Two suspicious omissions: Abdullah Tabarak and Abdurahman Khadr

Of the 14 missing stories, just two are overtly suspicious. The first of these is the file for Abdullah Tabarak Ahmad (ISN 56), a Moroccan who, according to a Washington Post article in January 2003, “was one of [Osama] bin Laden’s long-time bodyguards,” and who, in order to help bin Laden to escape from the showdown with US forces in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains in December 2001, “took possession of the al-Qaeda leader’s satellite phone on the assumption that US intelligence agencies were monitoring it to get a fix on their position.” Whether or not there is any truth to this story is unknown, as the Post‘s source was a number of “senior Moroccan officials,” who have visited Guantánamo, and had interviewed Tabarak. One official said, “He agreed to be captured or die. That’s the level of his fanaticism for bin Laden. It wasn’t a lot of time, but it was enough.” Moroccan officials also stated that Tabarak, who was 43 years old at the time, “had become the ‘emir,’ or camp leader,” at Guantánamo.

One sign of Tabarak’s supposed significance is that, when representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross visited Guantánamo in October 2003, he was one of four prisoners they were not allowed to visit. However, the problem with this is not that they were refused access to him, but that he was no longer present at Guantánamo. Although it was reported in August 2004 that he had been released from Guantánamo at that time with four other Moroccans, it actually transpired that he had been released 13 months earlier, on July 1, 2003.

The reason for this is unknown, although in January 2006, in another article in the Washington Post, Tabarak’s attorney, Abdelfattah Zahrach, “said his client’s importance as an al-Qaeda figure ha[d] been exaggerated, although he acknowledged that Tabarak knew bin Laden and worked for one of his companies.” Zahrach stated, “He was in bin Laden’s environment, but he didn’t play an operational role. Do you think that if he was really the bodyguard of bin Laden that the Americans would have let him come back to Morocco?” In response to this question, others in Rabat who were “familiar with Tabarak’s case” told the Post that “Moroccan officials had pressed the US military for many months to hand over Tabarak, arguing that they would have a better chance of persuading him to reveal secrets about al-Qaeda.”

The truth may never be known, but Tabarak’s missing file suggests that there were some secrets that were regarded as off-limits to general readers of the Guantánamo DABs in the US intelligence circles with access to them — focused, presumably, on the 13 months between his real date of his release, and his stated date of release.

The second suspicious missing file is that of Abdurahman Khadr (ISN 990), listed as Abdul Khadr. A Canadian, and the brother of Omar Khadr (ISN 766), he was persuaded to work as a spy, as I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files:

Abdurahman was captured by Afghans in Kabul in November 2001, when he was 20 years old, and was then handed over to the Americans. Describing himself as the “black sheep” of the family, who saw no value in the radical beliefs of the rest of his family, Abdurahman agreed to work as a spy for the CIA in Kabul, and then in Guantánamo, but was told that, to protect his cover, he would have to be treated like all the other prisoners. He said that his imprisonment at Bagram — where he was stripped, photographed naked and subjected to an anal probe — was the start of “the longest and most painful ordeal of his life,” and that he “had no idea what he was getting into.”

After ten days at Bagram, he was flown to Guantánamo, where, he said, he arrived “a broken man,” and was then kept in isolation for a month before being moved to a cell near other prisoners. The plan, as he described it, was that “they could put me next to anyone that was stubborn and that wouldn’t talk and I would talk him into it. Well, it’s not that easy — lots of people won’t talk to anyone because everybody in Cuba is scared of the person next to him. I couldn’t do a lot for them.” Unable to cope with his situation, he spent the rest of his time in Guantánamo in a “luxurious” private cell, and was then sent to Bosnia, where his mission was to infiltrate radical mosques and gather information on al-Qaeda’s activities.

When the CIA wanted to send him to Iraq, however, he decided that he couldn’t take the pressure any more, and after resigning from the agency he returned to Canada, where his most salient comments concerned the prisoners in Guantánamo. He said that he told the CIA that the vast majority of the prisoners were innocent, and that it was “a huge mistake for the US military to offer large cash rewards for the capture of al-Qaeda suspects when they first arrived in Afghanistan.”

The US “enemy combatant”: Yasser Hamdi

One other missing file relates to Yasser Hamdi or Yaser Hamdi (ISN 009), identified as Himdy Yasser in the files, who was one of around 80 survivors of a massacre in the Qala-i-Janghi fort in Mazar-e-Sharif in November 2001. This came about after several hundred prisoners had surrendered, as part of the fall of the city of Kunduz, apparently on the basis that they would be allowed to return home after doing so. However, after being transported to the fort, some of the men started an uprising, because of their betrayal, or because they feared that they were about to be killed, which was then suppressed savagely. Hamdi and the other survivors hid in the basement for a week, where they were bombed and, finally, flooded.

Hamdi was initially regarded as a Saudi, even though he had told a journalist on his emergence from the basement that he was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When it finally dawned on the US authorities that they were holding an American citizen at Guantánamo, Hamdi, who retained his US citizenship, although he had moved to Saudi Arabia as a child, was immediately moved to the US mainland (on April 5, 2002), where he was one of only three US citizens or residents held as “enemy combatants” — along with Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri — and subjected to profound isolation, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation (in other words, torture), until he was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in September 2004 — and stripped of his citizenship — after he won a landmark case in the US Supreme Court (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in which the Court rejected the government’s attempts to detain him indefinitely without trial).

The late arrivals — in 2007 and 2008

Three other missing files relate to three of the last six prisoners brought to Guantánamo, between March 2007 and March 2008, two of whom are, according to the US authorities, regarded as “high-value detainees.”. I am unsure why these files are missing, as files are available for the three other prisoners who arrived at Guantánamo during this period.

The first of these three (and the first of the two missing “high-value detainees”) is Nashwan Abd Al-Razzaq Abd Al-Baqi, more commonly known as Abd Al-Hadi Al-Iraqi (ISN 10026), who is referred to repeatedly in the Detainee Assessment Briefs, and the third to arrive (and the other “high-value detainee”) is Muhammad Rahim (ISN 10029), an Afghan.

This is how they were described in the United Nations’ “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed report issued in February 2010 (PDF, or see here):

On 27 April 2007, the Department of Defense announced that another high-value detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, described as “a high-level member of Al-Qaida”, had been transferred to Guantánamo. On the same day, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, stated that the detainee had been transferred to Defense Department custody that week from the CIA although he “would not say where or when al-Iraqi was captured or by whom”. However, a United States intelligence official stated that al-Iraqi “had been captured late last year in an operation that involved many people in more than one country”. Another high-value detainee, Muhammad Rahim, an Afghan described as a close associate of Osama bin Laden, was transferred to Guantánamo on 14 March 2008. In a press release, the Department of Defense stated that, “prior to his arrival at Guantánamo Bay, he was held in CIA custody”. According to reports in Pakistani newspapers, he was captured in Lahore in August 2007.

The Government of the United States provided no further details about where the above-mentioned men had been held before their transfer to Guantánamo; however, although it is probable that al-Iraqi was held in another country, in a prison to which the CIA had access (it was reported in March 2009 that he “was captured by a foreign security service in 2006” and then handed over to the CIA), the Department of Defense itself made it clear that the CIA had been holding Muhammad Rahim, indicating that some sort of CIA “black site” was still operating.

The second to arrive (who was not regarded as a “high-value detainee”), was Inayatullah (ISN 10028), another Afghan, whose arrival at Guantánamo was announced on September 12, 2007. As I explained in an article at the time:

Captured, according to the DoD’s press release, “as a result of ongoing DoD operations in the struggle against violent extremists in Afghanistan,” the DoD claimed that Inayatullah had “admitted that he was the al-Qaeda Emir of Zahedan, Iran, and planned and directed al-Qaeda terrorist operations,” adding that he “collaborated with numerous al-Qaeda senior leaders, to include Abu Ubaydah al-Masri and Azzam, executing their instructions and personally supporting global terrorist efforts.” (Al-Masri and Azzam were not identified in the DoD’s press release, but the former is an Egyptian-born al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, and the latter is probably the American Adam Gadahn, known as Azzam the American, who has produced al-Qaeda propaganda with Ayman al-Zawahiri).

On May 18, 2011, it was reported that Inayatullah had “died of an apparent suicide,” according to a news release issued by US Southern Command. The news release also stated, “While conducting routine checks, the guards found the detainee unresponsive and not breathing. The guards immediately initiated CPR and also summoned medical personnel to the scene. After extensive lifesaving measures had been exhausted, the detainee was pronounced dead by a physician.”

As it transpired, the death could have been avoided, had the authorities been concerned to act on information that, according to the dead man’s attorney, was readily available to them. Paul Rashkind, a federal defender in Miami, explained that his client, whose real name was Hajji Nassim, “had never been known as Inayatullah anywhere but in Guantánamo, had never had a role in al-Qaeda and ran a cellphone shop in Iran near the Afghan border.” He also explained that he “suffered significant psychosis, a paralyzing psychosis beginning many years ago, long before he got to Gitmo,” and that he had previously attempted to commit suicide twice. Rashkind told the Associated Press that that he was “not permitted to provide details” about either of his client’s two previous suicide attempts, “except to say both were serious,” although he did explicitly state, “He was close to death the first time.”

Note: I wrote about the death of Hajji Nassim (aka Inayatullah) in two articles, The Only Way Out of Guantánamo Is In a Coffin and Guantánamo Suicide Was Severely Mentally Ill, And Was A Case of Mistaken Identity.

The eight others, released between 2003 and 2005

And finally, eight of the missing files seem to refer to generally Insignificant prisoners:

The first, Badshah Wali (ISN 638), an Afghan released in March 2003, is known about because he is the brother of Niaz Wali (ISN 640), also released in March 2003. As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “Two brothers from Khost — 39-year old Niaz Wali, a cobbler, and 24-year old Badshah Wali, a taxi driver — were ‘targeted for arrest by local people, who were their enemies from another Pashtun tribe.’ On their release in March 2003, they were ‘too scared to talk about their experiences.’” The quotes are from an article, “A Tough Homecoming,” published in the Institute for War and Peace Reporting’s “Afghan Recovery Report,” shortly after their release. In the Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks, it was revealed for the first time that Niaz Wali (Neyaz Walijan) was seized during “a routine search” of his home because “local security forces” “discovered a large, thick hard cover book.” When “questioned about the nature of the book,” Niaz Wali “was unaware of its existence.” On the basis of this book, he was taken into US custody, and when his brother, Badshah Wali (Patcha Walijan) “freely vsited” him at his place of detention “to inquire about the book,” he was “told to mind his own business.” “Shortly thereafter,” he too was seized.

Haji Mohammed Wazir (ISN 996), a 60-year old Afghan, was released in March 2004 with 22 other Afghans. A farmer from Helmand province, he spent a year in Guantánamo and was held for two and half years in total. Speaking briefly to reporters on his release, he said, “I’m a poor and innocent man. I was in my home, unaware of Taliban and al-Qaeda, when I was caught. If I’m a Taliban or al-Qaeda I want to be punished. If I’m not, then they should compensate me. The two-and-a-half years that I have spent in pain and soreness — who is going to pay?”

Mirwais Hasan (ISN 998) is an Afghan, apparently born in 1980, who was released in March 2004, but nothing else is known about him.

Reda Fadel El-Waleeli (ISN 663), identified by the US as Fael Roda Al-Waleeli, is an Egyptian, apparently born in 1966. The first Egyptian transferred from Guantánamo to Egypt, he arrived in Cairo on July 1, 2003, and subsequently disappeared. As I explained in an article in April this year:

In October 2009, Martin Scheinin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, complained that, after a visit to Egypt in April 2009, he “regrets that the Government of Egypt did not reply to his questions on the fate of … El-Weleli,” although I was later told that UN representatives finally succeeded in tracking him down, and that he was a broken figure, and very obviously a threat to nobody, who explained that, after his return from Guantánamo, he had been held and tortured in a secret prison in Egypt for three and a half years.

Ayman Mohammad Silman Al-Amrani (ISN 169) is a Jordanian, apparently born in 1978, who was released in November 2003, but nothing else is known about him.

Hammad Ali Amno Gadallah (ISN 705), from Sudan, is the only one of these eight released after September 2004. He was freed in July 2005, and, like all the prisoners released after September 2004, was subjected to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, whose results were released by the Pentagon in 2006. He was one of five prisoners working for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), a Kuwait-based NGO, with branches around the world, who were seized in 2002 after the Pakistani and Afghan branches of RHS were blacklisted by the US government. This is how I described his story in The Guantánamo Files:

32-year old Hamad Gadallah (released in July 2005) told the most complete story of the organization’s activities, and obviously managed to impress upon the Americans that not everyone who worked for the charity was siphoning off money for al-Qaeda. Arrested at his home on 27 May 2002, by two Americans and representatives of Pakistani intelligence and the police, he explained that he had been working for the Central Bank in Sudan, when his brother, who worked for a bank in Bangladesh, told him that the RIHS in Peshawar had a vacancy for an accountant. He took leave from his job to investigate the organization in January 2001, and, after seeing that they were “all good people, with high standards, [who] love their work, and … perform their work faithfully,” and that there were “no problems with the accountancy programme,” he handed in his notice at the bank and began working for the RIHS in March.

Refuting allegations about the organization’s inclusion in a US guide to terrorist organizations, he said, “I say that not every organization or person that is within that guide can be accused of being a terrorist. That requires a lot of evidence and proof … I’m sure that the year that I was working for the RIHS in 2001, it had nothing to do with any terrorist acts.” He added that the organization had an income of around two and a half million dollars in 2001, which came from mosques in Kuwait, and described it as a “huge organization” with one branch in Pakistan. He also explained the significance of his role and, crucially, how there were no underhand financial transactions during his time there:

Q: If your organization were transferring money to another organization, you would be aware of it?
A: That never happened.
Q: But if it had, you would know that?
A: Yes I would. Because I record everything that comes in and everything that goes out.

Sadee Eideov (ISN 665) is a Tajik, apparently born in 1953, who was released in March 2004, but nothing else is known about him.

Shirinov Ghafar Homarovich (ISN 732), also identified as Abdughaffor Shirinov, is one of three Tajiks seized in a raid on an improvised dorm in the library of Karachi University, where he was working, and where he allowed two of his compatriots to stay. Files exist for the other two — Muhibullo Umarov (Moyuballah Homaro) and Mazharuddin — and all three were released in April 2004. This was how I explained their story in The Guantánamo Files (via an article in Mother Jones), and the files for Umarov and Mazharuddin reinforce this explanation of how they were seized by mistake:

In 2006, the journalist McKenzie Funk met Umarov by chance while reporting from Tajikistan, when a farmer in the remote Obihingou valley told him, “There’s a man in the valley who has been to America. Really. He was in a prison. They made a mistake.” After tracking Umarov down to his tiny, mud-walled home, Funk heard how, during the civil war, when he was 14 years old, his father took him and his two younger brothers to Pakistan and installed them in madrassas for the duration of the war.

Six years later, he returned to his home village, diploma in hand, and began helping the family with their harvest of apples, potatoes and walnuts, “but then America bombed Afghanistan and the whole world went crazy.” Sent back to Pakistan to raise money to bring his brothers home, he found odd jobs in the bazaar in Peshawar and on 13 May 2002, in search of a better job, set off for Karachi, where his friend Abdughaffor Shirinov, who was working at the library, had a place for him to stay. Mazharuddin was also staying there, and at night the three men hung their T-shirts on the bookcases and slept on thin carpets on the floor.

Six days after his arrival, in the wake of Pakistan’s first suicide bombing, Pakistani intelligence agents raided the library, using the men’s T-shirts to tie them up and blindfold their eyes, and took them away. Held for ten days by the Pakistanis, Umarov was moved to secret prison — in what appeared to be a luggage factory — that was run by Americans, where he was questioned about al-Qaeda and was locked them up for ten days in a concrete cubicle that was only a metre long and half a metre wide, and was “insufferably hot.” “All my thoughts were about how my life was going to end,” he told the journalist. He was then returned to his friends in the Pakistani jail, and the following day the three men were transported to Kandahar.

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

As published exclusively on WikiLeaks.

In my previous article, The Only Way Out of Guantánamo Is In a Coffin, I wrote about the death at Guantánamo — reportedly as a result of committing suicide — of an Afghan prisoner identified by the US military as Inayatullah, who was the penultimate prisoner to be brought to the prison in Cuba, arriving in September 2007.

Noting that the US military had recycled information from a press release issued when he arrived at Guantánamo, describing him as “an admitted planner for Al-Qaeda terrorist operations,” but dropping a claim that he had “admitted that he was the Al-Qaeda Emir of Zahedan, Iran,” I suggested that he had never, in fact, been appraised adequately since his arrival, as no tribunal had been held to assess him as an “enemy combatant,” and noted, moreover, that his file was one of 14 missing from the classified military assessments of 765 prisoners, which were recently released by WikiLeaks.

In addition, I lamented that it was “unlikely that the evident truth about Obama’s Guantánamo — that the only way out is by dying — will shift public option either at home or abroad,” and also noted that, “whatever Inayatullah’s alleged crimes, it was inappropriate that, because of President Obama’s embrace of his predecessor’s detention policies, he died neither as a convicted criminal serving a prison sentence for activities related to terrorism, nor as a prisoner of war protected by the Geneva Conventions.”

As is now known, however, the unlamented death of a man held in such a disturbingly aberrant manner only scratched the surface of the horrors surrounding his death.

As his attorney, Paul Rashkind, a federal defender in Miami, told the Associated Press on Thursday, he had tried to kill himself twice at Guantánamo, and was severely mentally ill, with what the AP described as “a long-term mental illness that predated his time in custody.” Rashkind said, “This was a young man who suffered significant psychosis, a paralyzing psychosis beginning many years ago, long before he got to Gitmo.”

In an interview with the Miami Herald, Rashkind explained that his client’s psychological problems were “so severe” that he had “arranged to bring a civilian psychiatrist to the base to work with him” — although this had not happened by the time of his death. “I have no doubt it was a suicide,” Rashkind also said, adding, “This is really a sad mental health case … starting from childhood.”

In his discussion with the AP, Rashkind also explained that he was “not permitted to provide details” about either of his client’s two previous suicide attempts, “except to say both were serious,” although he did explicitly state, “He was close to death the first time.” The Miami Herald also noted that “[l]egal sources familiar with the case” had explained that he “had spent long stretches in the psychiatric ward at Guantánamo,” although Rashkind was at pains to point out that the authorities in Guantánamo “treated him pretty humanely, I’d have to say,”

Disturbingly, however, Rashkind also claimed that, as well as failing to recognise that his client’s mental health issues had made suicide a strong possibility, the US authorities had seized the wrong man.

His real name, according to Rashkind, was Hajji Nassim, and as the Miami Herald put it, “he had never been known as Inayatullah anywhere but in Guantánamo, had never had a role in al-Qaeda and ran a cellphone shop in Iran near the Afghan border.” In addition, as the AP described it, he had “finished school up to the fifth grade [and] was married,” and “there was no evidence to support the allegations against him.”

As Rashkind described it, “I will tell you as far as I’m concerned he never did a violent act, he never planned a violent act. He was not a terrorist. His mental health issues made it difficult to address why he was there.”

Adding that he was “still trying to contact family members in Iran and Pakistan to notify them of the death,” Rashkind told the AP that he was not at liberty to discuss the case openly because “some evidence is classified and because of US government secrecy rules.” He did, however, explain that he visited Nassim “every three months, along with a Pashtun translator,” and that he had last spoken to him by phone just two weeks before his death to discuss his ongoing habeas corpus petition.

After telling the AP that he had also planned to visit him again in June, after a hearing in the District Court in Washington D.C. regarding his habeas petition, Rashkind also said, “I can tell you he was fine at that time. In his conversations he seemed like he was doing well and he was looking forward to our visit that was coming up.”

Speaking to the Miami Herald, Rashkind called the case “an outlier” in Guantánamo’s history, “partly because Nassim was brought there so late in the camps’ history and partly because of his mental health issues.” According to Rashkind, he had, literally, fallen between the cracks, and was “never designated for trial, indefinite detention or release.”

His closing words echo what, to me, is the particular sadness and injustice I feel whenever anyone dies in Guantánamo, that cruel aberration created by the Bush administration, whose continued existence — and Obama’s failure to close it — mocks any attempt America might make to present itself to the world as a force for good, and an upholder of justice.

“I don’t think he belonged there at all,” Rashkind said, adding, “To me, this is a human tragedy.”

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

The last living prisoner to be released from Guantánamo was Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian who was repatriated against his will in January. Since then, an Afghan prisoner, Awal Gul, died in February after taking exercise, and on Wednesday the US military announced that another Afghan prisoner, Inayatullah, who was 37 years old, “died of an apparent suicide,” early on the morning of May 18.

A US Southern Command news release explained, “While conducting routine checks, the guards found the detainee unresponsive and not breathing. The guards immediately initiated CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] and also summoned medical personnel to the scene. After extensive lifesaving measures had been exhausted, the detainee was pronounced dead by a physician.”

Later, a Guantánamo spokesperson, Army Lt. Col. Tanya Bradsher, said that Inayatullah was discovered “hanging from his neck by what appear[ed] to be bed linen” in one of the prison’s recreation yards — a scenario that surely raises the question of how, in a prison where the detainees are closely monitored all the time, he was allowed to spend enough time unmonitored in a recreation yard to be able to kill himself.

Unlike the majority of the remaining 171 prisoners at Guantánamo, Inayatullah had not spent nearly ten years of his life in the prison. The penultimate detainee to arrive at Guantánamo, he was flown in from Afghanistan in September 2007, but no information about him had been released after a press release was issued by the Pentagon announcing his arrival.

It is not known if he had ever been subjected to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal — the review process used by President Bush to assess whether prisoners had been correctly designated, on capture, as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely — but it was noticeable that, in the recent release by WikiLeaks of classified military documents relating to the Guantánamo prisoners, Inayatullah’s was one of 14 files that were missing from the documents that were initially handed over to WikiLeaks, suggesting that he had not, in fact, been subjected to any type of process that claimed to legitimize his presence at Guantánamo.

In describing Inayatullah after his death, the US military recycled information from its initial press release announcing his arrival at the prison three years and eight months ago, claiming that he was “an admitted planner for Al-Qaeda terrorist operations, and attested to facilitating the movement of foreign fighters, significantly contributing to transnational terrorism across multiple borders.” It was also claimed that he “met with local operatives, developed travel routes and coordinated documentation, accommodation and vehicles for smuggling Al-Qaeda belligerents through Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq.”

Noticeably, however, what was missing was another claim, also aired in the military’s September 2007 press release, that he had “admitted that he was the Al-Qaeda Emir of Zahedan, Iran,” and that he had been transferred to Guantánamo “[d]ue to the continuing threat [he] represents and his high placement in Al-Qaeda.”

This was perhaps because that hyperbole had been punctured. Of the six prisoners who arrived in Guantánamo between March 2007 and March 2008, just two — whose files were also missing from the documents made available to Wikileaks — are regarded as “high-value detainees.”

These two are Nashwan Abd Al-Razzaq Abd Al-Baqi, more commonly known as Abd Al-Hadi Al-Iraqi, and Muhammad Rahim, an Afghan, and they join the 14 “high-value detainees” sent to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, who include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, as the only “high-value detainees” at Guantánamo — a grand total of 16 out of the remaining 171 prisoners.

It is too late for Inayatullah or Awal Gul to receive anything that resembles justice, as it is for the six other men who have died at Guantánamo in the last five years — the three disputed suicides in June 2006, the fourth alleged suicide in May 2007, the death by cancer of an unacknowledged Afghan hero in December 2007, and the fifth alleged suicide in June 2009.

More depressingly, it is unlikely that the evident truth about Obama’s Guantánamo — that the only way out is by dying — will shift public opinion either at home or abroad. Although the President is not entirely to blame for his failure to close the prison, as he has been confronted by unprincipled Republican opposition on a colossal scale, and also by cowardice in his own party, it ought to be unacceptable that his early promise has turned to such paralysis.

My hope is that there will eventually be a mobilisation of high-level international criticism about Guantánamo, as there was under President Bush, with international bodies and world leaders realizing that Guantánamo has become, once more, a place of indefinite arbitrary detention, and moreover, one that will remain open forever without concerted effort to close it.

Until that time, decent people must be wondering who, at Guantánamo, will be next to die, and reflecting that, whatever Inayatullah’s alleged crimes, it was inappropriate that, because of President Obama’s embrace of his predecessor’s detention policies, he died neither as a convicted criminal serving a prison sentence for activities related to terrorism, nor as a prisoner of war protected by the Geneva Conventions.

The Obama administration cunningly dropped the use of the term “enemy combatant” in its legal dealings regarding the prisoners, but that is essentially what they remain, and if Inayatullah’s death were to be marked by words, he could, in all fairness, be described as follows:

Inayatullah — enemy combatant: held and died without charge or trial, to America’s undying shame.

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

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

Rosenberg reported that the two men “were processed by the Somaliland government and then released to rejoin their families in Hargeisa,” the capital of “the breakaway region in northern Somalia that has its own autonomous government.” She added, “The United States does not recognize the government in Somaliland and there were no official statements on how Arale and Barre arrived there. A local newspaper, the Somaliland Press, said they arrived aboard a jet provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross, suggesting that the United States had released the men to the Red Cross in a third country.”

As President Obama attempts to close Guantánamo, with the administration recently announcing its intention of purchasing a prison in Illinois to hold some of the prisoners, the release of these two men — as with the overwhelming majority of releases from Guantánamo — yet again demonstrates how hysterical and unsubstantiated are Republican claims that Guantánamo is full of hardcore terrorists, as their stories demonstrate:

Seized in Pakistan: Mohammed Sulaymon Barre

Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, who was 37 years old at the time of his capture, was one of the first men to be seized in the “War on Terror.” As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, he had been living in Pakistan as a UN-approved refugee since fleeing his homeland during its ruinous civil war in the early 1990s, and was seized at his home in Karachi on November 1, 2001 “by police and intelligence agents who had made two previous visits to check his papers, and who seem, therefore, to have seized him on this third occasion because they were looking for easy targets to hand over to the Americans.”

As I also explained in The Guantánamo Files:

Barre worked from his home as the Karachi agent for the Dahabshiil Company, a Somali organization with branches around the world, which provides essential money transfer operations for the Somali diaspora. According to the Americans, Dahabshiil was “closely related to al-Barakat, a Somali financial company designated as a terrorism finance facilitator,” [which had been added to a US terrorism watch list and had its assets frozen]. Barre said that he knew nothing about this allegation, pointing out that his job only involved making small transactions on behalf of Somalis living in Pakistan.

In fact, as was noted in a report in 2004 [for a UN conference on Trade and Development], the enforced US-led closure of money transfer operations with suspected links to terrorism was “disastrous for Somalia, a country with no recognized government and without a functioning state apparatus. After the international community largely washed its hands of the country following the disastrous peacekeeping foray in 1994, remittances became the inhabitants’ lifeline. With no recognized private banking system, the remittance trade was dominated by a single firm (al-Barakat).” Crucially, the report added that, although the US authorities closed down al-Barakat in 2001, labeling it “the quartermasters of terror,” only four criminal prosecutions had been filed by 2003, “and none involved charges of aiding terrorists.”

Nevertheless, the authorities at Guantánamo — operating in a bubble of terror-related allegations that largely bore no relation to the realities of the outside world — had no time for Barre’s protestations of innocence. “I am convinced that your branch of the Dahabshiil company was used to transfer money for terrorism,” the presiding officer of his tribunal at Guantánamo told Barre in 2005. “What I am trying to find out is if you think maybe there were some people that were using your company and using your branch to transfer money, or whether you were just totally not paying attention.”

A year later, as the BBC reported in August 2006, al-Barakat had been removed from the US watchlist of terrorist organizations. The report explained that al-Barakat had been included on the watchlist because US intelligence analysts thought it had been used to finance the 9/11 hijackers, but the 9/11 Commission had investigated the claim and had found it baseless. In February 2009, in a report for the Washington Post, Peter Finn noted that, in the allegations against Barre at Guantánamo, Dahabshiil’s alleged ties to al-Barakat had been dropped by 2006, although even then the taint of the allegation was not entirely removed.

In a letter to the Post, an attorney for Dahabshiil was obliged to point out that the firm has “never been the subject of any investigation in relation to alleged terrorist funding” and that it “has no involvement whatsoever with money laundering or the funding or of terrorist organizations and … places the highest importance on money laundering compliance.” As the Post noted ruefully, “Dahabshiil should have been given an opportunity to comment for the article.”

Shorn of this central allegation, it is no wonder that, as Barre’s lawyers explained in a court filing in connection with his habeas corpus petition, the allegations against him have “varied dramatically.” In 2006, for example, presumably through a false allegation coerced from some other prisoner, the authorities claimed that he was not in Pakistan in 1994 and 1995 — despite the existence of UN papers documenting his meetings in Pakistan in those years — but was actually working in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Khartoum, Sudan, an allegation so worthless that his lawyers described it as “implausible and unsubstantiated.”

According to Emi MacLean of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Barre, most of his problems at Guantánamo stemmed from his opposition to the regime at prison, and his involvement in several hunger strikes. “If you were detained for seven years without charge and any fair process, you might be engaged in activities that would be considered disciplinary violations that are really protests for your detention,” she said.

The truth, as Barre himself noted at his tribunal in 2005, was that “A lot of interrogators said to me that … a lot of mistakes were made and they must be corrected. They told me many times that I am here by mistake.” Sadly, this was not enough to prevent him from suffering in Guantánamo, and also in US custody in Bagram before his transfer to Guantánamo in 2002, when, as he explained in his tribunal:

They interrogated me and one of the interrogators told me I was from al-Wafa [a Saudi charity that was also regarded with suspicion by the US authorities] and I needed to confess to that. You have no choice. I told them it wasn’t true. They pressured me. They whispered something then spoke to the guard. The guard came in, grabbed me by my neck and threw me. He took me in a bad way to isolation. All my blankets, except one, were taken from me. It was freezing cold. They didn’t feed me lunch and sometimes they didn’t feed me twice. At night it is very cold and if you don’t eat dinner it gets colder. This torture lasted fifteen to twenty days. My feet and hands were swollen. I wasn’t able to stand because I was in so much pain. I asked for treatment and an interrogator brought a nurse and asked if I wanted treatment. They told me they could cut my legs to stop the pain. They did this so I would confess to the accusations that I didn’t do. Nothing happened. After the torture ended, I met another interrogator who told me injustice was done to me and I didn’t have anything to do with this. He said he would do a report so I could go home. He told me I would be released. Suddenly, I was taken back to Kandahar and then to Cuba.

Seized in Djibouti: Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad

Unlike Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad was one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, one of just six men flown to the prison after the arrival of 14 “high-value detainees” in September 2006. Identified by the Pentagon as Abdullahi Sudi Arale, he arrived with little fanfare in June 2007, and, as I explained in an article in September 2007:

Possibly … his arrival was little trumpeted because it involved the deliberately under-reported “War on al-Qaeda” in the Horn of Africa, and because the administration had very little information to offer about him. In almost questioning terms, Arale was described as a “suspected” member of “the al-Qaeda terrorist network in East Africa,” who served as “a courier between East Africa al-Qaeda (EAAQ) and al-Qaeda in Pakistan.”

In a press release, the DoD added that, after returning to Somalia from Pakistan in September 2006, he “held a leadership role in the EAAQ-affiliated Somali Council of Islamic Courts (CIC),” and noted, with distressing vagueness, that there was “significant information available” to indicate that Arale had been “assisting various EAAQ-affiliated extremists in acquiring weapons and explosives,” that he had “facilitated terrorist travel by providing false documents for AQ and EAAQ-affiliates and foreign fighters traveling into Somalia,” and that he had “played a significant role in the re-emergence of the CIC in Mogadishu.” Unmentioned, of course, was the subtext of the situation in Somalia: the role of the CIC in returning some semblance of order to one of the world’s least-governed countries, and the US government’s use of Ethiopia as a proxy army in yet another secret, dirty war.

It took some time for the truth about the Pentagon’s “distressing vagueness” to be explained, in part because the US authorities released no further information about him, and, in two and a half years, do not appear to have conducted a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, to ascertain whether he was correctly designated as an “enemy combatant.” However, when Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent dozens of Guantánamo prisoners, became involved, another narrative emerged, in which Muhammad not only had no connection to al-Qaeda, but was, in fact, “an English teacher and centrist political activist.”

Born in Mogadishu in 1970, Muhammad had remained in the capital throughout the civil war of the 1990s until the security situation deteriorated to such an extent that he moved north to Somaliland, establishing the first English school in the new country, and working as a journalist. In 1998, he traveled to Pakistan, where he studied English Literature at the International Islamic University, and became, as Reprieve described it, “a respected leader of the Somali community in the country.”

When his father died, he moved back to Mogadishu, “where the rule of the Union of Islamic Courts had brought relative stability to the war-torn capital,” but at the end of 2006, when, backed by the US, the Ethiopian Army invaded, he moved north one more. Opposed to the Ethiopian invasion, he was asked, “as a respected member of the community … to attend a conference in Eritrea aimed at organizing a political campaign” to ensure that the Ethiopians left.

It was while he was on his way to this conference that he was seized by local police in Djibouti, “apparently at the behest of the Americans.” Handed over to the US military, he was taken to Camp Lemonier, the US military base that played a key role in American interference in the Horn of Africa, where other prisoners have been held, possibly including an unknown number of “ghost prisoners.” There, as Reprieve explained, “he was held in a shipping container and interrogated by Americans.”

Compared to Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, Ismael Mahmoud Muhammad was fortunate that his wrongful imprisonment lasted for only two and a half years, but as the eighth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo approaches, the release of these two men — neither of whom was cleared until the Obama administration’s inter-agency Task Force began its deliberations this year — demonstrates, yet again, that, when it comes to undoing the shameful legacy of Guantánamo, much work still remains to be done.

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

As published on the Huffington Post. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Common Dreams and Axis of Logic.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 30 prisoners released from February to early December 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody, December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah).

Remember ten months ago, when the Democrats, following success in the mid-term elections, briefly held out the promise that they had teeth, and Donald Rumsfeld, the former strong man who had, in his latter days, become a laughing stock, resigned his post as defense secretary? There were, at that time, high hopes that his successor, former CIA director Robert Gates, would take a less bullish approach to Guantánamo than that of his political masters, the lonely Bush and the dominant Cheney cabal. Those with a particular surfeit of optimism even dared to think that, having tackled the tip of the iceberg, the country might then be ready to probe the dark and largely unexplored mass beneath: the network of secret and semi-secret prisons run or maintained by the CIA, or otherwise connected to the agency, which had begun to attract ferocious opposition, not just from human rights groups, but also from major international bodies including the United Nations and the Council of Europe.

Soon after taking office, Gates declared that he wished to close Guantánamo and conduct trials on the US mainland, explaining that, “because of things that happened earlier at Guantánamo, there is a taint about it,” and adding that he felt that “no matter how transparent, no matter how open the trials, if they took place in Guantánamo, in the international community they would lack credibility.” Despite support from Condoleezza Rice, however, who had inherited the State Department’s profound opposition to Guantánamo from the intel-cuckolded Colin Powell, the malignant swamp of Cheneydom was not to be drained. In no uncertain terms, the Vice President and his little puppet boy, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, shut down all discussion of Gates’ plan, and pretended, as ever, that it was business as usual.

As the months wore on, Gates’ pragmatic opposition to Guantánamo was slowly but surely undermined, as five new “terror suspects” arrived at Guantánamo –- mostly announced without fanfare, each separated by a sufficient space of time to avoid undue attention, and generally hidden behind the coat tails of other, more distracting events.

Mohammed Abdul Malik

The first to arrive was Mohammed Abdul Malik, an apparently “dangerous terror suspect,” who, according to the DoD, had “admitted to participation in the 2002 Paradise Hotel attack in Mombasa, Kenya, in which an explosive-filled SUV was crashed into the hotel lobby, killing 13 and injuring 80,” and had also “admitted to involvement in the attempted shootdown of an Israeli Boeing 757 civilian airliner carrying 271 passengers, near Mombasa.” Malik was flown in from Kenya two weeks after 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s spectacular “confession” was still fresh, and at almost exactly the same time that Guantanamo’s remaining Australian, David Hicks, was prevailed upon to accept a plea bargain before his trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo. This should have been a humiliation for the administration, as a man it had long touted as one of the “worst of the worst” (of the worst) –- one of just a handful of detainees considered eligible for the administration’s new wave of “war crimes” trials –- was sent home with a smacked wrist to serve just nine months in prison in Australia after confessing that he had “provided material support for terrorism.”

Remarkably, however, the administration rode through the criticism –- primarily, that the Military Commissions were a total farce, and that Hicks was so desperate to go home that he agreed to drop all his legitimate and well-documented claims that he was abused by the US military in Afghanistan, on US warships and in Guantánamo –- and emerged relatively unscathed, having managed, additionally, to smuggle a relative nobody into Guantánamo from Kenya without having to reveal anything of the new front in the “War on Terror” that it had embarked upon in the Horn of Africa. However malign, this was quite an achievement. Almost unnoticed, the waning world of “disappearances” and secret prisons was revived with a vengeance in Africa, conducted, this time, by FBI agents instead of the tarnished operatives of the CIA, but with the innovative addition of kidnapping dozens of women and children as well as their allegedly militant menfolk.

Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi
A month later, the administration followed this up with a more audacious delivery: that of Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, a suspect who was sold more aggressively to the public, as he ticked a lot of boxes that the administration wished to have connected in voters’ minds. An Iraqi, and a member of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, al-Iraqi was described in a DoD press release as “a high-level member of al-Qaeda” and “one of al-Qaeda’s highest-ranking and experienced senior operatives.” The DoD added that, at the time of his detention, he was “associated with leaders of extremist groups allied with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the Taliban,” and that he had “worked directly with the Taliban to determine responsibility and lines of communication between Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, specifically with regard to the targeting of US Forces.”

In a separate “high-value” detainee profile –- similar to those issued after 14 other “high-value” detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 –- further details were provided about al-Iraqi’s activities and connections, including claims that he was “known and trusted by [Osama] bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri,” and “at one point was al-Zawahiri’s caretaker,” that he worked “for a long time” as an instructor in an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and that he was a member of al-Qaeda’s ruling Shura Council and its Military Committee.

Speaking after the announcement of his transfer was made, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman added a few additional morsels of information, explaining that he had been transferred to DoD custody from the custody of the CIA, although he “would not say where or when al-Iraqi was captured or by whom.” Expanding on the CIA custody angle, USA Today reported that a US intelligence official, “speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter,” explained that al-Iraqi had actually been captured “late last year in an operation that involved many people in more than one country.” This admission confirmed, therefore, that al-Iraqi had been secretly held in US custody for at least four months before his transfer to Guantánamo, and also suggested that the time of his transfer was chosen for its political impact.

Abdullahi Sudi Arale

The third arrival was delivered in early June. Abdullahi Sudi Arale, a Somalian, received little fanfare, perhaps because the spotlight on terror had been dimmed following the death, the week before, of a fourth detainee at Guantánamo, a Saudi –- and long-term hunger striker –- named Abdul Rahman al-Amri. Possibly, however, his arrival was little trumpeted because it involved the deliberately under-reported “War on al-Qaeda” in the Horn of Africa, and because the administration had very little information to offer about him. In almost questioning terms, Arale was described as a “suspected” member of “the al-Qaeda terrorist network in East Africa,” who served as “a courier between East Africa al-Qaeda (EAAQ) and al-Qaeda in Pakistan.”

In a press release, the DoD added that, after returning to Somalia from Pakistan in September 2006, he “held a leadership role in the EAAQ-affiliated Somali Council of Islamic Courts (CIC),” and noted, with distressing vagueness, that there was “significant information available” to indicate that Arale had been “assisting various EAAQ-affiliated extremists in acquiring weapons and explosives,” that he had “facilitated terrorist travel by providing false documents for AQ and EAAQ-affiliates and foreign fighters traveling into Somalia,” and that he had “played a significant role in the re-emergence of the CIC in Mogadishu.” Unmentioned, of course, was the subtext of the situation in Somalia: the role of the CIC in returning some semblance of order to one of the world’s least-governed countries, and the US government’s use of Ethiopia as a proxy army in yet another secret, dirty war.

Haroon al-Afghani

The fourth new Guantánamo detainee arrived a fortnight later. Buoyed up, perhaps, by midsummer weather, and secure that parts of the media were not paying too much attention to who was arriving in Guantánamo, and were, instead, agitating about the plight of US “enemy combatant” Ali al-Marri and the departure from Guantánamo of two cleared detainees who were sent to Tunisia where they faced the risk of torture, the DoD touted Haroon al-Afghani as a “dangerous terror suspect,” who was “known to be associated with high-level militants in Afghanistan,” and had apparently “admitted to serving as a courier for al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL).” The Pentagon also reported that there was “significant information available” that he was a senior commander of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), an anti-US militia led by renegade Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Despite never having disguised his loathing of the United States, Hekmatyar was, ironically, one of the major recipients of billions of dollars of American money to fight the Soviet Union in the 1980s, which was channeled to him through his supporters in Pakistan’s intelligence services, the ISI. According to the DoD, al-Afghani “commanded multiple HIG terrorist cells that conducted improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Nangarhar Province” (centered on Jalalabad) and was ”assessed to have had regular contact with senior AQ [al-Qaeda] and HIG leadership.”

Like Abdullahi Sudi Arale, Haroon al-Afghani arrived with less aplomb than al-Iraqi, presumably because, despite the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the administration had so mercilessly pumped in the latter’s case, some churlish commentators had refused to ignore the implied existence of secret prisons that were not supposed to exist anymore, and had attempted to rake up issues that the administration considered dead and buried –- or at least locked up far away in grave-like tombs in unnamed foreign countries. The misunderstanding was based on an announcement by the President, in September 2006 –- after KSM and the 13 other “high-value” suspects arrived at Guantánamo –- that the secret prison program, which had not entirely escaped the notice of the Supreme Court in June, had now been closed down. Speaking to the world from the White House, the President claimed, “The current transfers mean that there are now no terrorists in the CIA [secret prison] program.” This appeared to be a clear-cut confession that the program had been closed down, but it was followed by a warning that, “as more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical –- and having a CIA program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information.” Just seven months after Bush’s speech, the case of Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi revealed, uncomfortably, that, at best, the CIA’s secret prisons had only remained empty for a couple of months.

Inayatullah

And finally –- for now, at least –- last Wednesday another new boy, an Afghan identified only as Inayatullah, flew into Guantánamo from Afghanistan. Captured, according to the DoD’s press release, “as a result of ongoing DoD operations in the struggle against violent extremists in Afghanistan,” the DoD claimed that Inayatullah had “admitted that he was the al-Qaeda Emir of Zahedan, Iran, and planned and directed al-Qaeda terrorist operations,” adding that he “collaborated with numerous al-Qaeda senior leaders, to include Abu Ubaydah al-Masri and Azzam, executing their instructions and personally supporting global terrorist efforts.” (Al-Masri and Azzam were not identified in the DoD’s press release, but the former is an Egyptian-born al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, and the latter is probably the American Adam Gadahn, known as Azzam the American, who has produced al-Qaeda propaganda with Ayman al-Zawahiri).

In further unwieldy prose, the DoD noted, “Inayatullah attests to facilitating the movement of foreign fighters, significantly contributing to trans-national terrorism across multiple borders,” claiming that he “met with local operatives, developed travel routes and coordinated documentation, accommodation and vehicles for smuggling unlawful combatants throughout countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq.” Like the other new arrivals, he will –- at some unspecified time in the future –- be subjected to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, which will find that he has been correctly designated as an “enemy combatant,” and the administration will then, presumably, push all five men forward for trial by Military Commission.

While these new deliveries have done little for the reputation of Robert Gates, confirming that the White House has as much disdain for the new-look DoD as it does for the State Department, the arrival of these men at Guantánamo also demonstrates that, although the administration is willing to clear out some of the dead wood at Guantánamo, by sending home the husks of innocent men and Taliban foot soldiers who have been ruthlessly exploited for “intelligence” for over five years, it is still committed to pressing ahead with the Military Commissions at Guantánamo –- a bargain basement judicial system, which, by imperial command, seem to have been especially designated “For Muslims Only.” Side-stepped by David Hicks in March, the Commissions remain as toxic and unreliable to those concerned with the rule of law as the tribunals at Guantánamo, designed to conceal all evidence of torture on the part of the US authorities, to conceal secret evidence from the defense lawyers, and to secure pre-ordained verdicts of guilt.

The Military Commissions

To recap briefly, the entire Military Commission process began in November 2001, when, with the utmost stealth, and with no oversight whatsoever, Dick Cheney arranged for the President to grant himself the power to detain anyone at will, and to try them in kangaroo courts of his own devising. After starting, and stalling, several times in the intervening years, the Commissions were ignominiously extinguished by the Supreme Court in June 2006, which ruled decisively that they were illegal under US law and the Geneva Conventions. Following this decision, the administration responded to a sliver of hope offered by one of the Supreme Court judges –- Justice Stephen Breyer, who pointed out that “Nothing prevents the President from returning to Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary” –- by doing just that, drafting new legislation, which was almost exactly the same as the old legislation, on the back of a cigarette packet, and pushing the Military Commissions Act through a comatose Congress last fall.

Resuscitated, zombie-like, through this complete failure on the part of Congress to challenge the White House’s lust for unbridled power, the Commissions spluttered unchallenged through the Hicks farrago, but failed to blaze back to triumphant life in June, when child soldier Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan, one of Osama bin Laden’s chauffeurs, were wheeled out to face the “war crimes” charges evaded by Hicks. The new style Military Commissions were regarded by those still in touch with the rule of law –- primarily the detainees’ own government-appointed military lawyers –- as being as ad hoc and monstrously illegal as the system thrown out by the Supreme Court, and the lawyers were looking forward to a fight, relishing the opportunity to challenge the spurious basis of the “war crimes” charges, and as determined as ever to do whatever they could to prevent the administration from succeeding in its malign attempts to destroy a centuries-old judicial system that was just and efficient, and to replace it with a system of show trials that would have done Stalin proud.

Astonishingly, the revived system collapsed on its first day, when, in independent decisions, both of the government-appointed military judges, Army Colonel Peter Brownback and Navy Captain Keith Allred, shut down the proceedings, pointing out, with a lawyer’s eye for detail, that the MCA mandated them to try “illegal enemy combatants,” whereas the two men before them –- and everyone else in Guantánamo, for that matter –- had only been determined to be “enemy combatants” in the tribunals that had made them eligible for trial in the first place. Blustering impotently about semantics (and ignoring its own semantic crimes over the preceding five years), the administration responded by wailing that it would appeal the decision in the appeals court for the Military Commissions, and was mocked when it transpired that that the court in question –- like so much of the architecture of the Commissions themselves –- had not yet been established.

This oversight was finally remedied two weeks ago, and the court is due to make a decision in the coming weeks, but the military lawyers representing Khadr and Hamdan have refused to be cowed, and one of them, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, explicitly told journalists after the hearing, “This is a lawless process,” and stressed that the hoped-for demolition of the rigged system was “about the credibility of the United States and the perception around the world of our commitment to the rule of law.”

While the future of the entire system of Military Commissions hangs in the balance –- and with schools of lawyers already circling the Supreme Court in the hope that the wavering justices will soon deliver a crushing verdict on the illegality of the whole Guantánamo operation –- this does not seem, under any circumstances, to be the right time to brag, as the administration did last week, that it was building a vast tent city, on an unused runway at Guantánamo, to hold “war crimes” trials beginning in March 2008, with as many as six trials taking place simultaneously, and to follow this up by flying yet another detainee into Guantánamo. But this is, perhaps, no longer the real world, and is, instead, just the latest and most outrageous manifestation of the blinkered, belligerent, bellicose Bush-and-Cheney World, an ever-shrinking war bunker in which the will alone matters, and it has been entirely forgotten that one man’s will power may be another man’s manifestation of psychotic delusions.

Note: Al-Hadi’s name is also transliterated as Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, and the DoD revealed that his real name is Nashwan Abd al-Razzaq Abd al-Baqi.

POSTSCRIPT: A sixth prisoner, Muhammad Rahim, was transferred into Guantánamo in March 2008. Apparently regarded as a “high-value detainee,” along with Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi (and unlike the other four new arrivals, whose transfer to Guantánamo was therefore inexplicable), he was described as being “in his 40s” and “a native of Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan,” according to the New York Times, which also reported that he had “fought battles for two decades,” and was described by government officials as an al-Qaeda planner and facilitator “who at times in recent years had been a translator for Osama bin Laden.” Apparently captured in Lahore in August 2007, he, like al-Iraqi, was held in secret CIA custody before his transfer to Guantánamo, even though President Bush had declared in September 2006, when 14 “high-value detainees” arrived in Guantánamo, that the CIA’s secret prisons were now empty. In a message to CIA employees, Gen. Michael Hayden, the CIA’s director, described Rahim as a “tough, seasoned jihadist” with “high-level contacts” who, in 2001, had “helped prepare the Afghan cave complex of Tora Bora as a hideout for Qaeda fighters fleeing the American-led offensive.”

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

As published on Antiwar.com.

Guantánamo’s 777th detainee is Haroon al-Afghani, who, according to the DoD, was “captured as a result of our ongoing efforts in the Global War on Terror.” The DoD also declared that he was “known to be associated with high-level militants in Afghanistan, and has admitted to serving as a courier for al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL),” and reported that there was “significant information available” that he was a senior commander of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), an anti-US militia led by renegade Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who, ironically, was one of the major recipients of billions of dollars of American money in the 1980s, which was channeled to him through his supporters in Pakistan’s intelligence services, the ISI. According to the DoD, al-Afghani “commanded multiple HIG terrorist cells that conducted improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Nangahar Province” (centered on Jalalabad) and “is assessed to have had regular contact with senior AQ [al-Qaeda] and HIG leadership.”

No details of al-Afghani’s capture were provided –- either the date or the location –- probably to prevent the kind of furore that arose after senior al-Qaeda operative Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi was transferred to Guantánamo in April, when the administration let slip that he had been held for several months by the CIA –- in one of the secret prisons that the President declared empty on 6 September 2006 –- but from the DoD’s comment that he “admitted serving as a courier for al-Qaeda,” it’s clear that wasn’t picked up yesterday, and probable that he was held for some time in one of the many US-run prisons in Afghanistan.

Expect months to go by before we learn any more, when he will go through a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), which will confirm that he was an “enemy combatant” –- as designated by the President when he was captured –- so that he can progress to trial by Military Commission, if –- and it’s a big if –- the administration can actually breathe life into their Frankenstein-like substitution for a real court of law.

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

After Hicks’ Houdini-like escape from Guantánamo –- which not only freed him from the administration’s offshore gulag, but also conveniently prevented him from pointing out that he was tortured in Afghanistan and Guantánamo –- defense lawyers were anticipating a protracted struggle over the fate of the next two prisoners to face the Commissions: Omar Khadr, a Canadian accused of killing a US soldier in Afghanistan, who was only 15 years old at the time of his capture in July 2002, and Salim Hamdan, a 37-year old from the Sudan, who was one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers in Afghanistan.

Countless articles have been written about Khadr, but a good place to start is The Good Son, published in Canada’s National Post in December 2002. Although his father was a militant (and a friend of bin Laden), it’s worth pointing out, I think, that only the US administration would choose, in the full glare of the world’s media, to brazenly pursue a legally dubious ‘war crimes’ charge against someone who was only a child when the alleged incident took place.

In Hamdan’s case, the main source of information is his military lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, of the US navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corp (JAG), who has been opposed to the Military Commissions almost from the moment that he was assigned the case in 2003. In a letter to Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair in January 2007 (for an excellent article, Taking on Guantanamo, that was published in March), he wrote, ‘The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively — what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law. Why build a prison here when there are plenty of prisons in Nebraska? Why is it, when we see photos of Abu Ghraib, we think that it is “exporting Guantánamo”? That it is the “Guantánamo method”?’

Working with Neil Katyal, a civilian lawyer, Swift’s arguments helped to persuade the Supreme Court, in June 2006, that the Military Commissions were illegal under US law and the Geneva Conventions. His victory was short-lived, however. Within four months, President Bush convinced a supine Congress to reinstate them in the vile Military Commissions Act, but Swift, who, as a result of his actions, had already been passed over for promotion, remained implacably opposed to them, telling a meeting of law students in April 2007 that the government’s insistence that Military Commissions which accepted coerced testimony ‘were “full and fair trials” reminded him of an old Western in which a character is told, “You’re going to have a fair trial, and then we’re going to hang you.” “They weren’t doing what military commissions historically were set up to do,” he said. “Rather than bring law to a lawless place, it was to create a lawless place”.’

With this build-up to the Military Commissions of Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan, no one foresaw that, of all people, the military judges appointed by President Bush to preside over the Commissions would, in separate decisions, throw out both cases on a technicality. Yet this is what happened. Both Navy Captain Keith Allred, presiding over Hamdan’s case, and Army Colonel Peter Brownback, in Khadr’s case, dismantled, in the space of a few short hours, what the administration had spent five and half years trying to construct.

The technicality that derailed the Commissions centered on a legal distinction overlooked by the lawyers who cobbled together the Military Commissions Act during the summer of 2006. For the Commissions to proceed, those brought before them had to have been designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ (a post-9/11 term that seems to be recognized only by the White House and the Pentagon) in a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT). These tribunals, set up to review the prisoners’ status as ‘enemy combatants’ in response to the Supreme Court decision in June 2004 that they had a right to challenge their detention, were memorably described on 5 June, in a New York Times editorial, Gitmo: A National Disgrace, as ‘kangaroo courts that give the inmates no chance to defend themselves, allow evidence that was obtained through torture and can be repeated until one produces the answer the Pentagon wants’.

What both Brownback and Ellred pointed out, however, was that Khadr and Hamdan had not been designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ in their CSRT, and had, instead, been judged as ‘enemy combatants’ only, without the crucial designation ‘unlawful’. Far from being a minor quibble, the distinction is of enormous importance, as Allred pointed out, ruling that Hamdan had never received ‘an individuated determination’ that he was an unlawful combatant, as required by the Geneva Conventions, and that without this determination he and other detainees were entitled to be treated as prisoners of war (in other words, as ‘lawful enemy combatants’). Moreover, as both judges clearly realized, none of the 383 other prisoners at Guantánamo had been designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ either.

One can only imagine the responses of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney when they heard the news about the Military Commissions. As approved in October 2006, the Commissions were intended, once and for all, to provide the means whereby high-profile prisoners like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abu Zubaydah could be tried and convicted without the interference of uncooperative lawyers and without the possibility that torture could ever be mentioned (just as Charles Swift and others had realized in 2003). Attempting to gloss over the collapse of the Commissions, a Pentagon spokesman declared it a mere question of semantics (which, as explained above, it was not) and threatened to appeal, but it took virtually no time, as a Washington Post editorial, Stuck in Guantánamo, explained on 7 June, for commentators to realize that ‘the appeals court that is to hear military commission cases hasn’t yet been established’.

With the administration apparently on the ropes, the media revolt against its policies grew noticeably larger. In addition to the coruscating New York Times editorial and criticism in the Washington Post, dozens of smaller papers in the US ran ‘Close Guantánamo’ editorials, and even the Financial Times weighed in with a pointedly unambiguous editorial, Time to abandon the absurd charade at Guantánamo Bay. On 10 June, former Secretary of State Colin Powell joined in, telling NBC’s Meet the Press, ‘Guantánamo has become a major, major problem [in] the way the world perceives America. And if it was up to me, I would close Guantánamo, not tomorrow but this afternoon. I’d close it. And I would not let any of those people go. I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system … essentially, we have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantánamo open and creating things like the military commission. We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far damage than any good we get for it’.

In Slate, meanwhile, in an article entitled Line in the Sand, Dahlia Lithwick speculated about the judges’ reasons for dismissing the cases. Noting that they could have ‘simply deferred to President Bush’s 2002 determination that all associates and agents of al-Qaeda are automatically “unlawful” enemy combatants’, she wondered whether, like ‘many highly conservative legal and career military professionals once willing to follow this president wherever he led them’, they had ‘simply become disillusioned with a process that is so clearly ends-driven as to have been described as “rigged” by one of the three prosecutors who eventually quit, rather than proceed with the trials’.

Lithwick also pointed out that the judges may have wished to make a point about being presented with ‘small fry’ rather than the high-profile prisoners held at Guantánamo –- including KSM, bin al-Shibh and Zubaydah. If the judges were more in sympathy with the State Department than with Bush and Cheney, they would no doubt have read Legal Policy in a Twilight War, a lecture delivered in April 2007 by Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and a former advisor to the State Department, who described a ‘new paradigm’ in the State Department’s approach to the ‘War on Terror’, which called for the closing of Guantánamo, and, crucially, as Marty Lederman described it in an article for Balkinization, ‘to reserve military commission trials for the big fish directly involved in terrorist activities, against whom such trials have historically been used –- “for major war criminals and al-Qaeda’s leaders, not Osama’s driver.”’

Lithwick added, ‘And who did Brownbeck and Allred see in their courtrooms [on 4 June]? Osama’s driver. And a Canadian kid who allegedly threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier. What must it feel like to be handpicked to pass judgment over the “worst of the worst” and instead find yourself confronted with the worst of the tweens? If these military commissions are intended to be taken seriously, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be facing one’.

Whether the State Department’s ‘new paradigm’ can actually influence the policies of Bush and Cheney remains to be seen. Noticeably, Robert Gates, the new defense secretary, was overruled by Cheney when he called for the closure of Guantánamo shortly after taking office. As is always the case with this administration, it’s far too early to applaud a return to decent human values and the triumph of due process. Deprived of a trial –- however ‘rigged’ –- Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan will, like the other 383 prisoners in Guantánamo, simply be returned to their cells to be held indefinitely without charge or trial. This, remember, is an administration that has bragged of its willingness to hold prisoners indefinitely, ‘even if they are found not guilty by a military tribunal’.

And in the meantime, as if to demonstrate that the President and the Vice President will not be swayed from the remorseless pursuit of their lawless global vendetta, on 7 June, just three days after the debacle of the Commissions, another prospective victim of the show trials –- a Somalian identified by defense officials as Abdullahi Sudi Arale –- arrived at Guantánamo from the Horn of Africa. Accused of being a courier between al-Qaeda operatives in East Africa and Pakistan, who ‘assisted extremists in acquiring weapons and explosives’, as well as facilitating travel by providing false documents for al-Qaeda operatives and foreign fighters, Arale is the third prisoner to arrive at Guantánamo in the last ten weeks, following Mohammed Abdul Malik, a Kenyan, and Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, a long sought-after al-Qaeda operative, who had apparently been held for several months in one of the secret prisons run by the CIA that no longer exist, according to a speech made by President Bush on 6 September 2006, shortly after the 14 ‘high-value’ prisoners –- including KSM, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abu Zubaydah –- were transferred to Guantánamo from CIA custody.

With the administration once more demonstrating its undiluted commitment to unfettered executive power, the brightest light in the last week’s events may not be the collapse of the Military Commissions per se, but what comes out of it: a renewed vigor to topple the architects of this ‘rogue system’ (as the New York Times described it), and unflinching support for the legislation, proposed by the Republican Arlen Specter and the Democrat Patrick Leahy and passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 8 June, to restore the right of habeas corpus to the Guantánamo prisoners (which was stripped by the Military Commissions Act), allowing them once more to appeal their detention in the US federal courts.

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

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

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