, also known as Abu Abdullah al-Shami. Five prisoners were reportedly returned to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in 2006: Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi [see para. 146 below]; Hassan Raba’i and Khaled al-Sharif, both captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2003, who had “spent time in a CIA prison in Afghanistan”; Abdallah al-Sadeq, seized in a covert CIA operation in Thailand in the spring of 2004; and Abu Munder al-Saadi, both held briefly before being rendered to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. In May 2009, Human Rights Watch reported that its representatives briefly met Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi on a visit to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, although he refused to be interviewed. Human Rights Watch interviewed four other men, who claimed that, “before they were sent to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, United States forces had tortured them in detention centers in Afghanistan, and supervised their torture in Pakistan and Thailand”. One of the four was Hassan Raba’i, also known as Mohamed Ahmad Mohamed al-Shoroeiya, who stated that, in mid-2003, in a place he believed was Bagram prison in Afghanistan, “the interpreters who directed the questions to us did it with beatings and insults. They used cold water, ice water. They put us in a tub with cold water. We were forced [to go] for months without clothes. They brought a doctor at the beginning. He put my leg in a plaster. One of the methods of interrogation was to take the plaster off and stand on my leg”.

133. The released detainees are:

• Laid Saidi, an Algerian seized in the United Republic of Tanzania on 10 May 2003, was handed over to Malawians in plain clothes who were accompanied by two middle-aged Caucasian men wearing jeans and T-shirts. Shortly after the expulsion, a lawyer representing Mr. Saidi’s wife filed an affidavit with a Tanzanian court, saying that immigration documents showed that Mr. Saidi had been deported through the border between Kasumulu, United Republic of Tanzania, and Malawi. He was held for a week in a detention facility in the mountains of Malawi, then rendered to Afghanistan, where he was held in the “dark prison”, the “salt pit” and another unidentified prison. About a year after he was seized, he was flown to Tunisia, where he was detained for another 75 days, before being returned to Algeria, where he was released.

• Three Yemenis — Salah Nasser Salim Ali Darwish, seized in Indonesia in October 2003, Mohammed al-Asad and Mohammed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah — were held in a number of CIA detention facilities until their return to Yemen in May 2005, where they continued to be held, apparently at the request of the United States authorities. Mr. Bashmilah was detained by Jordanian intelligence agents in October 2003, when he was in Jordan to assist his mother who was having an operation. From 21 to 26 October 2003, Mr. Bashmilah was detained without charge and subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including prolonged beatings and being threatened with electric shocks and the rape of his mother and wife [see Declaration of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in support of plaintiffs’ opposition to the motion of the United States to dismiss or, in the alternative, for summary judgment, civil action No. 5:07-cv-02798 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division]. A communication was sent by the special rapporteurs on torture and on human rights while countering terrorism to the Governments of the United States, Indonesia, Yemen and Jordan on the cases of Bashmilah and Salim Ali, who were both detained and tortured in Jordan [E/CN.4/2006/6/Add.1, paras. 93, 126, 525 and 550]. Only the latter country responded, declaring that no record showing that the two men had been arrested for the violations of either the penal, disciplinary or administrative codes, and that they did not have documented files indicating that they posed a security concern, eliminating the possibility of their arrest for what may be described as terrorism [A/HRC/4/33/Add.1, para. 123]. The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention adopted its opinion No. 47/2005 (Yemen) on the case on 30 November 2005, declaring their detention to be arbitrary as being devoid of any legal basis. In its reply to the allegations, the Government of Yemen confirmed that Mr. Bashmilah and Mr. Salim Ali had been handed over to Yemen by the United States. According to the Government, they had been held in a security police facility because of their alleged involvement in terrorist activities related to Al-Qaida. The Government added that the competent authorities were still dealing with the case pending receipt of the persons’ files from the United States authorities in order to transfer them to the Prosecutor [A/HRC/4/40/Add.1, para. 15].

• Khaled El-Masri, a German seized on the border of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on 31 December 2003, was held in a hotel room by agents of that State for 23 days, then rendered by the CIA to the “salt pit”. He was released in Albania on 29 May 2004 [Also see Interview with the lawyer of Khaled El-Masri (annex II, case 9)].

• Khaled al-Maqtari, a Yemeni seized in Iraq in January 2004, was initially held in Abu Ghraib, then transferred to a secret CIA detention facility in Afghanistan. In April 2004, he was moved to a second secret detention facility, possibly in Eastern Europe, where he remained in complete isolation for 28 months, until he was returned to Yemen and released in May 2007.

• Marwan Jabour, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, was seized in Lahore, Pakistan, on 9 May 2004, and held in a CIA detention facility in Afghanistan for 25 months. He was then transferred to Jordan, where he was held for six weeks, and to Israel, where he was held for another six weeks, before being freed in Gaza.

[Also mentioned:] Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish national residing in Germany, interviewed by the experts for the present study, was arrested in Pakistan in November or December 2001 and initially held by Pakistani police officers and officers of the United States. He was then transferred into the custody of the United States at that country’s airbase in Kandahar, Afghanistan, before being taken to the naval base at Guantanamo Bay on 1 February 2002. He was held secretly until May 2002, and released on 24 August 2006.

134. A total of 23 detainees who ended up in Guantanamo were also held in CIA detention facilities in Afghanistan. They include:

(a) Six men seized in the Islamic Republic of Iran in late 2001:

• Wassam al-Ourdoni, a Jordanian, who was released from Guantanamo in April 2004. In 2006, he told Reprieve that he had been seized by the Iranian authorities while returning from a religious visit to Pakistan with his wife and newborn child in December 2001, then handed over to the Afghan authorities, who handed him on to the CIA. He said that the Americans “asked me about my relationship with Al-Qaida. I told them I had nothing to do with Al-Qaida. They then put me in jail under circumstances that I can only recall with dread. I lived under unimaginable conditions that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.” He said that he was first placed in an underground prison for 77 days: “this room was so dark that we couldn’t distinguish nights and days. There was no window, and we didn’t see the sun once during the whole time.” He said that he was then moved to “prison number three”, where the food was so bad that his weight dropped substantially. He was then held in Bagram for 40 days before being flown to Guantanamo [Clive Stafford Smith, “Abandoned to their fate in Guantánamo”, Index on Censorship, 2006].

• Aminullah Tukhi, an Afghan who was transferred to Afghan custody from Guantanamo in December 2007. He alleged that he had fled from Herat to the Islamic Republic of Iran to escape the Taliban, and was working as a taxi driver when the Iranians began rounding up illegal immigrants towards the end of 2001 [PDF, pp. 71-7].

• Hussein Almerfedi, a Yemeni, still at Guantanamo. He alleged that he was “kidnapped” in the Islamic Republic of Iran and held for a total of 14 months in three prisons in Afghanistan, “two under Afghani control and one under US control [Bagram]” [PDF, pp. 31-40].

• Tawfiq al-Bihani, a Yemeni, still at Guantanamo. Allegedly, after deciding to flee Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks, he was “arrested by Iranian Police in Zahedan, Iran for entering the country without a visa” and held “in various prisons in Iran and Afghanistan, for approximately one year in total [PDF, pp. 66-9].

• Rafiq Alhami, a Tunisian still held at Guantanamo, who alleged that “I was in an Afghan prison but the interrogation was done by Americans. I was there for about a one-year period, transferring from one place to another. I was tortured for about three months in a prison called the Prison of Darkness or the Dark Prison” [PDF, pp. 147-61]. And further: “Back in Afghanistan I would be tortured. I was threatened. I was left out all night in the cold. It was different here. I spent two months with no water, no shoes, in darkness and in the cold. There was darkness and loud music for two months. I was not allowed to pray. I was not allowed to fast during Ramadan. These things are documented. You have them” [PDF, pp. 20-22].

• Walid al-Qadasi, a Yemeni who was rendered to the “dark prison” and held in other prisons in Afghanistan, together with four other men whose whereabouts are unknown [In addition, Aminullah Tukhi explained that 10 prisoners in total -- six Arabs, two Afghans, an Uzbek and a Tajik -- had been delivered to the Americans. Although six of these men are accounted for above, it is not known what happened to the other four: an Arab, an Afghan, the Uzbek and the Tajik]. An allegation letter was sent in November 2005 by the Special Rapporteur on torture in relation to Walid Muhammad Shahir Muhammad al-Qadasi, a Yemeni citizen, indicating that the following allegations had been received: He was arrested in Iran in late 2001. He was held there for about three months before being handed over to the authorities in Afghanistan who in turn handed him over to the custody of the US. He was held in a prison in Kabul. During US custody, officials cut his clothes with scissors, left him naked and took photos of him before giving him Afghan clothes to wear. They then handcuffed his hands behind his back, blindfolded him and started interrogating him. The apparently Egyptian interrogator, accusing him of belonging to Al-Qaida, threatened him with death. He was put in an underground cell measuring approximately two metres by three metres with very small windows. He shared the cell with ten inmates. They had to sleep in shifts due to lack of space and received food only once a day. He spent three months there without ever leaving the cell. After three months, Walid al-Qadasi was transferred to Bagram, where he was interrogated for one month. His head was shaved, he was blindfolded, made to wear ear muffs and a mouth mask, handcuffed, shackled, loaded on to a plane and flown out to Guantanamo, where he was held in solitary confinement for one more month. In April 2004, after having been detained for two years, he was transferred to Sana’a prison in Yemen. In its response, the Government of the United States reiterated its earlier announcements that no Government agency was allowed to engage in torture and that its actions complied with the non-refoulement principle. Opinion No. 47/2005 of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention also concerns Mr. al-Qadasi [See E/CN.4/2006/6/Add.1, paras. 1 and 527, and the response from the Government of the United States (A/HRC/10/44/Add.4, para. 252). See also the report of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 47/2005 (A/HRC/4/40/Add.1)].

(b) Two men seized in Georgia in early 2002 and sold to United States forces:

• Soufian al-Huwari, an Algerian, transferred to Algerian custody from Guantanamo in November 2008; and Zakaria al-Baidany, also known as Omar al-Rammah, a Yemeni, still held at Guantanamo. According to Mr. al-Huwari, both were rendered to the “dark prison”, and were also held in other detention facilities in Afghanistan: “The Americans didn’t capture me. The Mafia captured me. They sold me to the Americans”. He added: “When I was captured, a car came around and people inside were talking Russian and Georgian. I also heard a little Chechnyan. We were delivered to another group who spoke perfect Russian. They sold us to the dogs. The Americans came two days later with a briefcase full of money. They took us to a forest, then a private plane to Kabul, Afghanistan” [PDF, pp. 15-23].

(c) Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi national and British resident, was seized in the Gambia in November 2002, and rendered to the “dark prison” at the beginning of December 2002. He was kept shackled in complete isolation and darkness for two weeks. On or around 22 December 2002, he was transferred to Bagram, and then to Guantanamo on 7 February 2003. He was finally released on 30 March 2007. At Bagram, he was reportedly threatened and subjected to ill-treatment and sleep deprivation for up to three days at a time [Interview with Bisher al-Rawi (annex II, case 4)].

(d) Jamil El-Banna, a Jordanian national and British resident, was also seized in the Gambia in November 2002 and rendered to the “dark prison”, then to Guantanamo. He was released from Guantanamo in December 2007.

(e) Six other detainees were flown to Guantanamo on 20 September 2004 after having spent one to three years in custody:

• Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani and Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani, Pakistani brothers seized in Karachi, who were held in the “salt pit” [Both Laid Saidi and Khaled El-Masri spoke about getting to know the Rabbani brothers in the “salt pit”];

• Abdulsalam al-Hela, a Yemeni colonel and businessman who was seized in Egypt;

• Adil al-Jazeeri, an Algerian seized in Pakistan [PDF, pp. 315-34];

• Sanad al-Kazimi, a Yemeni seized in the United Arab Emirates [PDF. Also on the flight that took these men to Guantanamo were Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, Hassan bin Attash and Binyam Mohamed. See also paras 151 and 159 below];

• Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman seized in Thailand, who was held in isolation in Bagram for a year.

Mr. al-Kazimi was apprehended in Dubai in January 2003 and held at an undisclosed location in or near Dubai for two months. He was then transferred to a different place about two hours away. He was kept naked for 22 days, at times shackled, and subjected to extreme climatic conditions and simulated drowning. After six months, he was transferred to United States custody, allegedly pursuant to the CIA rendition programme. He was taken to Kabul and held in the “dark prison” for nine months, where he suffered severe physical and psychological torture by unidentified persons. He was then transferred to Bagram airbase, where he was held for a further four months in United States custody. Again, he was allegedly subjected to severe physical and psychological torture by what he believed were the same unidentified persons he had encountered in the “dark prison” [See the report of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 3/2009 (United States of America) (A/HRC/13/30/Add.1)].

135. Four other detainees, held in Bagram, are known because lawyers established contact with their families and filed habeas corpus petitions on their behalf:

• Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian who was seized in Karachi in May 2002.

• Amin Mohammad al-Bakri, a Yemeni who was seized in Bangkok on 28 December 2002 by agents of the intelligence services of the United States or of Thailand. Throughout 2003, his whereabouts were unknown. The Thai authorities confirmed to Mr. al-Bakri’s relatives that he had entered Thai territory, but denied knowing his whereabouts. In January 2004, Mr. al-Bakri’s relatives received a letter from him through ICRC, informing them that he was being kept in detention at the Bagram airbase. It was reported that Mr. al-Bakri was detained owing to his commercial connections with Mr. Khalifa, a cousin of Osama bin Laden later assassinated in Madagascar [Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 11/2007 (Afghanistan/ United States of America) (A/HRC/7/4/Add.1)].

• Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni seized in 2004, who was sent to Abu Ghraib before Bagram.

• Haji Wazir, an Afghan seized in the United Arab Emirates in late 2002 [PDF].

136. The whereabouts of 12 others are unknown, and the others remain to be identified. It is probable that some of these men have been returned to their home countries, and that others are still held in Bagram. The experts received allegations that the following men were also held: Issa al-Tanzani (Tanzanian), also identified as Soulayman al-Tanzani, captured in Mogadishu; Abu Naseem (Libyan), captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, in early 2003; Abou Hudeifa (Tunisian), captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, at the end of 2002; and Salah Din al-Bakistani, captured in Baghdad. Marwan Jabour also mentioned eight other prisoners. One was Yassir al-Jazeeri (Algerian), seized in Lahore, March 2003 (whom he met), and he heard about seven others: Ayoub al-Libi (Libyan), seized in Peshawar in January 2004; Mohammed (Afghan, born Saudi), seized in Peshawar in May 2004; Abdul Basit (Saudi or Yemeni), seized before June 2004; Adnan (nationality unknown), seized before June 2004; an unidentified Somali (possibly Shoeab as-Somali or Rethwan as-Somali); another unidentified Somali; and Marwan al-Adeni (Yemeni), seized in or around May 2003.

2. Iraq

137. Although the Government of the United States stated that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees seized during the occupation, an unknown number of persons were deliberately held “off the books” and denied ICRC access. In Abu Ghraib, for example, the abuse scandal that erupted following the publication of photographs in April 2004 involved military personnel who were not only holding supposedly significant detainees delivered by the United States military, but others delivered by the CIA or United States Special Forces units. The existence of “ghost detainees”, who were clearly held incommunicado in secret detention, was later exposed in two United States investigations.

138. In August 2004, a report into detainee detentions in Iraq (chaired by former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger) noted that “other Government agencies” had brought a number of “ghost detainees” to detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib, “without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention”, and that, on one occasion, a “handful” of these detainees had been “moved around the facility to hide them from a visiting ICRC team” [PDF].

139. In another report issued in August 2004, Lieutenant General Anthony R. Jones and Major General George R. Fay noted that eight prisoners in Abu Ghraib had been denied access to ICRC delegates by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Commander of the Coalition Joint Task Force in Iraq: “Detainee-14 was detained in a totally darkened cell measuring about 2 metres long and less than a metre across, devoid of any window, latrine or water tap, or bedding. On the door the delegates noticed the inscription ‘the Gollum’, and a picture of the said character from the film trilogy ‘The Lord of the Rings’” [PDF].

140. Although the Schlesinger report noted the use of other facilities for “ghost detainees”, the locations of these other prisons, and the numbers of detainees held, have not yet been thoroughly investigated. In June 2004, the then United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that a suspected leader of Ansar al-Aslam had been held for more than seven months without ICRC being notified of his detention; he also stated: “He was not at Abu Ghraib. He is not there now. He has never been there to my knowledge” [also see this New York Times report]. According to another report, the prisoner was known as “Triple X” and his secret detention was authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who issued a classified order in November 2003 “directing military guards to hide [him] from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters”. In addition, some locations may well be those in which prisoners died in United States custody. In 2006, Human Rights First published a report identifying 98 deaths in United States custody in Iraq, describing five deaths in CIA custody, including Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in Abu Ghraib, and others at locations including Forward Operating Base Tiger, in Anbar province, a forward operating base near Al-Asad, a base outside Mosul, a temporary holding camp near Nasiriyah and a forward operating base in Tikrit [PDF].

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

For a sequence of articles 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), 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), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA) (all May 2009) and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009), When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan (July 2009), US Torture Under Scrutiny In British Courts (July 2009), What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed (August 2009), Torture in Bagram and Guantánamo: The Declaration of Ahmed al-Darbi (September 2009), UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents (October 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), Two Algerian Torture Victims Are Freed from Guantánamo (January 2010), UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?” (January 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive.

The deaths of the three men — Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani — have been controversial from the moment that they were first announced, when Guantánamo’s then-Commander, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, attracted international opprobrium by declaring that they were an act of “asymmetric warfare,” and Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, had similar scorn heaped upon her when she described the men’s deaths as a “good PR move.”

As I have explained previously, the administration soon assumed a slightly more placatory role, when Cully Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, declared, “I wouldn’t characterize it as a good PR move. What I would say is that we are always concerned when someone takes his own life, because as Americans, we value life, even the lives of violent terrorists who are captured waging war against our country.”

In keeping with the unjustified rhetoric that concluded Stimson’s “apology,” the Pentagon proceeded to pump out propaganda portraying the men as terrorists, even though, like all the prisoners in Guantánamo, the majority of the information against them had come from interrogations in which torture and coercion were widespread, and none of the men had ever been screened adequately to determine whether or not there was any basis for their automatic designation as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

Al-Zahrani (left), who was only 17 years old at the time of his capture, was accused of being a Taliban fighter who “facilitated weapons purchases,” even though this scenario was highly unlikely, given his age. In al-Utaybi’s case, he was declared an “enemy combatant” because of his involvement with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, a vast worldwide missionary organization whose alleged connection to terrorism was duly exaggerated by the Pentagon, which had the effrontery to describe the avowedly apolitical organization as “an al-Qaeda 2nd tier recruitment organization.” The administration also admitted that al-Utaybi had actually been approved for “transfer to the custody of another country” in November 2005, although Navy Commander Robert Durand said he “did not know whether al-Utaybi had been informed about the transfer recommendation before he killed himself.” In the case of al-Salami, who was captured in a guest house in Pakistan with over a dozen other prisoners, most of whom have persistently claimed that they were students, the Pentagon alleged that he was “a mid- to high-level al-Qaeda operative who had key ties to principal facilitators and senior members of the group.”

Sadly, the NCIS statement (published in full here) does little to address long-standing concerns about the circumstances of the men’s deaths. The investigators unreservedly backed up the suicide story by reporting that “Autopsies were performed by physicians from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Naval Hospital Guantánamo on June 10 and 11. The manner of death for all detainees was determined to be suicide and the cause of death was determined to be by hanging, the medical term being ‘mechanical asphyxia.’”

Their major contribution to the story of the men’s deaths was to revive claims that they had left suicide notes. They wrote that “A short written statement declaring their intent to be martyrs was found in the pockets of each of the detainees,” and that “Lengthier written statements were also found in each of their cells.”

The contents of the alleged suicide notes were not revealed in the NCIS statement, but were part of “more than 3,000 pages of military investigative documents, medical records, autopsies, and statements from guards and detainees” obtained by the Washington Post. According to the NCIS, the “case file will be posted in its entirety on the DOD FOIA web site in the near future.”

As the Washington Post described it, Ali al-Salami (left) wrote, “I am informing you that I gave away the precious thing that I have in which it became very cheap, which is my own self, to lift up the oppression that is upon us through the American Government,” adding, “I did not like the tube in my mouth, now go ahead and accept the rope in my neck.” He also apparently criticized the International Committee of the Red Cross, accusing its representatives, who secure access to some of the world’s most notorious prisons primarily on the basis that they will not publicly disclose their findings, of “conspiring in the detainees’ suffering” because it had been “covering the American Government repugnance since the first day.”

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg reported that the other two prisoners had left notes that stated, “I turned in my Koran not insult … Now I’m turning in my body and sacred are so you not insult it,” and “I left out of the cage despite of you,” and wondered, with some justification, whether the report had “quoted awkward Arabic-English translations of the detainees’ notes,” or if the men had, in fact, “written in crude English.”

The rest of the NCIS statement essentially explained the long delay in submitting the report. “Due to similarities in the wording of the statements and the manner of suicides, as well as statements made by other detainees interviewed,” the investigators wrote, “there was growing concern that someone within the Camp Delta population was directing detainees to commit suicide and that additional suicides might be imminent. Representatives of other law enforcement agencies involved in the investigation were later told that on the night in question, another detainee (who did not later commit suicide) had walked through the cell block telling people ‘tonight’s the night.’”

They added, “The cells of other detainees were searched during the week following the suicides in an attempt to find evidence regarding whether the suicides had been part of a larger conspiracy which might result in additional detainees also taking their lives,” and explained that the searches produced 1,065 pounds of documents, including “additional handwritten notes found in cells other than those where the suicides took place.” These, they wrote, were then subjected to translation and analysis, and they went on to explain that the process was particularly time-consuming because a separate body had to be set up to ensure that documents relating to confidential correspondence between prisoners and their lawyers was not included.

Rather disturbingly, reporting on the story has been noticeably muted. In the Washington Post, Josh White painted a vivid picture of how the men apparently committed suicide, but was content to parrot the NCIS’s line about the deaths, noting that the NCIS investigation “and other documents reveal that the men took advantage of lapses in guard protocol and of lenient policies toward compliant detainees to commit what suicide notes described as an attack on the United States.”

He added, “Investigators found that guards had become lax on certain rules because commanders wanted to reward the more compliant detainees, giving them extra T-shirts, blankets and towels. Detainees were allowed to hang such items to dry, or to provide privacy while using the toilet, but were not supposed to be able to obscure their cells while sleeping. Guards told officials that it was not unusual to see blankets hanging in the cells and that they did not think twice when they passed several cells on the night of June 9, 2006, with blankets strung through the wire mesh. Authorities believe the men probably hanged themselves around 10 p.m., but they were not discovered until shortly after midnight on June 10.”

White’s most explosive revelation was reserved for the end of his article, where he explained that the documentation revealed that the military’s Criminal Investigation Task Force had “decided years earlier” that Ali al-Salami, “who was arrested near his college in Pakistan in March 2002 and was turned over to U.S. authorities on May 2, 2002, in Afghanistan, was not someone they could prosecute.” Far from being “a mid- to high-level al-Qaeda operative who had key ties to principal facilitators and senior members of the group,” as the Pentagon alleged after his death, what was described as “a previously ‘secret’ document” revealed that investigators had concluded instead that “Although many of the individuals apprehended during the raid have strong connections to al-Qaeda, there is no credible information to suggest Ahmed received terrorist related training or is a member of the al-Qaeda network.” This, of course, is a shockingly belated vindication of al-Salami’s innocence, which deserves far more publicity than it has so far received.

If Josh White was rather soft on the administration, Carol Rosenberg was more challenging, writing that the NCIS statement “shed little light” on the circumstances of the men’s deaths. She spoke to a “senior Pentagon official who read the report and provided details in exchange for anonymity,” who, she wrote, noted, as if reading from a script prepared by Dick Cheney, “that the Navy investigation found the simultaneous suicides to be acts of ‘defiance and martyrdom,’” and she pointedly asked why the report “left unexplained one key question — why guards had not checked on the men for two and a half hours before they were discovered hanging in their cells.” “For years,” she added, drawing on her long experience as Guantánamo’s most frequent visiting journalist, “tours of the prison camps have described a strict doctrine that had guards check on each detainee every few minutes.”

Perhaps when — or if — the full case file is released publicly, the documents it contains will shed more light on the deaths of Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani, but for now the investigation has the appearance of a whitewash. As al-Salami’s lawyer, David Engelhardt, explained to the Washington Post, “It’s simply astounding that it took the government over two years to conclude a so-called investigation of three men who died in a small cage under the government’s exclusive control. The investigation itself is what needs to be investigated, along with the people who’ve perpetrated the disgraceful, extra-constitutional detentions.”

Not mentioned in the current round of discussions are two of the most convincing explanations of the men’s apparent suicide, which I have also reportedly previously. In my book The Guantánamo Files, which features a chapter on the suicides and hunger strikes at Guantánamo, I cite an article by Tim Golden from the New York Times Magazine in September 2006, in which Guantánamo’s warden, Col. Mike Bumgarner, explained that the British resident Shaker Aamer had told him that “several of the detainees had had a ‘vision,’ in which three of them had to die for the rest to be freed.” As I also reported in a previous article, Aamer also seemed to endorse the view that the men had committed suicide, explaining that a guard had told him before the men’s deaths, “They have lost hope in life. They have no hope in their eyes. They are ghosts, and they want to die. No food will keep them alive now. Even with four feeds a day, these men get diarrhea from any protein which goes right through them.”

Even so, other burning questions about the men’s deaths remain unanswered. In an environment in which cell searches are notoriously frequent and access to pens and paper is strictly rationed, is it really plausible that the three men could actually have written and secreted the suicide notes they were alleged to have written? And, as Carol Rosenberg asked, is it also plausible that the regime had become so lax that three men who had been on painfully long hunger strikes would have been left unmonitored for at least two hours?

One person who is not convinced is Murat Kurnaz, the German-born Turkish citizen and German resident, who was released in August 2006. In his extraordinary account of his experiences, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, Kurnaz wrote about the men’s deaths, specifically addressing these questions, providing a view of the prison’s security that is completely at odds with the blanket-shrouded cells and lax security described by the NCIS, and reaching a far darker conclusion.

Kurnaz was not present in the cell block — Block Alpha in Camp 1 — on the night the men died, but several weeks later some prisoners who were moved to cells near him explained their take on what had happened. These prisoners, who had been in Block Alpha, “said that dinner had come early that evening and that everyone in the block suddenly got tired and had fallen asleep — even though it was never quiet in the block at that hour, even when the guards left us in peace. There was always someone who couldn’t fall asleep, who wanted to pray or who kept waking up throughout the night.” Kurnaz added that Yasser’s last neighbor also noted, “The metal shutters in front of the windows had also been closed from the outside … as if a storm were approaching.”

This man explained that, although “he had been woken up in the middle of the night by a loud bang” and had seen a team of guards entering Yasser’s cell, he had thought nothing of it, as this was a regular occurrence. Some time later, however, the guards woke everyone up, and Yasser’s body was carried out of his cell on a stretcher, with a piece of sheet in his mouth, other pieces binding his arms and legs, and “more sheet around his neck, like a noose.”

The guards proceeded to explain that Yasser “had hung himself,” but, the man explained, “we didn’t think that could be true. He would have had to attach the noose to the sharp metal lattices with his hands and feet tied and with no chair to stand on. That was nearly impossible.” In addition, as Kurnaz noted, “It seemed highly unlikely that the guards would have failed to catch him in time.” Reinforcing Carol Rosenberg’s doubts, he explained, “They barely let us out of their sight for a minute.”

Kurnaz also noted, “The guards claimed he had covered the walls of his cage so that they hadn’t seen him do it. But what was he supposed to have used to cover the cage? The same sheets with which he allegedly hung himself?” He added, taking exception to the official claims that, at the time of the deaths, “it was not unusual to see blankets hanging in the cells,” “And what about the rule prohibiting us from hanging anything on the walls of our cells?”

He continued: “It seemed too much of a coincidence that the other two dead men had hung themselves at exactly the same time in exactly the same way in the same block, while all the other inmates had been sleeping like babies. When the guards were patrolling the corridors, it never took long before other guards came to ensure we were following the rules. The guards never took a break since they, too, were kept under surveillance to ensure that they too were carrying out their duties.” While this could, in theory, be explained by the report’s conclusion that security had slipped on the night in question, no one in authority addressed the next question posed by Kurnaz: “And what about the sharpshooters in the watchtowers? Hadn’t they noticed anything?”

After noting, poignantly, that Mani al-Utaybi had indeed been informed “a few days earlier” that he was going to be released — and that he was “[o]verjoyed,’ that he “had told everyone about it,” and that, consequently, he “didn’t seem to have much of a reason for killing himself” — Kurnaz presented the prisoners’ unavoidable conclusion about the men’s deaths: “No, we prisoners unanimously agreed, the men had been killed. Maybe they had been beaten to death and then strung up, or perhaps they had been strangled.”

He added that no one knew why, but that he and many others believed that it may have been because many of the guards in Guantánamo “were afraid of being sent to Iraq,” and that some of them thought that “if prisoners died in Guantánamo, it would create trouble for the Bush government, and they wouldn’t have to take part in the war.”

This strikes me as a far-fetched interpretation, but it’s clear that, although we may never know the truth about the deaths of Ali al-Salami, Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani, the NCIS’s insistence that the investigation into the deaths is now closed is premature, despite the long delay in its production. Scorned in death, and hacked up and shipped home like packages of meat, these three men deserve much more than has so far been delivered in the way of justice.

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 Antiwar.com, the Huffington Post, CounterPunch, ZNet and AlterNet.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the hunger strikes at Guantánamo, see Shaker Aamer, A South London Man in Guantánamo: The Children Speak (July 2007), Guantánamo: al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj fears that he will die (September 2007), The long suffering of Mohammed al-Amin, a Mauritanian teenager sent home from Guantánamo (October 2007), Guantánamo suicides: so who’s telling the truth? (October 2007), Innocents and Foot Soldiers: The Stories of the 14 Saudis Just Released From Guantánamo (Yousef al-Shehri and Murtadha Makram) (November 2007), A letter from Guantánamo (by Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj) (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), The forgotten anniversary of a Guantánamo suicide (May 2008), Binyam Mohamed embarks on hunger strike to protest Guantánamo charges (June 2008), Second anniversary of triple suicide at Guantánamo (June 2008), Seven Years Of Guantánamo, And A Call For Justice At Bagram (January 2009), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), Obama’s “Humane” Guantánamo Is A Bitter Joke (February 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), Guantánamo’s Long-Term Hunger Striker Should Be Sent Home (March 2009). Also see the following online chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 2 (Ahmed Kuman, Mohammed Haidel), Website Extras 3 (Abdullah al-Yafi, Abdul Rahman Shalabi), Website Extras 4 (Bakri al-Samiri, Murtadha Makram), Website Extras 5 (Ali Mohsen Salih, Ali Yahya al-Raimi, Abu Bakr Alahdal, Tarek Baada, Abdul al-Razzaq Salih).

At the start of the show, Murat, who is here to promote his account of his horrendous five-year ordeal, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, spoke about the circumstances of his arrest and imprisonment, and Paul and I were then asked to talk about the use of torture, and the system of trials by Military Commission that was introduced in November 2001 by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers, including David Addington.

Both of us, it was clear, are hopeful that whoever leads the next administration will follow through on their promise to close the prison, and will put an end to the extraordinary flight from domestic and international law that has been engineered by the White House’s current occupants. Paul, I was happy to note, echoed the American people’s widespread revulsion at the use of torture, extraordinary rendition and imprisonment without charge or trial that I noted during my visit to the United States last month.

To watch the show on YouTube, see below.

Andy 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.

The three “high-value” detainees whom Michael Hayden admitted were waterboarded by the CIA. From L to R: Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri.

My questions for Mr. Hayden are simple. Firstly, if it’s true that only three detainees were subjected to waterboarding, then why did a number of “former and current intelligence officers and supervisors” tell ABC News in November 2005 that “a dozen top al-Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe” were subjected to six “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” instituted in mid-March 2002?

According to the ABC News account, the six techniques used by the CIA on the “dozen top al-Qaeda targets” were “The Attention Grab,” “Attention Slap,” “The Belly Slap” and three other techniques that are particularly worrying: “Long Time Standing,” “The Cold Cell,” and, of course, “Waterboarding.”

“Long Time Standing” was described as “among the most effective [techniques],” in which prisoners “are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours.” The ABC News report added, “Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.” In “The Cold Cell,” the prisoner “is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.”

The description of “Waterboarding” was as follows: “The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.”

The article proceeded with recollections of the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who apparently “won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess” (the interrogators tried it on themselves, but “only lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in”).

According to the ABC News report, one other detainee who was waterboarded was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the director of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, who was captured in November 2001. His current whereabouts are unknown, although there are suspicions that he was finally delivered to the Libyan government. Having slipped off the radar, the government clearly does not want his case revived, not only because it may have to explain what has happened to him, but also because, as a result of the application of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” al-Libi claimed that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Al-Libi’s “confession” led to President Bush declaring, in October 2002, “Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases,” and his claims were, notoriously, included in Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. The claims were of course, groundless, and were recanted by al-Libi in January 2004, but it took Dan Cloonan, a veteran FBI interrogator, who was resolutely opposed to the use of torture, to explain why they should never have been believed in the first place. Cloonan told Jane Mayer, “It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq … The reason they got bad information is that they beat it out of him. You never get good information from someone that way.”

My second question for Mr. Hayden concerns an allegation made by Murat Kurnaz, the German detainee who was released from Guantánamo in August 2006. In an article in the Washington Spectator last July, focusing on Kurnaz’s story, as described in his book Fünf Jahre Meines Lebens: Ein Bericht Aus Guantánamo (Five Years Of My Life: A Report From Guantánamo), the following passage came after Kurnaz’s recollections of being hung by his wrists for “hours and days,” interrupted only by a doctor who came to “check his vital signs to determine if he could withstand more enhanced interrogation,” and his recollections of seeing, in the neighboring cell, another detainee who had died as a result of this ordeal:

“Kurnaz said he was also subjected to waterboarding and electric shock. And that beatings were routine and constant. He theorizes that much of the torture was a result of the failure of the American soldiers and agents to capture any real terrorists in the initial sweeps. (He was told that he was sold to the Americans for $3,000 by Pakistani police, who identified him as a terrorist). ‘They didn’t have any big fish. And they thought that by torture they could get one of us to say something. “I know Osama” or something like that. Then they could say they had a big fish.’”

In light of the comments made by CIA sources in November 2005, and by Murat Kurnaz in his book, I can only wonder how it’s feasible for Mr. Hayden to assert that the use of waterboarding was restricted to three of the 14 “high-value” detainees who were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, and, by extension, to claim that waterboarding was not used elsewhere in the “War on Terror” prisons; specifically, as Murat Kurnaz alleged, in one of the US prisons in Afghanistan, which, with Guantánamo, provided the template for the well-chronicled riot of torture and abuse that later migrated to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

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, AlterNet, Antiwar.com and CounterPunch.

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), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, 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). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

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

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

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

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

Mamdouh Habib

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

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

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

Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost

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

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

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

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

Note: For more on Kurnaz, see here, and for more on the stories of all three men see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.