Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist in Basra, Iraq, was killed by British soldiers in September 2003, his brutalized body bearing 93 separate injuries, after two days of what the judge in the three-year inquiry, Sir William Gage, described as “serious, gratuitous violence” that leaves “a very great stain on the reputation of the Army.”

As the Independent explained in an editorial today, the report is “damning.” The judge found that the “savagery meted out to Mr. Mousa and fellow detainees in Basra in 2003 were not the actions of a few ‘bad apples,’” but were, instead, “the result of systemic, ‘corporate’ failures that meant neither the abusive soldiers, nor their superiors, were aware that forcing detainees to wear hoods and adopt excruciating stress positions contravened both British law and the Geneva Convention.”

The Independent noted, “That any British soldier is unclear about what constitutes torture is disgraceful enough. That there were others who saw what was happening and allowed it to continue is truly shameful.”

In response, Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for Defence, “accepted the vast majority of Sir William’s recommendations, which includes “a total ban on the use of techniques such as hooding, the creation of an independent inspection regime for military detention centres, and an overhaul of soldiers’ training for handling civilian detainees.”

This is appropriate, of course, but the obvious problem that can easily be overlooked is that hooding — and the use of stress positions — were illegal when British soldiers arrived in Basra, having been outlawed by the government of Ted Heath in 1972, following the abuse of IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland.

Phil Shiner, a human rights lawyer who has been involved in seeking accountability for the torture, abuse and murder of prisoners in Iraq, remains deeply concerned abut the use of banned techniques. Speaking to the BBC, he said, “How did it come about that intelligence units were using techniques that were banned in the 1970s — food and water deprivation, stress positions, hooding and the use of noise?”

The BBC noted that, during the inquiry, it emerged that, apparently, “the ban was never made explicit in British army guidance on prisoner of war handling.” The BBC added, “A four-star general was not aware of the Heath ruling. Nor was Adam Ingram, the former armed forces minister.”

If this seems incredible, I’d suggest that it is, and would also suggest that, for those interested in the truth, what is glaringly obvious is that the torture and abuse inflicted on Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers exactly mirrored what the US military was doing, because the British had, by joining the Americans in Iraq, also fallen under the sway of the Bush administration, and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had been responsible for implementing exactly the same techniques used by the British in their own prisons — most notoriously, in Abu Ghraib.

In 2005, the Intelligence and Security Committee produced a report, “The Handling of Detainees by UK Intelligence Personnel in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq” (PDF) which claimed that, “Whilst the UK co-operates with the US both against terrorism and in Iraq, each country has significantly different rules governing the handling, detention, interrogation and classification of prisoners of war, detainees and internees.” The report claimed that “The UK rules governing detention and interrogation … accord with the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,” but as this was so horribly contradicted by the actions of UK troops in Iraq, and as the inquiry did not fall for the “few bad apples” scenario favoured by the Bush administration, the Committee’s findings do nothing to contradict the assumption that the techniques used by the British — or, perhaps more accurately, the absence of restraints on their behaviour — had come, whether directly  or indirectly, from the Americans.

In addition, as Phil Shiner reported yesterday in the Guardian, after explaining, “I act for over 150 other Iraqis in a court of appeal case where the judgment is due next month on our argument that there must be a single inquiry into the UK’s detention policy in Iraq,” the pattern of abuse was so widespread throughout UK forces in Iraq that there must be further investigations. As he stated, the cases “span the period of March 2003 to December 2008, involve at least 14 different UK facilities and implicate numerous battle groups,” and the allegations “are shocking and involve a range of techniques and practices which were simply not on Sir William’s radar: unbelievably debased sexual behaviour, mock executions, vicious threats of rape of detainees’ female relatives, and systematic use of hooding, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, temperature manipulation and solitary confinement for weeks” — all, again, the types of torture and abuse used by US forces.

In Britain, to date, only one former soldier, Cpl. Donald Payne, has been prosecuted and imprisoned for his role in the murder of Baha Mousa. At a court martial in 2007, he “became Britain’s first war criminal,” as the BBC put it, “when he pleaded guilty to inhumane treatment, and was given a one-year sentence. The BBC also toed that he was “the only person to be punished for what happened to Baha Mousa,” although “he told the inquiry that all members of the unit guarding the detainees had kicked and punched them, including an officer.”

As the BBC also explained, “The inquiry heard that Payne had conducted a ‘choir’ of the screams of the detainees.” Former soldier Gareth Aspinall said, “Towards the end of the second day they were all in so much pain that he only had to poke them to get them to make a noise. Cpl. Payne found this funny and when visitors came across they also found it funny.”

In the US, a handful of personnel at Abu Ghraib were blamed for the abuse that was revealed in April 2004, and were subsequently tried, sentenced and imprisoned. In America, however, the Bush administration got away with blaming the abuse on “a few bad apples,” and every branch of the US government has, to date, failed to hold anyone accountable for the 100 or more murders in US custody in Iraq that have never been adequately investigated. The only investigation relating to Iraq that remains open concerns the murder in Abu Ghraib of Manadel al-Jamadi, as was revealed in July, when it also became clear that this investigation — and another involving the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan — were all that was left of the persistent calls by NGOs, lawyers and activists for accountability for those involved in the torture and murder of prisoners in the “war on terror.”

The moral extension of accountability for murders in military custody from the UK to the US is, for me, the most significant knock-on effect of the Baha Mousa Inquiry, although, in closing, I should also note that it ought to show David Cameron what a proper inquiry looks like, as he prepares to push ahead with his whitewash of the security services in his proposed inquiry into British complicity in torture abroad in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as I have explained before, most recently last month, when ten NGOs, including Amnesty International, Liberty and Reprieve, shredded the supposed validity of the inquiry by refusing to take part in it. As I explained at the time:

I hope that the government will face increased pressure to replace the planned whitewash with a full public inquiry, as, for example, with the Baha Mousa inquiry, held under the Inquiries Act of 2005, as Reprieve requested last summer, noting that that particular inquiry, which is due to issue its report on September 8, was “a model of an inquiry functioning efficiently, including the hearing of secret evidence.” Last summer, Reprieve lamented that, under the plan for the torture inquiry, “there is no formal mechanism for civil participation — so Reprieve and other civil organisations will not be allowed access to documents and proceedings,” whereas, under the Inquiries Act, “document classification review proceedings are sophisticated and rightly allow the judge to balance the need for national security against the need for transparency.”

For Baha Mousa’s family, nothing can ever remove the horror of his murder, but as an indictment of the unacceptable brutality of the “war on terror,” and Britain’s shameful involvement in it, the inquiry is to be commended. It needs to be replicated in the US, of course, although that remains unimaginable, and in both Britain and America it should also stand as model of how to conduct inquiries into the wider use of torture.

But that, of course, will not happen until significantly more people care about the crimes that were committed “in our name,” which at present, sadly, appears to be a far-off dream, however much Baha Mousa’s murder ought to remind us of the nightmare of our own making that we’ve been living through for the last ten years.

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.

I won’t run through the whole article here — and its suggestion that the men were killed, either by accident or design, and probably during torture sessions in “Camp No,” a separate facility outside the main perimeter fence — as I recommend anyone who has not read it to do so (and also to read my own commentary on it, and my follow-up here), but I will say that, having spoken to the lead soldier responsible for questioning the official story, Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, I was convinced that he had no reason to fabricate a story that could only damage his career, and was particularly impressed by the description of how “he could not forget what he had seen at Guantánamo. When Barack Obama became president, [he] decided to act. ‘I thought that with a new administration and new ideas I could actually come forward,’ he said. ‘It was haunting me.’” And as he told me last year, he felt “physically sick” after holding onto his story for three years.

Critics of Horton’s article took the position that a cover-up would have required the complicity of dozens of military personnel, but Horton’s article made it clear that the official story also required the silence of numerous people, meaning that neither option reflected well on the government and on the authorities at Guantánamo. Nevertheless, critics have been out in force again over the last month after Horton’s article won the National Magazine Award for Reporting in the US, beating four others in a shortlist that also included  Michael Hastings’s Rolling Stone profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, which led to McChrystal losing his job as commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, and which was the favourite to win.

A particularly savage attack came via an article in Adweek by Alex Koppelman, and, to mark the fifth anniversary of the deaths of the three men at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006, I’m cross-posting below a detailed deconstruction of Koppelman’s article by my friend and colleague, the psychologist and blogger Jeffrey Kaye, which was published on Truthout.

Deconstructing the Campaign to Malign Award-Winning Article on Guantánamo “Suicides”
By Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, June 1, 2011

While not the first article attacking Scott Horton’s controversial Harper’s article, “The Guantánamo Suicides,” Alex Koppelman’s critique in Adweek on May 23 capped a long campaign by some media figures to impugn the veracity of Horton’s investigation, if not the integrity of both Horton and Harper’s Magazine.

Horton’s article in January 2010 strongly criticized the Department of Defense (DoD) investigations into the June 10, 2006, deaths of three Guantánamo detainees, bringing forth new eyewitness testimony as to what occurred that terrible evening at the camp, calling into question the official narrative. For their part, Guantánamo authorities immediately labeled these deaths suicides. Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the commander at Guantánamo, called the deaths a day after they occurred “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

Koppelman’s article appears to be a reaction to the recent presentation of the prestigious National Magazine Award to Horton’s article. The award is given annually by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), who, since then, have stood by their decision to recognize the Horton article.

The Koppelman article also followed attacks on those critical of the DoD investigation of the “suicides” by Donald Rumsfeld, in a May 12 op-ed at the Washington Post, and a May 17 blog post by Cully Stimson, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs at the time of the prisoners’ deaths, lambasting ASME’s “disgraceful award” to Horton.

In addition, the Adweek article was published only five days after another mysterious purported suicide at the Guantánamo prison camp. Inayatullah was a 37-year-old prisoner found dead either in a recreation yard or in his cell, depending on the news account. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) is investigating his death, which, if ruled suicide, would be the sixth such death at the camp, if one includes the deaths of the three prisoners in 2006.

An unprecedented attack by an advertising industry journal against a magazine industry award-winning story, Koppelman’s article stimulated a cascade of grateful response from conservative commentators, such as the Weekly Standard‘s “The Scrapbook, ” Jonathan Last, and Joe Carter (who wrote his own earlier series of articles critiquing Horton’s investigation, blustering that to compare Harper’s Magazine with the National Enquirer “would be an insult to the supermarket tabloid”).

What was surprising was the enthusiasm for Koppelman’s piece from ostensibly more liberal writers, such as John Cole, and Mark Benjamin. In addition, the article was noted and recommended at numerous web sites, from Gawker to the Daily Beast.

Benjamin is an interesting, if strange, case. Writing in Time/CNN’s blog, Battleland, Benjamin, himself the author of numerous articles on US torture for Salon.com, wrote, “Alex Koppelman at Adweek does a thorough job of airing the problems in Horton’s piece,” adding, “It’s worth a read.”

Benjamin never notes in his encomium to Koppelman’s piece that he had a prior relationship with Koppelman at Salon.com, or that he co-authored articles with Koppelman. It never occurs to him to reveal this as any source of potential bias. Perhaps, he might have reflected that both Koppelman and he have cited Horton as a reliable commentator on US policies in the past.

As yet, no one has chosen to analyze Koppelman’s article in any depth, though both Harper’s Senior Editor Luke Mitchell, Horton and legal professor Mark Denbeaux have all replied at various times to previous criticism, a fact Koppelman never cites in his article.

Denbeaux was the lead author of a Seton Hall University School of Law, Center for Policy and Research study on the Guantánamo “suicides,” “Death in Camp Delta,” and a follow-up answer to DoD’s reply to the Horton and Seton Hall investigations, published as “DoD Contradicts DoD: An Analysis of the Response to ‘Death in Camp Delta.’”

Koppelman’s supposed exposé of Horton’s article is a mish-mash of poor analysis, half-truths and misrepresentations of the facts. He relies on the following points, which are reproduced below in the order they appear in the article. In order to examine Koppelman’s evidence, and thereby demonstrate the dishonest methodology employed by Koppelman, the counterevidence follows each of Koppelman’s arguments.

1) The story had been “well-shopped” around, and had been considered and rejected by Seymour Hersh, ABC News’ Brian Ross Investigative Unit, CBS “60 Minutes,” NBC News’ chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, and an unidentified New York Times reporter.

Nothing is less convincing that this particular argument. There are many reasons a reporter or news agency may pass on a story. It does not strain credulity too far to say that a story that directly contradicts official DoD investigations may not be acceptable to reporters who value access to Pentagon sources, or who, like Miklaszewski, are involved in national security reportage training to a good extent upon cooperation with DoD personnel.

Besides a quote from Miklaszewski, the only other quote from a journalistic source regarding Horton’s article is an anonymous criticism from “one of the reporters who looked into the story.” Why is this source anonymous? Why are they not on the record?

Koppelman studiously ignores in his article news sources and human rights groups that were laudatory of Horton’s article, including Amnesty International and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

2) “Horton’s main sources were perimeter guards, distant from the prisoners.”

Koppelman’s story never says how “distant” the guards were. Army Sgt. Joseph Hickman, the primary source for Horton’s article, was in Tower 1, 20 feet away from Sally Port 1 and mere yards away from the Detention Medical Clinic, the activity areas upon which Hickman reports, and perhaps 50 yards from Alpha block, where the prisoners were ostensibly found.

Rather than having a poor perspective on events, the guards, especially Hickman, had a unique overview of camp activities during the critical events that took place. A map [left, click to enlarge] labeling the various camp components was published along with the original Harper’s article.

Neither Hickman nor the other Army guards on duty around the camp that night were ever interviewed by military investigators. When Hickman brought new witnesses to the attention of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the DOJ failed to follow-up.

3) In an interview with Adweek, Col. Michael Bumgarner, commander of the Joint Detention Group (JDG), the guard force component of Joint Task Force Guantánamo, denied he ever made a speech after the suicides telling guards the media would hear the dead detainees had hanged themselves. Horton reported witnesses as saying Bumgarner said “you all know” the detainees killed themselves by swallowing rags, and then choking to death.

Nothing is stranger, perhaps, than Koppelman’s reliance on DoD assurances, not least that of a primary actor in the controversy, Colonel Bumgarner. The JDG commander, who had been at Guantánamo from April 2005 and was due to leave command at the end of June 2006, was stripped of his command only days after the detainees’ deaths, possibly for having told the press that each of the detainees had been found with a ball of cloth in their mouths.

The DoD later denied that the dead detainees all had such cloths or “rags” stuffed down their throats, saying, despite evidence from the NCIS investigation to the contrary, that such cloths were present in only one prisoner’s mouth.

According to Horton, Bumgarner’s speech to the guards, telling them to stick to the hanging story, was derived via a number of sources. Meanwhile, Koppelman asks us to rely on the word of a man who called the detainees under his control totally untrustworthy, as “nothing short of a damn animal that can’t be trusted.”

Furthermore, reading the detainees’ statements (large PDF) taken by the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantánamo in the immediate aftermath of the discovery of the “suicides,” one is struck by the multiple complaints of the “Colonel” for making prison conditions worse during the term of his command.

4) One of the independent autopsies performed at the request of the families of the deceased men wrote a report that “ended with the conclusion that hanging was, in fact, the most likely cause of death.” Moreover, according to Koppelman, “[Swiss pathologist Patrice] Mangin reiterated this point in a press conference.”

Koppelman’s fudging of the facts regarding Mangin’s autopsy is egregious. In fact, the autopsy report says that the cause of death is mechanical asphyxiation consistent with a hanging, but also “sans pouvoir exclure formellement un autre mécanisme,” that is, unable to formally exclude another mechanism or cause.

The primary reason for the lack of a definitive decision was the decision of US authorities not to provide crucial neck organs — the larynx, the hyoid bone and the thyroid cartilage — whose examination, for instance, could rule out death by hanging versus death by strangulation or other means. The government’s autopsy noted that one detainee had a broken hyoid bone. Such an injury, according to forensic experts, is more consistent with strangulation than hanging and quite rare in younger persons.

Mangin was quite explicit about his findings in a March 3, 2007, interview in English with Carol Vann at InfoSud. Mangin told Vann, “There was asphyxiation which could be due to suicide but also to other reasons. We have too little information to make any definitive conclusions … And above all, what was the state of the missing organs? We have written to the American authorities, but so far we have not had any reply.”

Not only did the DoD stonewall requests for the missing organs to more than one independent autopsy physician, they gave no answer to questions Mangin had surrounding the odd cuttings of the prisoners’ toenails and fingernails, removing critical evidence such as DNA or other material to be found under the nails, as there often is in murder cases, in particular strangulation (where the victim often claws the attacker to remove their hands or other mechanical choking device).

That Mangin did not definitively rule the cause of death as suicide by hanging at his press conference, as maintained by Koppelman, also is reported in an Associated Press article on the press conference at the time. Koppelman is totally wrong in his Adweek assertion about Mangin’s findings.

5) Army Sergeant Hickman’s account of paddy wagons transporting prisoners to a secret black site at Guantánamo, dubbed “Camp No,” is not plausible, and this is backed up by an email from Dwight Sullivan, who’d been chief defense counsel in the Office of Military Commissions, writing at the time to Slate’s Jack Shafer, who also wrote a series of articles last year criticizing the Horton article.

Sullivan wrote about the Camp No issue in an impassioned blog post recently, calling Horton’s accusations “crazy libel,” “conspiracy theory,” and “Birther/Truther crazy.” Sullivan maintains that the road the paddy wagons took towards Camp No led “to everything on Naval Station Guantánamo other than the detention camps. That road leads to the hospital. That road leads to the commissary. That road leads to the military commission complex. That road leads to a high school. That road leads to housing areas. That road leads to the ferry to the airport. The road leads to a McDonald’s, a coffee shop, and my favorite Guantánamo eating establishment, the Jerk House.”

Horton’ s own reply to Koppelman appears to answer the charge, explaining. “It’s true, of course, that when you drive out and you get on roads, you could take roads almost anywhere, there were connections that went on, but everyone I spoke with said ‘No, you would not have driven to that part of the base using that road, there were other roads that would have taken you there much more directly.’”

A look at the map of Guantánamo provided with the original Harper’s article shows Camp No to be quite isolated along a road running north of the main prison camp. There is nothing else along that road, and certainly nothing like a McDonalds, or any housing areas. The areas to the east of Camp No, which include some of the areas to which Sullivan alludes, including the camp headquarters, the chapel, the post office, and other buildings from the camp, are eminently reachable and in a much more direct fashion from Camp Delta from a road running west by northwest out of the camp area. (See also this map from The Guantánamo Testimonials Project.) It is difficult to imagine that multiple paddy wagon trips took a long way around to get to other parts of the camp, along a long empty road passing the Camp No area each time. In short, the objections Sullivan raises do not pass the logic test.

Sullivan also quotes in his blog piece a McClatchy news article reporting that former Guantánamo detainee Abdul Zuhoor said the suicides were a plot by Taliban and Arab prisoners at Guantánamo, corroborating charges of “asymmetrical warfare” put forth by camp officials. But, in a lapse of integrity more typical of the charges Sullivan aims at Scott Horton, Sullivan never mentions that the McClatchy reporter cautioned Zuhoor’s story “must be taken with some skepticism” as Zuhoor “admitted lying to the tribunal at Guantánamo about a host of things.”

[UPDATE: Sullivan has noted that the McClatchy article he cited was not the article that discussed the issues with Zuhoor’s writing. Sullivan utilized a different article when writing his blog piece. That article did not report on problems with the veracity of Zuhoor’s story, hence Sullivan’s integrity on this issue is not at issue, though his follow-through in terms of researching this point remains problematic.]

6) Hickman may have seen prisoners being transported, but he could not identify them. Furthermore, the timeline he provides contradicts that of “multiple witnesses” who saw the detainees in their cells that evening.

While Hickman could not identify the prisoners, and never claimed he could, the unusual instance of their nighttime transfer piqued his interest, and took on a more ominous light due to the circumstances that followed.

The “multiple witnesses” argument might carry more weight, if there weren’t significant problems with the witness statements themselves. As Denbeaux and his team at Seton Hall have described it, the “multiple witnesses” testimony is both dubious and unreliable.

For one thing, the Guantánamo Standard Operation Procedure (SOP) calls for witnesses to a self-harm act to fill out a Form 2823 immediately after a self-harm event (see p. 172, “Emergency Action Plan (EAPs). 32-1. Attempted Actual Self-Harm”). But no sworn statements were ever given until, as Seton Hall wrote, “more than three days after the detainees died and after the official announcement that they hanged themselves.”

Moreover, the statements actually given by the six guards on duty in Alpha Block that night were suspected by NCIS of being false, and the guards were made to sign letters to that effect. Yet, none of the guards’ statements have ever been released. Of note, no guard or other personnel on duty at Guantánamo that evening was ever disciplined or charged with anything, despite the fact that numerous SOPs seem to have been ignored (such as the failure to call an emergency “Code Blue” after the discovery of the bodies).

A number of detainees in Alpha Block were also interviewed. Almost all said they had seen or heard nothing, and at least one blamed the Americans for the deaths of the prisoners.

Koppelman’s article is not a comprehensive summary of all the purported arguments that have been brought to bear against Horton’s reporting, hence, Truthout is not here providing a complete refutation of every argument made by every critic that has been made thus far.

But Koppelman’s story gained an inordinate amount of attention, and the credulity with which it was accepted and promoted by a number of people appears to have more to do with animus against Horton’s investigation than anything else. While the Seton Hall reports, which together total over 150 pages, are far more comprehensive in answering the DoD investigation, they have not been the subject of detailed critique by these same critics. But then, many fewer people were likely to have read them than the Harper’s article. In general, except in passing, Koppelman, like others writing negative hit pieces on the Horton article, have ignored the Seton Hall studies, which fully back Horton’s reporting.

Perhaps what the flap over the ASME award demonstrates is that no serious piece of investigative journalism, especially if recognized, that challenges national security narratives will go unattacked. Certainly any piece of journalism can be challenged, and deservedly so, the better to ascertain its credibility. Koppelman’s article fails to stand up to scrutiny. It is an unserious poison-pen attack, cavalier with facts, and undetermined to examine what occurred beyond what DoD authorities allege. Those who have jumped on Koppelman’s bandwagon should be ashamed of themselves.

Note: For a short interview with Scott Horton the day after he won the National Magazine Award, see this Foreign Policy article by Steve LeVine.

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.

This is the fourth article in “Bagram Week” here at Andy Worthington, with seven articles in total exploring what is happening at the main US prison in Afghanistan through reports, analyses of review boards, and the voices of the prisoners themselves, and ongoing updates to the definitive annotated Bagram prisoner list.

As part of “Bagram Week” here at Andy Worthington, I’m cross-posting a rather harrowing story, originally published on the Afghanistan Analysts Network, that I came across recently, and then lost again. I retrieved it via my colleague Mathias Vermeulen, who, on his blog The Lift, picked out a key passage in this bleak account by a former Bagram prisoner of the time he spent in the Tor jail — Bagram’s secret torture prison — before his transfer to the main facility. This is the passage:

After our arrest we were first taken to Tor Jail, or the Black Jail. It was terrible. They didn’t treat us like humans at all. They didn’t allow us to sleep. There was nothing to cover ourselves with. They insulted the Quran. Whenever we were taken to the bathroom, they left the door open. We never knew when it was time to pray or which direction we should face. We never saw sunlight. We were treated rudely during interrogation.

This entire article is a damning revelation — an insider’s account not only of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used in the Tor Jail, but more generally of the cruelty and incompetence that fuels Bagram as surely as it fueled Guantánamo, with random arrests, threats, psychological abuse, poor intelligence, incompetent translators, ”segregation” — in isolation cells — used as persistently as it was in Guantánamo on perceived troublemakers, and, worse than Guantánamo (but as Bagram was in its early days) the death of a prisoner that was, it seems, effortlessly covered up and not reported. The account is also revealing about the dysfunctional relationship between the Afghan and American detention facilities, where there is supposed to be cooperation regarding trials, but where in fact chaos reigns, and prisoners are being lost between the two systems, abandoned unless they can pay a substantial bribe.

Overall, this article should, I think, be widely circulated as an antidote to all the claims that the move from Bagram to the new Detention Facility in Parwan has suddenly done away with abusive patterns of behavior that, it seems, are engrained in the operations, and in the casual racism and dehumanization of war, and that have nothing to do with the buildings themselves. Of all the accounts I have read, this one rings the truest, not just becasue it accords with other insider reports I have heard over the last few years about the ongoing physical and psychological abuse of prisoners, but also because it so clearly echoes what we know about detention operations throughout the “War on Terror,” which will not fundamentally change until someone draws a line under it all, and actually starts all over again, with respect for the geneva Conventions that were shredded by the Bush administration, and that have not been thoroughly reintroduced under President Obama.

Stories people tell: Bagram prison; not a single good day
By Martine van Bijlert, Afghanistan Analysts Network, March 9, 2011

There are so many stories of people who get caught up in the nightly operations by American and Afghan forces. In the search for ‘kill & capture’ targets the net is cast wide: once a door is kicked in all males in a household are usually taken for interrogation. And it is then anyone’s guess when they will be released again. One story — out of many — of how an unlucky sleep-over resulted in years of detention, and what those years were like.

I was arrested by American and Afghan Special Forces about two and a half years ago. It was night and I was staying as a guest in a house when the forces came. I had saved money to open a small medicine shop and that night I had gone to see this man to buy medicine. Maybe someone reported him to the Americans; in Afghanistan there are so many enmities. Maybe they thought there was some kind of meeting or program going on, because there were other guests as well. I don’t know why they arrested us, but they took all the men in the house: nine in total, including a 12-year old boy.

When they came we were sleeping. None of us was wearing shoes or proper clothes. One of us was only wearing his underwear. They took us with them just like that. We had to walk through the mud. After our arrest, one of the men was handed to the NDS (National Directorate for Security); he was a friend of the owner of the house. The four sons and a nephew were released after about two weeks. Then two other guests were released. They had come that night to get a tahwiz (religious amulet). They were released a few months before me. The owner of the house and I were released last, now a few weeks ago.

After our arrest we were first taken to Tor Jail, or the Black Jail. It was terrible. They didn’t treat us like humans at all. They didn’t allow us to sleep. There was nothing to cover ourselves with. They insulted the Quran. Whenever we were taken to the bathroom, they left the door open. We never knew when it was time to pray or which direction we should face. We never saw sunlight. We were treated rudely during interrogation. Some people were also beaten, but that didn’t happen to me.

After 33 days in the Black Jail I was transferred to the big jail. Here we were visited by ICRC [the International Committee of the Red Cross], which was good even though they had no authority. They brought letters, but they didn’t tell the press about us or about the circumstances we were in. The Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) didn’t come to the prison; maybe they were not allowed in. About a month before my release they came, but they were so young. What could they do?

Many things were really bad. For instance, I was locked up in ‘segregation’ sixteen times, sometimes for 10 or 20 days at a time. I did nothing special to provoke this. I didn’t do anything serious like hit them or attack them. It happened when I asked for my rights.That was reason enough to call me shureshi (trouble maker, revolter). I just asked for food, for instance, or I complained that they were interfering with our prayers. The food in segregation was especially bad; they called it ‘low-grade food’. It smelled and tasted horrible and made you sick. They even put an old man of 75 years in segregation, with bare feet and a bare head. The guards also used gas on the prisoners, it was like teargas and it made it very difficult to breathe.

There was one group of [American] guards who were called badmashi (thugs). They behaved very badly and rudely with the prisoners. One of them once told me he would kill me. When that group left things got a little better. But we did not see one good day in that place. The Black Jail of course was worse. At least in the big prison I was registered with ICRC. I knew they could not just execute me. Other prisoners said that from Tor Jail many people had disappeared.

There was a man from Uruzgan; he was about 30 years old. He became very agitated, but the doctor said he was alright. When the doctor finally came, he had died. Those kinds of things happen. But they don’t appear in the press, nobody pays attention.

There was also a young boy, he was mute and had psychological problems. When he was put in our cell, he was climbing the walls and trying to hurt himself. We tried to calm him down and to stop him. I told those in charge that it was not our job to look after him and that he should receive proper treatment. They said he was a suicide bomber. In the end they put him in segregation. When I was released he was still there. By that time he had been there for three months. He didn’t receive any medication. He was very loud and kept all the prisoners in that section awake.

There were also no facilities for handicapped or wounded people. Many prisoners had no legs or had other handicaps. It was difficult for them to go to the bathroom. There was one person in my cell who had fallen off the roof when he was arrested. His 10-year old son was shot during the raid. He arrived in prison with two broken legs. For two months we carried him to the bathroom.

About one year ago things in the prison became a bit better. A mullah was appointed. He belonged to the Americans and he helped improve the situation. Then the ANA [Afghan National Army] took over and we were transferred to a new jail. The new jail was better, there were bigger cells. But the Americans were still in charge. The Afghan soldiers had no right to talk to the prisoners. In every block there was a station, one at the north and one at the south, where there were Americans. They had to be informed about any request the prisoners had. The Afghan soldiers complained that they were just like waiters or sweepers in a hotel and that they weren’t allowed to do anything. Even the officers felt like that.

I was interrogated so many times. They asked me, “Do you know this person? Have you done that?” Once they showed me some pictures of what looked like explosives. I don’t know what it was, but they kept saying that it belonged to me. I was tied to a chair until nine o’clock at night. The Americans say that they don’t do zulm (oppression, cruelty), but they do. They bothered prisoners in a psychological way. They threatened them.

Once they told me that they would bring my father to the prison. I said that I would be very happy, because my father had died several years ago and I would like to see him again. But they did the same to other prisoners, who really became worried. Especially those who were not educated, who didn’t know whether the Americans might really do this or not. Sometimes the Americans even told the prisoners they would bring their wives or sisters to the prison. There was one man from Zabul. When they arrested him they took pictures of all the women in his family. During the interrogation they showed him the pictures and said they were going to make copies and distribute them in the whole of Zabul. They also took pictures of prisoners while they were having a shower and threatened to distribute them in their home areas. These kinds of things can give you psychological problems.

There were also problems with the translators. Some of them didn’t understand Afghan vocabulary at all. Once when I was being interrogated I told them that I had done two namaz (prayers) and that there were two left. He translated that I had shot two rockets and that there were two left. I didn’t know it at the time, but they confronted me with this during an interrogation much later. The whole thing was like a stupid joke.

There was a commander who was also detained. After six and a half years they told him, “We still have doubts that you are a Hezb-e Islami commander”. He said, “You have doubts? There is no doubt! I am a Hezb-e Islami commander, for sure. But what is my crime?” He was a commaner and a malek, a person who tried to build up the government, but they kept him detained for such a long time for no reason. There was another man called Abu Baqer. The Americans thought he was Commander Abu Baqer, because his name was the same, so they kept him detained for seven years. In the meantime the real Commander Abu Baqer was still moving around and everybody knew it.

Some prisoners did not see their relatives for a year or more. There was a man from Khost. When his relatives asked about him, the Americans told them that he was not there — but he was. After a year and a half he was finally given a meeting. After that he was released.

I was released a few weeks ago. At my release an American colonel apologized to me. He said that they had concluded that I was innocent and that I had worked for the good of Afghanistan. He said that after two and a half years! They gave me a bottle of perfume, but they did not return my possessions. When I was arrested I had $6000 on me, as an advance for the medicines, and also my mobile phone and some afghanis. They did not give them back. At the time I didn’t say anything; I just wanted to leave. But they should give it back.

Now I am in a bad situation. I feel like half my life is gone. My economic situation is bad, my savings are gone. My health is not well. My legs hurt, I don’t know why, maybe because of the lack of exercise. On the day of arrest I also hit my leg, when they pushed me into the car while I was blindfolded. For the first few months I couldn’t walk properly. My back also hurts. We went on strike for a while in the prison, because of the bad conditions and because we were upset that our fate was not clear. After four and a half months they came in with force to break up the strike. One man broke a leg and an old man broke a rib. Two guards fell on top of me with their heavy jackets. My back still aches from that.

One prisoner wrote a book. He actually wrote two books. While he was in prison he gathered toilet paper and wrote on it with a pen. We were not allowed pens, but he had received one from an ANA guard. The books are called ‘Gift from Bagram’ and ‘From Karez Mir to Bagram’. I don’t know if they have been published yet.

According to Afghan and international law you can detain a person for three months, but they hold people for years and years without any decision. Since the demonstrations there are now reviews every six months, but there are so many people who have already been kept for years and who are still in the prison. Their detention just gets extended every time. Once when I was getting ready for the DRB (Detention Review Board), the representative gave me a piece of paper and said that if I read that at the meeting I would be released. The paper said that I had killed people. I said I cannot read that, but he said if you do you will be handed over to the Afghan government. I went to the court but I did not read the paper. My detention was extended for six months.

In the end I was sent to two Afghan courts. They decided to release me. Two months after that the Americans released me. They don’t care about the Afghan courts, and the Afghan courts are not processing the cases. There are more than 300 prisoners that are in between the two systems. Their files have been sent to the Afghans, but they are still in the American prison. They are lost. If they don’t give money, their file will never be found again.

I wasted two and a half years of my life. I don’t feel well at all. I am afraid that, because this happened once for no reason, it may happen again. Who can guarantee me that I will not be unlucky again? When I was arrested I was engaged. I still am, but I have no money or income. So much happened in those years, I cannot remember it all. I have only told you what I remembered. I think it might be good if my story is published. The world should know what it was like. There was not one good day in all those years. We were not treated like humans. Even though we had done nothing wrong and they had no information against us.

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

So what’s happening at Bagram, the main US prison in Afghanistan, which has been wracked by scandals, including a number of murders, and allegations of torture and abuse since it opened in December 2001?

Unrecognizable since those early days, the prison at Bagram — once housed in a Soviet-era machine shop — is now in an entirely new building, known as the Detention Facility in Parwan. This, according to the Pentagon, is part of a larger Afghan Justice Center in Parwan, which “will become Afghanistan’s central location for the pre-trial detention, prosecution and post-trial incarceration of national security suspects.”

Bagram only occasionally attracts media attention, but in February the prison — in its new location — was officially relaunched as part of America’s revised approach to detention in the Afghan warzone, with more focus on rehabiitation, and less on punishment and isolation. At the time, I was too busy to write about or to cross-post reports by journalists who visited the facility for this relaunch — whose reports were published in the Huffington Post, Stars and Stripes and McClatchy Newspapers — so I thought I’d gather them together here, for anyone else who missed them, as part of my special coverage of Bagram this week. This coverage includes an update to the definitive Bagram prisoner list (the updated prisoner list is here), and “Voices from Bagram,” a three-part series drawing on the Detainee Review Boards at Bagram, and featuring rare examples of the testimony of prisoners.

I was planning to do a clever edit of these three articles, but instead I’m going to content myself with cross-posting them in their entirety, as they all have something to offer. First up is an article in the Huffington Post on February 13 by Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First, looking primarily at the problems with clearing foreign prisoners for release, but then continuing to hold them (something that also has echoes at Guantánamo). This is based on a useful analysis of the work of the Detainee Review Boards,  introduced by President Obama in September 2009, which are used to formalize detention at Parwan/Bagram, in a form that is an improvement on the Bush years, but is still problematical, not only because they are not leading to the release of foreign prisoners, thereby undermining their credibility,  as Daphne explains, but also because they still bear no resemblance to the Geneva Conventions, which were throughly sidelined by the Bush administration, and are stlll, it seems, missing in action under President Obama.

This article is followed by a McClatchy Newspapers article from February 25, looking primarily at the success of the new, more humane regime at Parwan, but also touching on problems with abuse at the point of capture, and the prisoners’ difficulties when it comes to mounting meaningful challenges to the evidence against them in their Detainee Review Boards, where they do not have access to lawyers, or, in any adequate sense, to the outside world as a whole, where witnesses might be located who would be able to help them.

The concluding article, published in Stars and Stripes on February 21, examines the difficulties of establishing the guilt or innocence of prisoners, again revisiting important questions that need to be raised about the Detainee Review Boards, and about the type of screening that needs to take place in wartime, by focusing on one particular story — that of former Bagram prisoner Ghullam Sarwar Jamili. This is an excellent case study, juggling the many different elements of detention in Afghanistan — in particular, how the Afghans’ hopes of “build[ing] a law-based state, where due process in a courtroom is the basis for incarceration,” clashes with the US approach.

Defending their use of open-ended detention and review boards — despite the fact that they constitute a unilateral abrogation from the Geneva Conventions — US officials appear to be unconcerned that Afghan prosecutors are complaining that they receive nothng more than “vague case files” from intelligence officials at Bagram, provoking doubts that “the right people are landing behind bars” because “the detentions are based more on confidential intelligence than on releasable evidence.”

US officials also appear unconcerned by complaints from “human rights groups, along with the Bagram detainees themselves,” who say that “their inability to adequately refute the claims against them breeds bitter contempt against the Americans.”

As the articles reveal, the physical conditions at Bagram may have improved for the majority of the prisoners held, but complaints remain that America is still operating under an assumption that it can make up rules as it goes along, and that no one is listening when critics — either Afghan officials, or the priosners, or human rights groups — complain that these innovations have not led to fairness, and to success in the crucial arena of winning Afghan hearts and minds, but have, instead, often led to more confusion, resentment and bitterness, and a belief that Bagram and justice are incompatible.

Justice Remains Elusive for Many at U.S. Prison in Afghanistan
By Daphne Eviatar, Huffington Post, February 13, 2011

In the summer of 2008, the United States military captured a 16-year-old Pakistani boy and imprisoned him at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. According to his lawyers, for over a year his family had no idea where he was. When he was finally allowed to speak to relatives nearly two years later due to intervention by the Red Cross, Hamidullah Khan told his brother that he had had a hearing in the U.S. prison. The U.S. military judges had admitted lacking any evidence against him and recommended he be returned home to his family in Pakistan. Months later, he remains imprisoned at the U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan.

Hamidullah Khan is not alone. Of the 41 men who come from outside Afghanistan and remain locked in the U.S.-run prison at Bagram, more than a dozen have been recommended for release by U.S. military tribunals. Yet only one is currently scheduled to be sent home.

I arrived in Afghanistan last week to research U.S. detention here. According to the recently-released detainees I interviewed, prison conditions and treatment have significantly improved in recent years and prisoners now at least have a chance to plead their case in a hearing — a big step up from the policies of the Bush administration. But I was shocked to learn that for some reason no one seems to know, prisoners from outside Afghanistan who are imprisoned here aren’t being sent home even after they’ve won their case and been recommended for release.

Known as Detainee Review Boards, the hearings take place at the United States’ recently-built Parwan Justice Center on the Bagram air base. Detainees are supposed to get a hearing about every six months, but they’re not represented by lawyers and don’t get to see much of the evidence against them. (I’ll be writing more about this later). But it’s still the only opportunity prisoners at Bagram have to make their case, ask relatives or village elders to speak on their behalf, and plead for release. Last year about 350 U.S. prisoners were released this way. But in some cases, even though a panel of military judges has ruled that the prisoner does not pose a security threat and the military has no evidence that he’s done anything wrong, these men — who come from Pakistan, Tunisia, Kuwait, Yemen and even Germany — are still locked up in prison. At least one has been at Bagram since 2002. [Actually, two men, Mohammed Amin al-Bakri, a Yemeni seized in Thailand, and Ridha Ahmad Najjar, aka Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian seized in Karachi, were seized in 2002. They, and another Bagram prisoner, Fadi al-Maqaleh, won a habeas corpus petition in a US court in March 2009, but this was overturned by an appeals court in May 2010. However, just two days after this article was published, Judge Bates gave them an opportunity to present new evidence in support of their habeas petitions, as discussed here].

Since arriving in Kabul a week ago, I’ve asked about a half dozen U.S. military and State Department officials in Afghanistan why that is. Nobody seems to know.

The reluctance to release these men may have something to do with the parallel holdup at Guantánamo Bay, where almost 90 prisoners have been approved for transfer or release but remain stuck in the U.S. prison there. Most of those detainees come from unstable countries such as Yemen, where the U.S. government categorically refuses to return Gitmo prisoners ever since one Yemeni over a year ago [actually a Nigerian, allegedly recruited in Yemen] tried to blow up a plane bound for Detroit. Others, such as the Chinese Muslim Uighurs, don’t want to return to home because they legitimately fear being tortured upon their return. Finding a place for these detainees to go is a challenge — particularly since the United States has refused to accept a single one of them. [For more on these stories, see my articles, Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo?, Guantánamo and Yemen: Obama Capitulates to Critics and Suspends Prisoner Transfers and No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court].

Congress just made returning Guantánamo prisoners even more difficult by blocking their transfer unless the Defense secretary and secretary of State will certify that the receiving country will prevent the detainee from getting involved in any future anti-U.S. activities. [See my article, With Indefinite Detention and Transfer Bans, Obama and the Senate Plumb New Depths on Guantánamo].

But there’s no legal bar on returning home innocent men, like Hamidullah Khan, who’ve been recommended for release from Bagram. Yet for some reason, the U.S. government isn’t doing it.

Officials in both the Defense and State Departments I spoke to say they’re aware of the problem but it’s out of their hands. When I was at the Parwan Justice Center at Bagram earlier this week watching Detainee Review Board hearings, one soldier complained about how frustrating it is to be unable to tell innocent prisoners when they’ll be going home, or what’s causing the holdup. The problem, according to the U.S. officials I spoke to in Afghanistan, is somewhere in Washington.

Why should Washington start paying more attention to the problems of a dozen or so men? One military commander at Bagram I spoke to insisted this group makes up just a tiny percentage of the more than 1500 prisoners at Bagram — not something to be too worried about, given the number of detainees. But it’s still a big concern to the family of Hamidullah Khan. And outraging extended families in the region isn’t going to help the United States.

What’s more, the belief that the United States is imprisoning people without cause is widespread in Afghanistan. For a long time, that was because the U.S. didn’t give detainees at Bagram any opportunity to defend themselves at all. They could be locked up for years without even knowing the charges against them. There are now almost three times as many prisoners at Bagram as there were during the Bush Administration. Although now they get hearings, they’re not allowed to have lawyers and much of the evidence against them remains secret. The detainees never get to see or challenge it. Still, some detainees manage to win recommendations for release. But the United States’ refusal to release the non-Afghans among them tells the entire prison population that this new so-called “justice” system — and with it, U.S. respect for the rule of law — is meaningless.

That’s not going to help the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan.

What happened earlier this week in Jalalabad is illustrative. On Monday, hundreds of Taliban sympathizers rallied in an anti-U.S. protest at the funeral of a Guantánamo detainee who was returned home in a coffin after he died last week [actually on February 1] in the U.S. prison. Although the United States insists he was a known Taliban commander, 48-year-old Awal Gul was never charged or put on trial, so the government never proved its case. The Taliban and their sympathizers eagerly capitalized on that at home in Afghanistan. “Death to America!” was the rallying cry at the funeral. [For more on this story, see my articles, Guantánamo Prisoner Dies After Being Held for Nine Years Without Charge or Trial and In Afghanistan, 5,000 Attend Funeral of Prisoner Who Died in Guantánamo, as Afghan Peace Council Calls for Release of Former Taliban Official].

As the war in Afghanistan drags into its tenth year, the United States doesn’t need more martyrs. It does need to do a much better job of winning regional support for its mission. Sending innocent prisoners home would be a good start.

With new Bagram prison, U.S. looks to put bad press of years past to rest
By Saeed Shah, McClatchy Newspapers, February 25, 2010

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan — The bearded Taliban prisoners at Bagram broke off from a spirited game of soccer in the yard to greet a McClatchy Newspapers reporter, the first journalist allowed into the notorious U.S. jail in Afghanistan since detainees there were moved into a new multimillion-dollar facility.

“Nice to see you guys!” one of the prisoners said with unexpected cheerfulness, in English with an American accent, rushing over and showing off some prayer beads made in the prison workshop. “These should be in retail somewhere.”

The prisoners were running around in bright orange Afghan-style baggy shirts and trousers, a slight variation on the orange jumpsuits made infamous at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba. The detainees, all young men allegedly associated with the Taliban or al-Qaida, wore prayer caps and the long, unkempt beards that fundamentalist Muslims favor.

“Colonel Garrity has brought us a lot of good things,” the prisoner volunteered. He spoke through a metal fence and didn’t identify himself, and McClatchy’s reporter wasn’t allowed to ask any questions.

Col. John Garrity runs the new Bagram jail, formerly known as the Detention Facility in Parwan, and he aims to bury years of bad press. Garrity, brought in last year from Fort Bragg, N.C., to take over the jail, admitted that not all his charges feel so warmly toward him.

“I know most of them, and I know all of their stories,” Garrity said as he conducted a lengthy tour. “This is COIN” — counterinsurgency — “inside the wire, turning an insurgent into a productive citizen.”

Journalists weren’t allowed to visit the old Bagram prison, in another part of the vast air base 30 miles outside Kabul, where prisoners were kept in cages in a converted aircraft hangar and widespread abuse has been documented, including two homicides in 2002.

While the Obama administration plans to close Guantánamo, Bagram not only has been retained, it’s also been expanded in its new location, leading some critics to dub it “Guantánamo Two.”

Bagram is the test of President Barack Obama’s ambition to improve the treatment of detainees the U.S. military captures in its anti-terrorism fight. The new American approach to the Afghan conflict also rests partly on the conditions for detainees, in order to win over an outraged population that for years has dined on stories of torture and religious abuse.

Jonathan Horowitz, a consultant with the Open Society Institute, an independent group based in the U.S. that promotes democracy, said that there were “very few, if any” indications that the institutionalized physical abuse reported at Bagram from 2003 to 2005 was continuing. However, he said that many detainees at Bagram remained there because of mistaken identity or on the basis of false information provided against them.

Reports of prisoner abuse began to decline in 2006 and now are rare.

Horowitz said two big problems remained: physical abuse at the point of capture and the inability of detainees at Bagram to “meaningfully” challenge the allegations against them, despite procedural reforms that were instituted in September.

The average detainee spends 24 months at Bagram — some spend many years there — and no one sees a lawyer once during that time.

“There has to be a credible and fair process that can get these detainees out of the fog of war, to be able to make an accurate assessment of who should stay in detention and who should get to go home to their families,” said Horowitz, who’s worked extensively with former Bagram detainees.

The new $60 million facility, to which the detainees were transferred in recent weeks, is a spotless, modern prison. Human rights groups, who were allowed to visit before the prisoners arrived, say the new building is a vast improvement.

Inside the cells, the guards — 1,200 American military personnel are deployed there — were using the prisoners’ recreation time to search through their few possessions — mattresses, blankets and clothing — for banned items. Their Qurans, provided for each prisoner and stacked in a corner, also would be checked, but by a Muslim employee.

At 10:30 a.m. one recent day, those prisoners who were still in their spartan cells mostly were napping or lying on their mattresses staring into space, while a few were bent over in prayer. Although officials had warned that the prisoners might spit at visitors or even throw feces, there was no hostility.

Each cell was crammed with about 20 prisoners, a rubber mat on the floor marking the spots where each would place a thin mattress. Food is passed into the cells. Piles of Afghan flatbread were stacked outside the cells, waiting for lunchtime. The Bagram authorities boasted that the average prisoner gains 36 pounds during his detention.

In one section of the jail, detainees were speaking by video link to friends or relatives — bearded, turbaned men were on the screens at the other end — an experience they appeared to relish. According to Garrity, better facilities, including space to hold classes and separate “negative detainees,” mean that Bagram can attempt to rehabilitate some detainees.

“If we treat him with dignity and respect, he’s less of a threat to you. He’s not angry at the guard force,” Garrity said. “We change Taliban, one detainee at a time.”

Under a legal revamp last September [actually, September 2009], a new detention-review procedure means that detainees are present for their hearings and get “personal representatives” or military officers to argue for them and, in theory, to call witnesses. This, however, is technically “internment,” so no charges are ever brought, nor is anyone found guilty or innocent.

The U.S. plans to hand over the new Bagram to the Afghan military next January, a demanding target that some think it will be unable or unwilling to meet. Afghan guards are due to start arriving this spring to be trained. This appears to be the reason, officially at least, for expanding the capacity so dramatically, from 600 prisoners at the old site to 1,000 currently and up to 2,300 when the new building is completed.

“This will be the enduring detention facility for the next 50, 60 years. It’s world class,” said Navy Vice Adm. Robert Harward, who’s in charge of U.S. detention programs in Afghanistan and who was visiting Bagram. “For the Afghans, this means that they will immediately be able to separate the insurgents from the criminal population.”

One obstacle is funding, though. It costs $5 million a year to maintain the new facility, plus an additional cost per detainee, Garrity said. That’s way beyond the budget of the Afghan authorities for a single jail, so it remains unclear how the new prison will be financed.

Parwan detention center reviews suspects’ cases, but finds neither guilt nor innocence in a war zone
By Dianna Cahn, Stars and Stripes, February 21, 2011

KABUL — It would be easy to take Ghullam Sarwar Jamili at his word — that this smiling and dedicated family man has survived a hard life swept up in his country’s endless travails.

Behind his glasses, one lid is closed over a missing eye. Jamili’s leg, hidden beneath his traditional Afghan cloak, bears battle scars from almost 20 years ago, during the civil war. His scarred and ruined arm does not fully extend.

Jamili’s family sits around the soft-spoken man with the salt and pepper beard and jokes easily, quick to defend this 59-year-old patriarch who raised nine children as a refugee outside his native Afghanistan, educating them through college and beyond.

But there is another, more menacing portrait of Gullam Sarwar Jamili — that of an Islamic revolutionary committed to violent struggle for Afghanistan and accused of recruiting young militants to fight against U.S. and Afghan forces. That is the man whom U.S. soldiers say they imprisoned in 2007 and held behind the concrete and razor wire walls of Afghanistan’s most secretive prison, the U.S. detention center at Bagram Air Field in Parwan province, for three and half years.

Throughout his detention, Jamili held fast to his declarations of innocence, while American officials and some observers familiar with the case insisted the suspicions against him were warranted.

But even after he was released last September, the truth remained hidden. Jamili, like most of the thousands of detainees held in Bagram since 2002, or the new Parwan facility nearby, found himself consigned to a legal purgatory, never found guilty of any crime, but never quite cleared, either.

U.S. officials say they have no choice but to hold suspected Afghan militants like Jamili without formal charges. In a time of war, they say, it’s the only way to keep dangerous enemy fighters off the battlefield.

But Afghan government officials looking to the Americans to help them build a law-based state, where due process in a courtroom is the basis for incarceration, are instead being presented with a very different, extra-judicial example based on the laws of armed conflict.

For Afghan prosecutors, who receive vague case files from U.S. officials at Bagram, there is skepticism that the right people are landing behind bars because the detentions are based more on confidential intelligence than on releasable evidence.

Meanwhile, human rights groups, along with the Bagram detainees themselves, say their inability to adequately refute the claims against them breeds bitter contempt against the Americans.

“Once you are in Bagram, it doesn’t matter what country you came from or how you got there,” said Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network that represents dozens of Bagram detainees, though it has never had access to them. “You are in a black hole. You have no legal recourse anywhere in the world.”

Human rights groups complained for years that detainees at Bagram languished with little or no knowledge of the accusations against them, no rights to challenge their detentions and no legal representation. In the early years of the war, two detainees were killed in Bagram and several U.S. soldiers were convicted of or pleaded guilty to abusing inmates.

More recently, conditions have improved. In the past year, the U.S. replaced the old facility with a pristine new complex dubbed the Detention Facility in Parwan and moved the detainees there. It has roomier housing, space for family visitations and, most importantly, new detainee review boards that allow detainees to receive some information regarding the suspicions against them. Suspects can also rebut those accusations and call witnesses to appear on their behalf.

The facility, which many still refer to as Bagram prison, also opened its gates to visits by human rights groups and journalists, who are permitted to attend hearings.

“Part of the goal of our command was to increase transparency,” said Michael Gottlieb, a State Department attorney who advises the year-old Task Force 435 that runs the complex. “Stories of people disappearing and families not knowing where there their relatives were, especially in the 2004 to 2007 period, were a common gripe.”

Nevertheless, rights groups say that the system remains fundamentally flawed. Detainees still don’t have lawyers, and there is no threshhold of proof to keep them indefinitely behind bars. Information gathered through intelligence remains secret. And a determination that a detainee poses a threat is enough to extend his detention.

“They might have improved buildings, they might have made it prettier, they might have improved their own internal proceedings,” Foster said. “But nothing has changed regarding the rights of these people.”

A history of violence

Jamili’s story is the story of Afghanistan, a chronicle of strife and displacement that began more than 30 years ago.

It was 1979 and Soviet forces were assisting their client government in Kabul to fight U.S.-backed mujahadeen rebels.

Jamili, then an educated 27-year-old, said he spent a year in prison for his anti-communist views. In 1982, he said, he fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, with his wife and three young children, and ultimately settled at the Shamshatu refugee camp run by the Islamist Hezbi-e-Islami movement of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, or HiG.

Jamili said he spent the next 10 years working for HiG political agencies, first in the refugee section in Shamshatu and later as a party communications officer in Tehran. He taught his children to speak and teach English, and the family was well known in the camp.

Jamili said he followed the mujahadeen briefly to Kabul in 1994, and that he was wounded when his car got caught in the crossfire of warring parties. He was shot in the arm and in the head, a life-threatening wound that cost him an eye.

After recuperating in Pakistan, Jamili said, he spent four more years as a principal of a madrassa, or religious school, in Iran, and returned to Shamshatu in 2000.

By then, the Taliban was in control in Kabul, and HiG had aligned itself with the Taliban and al-Qaida in Pakistan. When al-Qaida terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, Jamili said, he was no longer involved.

Jamili’s eldest sons supported the family. Javid, the oldest, was a journalist. Anwar, who went to medical school, brought home extra money by playing a part on a popular BBC radio soap opera. Both later moved to Kabul, where Anwar worked with USAID and then an affiliate charity where he ultimately became country director.

In July 2007, the Jamili clan gathered in Kabul for a niece’s wedding. Anwar was about to set his parents and youngest siblings up in Kabul permanently. Life was good.

Then, on July 11, Jamili said he was walking down the street with his son and son-in-law when an unmarked car pulled up alongside them. An undercover officer declared that Jamili needed to come with them.

At the police station, Jamili recalled, two Americans took his photograph. The hours passed, and he said two U.S. soldiers blindfolded him and cuffed his arms and legs. They took him somewhere where he could hear helicopter rotors.

And then he found himself in a cell in Bagram.

‘A pretty robust process’

The Americans in charge like to describe the detainee review boards as the real change. Detainees get to appear and answer questions regarding the accusations against them. Each is assigned a uniformed U.S. soldier familiar with the case who is tasked with helping to defend the detainee. Witnesses also may be called on a detainee’s behalf.

“It’s a pretty robust process,” said Gottlieb. “We’ve had over 1,300 Afghan witnesses testify before the board this year.”

Across Afghanistan in 2010, U.S. forces detained more than 5,000 suspected combatants, Gottlieb said. Of those, 1,000 were sent to Parwan, where each came before a detainee review board.

Review boards last year ruled that 60 percent of those being held met the minimum criteria for detention and should remain in custody, Gottlieb said. Eleven percent did not meet the criteria and were released. An additional 10 percent were found suitable for reintegration; that is, they met the criteria for being held but the board decided to release them. And 10 percent were handed over to the Afghans for prosecution. Gottlieb did not account for the remaining detainees, but said some were foreigners who were found eligible for extradition to other countries.

A detainee review board is not a criminal trial, the military says, and it is not intended to prove guilt or innocence. Instead, its purpose, based on evidence and intelligence, is to determine whether a detainee continues to pose a threat.

“The purpose is to remove an insurgent from the battlefield during a time of hostility,” Gottlieb said, “not to … prove an individual’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Military officials say that the process is the only way to protect intelligence they gather on suspected insurgents or terrorists. But that’s a sticking point for rights groups.

“There may have been devastating intel for these detainees — we just don’t know,” said Rachel Reid, an Afghanistan analyst with Human Rights Watch. “As a counterinsurgency strategy, the U.S. wants to be seen as a fair actor. As long as they keep this process secret, it is very difficult to show Afghans that they are getting a fair process.”

‘Not even No. 100’

At first, Jamili believed he would be released quickly. But when days turned to weeks, then months, Jamili resigned himself to his detention.

Physically, he said, he was treated well.

“It’s enough if you are in a cage with no link to the outside world,” Jamili said, “and no certainty about your future and no connection to your family.”

In the old facility, he said, detainees were shackled together in a chain gang to go outside and exercise. But that stopped once they moved to the new facility, he said. If prisoners misbehaved or protested, Jamili said, guards took away everyone’s blankets and mats.

Occasionally, Jamili said, if a prisoner taunted a guard, there were beatings, but they were rare.

Jamili’s description matched those provided by other detainees who spoke during a recent release ceremony at the facility.

“No one is mistreated, but if one detainee makes a problem, all the detainees are punished,” said Mullah Abdul Rauf, a madrassa teacher from Paktiya province who said he was held in Bagram for two years.

Throughout his more than three years in detention, Jamili steadfastly denied that he’d played any role in the insurgency.

But an officer with one independent international organization that monitors detentions, who spoke on condition that neither he nor his agency be identified, said that Jamili was “a dangerous man,” a recruiter who solicited young Afghan refugees to fight against the Afghan government and U.S. soldiers.

U.S. officials won’t comment on reasons for holding or releasing individual detainees. But one official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Jamili’s detention was not an accident. He’d been reviewed repeatedly and review boards continued to find reason to hold him, the official said.

Others backed Jamili’s claim of innocence. Ghairat Baheer, Hekmatyar’s son-in-law and a spokesman for HiG, was in Bagram at the same time. He recounted how his jailers questioned him about Jamili.

“When he was captured, they told me that they had captured a senior person in HiG,” said Baheer, who has since been released and was reached by telephone in Pakistan. “I said he’s not No. 2, No. 3, No. 10, not even No. 100.”

Outside the prison walls, Anwar, Jamili’s son, reached out to everyone he could. He hired an Afghan lawyer and contacted Foster at the International Justice Network. He called the U.S. Embassy repeatedly. Meanwhile, Javid, who had moved to Paris, contacted rights groups there.

When the brothers appeared before a review board for their father last summer, Anwar said he confronted the Americans.

“We told them, ‘How could we be al-Qaida when we are working with the government, the educated?’ ” Anwar recounted.

When Jamili was released from U.S. detention in September, it was not to be set free. The U.S. military handed him over to Afghan prosecutors, who were asked to determine whether to put him on trial.

Problematic handover

The U.S. military has been negotiating with the Afghan government to eventually transfer the prison at Parwan to Afghan control.

But that process is fraught with problems. Afghanistan’s judicial system is steeped in corruption and its jails are known for torture, creating a dilemma for international armies wishing to hand over suspected insurgents or terrorists.

Hoping to create a model for a new justice system, the U.S. military is building an entire judicial complex near the prison, training judges, defense lawyers and prosecutors and setting up a crime lab that includes equipment for forensics and DNA analysis.

“One of the reasons we built the judicial complex in Parwan is because we know corruption is endemic in the Afghan justice system,” said the State Department’s Gottlieb.

When Jamili was finally handed over to Afghan custody in September, his case file was incomplete. Afghan prosecutors said they found no indication of insurgent activity, and they allowed a reporter to go through the file.

Though Jamili was held until September 2010, his file ends in July 2008, making reference to just three interrogations and three polygraph tests.

Jamili stuck to his account throughout, stating that “he hated the Taliban,” and that he knew the camp in Pakistan was run by HiG, but “… when you do not have a place to stay or eat from, you would do anything for your family,” according to the file.

After each recorded interview, the American representative would make an assessment.

“The detainee did not show indication of deception and was willing to cooperate,” wrote one, noting that Jamili might have more information to reveal if asked the right questions.

“The detainee, in my opinion, remains a moderate threat to U.S./coalition forces and would not continue to be a part of the HiG group,” the representative concluded. Still, he recommended that Jamili remain in detention.

Afghan prosecutor Maulavi Saddiqi said he believed that someone likely framed Jamili.

“The main problem is with our own people — they give bad reports to the U.S. Army because of personal conflicts,” Saddiqi said. Saddiqi’s team decided there was no case against Jamili and six weeks later, they released him.

The stigma remains

At the time of his father’s arrest, Anwar Jamili was at first relieved when he heard that his father was in American hands.

“I said at the time that if we went to the coalition, he will be back in 10 days. If it were Afghan forces, it could be longer, but these were the Americans.”

But as time went on, the family grew angry. Anwar went to the American Embassy and asked them what he should do.

“I told them we can’t go back to Pakistan because I work with a U.S. NGO. You think we are al-Qaida. What should we do?”

Foster, from the International Justice Network, said Jamili was one of the lucky ones. He and his family were educated and able to navigate the complex system.

“The thing that was most helpful at his [Detainee Review Board hearing] was his ability to present witnesses who were sympathetic to folks who detained them,” she said. “They spoke English, were modern, had Western attitudes.”

Still, the stigma of detention remains, she added.

“It’s impossible to clear your name after having been captured by the U.S. government.”

Jamili might very well have been a terrorist recruiter who used his intellect and education to fight Americans. Or he could have been an educated Afghan refugee swept up in the turmoil of a conflict that has taken a terrible toll on his country.

In mid-November, Jamili’s family members gathered for their first Eid holiday together since the patriarch’s release. Jamili sat surrounded by his eight sons and his daughter, who is in law school, and shook his head.

“This is the reason that after 10 years the American people cannot win against the Taliban and al-Qaida,” Jamili said. “They are always preaching about human rights and respect for religious cultures. But in reality, they are not doing this, and it just increases the hatred of the people.”

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

To mark the occasion, and, I think, to highlight American and British hypocrisy regarding Article 5 (“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”) and Article 9 (“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”), the journalist and playwright Victoria Brittain has written an article for the Guardian about Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who has, like almost everyone seized in the “War on Terror,” been “subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” and remains held at Guantánamo, despite being cleared for release by a military review board in 2007, and despite the fact that he has never been charged with any offense.

This is a situation shared by the majority of the remaining 174 prisoners, which can clearly be described as “arbitrary arrest” followed by nine long years of abusive treatment (including torture), illegal interrogations, and an indifference on the part of the US authorities to any form of due process. I believe that this also contravenes Article 10 of the UDHR (“Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him”) and Article 11(1) (“Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence”), on the basis that Shaker, and all the other prisoners, have not been held as prisoners of war, according to the Geneva Conventions, and remain consigned to a legal twilight zone, which remains in force despite the fact that, two and a half years ago, the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights. Of the 174 men still held, just 57 have had their habas petitions ruled on by a US court, and although 38 of these were won by the prisoners, just 25 of those men have been released.

In recent weeks, I have written extensively about Shaker’s case, particularly in my articles, As the UK Government Announces Compensation for Ex-Guantánamo Prisoners, Is the Return of Shaker Aamer Part of the Deal? and The UK Government’s Guantánamo Guilt, and the Urgent Need for Shaker Aamer’s Return, and I hope that, as well as reading Victoria’s article, readers will also — if possible — come to “A Day for Shaker Aamer” in Battersea tomorrow, and/or write to foreign secretary Wiliam Hague, their MPs, and Daniel Fried, President Obama’s Special Envoy on Guantánamo ((although I would cut the section mentioning that the US government can, if it wishes, “charge him promptly and give him a fair trial”), to demand his immediate return to his British wife and family. Readers can also encourage their MPs to sign an Early Day Motion submitted by Caroline Lucas, our only Green MP, and can order free pre-printed postcards from the indefatigable activist Maryam Hassan (of the Justice for Aafia Coalition) to send to Wiiliam Hague and to Shaker himself in Guantánamo.

Ken Clarke’s Guantánamo credibility test
By Victoria Brittain, The Guardian, December 10, 2010

Ken Clarke, as lord chancellor and justice secretary, is facing a significant test of credibility within a long and successful career — at the bar, in politics and in business — in the current power struggle with the United States over the return from Guantánamo Bay of British resident Shaker Aamer to his family in London.

Clarke, as he informed parliament, did what the Labour government signally failed to do in personally meeting the former Guantánamo Bay prisoners, both British citizens and residents, after the claimants requested a ministerial meeting during the negotiations over their recent settlement. Hearing from every one of the men how the return of Aamer to his wife and children mattered to them more than any financial settlement, and what the loss of shared years of a child’s life meant to them, changed the tone. Clarke appears to be the first minister to have taken in the enormity of the wrong done to these men and to have been affected by what they had to say.

In the last nine years, personal letters to prime ministers Blair and Brown, and even to Sarah Brown, handed in by delegations to Downing Street, including Aamer’s daughter, and earlier by other prisoners’ children, never met a human response. It requires an unusually independent and confident politician to offer such a response. The justice secretary, famous for his stalwart refusal to take his party’s line against joining the European Union, is certainly one such person. It is now known in fact, from the US end, that the previous British government made only sporadic and token efforts to get Aamer home to his family, although they claimed in recent years that they were doing all they could.

Aamer is not just another unknown prisoner. He was the spokesman and negotiator for the other prisoners with the US authorities in [a major] hunger strike [in the summer of 2005]. After the US side broke the agreement he went on other hunger strikes, was in solitary confinement for years, and was witness to the dark episode of the mysterious deaths of Salah Ahmed al-Salami of Yemen, and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani of Saudi Arabia in Guantánamo in June 2006. US claims that they were suicides were discredited both by autopsies when the bodies were returned home, and by a long investigation by Harper’s Magazine based on interviews with a [number of former] guard[s].

There is no mystery about why the Americans have been so reluctant to see him free to speak of what he knows. Even as the negotiations were going on with the former prisoners in London, a telephone call, lasting two hours, was arranged by the US for Aamer from Guantánamo — not with his wife and children in London who have not spoken to him in nearly a decade, but with a brother in Saudi Arabia. If he were to be returned there he would likely disappear indefinitely into a “rehabilitation programme”, his British family would probably never see him again, and he would be highly unlikely to talk publicly about what he knows.

The new coalition government moved the issue high up its agenda, so that Aamer’s future recently dominated discussions between the foreign minister, William Hague, and Hillary Clinton. The momentum for this change had come from the former Guantánamo prisoners in the UK, who insisted that convincing evidence of real government pressure for Aamer’s return to Britain was key to any settlement with the British government. The details of the settlement made with the 16 men, who included several residents as well as the British citizens, remain confidential. However, for the men, the most important aspect of this case is the wrongful detention the US and Britain subjected so many Muslim men to as part of the “war on terror”. Ongoing contacts, not the subject of any confidentiality, now indicate a new level of government effort by Britain on behalf of Aamer.

Once David Cameron’s government announced simultaneously the intention to negotiate a settlement, and to hold a public inquiry, two consequences flowed. The harsh realities of civil litigation meant that those who were eligible for legal aid would have that withdrawn by the Legal Services Commission, the possibility of continuing a protracted case with the option of a court hearing being thus ended.

The men nevertheless got significant parts of what the civil proceedings were intended to achieve. The demand for a public inquiry was a vital aspect of a number of the men’s claims under the Human Rights Act — Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna kidnapped by the US in the Gambia with the connivance of the UK, for instance. The government announcement of a judge-led public inquiry was made simultaneously with its intention to negotiate. We do not know how much will be in public. While the whole shameful story of Guantánamo may never be told, the coalition government is still party to the fight to keep secret material out of the courts, and keeping Aamer from talking has been an integral part of the US-UK history of the hidden account. What we do know is that the former prisoners’ evidence will be critical to the UK inquiry and that one key witness for Judge Gibson will be Aamer, who can testify to the presence of British intelligence agents at his own ill-treatment.

The battle with the US over Aamer’s return highlights a hugely sensitive area: the Obama administration’s failure to close the camp; the failure to persuade its allies to help; the massive fallout of broken families across many countries as a result of so many innocent men being held and tortured; and for those released with no stain on their character, the glaring lack of any public acknowledgment or apology for the great wrongs done by the US, and condoned by allies like Britain. The UK government’s settlement tacitly admits the credibility of the men’s claims. The outstanding part, this last man’s return, needs a further sustained push from Clarke and his cabinet colleagues if these men — and the millions watching — are not to feel that they have been cheated again.

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

As has been clear for many years, since prisoners and former prisoners began speaking about the conditions of their confinement, medical and psychiatric personnel were intimately involved in a regime that involved withholding medical treatment for those who refused to “cooperate” with their interrogators — in other words, by providing false confessions — and the entire interrogation program — the one based on torture and coercion rather than the one favored by the law enforcement agencies, who stuck to non-violent rapport-building techniques — was directed by psychologists from the SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) taught in US military schools, which involved using torture techniques to train military personnel to resist interrogation if captured, and which was reverse-engineered for use in the “War on Terror.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Presumptively Treating” Malaria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treatment, Torture or an Experiment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Briefings on Side Effects

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

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

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

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

Military Struggles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do so because, for those of us who have been studying the story of Guantánamo, of US torture and of British complicity in torture for many years, the financial settlement is a huge story, an admission of guilt on the part of the British government, prompted by judges whose commitment to the truth — and to the necessary revulsion at revelations of torture — has taken precedence over the narrow objections of ministers trying to cover their backs for their involvement in criminal wrongdoing by bleating about the importance of national security.

I also do so because I have been writing about Shaker Aamer for many years, and was recently reminded that the first event that I attended, which sought his release from Guantánamo, was in July 2007, in Balham, to mark his 2000th day in US custody without charge or trial. In April this year, I attended a protest to mark his 3000th day in US custody, and as he approaches the start of his tenth year in US custody it is unforgiveable that he is still held, when neither the American government nor the British government has any credible evidence to continue holding him.

I have also been writing about him with some urgency this past week, because he needs to be here in the UK to take part in a Metropolitan Police investigation into his allegations that British agents were present when he was subjected to torture in US custody in Afghanistan, and to take part in the judicial inquiry, announced by David Cameron in July, that will begin once that investigation is complete.

As my latest contribution, I am cross-posting below an article from the Independent, in which former Guantánamo prisoner (and Cageprisoners director) Moazzam Begg discusses the financial settlement, writes with great insight about the torture, threats and abuse to which he and other prisoners were subjected, and calls once more for Shaker Aamer’s return to the UK.

Moazzam Begg: We settled so we could get our lives back
The Independent, November 21, 2010

Eid ul-Adha is the most important Muslim celebration of the year. It is a time when Muslims commemorate the great test undergone by the prophet Abraham when he was ordered by the Almighty to sacrifice his son. It is a time for joy and for spending quality time with the family. This year, it fell on Tuesday 16 November. It is inconceivable that politicians and journalists would be unaware of the significance of that date — the same day the Government announced that it had reached an out-of-court settlement with 16 Guantánamo detainees, British citizens and residents, who were detained by US forces.

In the morning, my daughter was in tears in front of press photographers. By the evening, Islamophobic blogsites were posting statements such as: “Somebody post any of these innocent victims’ addresses and I will save the British taxpayers millions.”

None of this mattered to the scores of reporters who incessantly called me, and others, from the moment news of the imminent government announcement was “leaked” to ITN News on Monday. Neither did it prevent numerous journalists with their cameras and satellite vans turning up outside my house, desperate for a scoop on where the taxpayers’ money had been spent and to know if our voices — once so outspoken against the abuses we had sustained and which we alleged had happened with the complicity of our government — had now been silenced in return for a grubby pay-off.

Of the 16 men involved in the case against the British secret intelligence services, five were held for two-and-a-half years; five served three years; four others served six years; one served eight, and another, Shaker Aamer, is still in Guantánamo, nine years on. Collectively, we have spent over 66 years imprisoned without charge or trial.

Many of us allege that British intelligence was directly involved before and during our rendition. Others maintain they were tortured and abused in front of MI5 agents. All of us affirm that British agents regularly interrogated us, with full knowledge of the torture and conditions. Nine of the claimants in this case are British citizens; the others have long-term connections to the UK and in some cases had been legally resident here for decades.

All of the men allege that they were forcibly stripped naked, paraded like animals in front of others, regularly beaten, kept for extended periods in isolation and held incommunicado for the duration. This is just a tiny sample of what some of the claimants are alleging. There is much more — so much more that the Government decided to settle with us rather than see its reputation as an upholder of human rights tarnished even more.

I spent three years in Bagram and Guantánamo. I was subjected to the sounds of a screaming woman whom I believed was my wife being tortured. I witnessed the beating to death of two prisoners, and spent two years in solitary confinement, before returning home to meet the three-year-old son I had never seen before.

According to the terms of the settlement, no claimant knows what the other has been offered, and we are certainly not permitted to discuss it. But it would be safe to say none of us got even a fraction of the £6.5m awarded by the Canadian government to Maher Arar, who is the only comparable litigant. Despite the grand claims being made in the press, I’m no millionaire.

We understand the aversion some people have to us receiving anything, but the Government was always going to lose this case. They had to settle, because, as with the two unjust and immoral wars in which untold numbers of innocent people have been killed, wounded and displaced, the Government subjugated itself to the policies of other countries.

Earlier this month, the former US president George W. Bush released his memoir and defended waterboarding. He insisted that waterboarding of suspected terrorists by the CIA saved British lives by preventing terrorist attacks on Heathrow and Canary Wharf. He offered no credible evidence for his claim.

In 2002, the CIA told me about the fate of a man they had interrogated before me, saying that I would meet the same end if I failed to comply. When Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured by the US, he was trumpeted as the most senior al-Qa’ida figure in custody at the time. He was then rendered to Egypt where he was waterboarded and made a confession that was used as a major justification to invade Iraq. Al-Libi told his US interrogators that he was working with Saddam Hussain on obtaining chemical and biological weapons. This information was presented by Colin Powell as “credible evidence” to the UN Security Council in 2003 as a tangible link between al-Qa’ida and the Iraqi regime. It was a fabrication — and, eventually, the UN knew it. There were no WMDs in Iraq and no al-Qa’ida presence there before the invasion.

I told MI5 agents what I had been threatened with. They responded by saying that they could do nothing, and that I should just co-operate with the Americans. What would they have done if I had been waterboarded into giving such a confession? Waterboarding is a crime. The man who ordered this in our times was Britain’s closest ally, even as we were being abused. I have no doubt that he — and his henchmen — ordered that, too. And I have even less doubt that the Government knew exactly what was happening, because British intelligence agents were there at every leg of the journey on the road to Guantánamo.

We started this action not for the money, but to get our lives back, to repay our friends and relatives and to remove the stigma of being “terrorism suspects”. Most of all, we wanted the last remaining British prisoner, Shaker Aamer, reunited with his family. That is why he is one of the claimants in absentia — and why we told the Government that having Shaker back was more important to us than any amount they were offering in settlement. We are pleased to see the Government has now agreed to step up its efforts to bring home the last Briton held at Guantánamo as a priority.

We agreed to settle because we do not want to have to relive this episode indefinitely for years on end. To me, this is at least a partial victory. They would not have paid up if they thought they could win. British complicity in torture goes well beyond the Guantánamo cases. Cageprisoners intends to submit its findings of 29 such cases to the Gibson inquiry.

Note: A longer version of this article appears on the Cageprisoners 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 and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Shalabi, a Saudi, weighed 124 pounds when he arrived at Guantánamo in January 2002, but has rarely weighed more than 110 pounds since he began his hunger strike in August 2005, as part of the largest hunger strike in the prison’s history. At one point, in November 2005, he weighed just 100 pounds (PDF), and when the authorities took harsh steps to bring the strike under control in January 2006, importing a number of restraint chairs to make sure that it “wasn’t convenient” for the strikers to continue (as Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, the head of the US Southern Command, explained to the New York Times), Shalabi, Tarek Baada, a Yemeni, and another Saudi, Ahmed Zuhair (who was released last June), refused to give up.

In September 2009, after four years of being force-fed daily, Shalabi weighed just 108 pounds, and wrote a distressing letter to his lawyers, in which he stated, “I am a human who is being treated like an animal.” In November 2009, when his letter was included in a court submission, one of his lawyers, Julia Tarver Mason, stated, “He’s two pounds away from organ failure and death.”

Although it was understandable that the US authorities wished to prevent the PR disaster of having a prisoner die by starving himself to death, medical staff who participated in the force-feeding have run up against trenchant criticism from others in the profession, because medical ethics have long prohibited force-feeding mentally competent hunger strikers, recognizing that it is often the only manner in which they can make protests about the conditions of their confinement.

This is troubling enough, but a far more worrying aspect of the story of Guantánamo’s hunger strikers concerns the three men who died in mysterious circumstances in June 2006, and who may, according to reports by four soldiers who were present at the time, have been killed, either accidentally or deliberately, rather than having committed suicide, as claimed in the authorities’ official narrative. All three were long-term hunger strikers, as were the two other prisoners who allegedly committed suicide — Abdul Rahman al-Amri, a Saudi, in May 2007, and Muhammad Salih, a Yemeni, in June 2009 — and the disturbing subtext is that their resistance to injustice, through hunger striking, made them powerful enemies somewhere in the base’s command structure, or in the various shadowy agencies responsible for interrogation.

To the extent that he has survived his long ordeal, Abdul Rahman Shalabi is at least fortunate, although it is clear that five years on a hunger strike has taken a heavy toll on his health. This is in spite of the generally upbeat tone of the authorities’ commentary, which was included in a submission as part of the government’s response to a motion submitted by his lawyers, asking for independent medical experts to be allowed to travel to Guantánamo to examine Shalabi’s physical and mental health, and to treat him if necessary.

According to Navy Capt. Monte Bible, who commands the Joint Medical Group at Guantánamo, Shalabi “has begun to eat such things as pasta, bread, cake, seafood, baklava, cookies, peanut butter, cheese and ice cream,” and medical logs submitted by the government noted that he first ate solid food in February, when a guard “reported seeing him eat a granola bar behind a newspaper, trying to shield himself from view,” and he “received seven Slim Jims — a dried meat snack – and a pack of gum from a visiting attorney.” The next month, according to the log, he “received a sticky bun from night guards at the hospital,” where he is still held, and in July he “ate grapes, spaghetti with meat sauce, two pieces of baklava and a banana.”

Despite this, however, the authorities conceded that Shalabi weighed only 101 pounds — just two-thirds of his “ideal body weight” — in September, and also noted that doctors had diagnosed him with gastroparesis, a condition which slows the digestive system. According to Capt. Bible, it “causes constipation, bloating and abdominal pain,” and “was apparently caused by a weakening of his abdominal muscles as a result of the fast,” although he added that it “may go away as Shalabi begins to eat more solid food.”

His lawyers were less upbeat. Although they noted that he has eaten “high-fat foods, such as peanut butter, ice cream and cheese,” they continued to “express concern about the potentially dangerous long-term effects of his hunger strike,” as the Associated Press described it. One of his attorneys, Jana Ramsey stated, “For months, Mr. Shalabi’s weight has hovered around a dangerous line.”

It is unknown when the court will rule, but it is unlikely that the lawyers’ request will be granted, as judges have a long history of refusing to interfere in the day-to-day running of Guantánamo, or in seeking to allow visits by independent medical experts. In addition, as the Associated Press noted, “Lawyers for the government argued that outside experts are unnecessary in part because the prisoner has cooperated with medical personnel at Guantánamo and is showing signs of improvement.”

For a man who still weighs little more than an anorexic model, it is uncertain to what extent the odd peanut butter snack or ice cream can be regarded as “signs of improvement.” However, the authorities will be hoping that Capt. Bible’s intervention, and the scattered references to food in their logs, will be enough to prevent anyone with an objective point of view from being allowed to meet Shalabi in Guantánamo, where secrecy remains part of the very fabric of the prison, 20 months after President Obama came to power promising to close it, and 19 months after he received a specially commissioned report which concluded that the prison “complies with the humanitarian requirements of the Geneva Conventions.”

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Yahya’s Blog and Uruknet.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the hunger strikes and deaths at Guantánamo, see Suicide at Guantánamo: the story of Abdul Rahman al-Amri (May 2007), Suicide at Guantánamo: a response to the US military’s allegations that Abdul Rahman al-Amri was a member of al-Qaeda (May 2007), 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), Guantánamo Suicide Report: Truth or Travesty? (August 2008), The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo (November 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), Guantánamo, Bagram and the “Dark Prison”: Binyam Mohamed talks to Moazzam Begg (March 2009), Forgotten: The Second Anniversary Of A Guantánamo Suicide (May 2009), Yemeni Prisoner Muhammad Salih Dies At Guantánamo (June 2009), Death At Guantánamo Hovers Over Obama’s Middle East Visit (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation (June 2009), Binyam Mohamed: Was Muhammad Salih’s Death In Guantánamo Suicide? (June 2009), Torture In Guantánamo: The Force-feeding Of Hunger Strikers (for ACLU, June 2009), Murders at Guantánamo: Scott Horton of Harper’s Exposes the Truth about the 2006 “Suicides” (January 2010), Torture in Afghanistan and Guantánamo: Shaker Aamer’s Lawyers Speak (February 2010), The Third Anniversary of a Death in Guantánamo (May 2010), Omar Deghayes and Terry Holdbrooks Discuss Guantánamo (Part Three): Deaths at the Prison (June 2010), Suicide or Murder at Guantánamo? (1st anniversary of Mohammed al-Hanashi’s death, June 2010), Murders at Guantánamo: The Cover-Up Continues (June 2010), US Court Denies Justice to Dead Men at Guantánamo (October 2010).

Judge Huvelle’s ruling came in spite of additional evidence submitted by the families (PDF), drawing on the accounts of four US soldiers who were present in Guantánamo at the time of the deaths, and who have presented a number of compelling reasons why the official story of the men’s triple suicide (as endorsed by a Naval Criminal Investigative Service report in 2008) is a cover-up. That story, written by Scott Horton, was published by Harper’s Magazine in January this year, and I covered it here, and also in an update in June, although it has largely been ignored in the mainstream US media.

The case, Al-Zahrani v. Rumsfeld, was initially filed in January 2009, and primarily involved the families of the dead men seeking to claim damages through the precedent of a case known as Bivens, decided by the Supreme Court in 1971, in which, for the first time, damages claims for constitutional violations committed by federal agents were allowed. The families claimed relief under the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause (preventing individuals from being deprived of life, liberty, or property without “due process of law”) and the Eighth Amendment (which prohibits the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments”), as well as submitting a claim, under the Alien Tort Claims Act, “alleging torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and violations of the Geneva Conventions.”

Despite the families’ claims, the case was dismissed by the District Court on February 16, 2010, for two particular reasons. One involved a handful of legal precedents — including Rasul v. Myers, a case brought in 2006 by four former Guantánamo detainees from the UK, which was finally turned down by the Supreme Court in December 2009. In the hope of making tortuous legal reasoning comprehensible to the lay reader, these rulings essentially provide precedents for preventing the courts from providing a Bivens remedy and entitle the defendants to “qualified immunity against plaintiffs’ constitutional claims.”

Rather more readily comprehensible, and deeply shocking, is a clause in the Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress in the fall of 2006 and unchanged in the legislation revived under President Obama in 2009, which, as well as creating — or bringing back to life — the much-criticized Military Commission trial system for Guantánamo prisoners that was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, also granted blanket immunity to anyone involved in any activities relating to the detention and treatment of prisoners held in the “War on Terror.”

As Judge Huvelle explained in her opinion:

Specifically, the Court found that the section of the MCA removing from the courts ‘jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement’ of an alien detained and determined to be an enemy combatant by the United States is still valid law.

With these precedents, there was, to be blunt, little hope that Judge Huvelle would grant the complaint filed by the families of Yasser al-Zahrani and Salah al-Salami, even though the families had made an emotional appeal, pointing out:

The fact that Defendants fought to keep secret virtually all information concerning the cause and circumstances of Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami’s deaths from their families, the public and the courts until compelled by FOIA litigation in 2008, and that details of an elaborate, high-level cover-up of likely homicide at a “black site” at Guantánamo are only now emerging nearly four years after the fact, should disturb the Court and caution it against permitting unspecified national security concerns to trump all other factors in this case without question.

Perhaps more to the point, the families of al-Zahrani and al-Salami attempted to persuade Judge Huvelle that “Courts have allowed Bivens claims by detainees in the post-9/11 context to proceed … despite the presence of national security factors,” citing, amongst other cases, Ertel v. Rumsfeld, an ongoing case in Chicago “permitting US citizens detained by the United States in Iraq [former contractors Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel] to bring Bivens claims against Donald Rumsfeld for authorizing their detention and abuse,” and Padilla v. Yoo, another ongoing case (in California), in which Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant” in the United States as part of the “war on terror,” was permitted “to bring a Bivens suit against John Yoo [the lawyer who wrote the Bush administration’s notorious “torture memos”] for authorizing his detention and torture.”

The families also urged the court to “scrutinize bald assertions of national security and secrecy because the government’s account of the risks has in many cases been overblown,” adding, “As an apt case in point, after years of dire warnings to justify the indefinite detention of Guantánamo detainees and forestall court review, the government has by now released the majority of detainees without incident, including approving dozens of detainees for transfer on the eve of habeas review.” For reference, the families drew again on the case of Jose Padilla, citing Padilla v. Hanft, and “observing that the government had ‘steadfastly maintain[ed] that it was imperative in the interest of national security’ to hold Padilla in military custody for three and a half years, yet abruptly changing course on the doorstep of Supreme Court review, seeking to move him into criminal custody, at a ‘substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the courts.’” They also cited the case of Yasser Hamdi, a US citizen held briefly in Guantánamo, who was also held as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland. In Hamdi’s case, the Bush administration argued that “military necessity required Hamdi’s indefinite detention, yet [the authorities] releas[ed] him to Saudi Arabia seven months later.”

Despite all these arguments, Judge Huvelle was clear in her ruling that, although the allegations were of a “highly disturbing nature,” that alone “cannot be a sufficient basis in law” for the case to be heard. She also explained that the legal precedents established that “matters relating to the conditions of detention in Guantánamo remain the purview of Congress alone — not the courts — due to national security concerns,” as AFP explained.

“The question before the court,” she said, “is not whether homicide ‘exceeds the bounds of permissible official conduct in the treatment of detainees in US custody and demands accountability’ or whether the families of Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami deserve a remedy. Rather, the question is ‘who should decide whether such a remedy should be provided.’”

Following the ruling, Yasser al-Zahrani’s father Talal, spoke for everyone disturbed by the revelations of Joe Hickman and his colleagues, when he stated, “The courts should be investigating my son’s death and holding those responsible accountable. President Obama should be defending human rights and the democratic values the US preaches to the world, rather than going to court to defend the lies and gruesome crimes of the Bush administration.”

Pardiss Kebriaei of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the lawsuit with William Goodman of Goodman & Hurwitz, P.C. and the International Human Rights Law Clinic at the Washington College of Law, added, “The very secrecy of Guantánamo is what allowed the government to torture and illegally imprison innocent men there for years, as we now know from leaked government memos, whistleblowers, and repeated wins in court in detainees’ habeas cases. Yet the court’s decision today allows secrecy to continue to shroud the truth about these deaths, in the face of compelling evidence of a four-year cover-up of murder.”

With this ruling, it is uncertain how the families of Yasser al-Zahrani and Salah al-Salami can continue their quest for truth and justice, as it appears certain that Congress has no desire to investigate the circumstances of the men’s deaths. Sadly, only one major media outlet, AFP, covered the latest ruling, demonstrating how the story of the men’s deaths is viewed as such a toxic issue by most of the mainstream media that it is being ignored. If you care about what appears to be a particular vile cover-up by parts of the US administration, please do all you can to help to keep this story alive.

Below, I publish the sections of the families’ complaint, submitted as part of the “Motion for Reconsideration,” filed on May 3, 2010, that Judge Huvelle turned down last week, which spell out the deeply distressing story exposed by Harper’s Magazine in January this year.

Excerpts from the “Motion of Reconsideration in Light of Newly Discovered Evidence,” Al-Zahrani v. Rumsfeld, Submitted May 3, 2010

In early 2009, as Plaintiffs’ Amended Complaint was pending before this Court, a former soldier by the name of Joe Hickman approached the law school of Seton Hall University, which had produced several reports dealing with the deaths and whose work Hickman had followed. Hickman was a decorated Army officer who had served a distinguished tour of duty at Guantánamo from March 2006 to March 2007 and had been on duty as sergeant of the guard the night Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami died. Hickman said he had decided to come forward with his story because what he had seen “was “haunting me” and he thought that “with a new administration and new ideas I could actually come forward.” While he did not want to speak to the press, he felt that “silence was just wrong.”

On January 18, 2010, Hickman’s account and interviews from three other soldiers under his supervision — Specialist Tony Davila, Army Specialist Christopher Penvose, and Army Specialist David Caroll — were reported by Harper’s Magazine. The article, which serves as the source for this motion and Plaintiffs incorporate in full herein, was the first time Plaintiffs and their counsel became aware of the soldiers’ accounts.

Those accounts are dramatically at odds with the official version of events on June 9-10, 2006. The soldiers describe a cover-up initiated by the authorities within hours of the deaths and say they were affirmatively told not to speak out. Despite having first-hand observations of camp activity that night, they were never approached or interviewed for the NCIS investigation. While the official account of the deaths concluded that Al-Zahrani, Al-Salami and the third deceased, Mani Al-Utaybi, had hanged themselves in their cells, the soldiers’ accounts strongly suggest that the men were transported from their cells to an undisclosed, unofficial “black site” nicknamed “Camp No” that was outside the perimeter of the main prison camp, and died there or from events that transpired there.

Specifically, according to the soldiers’ reported accounts:

• Between approximately 6-8 p.m. on June 9, Hickman observed the van used to transport detainees drive up to the camp where the deceased were held three separate times in short succession. Each time, guards escorted a detainee from the camp to the van and drove away in the direction of Camp No. By the third time he saw the van approach the deceased’s camp, Hickman decided to drive ahead of the vehicle in the direction of Camp No to confirm where it was going. From his vantage point shortly thereafter, he saw the van approach and turn toward Camp No, eliminating any question in his mind about its destination.

• Camp No is an unnamed and officially unacknowledged facility located outside the perimeter of the area enclosing the prison complex at Guantánamo. Guards nicknamed the facility “Camp No” because anyone who asked if it existed would be told, “No, it doesn’t.” Hickman was never briefed about the site, despite frequently being put in charge of security for the entire prison. He reported once hearing a “series of screams” coming from the facility.

• At approximately 11:30 p.m., from his position in a watch tower, Hickman watched the van he had seen transporting the detainees to Camp No return to the camp. This time, the van backed up to the entrance of the medical clinic, as if to unload something.

• At approximately 11:45 p.m., nearly an hour before the NCIS claims the first dead body was discovered in the cells, Army Specialist Christopher Penvose was approached by a senior navy officer who appeared to be extremely agitated and instructed Penvose to go the prison chow hall, identify a specific officer who would be dining there, and relay a specific code word. Penvose did as he was instructed. The petty officer leapt up from her seat and immediately ran out of the chow hall.

• At approximately 12:15 a.m. on June 10, Hickman and Penvose reported that the camp was suddenly flooded with lights and the scene of a frenzy of activity. Hickman headed to the medical clinic, which appeared to be the center of activity, and was told by a medical corpsman there that three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic, that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised.

• According to Specialist Tony Davila, guards he talked to also said the men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.

• While the NCIS report’s narrative is that the deceased were found dead in their cells and transported from there to the medical clinic, Penvose, who was on guard duty in a watch tower at the time the deceased would have been transported to the clinic, had an unobstructed view of the walkway between the camp and the clinic, which was the path by which any detainee would be delivered to the clinic. Penvose reported that he saw no detainees being moved from the camp to the clinic.

• Army Specialist David Caroll, who was also on guard duty in another watch tower at the time the NCIS report says the deceased would have been transported to the clinic, also had an unobstructed view of the alleyway that connected the men’s specific cell block to the clinic. He similarly reported that he had seen no detainees transferred from the cell block to the clinic that night.

• By dawn, the news had circulated through the prison that three detainees had committed suicide by swallowing rags.

• On the morning of June 10, Defendant Mike Bumgarner, Commander of the Joint Detention Group at Guantánamo at the time, called a meeting of the guards during which he announced that three detainees had committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death. Defendant Bumgarner said that the media would instead report that the detainees had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. He said that it was important that the guards make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report, and reminded them that their phone and email communications were being monitored. This account of the meeting was corroborated by various guards in independent interviews conducted by Harper’s.

• On the evening of June 10, Defendant Harry Harris, Commander of the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo and Defendant Bumgarner’s superior at the time, read this statement to reporters: “An alert, professional guard noticed something out of the ordinary in the cell of one of the detainees. … When it was apparent that the detainee had hung himself, the guard force and medical teams reacted quickly to attempt to save the detainee’s life. The detainee was unresponsive and not breathing. [The] guard force began to check on the health and welfare of other detainees. Two detainees in their cells had also hung themselves.”

• In a press interview at the time, Defendant Bumgarner, contrary to his own admonition to the guards, let slip that each deceased detainee “had a ball of cloth in their mouth either for choking or muffling their voices.”

• As soon as Defendant Bumgarner’s interview was published, Defendant Harris called him for a meeting and told him that the article “could get me relieved.” The same day, an investigation was launched to determine whether classified information had been leaked from Guantánamo. Defendant Bumgarner was subsequently suspended.

• Hickman and Davila later learned that Defendant Bumgarner’s home was raided by the FBI over a concern that he had taken classified materials and was planning to send them to the media or use them for writing a book.

• The only apparent discrepancy between Defendant Bumgarner’s interview and the official Pentagon narrative was on one point: that the deaths had involved cloth being stuffed into the detainees’ mouths.

• For several months after Hickman first came forward, he and his attorneys attempted to pursue an investigation through the Department of Justice. Their first meeting was on February 2, 2009, where they related a detailed account of Hickman’s observations and later handed over a list of corroborating witnesses with contact information. The Justice Department ultimately closed its investigation on November 2, 2009, concluding without explanation that “the gist of Sergeant Hickman’s information could not be confirmed” and his conclusions “appeared” to be unsupported.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Common Dreams, The Smirking Chimp, The Public Record and Uruknet.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the hunger strikes and deaths at Guantánamo, see Suicide at Guantánamo: the story of Abdul Rahman al-Amri (May 2007), Suicide at Guantánamo: a response to the US military’s allegations that Abdul Rahman al-Amri was a member of al-Qaeda (May 2007), 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), Guantánamo Suicide Report: Truth or Travesty? (August 2008), The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo (November 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), Guantánamo, Bagram and the “Dark Prison”: Binyam Mohamed talks to Moazzam Begg (March 2009), Forgotten: The Second Anniversary Of A Guantánamo Suicide (May 2009), Yemeni Prisoner Muhammad Salih Dies At Guantánamo (June 2009), Death At Guantánamo Hovers Over Obama’s Middle East Visit (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation (June 2009), Binyam Mohamed: Was Muhammad Salih’s Death In Guantánamo Suicide? (June 2009), Torture In Guantánamo: The Force-feeding Of Hunger Strikers (for ACLU, June 2009), Murders at Guantánamo: Scott Horton of Harper’s Exposes the Truth about the 2006 “Suicides” (January 2010), Torture in Afghanistan and Guantánamo: Shaker Aamer’s Lawyers Speak (February 2010), The Third Anniversary of a Death in Guantánamo (May 2010), Omar Deghayes and Terry Holdbrooks Discuss Guantánamo (Part Three): Deaths at the Prison (June 2010), Suicide or Murder at Guantánamo? (1st anniversary of Mohammed al-Hanashi’s death, June 2010).