Published in August, Poems From Guantánamo contains 22 poems, by 17 Guantánamo detainees –- many of whom are still held without charge or trial after five and half years –- which were cleared for publication only after passing through a strict censorship process established by the Pentagon. In telephone interviews conducted on 7 and 10 September 2007, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, spoke to the book’s editor, Marc Falkoff, a law professor who also represents a number of Yemeni detainees in Guantánamo.

Andy Worthington: Hello, Marc. I’d like to begin by congratulating you and the University of Iowa Press for producing such a beautiful volume. It’s really a cut above most books in terms of its production values.

Marc Falkoff: Well, thanks. All credit to the University of Iowa Press.

Andy Worthington: Even before your book was published last month, you received what must have been a gratifyingly large amount of publicity. I noticed, however, that almost immediately some critics stepped up to question or criticize the literary value of the poems. Do you think they were somehow missing the point?

Marc Falkoff: Yes and no. I’ve got to say that almost everyone who’s reviewed the book or talked about it –- on blogs and elsewhere –- has recognized that aesthetics are largely beside the point. The prime example would be Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the United States, who’s been very generous in praise of the book, but his approach has been that these are “urgent” texts that require our attention by addressing the human rights issues that the Guantánamo imprisonments raise, and he has shied away from the aesthetic merit of the poems. In a recent interview he said that this isn’t like some of the great poetry that emerged from the Soviet Gulag –- the work of Mandelshtam, for example –- but essentially he remained focused on the poems’ political context.

However, I think it’s acceptable at some level, to some degree, to look at these poems as aesthetic objects. When you look at them, some people would agree that some of the poems are quite pedestrian, which is understandable given that the book is made up almost entirely of amateur poets. On the other hand, there are some poems that to my mind are quite striking in terms of imagery, metaphor and thematic complexity. But this said, clearly this book is about more than aesthetics, and in fact, even though you mentioned comments about aesthetics, I would say that for the most part the critiques I’ve seen did not provide evidence of reasoned aesthetic judgments. What they were really were ad hominem attacks against the detainees, made by right-wing bloggers who were outraged that a University Press was publishing poems by Guantánamo detainees, and who responded with bullying tactics, resorting to mockery and ridicule. You may have seen some of the sites on which bloggers invited readers to write “Gitmo poetry,” along the lines of: “Roses are red/ Violets are blue/ I’m stuck in Guantánamo/ And when I get out I’ll behead you.”

Andy Worthington: That’s very good. Almost eerily accurate. I’d say. Tell me about other responses.

Marc Falkoff: Well, the Pentagon was asked about the book before it had been published, and Commander Jeffrey Gordon, the Pentagon’s chief press officer, gave his opinion, declaring that poetry was a “tool” that the detainees were using in a “battle” against Western democracies. He had not even read the poems –- at best one or two online somewhere –- but he claimed that the detainees were not writing the poems in order to create art, but as part of an attack on Western democracies.

Once the book was published, the New York Times book reviewer Don Chiasson wrote that no one should be so hard-hearted as to bring aesthetic judgments to bear on the poems. That’s OK, but what he went on to do was perverse. At the same time that I was being decried on blogs as a “useful idiot,” a dupe of terrorists spouting jihadist rhetoric, Don Chiasson comes along and says that, because all the poems had to be first cleared by the Pentagon, the Pentagon has cleared and chosen these specific poems and has allowed their publication as a cunning public relations move to demonstrate that dissent is allowed at Guantánamo. So, simultaneously, I’m both a “useful idiot” for terrorists and a dupe of the Pentagon.

Finally, on this point, I do not think you must take aesthetics off the table by any means, but the interplay between aesthetics and politics in the poems raises interesting questions, and is not something to shy away from. Discussions about aesthetic judgments and political context, relating to the ways in which poetry is written and discussed, have been debated for hundreds of years and raise interesting and valid questions, and a review in Slate, by Meghan O’Rourke, captured what a smart discussion of these issues would look like.

Andy Worthington: That’s an interesting point that you make about the interface between aesthetics and politics, and it seems particularly relevant these days, as it seems to me that, over the last few decades, there has been a concerted effort by those in charge of driving this consumer-led society to deflect as much attention as possible away from politics.

Marc Falkoff: Sure, but let’s grab hold of the issue. People like to pigeonhole ideas and things, to bring a perfect coherence to the world. I defy anyone to define what literary merit is.

Andy Worthington: It’s in the eye of the beholder, essentially.

Marc Falkoff: Or like the famous Oscar Wilde quote, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.” But to conclude my answers to this question, it’s very important for someone who sets himself or herself up as an arbiter of literary merit to retain a self-consciousness about what they’re doing, and it’s particularly important for this book, because it’s easy for people to fall back on assumptions and think, “Oh, they’re just terrorists, how can this be art?” This is what happened with Maxine Kumin, who’s actually a poet herself, who criticized the poems. This was a remarkable step to take. Not only did she likely dampen sales of the book and its circulation, but she herself wrote a terrific poem, What You Do, from the viewpoint of detainees –-

Andy Worthington: US detainees?

Marc Falkoff: Yes, prisoners of the United States, in Guantánamo, or in Abu Ghraib. It suggests that what she was saying was, “Leave the poetry about Guantánamo to me.” A lot of these things that look like aesthetic judgments are, whether consciously or not, influenced by political judgments or assumptions.

Andy Worthington: I can’t believe she did that. It’s like she was saying, “Only poets should be writing poetry. Not prisoners held without hope.”

Marc Falkoff: Absolutely. And what’s also important to remember is that I didn’t decide, “Oh look, the 17 best poets in the world are at Guantánamo,” so the book is doing a different cultural job as well. These are the poems and the stories of men held without charge, trial or conviction, men entirely denied their day in court, denied that space in which they should be allowed to tell their stories. Their stories should be told in legal briefs and oral arguments, but these have been denied to them, so they must take place in a different venue. And so they have to tell their stories through poetry, or at least be given the opportunity to do so. The poem, in this context, is much more than an aesthetic object. In this context, the poem is a symbol, a sign of their humanity, their will to create. And it also functions as a proxy for the justice system and the rule of law.

Andy Worthington: That rather feeds into what was to be my next question, but which you’ve largely answered. What I wanted to say to you was that, while I was particularly moved by a number of the poems, and felt the burning indignation that fuelled others, the particular forms of Muslim prison poetry that linguistic and cultural anthropologist Flagg Miller explains in his excellent introductory essay –- and from which many of the detainees draw inspiration –- are only a part of the story. What I found at least as interesting was the book’s political context: the enlightening profiles of the poets, many of whom were previously unknown to the public, and your introduction, in which you explain the many obstacles to the publication of the book that you encountered from the Pentagon. I wanted to ask if you could clarify for me whether every poem written in Guantánamo, even those by detainees who have been released, remain subject to declassification by the US military?

Marc Falkoff: Yes and no again. For the poets who are still in Guantánamo, quite clearly the answer is yes. Anything they say is presumptively classified, and has to go through the Pentagon’s Privilege Review Team.

Andy Worthington: Could you explain that?

Marc Falkoff: Sure. Essentially, the military insisted to the courts that anything our clients said to us was a potential security risk. This is bullshit, but the courts were unwilling to step on the military’s toes. So if we wanted to publicize anything that our clients said –- relating to their treatment, allegations of torture, whatever –- it had to be cleared by a Pentagon-appointed censorship team. Or in fact an uncensorship team, as everything is presumptively censored.

Andy Worthington: Thanks for that. Please continue with the story.

Marc Falkoff: OK, so any poems that the released detainees were able to reconstruct from memory, they were able to do so. This is what happened with the poems by released British detainees Moazzam Begg and Martin Mubanga.

Andy Worthington: And Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost, the Afghan poet who, as you mention in the book, wrote 25,000 lines of poetry, much of it scratched onto Styrofoam cups and passed from cell to cell?

Marc Falkoff: Yes. When he was released from Guantánamo, almost all of his poetry was held, and as he said, and I described in the book, he asked a reporter after his release, “Why did they give me a pen and paper [which they eventually did] if they were planning to do that? Each word was like a child to me –- irreplaceable.” Muslim Dost asked for his poems to be returned but was refused. Eventually, he could bring a lawsuit against the US government, but it would probably take years and he would probably lose.

Andy Worthington: This was when he was free, obviously, before he was recaptured by the Pakistani authorities, after he wrote a book with his brother Ustad Badruzzaman Bader (also featured in your book) about Guantánamo, which was highly critical of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI. [Muslim Dost was freed from Guantánamo in April 2005, after which he wrote Da Guantánamo Matay Zolanay (The Broken Shackles of Guantánamo) with his brother. He was rearrested in Pakistan, where he had lived since the 1970s, on September 29, 2006, and is currently held in Peshawar’s Central Prison, farcically accused of “violating visa rules and illegal stay in Pakistan”].

Marc Falkoff: Yes. But we heard the other day that a journalist had been allowed to meet him.

Andy Worthington: Which may be the first step towards securing his release. It goes to show what happens when you mess with the ISI, however. But to return to the poems, does this mean that there are hundreds –- or thousands –- of poems that could not be included?

Marc Falkoff: For a variety of reasons, Muslim Dost’s case shows definitively that there are hundreds of poems that we couldn’t gain access to. In addition, I know of at least another dozen or so that were not cleared by the military; for example, several poems by my own clients that the review team refused to clear. Initially, they were wary about the whole process, but they eventually let some poems through and then they put the kibosh on the whole process and refused to let any more through.

Andy Worthington: What, they reached a point where they absolutely refused to declassify any more poems?

Marc Falkoff: Yes, it came to a complete standstill over a year ago. This doesn’t mean that they have stopped clearing all communications, only that they won’t clear any more poems.

Andy Worthington: They’re scared of poems.

Marc Falkoff: I think they took a step back when they realized this was coming out as a book. They were concerned about the public relations aspect of it, and realized that they could get away with describing it as a “security risk” and by claiming that poetry couldn’t possibly have anything to do with lawyers and litigation. We’ve tried to use all paths available. For example, we sent some of the poems that had been denied clearance to JTF-GTMO [the Joint Task Force that runs Guantánamo] to be released, but they refused. None of their attempts to articulate their reasons for refusing to permit publication makes sense, and the simplest explanation is that they were attempting to prevent the publication of the book from happening.

Andy Worthington: They’re that paranoid?

Marc Falkoff: This is a group of people unwilling to admit that they made mistakes, who don’t ever want to concede that the executive should not have absolute power to do whatever it wishes without being answerable to anybody. I think the government is engaged in a form of “lawfare” –- have you come across that term?

Andy Worthington: No.

Marc Falkoff: It’s based on a fear that non-state actors, unable to engage in conventional war, have to engage in asymmetric warfare –- a horrible example, for instance, was a small group of men hijacking airliners and bringing down the World Trade Center on 9/11. Thought up by the Council on Foreign Relations, and by some hyper-Conservative opinion-makers, “lawfare” theorists suggest that terrorists get lawyers to tie up military commanders with lawsuits, invoking international law and forcing soldiers to second-guess the manner in which they engage with the enemy, for example. But in fact “lawfare” is what the US military is doing at Guantánamo, tying lawyers up in endless knots by filing frivolous motions to dismiss our habeas petitions, claiming that Guantánamo is a law-free zone where men can be abused and held in indefinite detention without any oversight by the courts, ever. The government has engaged in what I consider “lawfare” –- making frivolous legal arguments and deploying procedural maneuvers designed only to delay the day of reckoning in the courts about the legality of the Gitmo detention center. That is “lawfare” –- the misuse of the legal system for purely military purposes. They have done so, remarkably, with the complicity of Congress, which passed habeas-stripping litigation, and the silent acquiescence of the courts, which have refused to insist on the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

Andy Worthington: The military, as we have discussed, has a special fear of poetry, suspecting, as you describe it in the book, that poetry “presents a special risk” to national security because of its “content and format,” which, it is believed, could be used to smuggle coded messages out of the prison to waiting terrorists. You explain that, in order to prevent this, the majority of the poems, which were written in Arabic, were translated by military linguists, and that independent experts, who may have been able to do more “justice to the subtlety and cadence of the originals,” were prevented from having access to them. I do find this an extraordinarily paranoid response, and I wondered if you think that, at some point, you or others will be allowed less restricted access to the original poems, and to some of the others that remain classified?

Marc Falkoff: OK, well first of all it has been reported a little bit in the press that these were military linguists who had translated the poems, but this is inaccurate. The poems were translated by our translators, all of whom, however, had to be security cleared by the FBI, just like all of the lawyers working on the cases had to get FBI security clearance. So that’s where that misconception came about, and that’s actually one of the reasons, I think, that the New York Times book review believes that this is all kind of a Pentagon project … these little pieces of misinformation that are floating around out there. So, the thing is, they were our interpreters, but there is only a small universe of Arabic-English translators who have security clearances that we could use in our litigation, and none of those whom we identified and who could be of use to us have any literary credentials. So the translations were done by workaday translators who never pretended to have any literary feel for what they were doing.

Now, because the military, as you say, was unwilling in many cases to release the original Arabic versions, we haven’t been able to get those literary translations done, outside of the secure facility [where all the documentation on the detainees is held], because we don’t have access to unclassified versions of the original Arabic language poems. I have no reason to believe that we will ever get access to those. It’s simply not going to happen. Once the military has made its decisions, it appears unwilling to revisit any of them. So, even after I resubmitted poems to JTF-GTMO to be cleared, they’ve been refused. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe, for example, that Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost, whose 25,000 lines of poetry were confiscated by the military before he left, is ever going to get those back.

Andy Worthington: While we’re on the topic of censorship, which I know is not confined solely to the detainees’ poetry, I wondered if you could provide the readers of this interview with some other information about the secrecy, censorship and obstructive tactics carried out Guantánamo against those attempting to provide legal assistance to the detainees?

Marc Falkoff: This regime … to give it a little bit of context, when we first went down to Guantánamo –- and I don’t mean just me, but all the lawyers who went down in the fall of 2004 to meet for the first time with the detainees, who had never had any significant contact with the outside world apart from a few censored letters from the International Committee of the Red Cross –- we brought back stories about all sorts of abuse that they had suffered. We brought back their stories about how they were taken into custody, and about their alleged innocence, but we also brought back the stories of abuse –- sometimes tantamount to torture –- at the hands of Americans, at Kandahar and Bagram, and to a lesser extent, but still there, at Guantánamo. Just as an example, I brought back a story which later turned out to be true, which a client of mine told me about another detainee who, during an interrogation, had refused to talk and then had menstrual blood smeared by a female interrogator onto his chest or his face –- that kind of story that I didn’t even plan to write down because it sounded so absurd. But later we found out, both in [former military linguist] Erik Saar’s book, Inside The Wire, and in the Schmidt-Furlow Report, a Pentagon investigation, which was mostly a whitewash, that this allegation was indeed true –- though the “menstrual blood” turned out to be red ink, a ruse. But when we sent information of this nature through the Privilege Review Team –- this Pentagon censorship team –- initially we weren’t allowed to make that information public. It was deemed classified because releasing it would reveal interrogation methods and procedures. We had to threaten legal action to loosen up that standard, and it’s at that point that you first started hearing –- really first-hand –- about what was going on at Guantánamo.

And there’s been all sorts of interference with the attorney-client relationship at Guantánamo, most obviously when the government suggested that the men at Gitmo should not have a right to a lawyer, and then when they argued to a judge in the fall of 2004, right before we went down to Guantánamo for the first time, that the military reserved the right to videotape and audiotape and contemporaneously monitor our conversations with our clients, and, I mean, talk about trying to undermine the lawyer-client relationship … We heard stories about clients being told that they shouldn’t cooperate with their lawyers because their lawyers were Jews, and why would Jews be looking out for their best interests, and Clive Stafford Smith’s clients were told that Clive was gay [he is, in fact, happily married], and therefore shouldn’t be trusted. Our clients have told us that their interrogators have said that you’re not going to get out of Guantánamo if you’ve got a lawyer, that you’re better off without a lawyer. So there are all sorts of difficulties inherent in these cases, and the government is acting frequently in a relatively underhanded manner. To distinguish, I’m not saying that the Privilege Review Team is acting in bad faith in some way, or in an underhanded manner, because I’m not privy to their internal decision-making process …

Andy Worthington: From my point of view, I wouldn’t say that they are, actually, because frequently I’ve been surprised, over the years, at what they have allowed to be declassified and to have come out of Guantánamo. It’s why I was quite shocked, in what we were discussing earlier, that they reached a cut-off point with poetry, where they’re absolutely refusing to declassify anything, whereas it still remains plausible to me that many stories which look quite damaging to the administration will actually be cleared for release. So on that front, the review process is not as much of a reflection of an administration that leans towards totalitarianism as the administration’s policies themselves.

Marc Falkoff: I’ll be honest with you. I don’t begin to understand it. I think it’s a mixture of some legitimate concern with the form of poetry, some haphazardness in their criteria, and some concern about the public relations effect of this that may be trickling down from the upper echelons of the Pentagon. I don’t think it’s necessary to impugn anyone, but the facts are as they are, and there are a lot of poems that were not cleared, and we’ve been supplied with odd reasons for that.

Andy Worthington: I think that, fundamentally, as you’ve described it, the whole process is haphazard and arbitrary, and the same thing applies to the poetry, but it remains interesting to me that, perhaps not through the review process, but through the higher levels of the administration –- the people running Guantánamo –- they really do have a fear that poetry is a weapon somehow. It’s probably a testament to the power of poetry, really.

Marc Falkoff: Well, poetry is all about packing meaning into words. Words are supposed to –- maybe this is a badly chosen metaphor, but they’re supposed to explode, supposed to provide a punch, so you can understand why the Pentagon would be wary of letting loose language like that on the world. To be honest, I think this fear that men who have been in confinement for five or six years, scribbling poetry on stray pieces of paper that eventually they gave to a lawyer –- the idea that somehow this is a coded message to a sleeper cell is way overblown. If this were true, why not write exactly the same thing in a letter to an attorney? Why break up your lines into stanzas and turn them into a poem? The literary scholar in me loves the fact that the military had recognized the power of poetry, but the fear’s overblown and a little bit paranoid. If they fear that there’s a code, that’s one thing. But just to exempt poetry on the basis of the way the lines are broken up, that’s just silly.

Andy Worthington: I noticed also that, although a profound sense of injustice permeates the poems, there are no poems that are stridently militant. What I found instead were the following two forms: political complaint, and, more deeply, the consolations provided by Allah, and a deep well of religious belief. The lack of militancy doesn’t surprise me, as I believe that there are very few militants actually in Guantánamo, but what I’ve found, when talking to many people, is that they come up with comments along the lines of, “But if they weren’t terrorists when they went in, they will be when they come out.” This seems to me to be a profound misunderstanding of the majority of the detainees in Guantánamo, and I wondered if, through you experiences with the poetry, and perhaps with your clients, you could shed some light on who we’re really dealing with.

Marc Falkoff: First of all, I think your characterization of the poems is right. It’s difficult to generalize too much about the poems: many of them are pastoral in nature, some of them describe homesickness and loneliness, a lot of them are decrying injustice, and a lot of them express some disillusionment with America. You’re right, it’s kind of a wide variety, but what you really don’t see, as you say, is much in the way of hatred of America, and certainly no militarism of the kind that people would expect. There’s an occasional poem in which clearly the poet’s anger and frustration is boiling over on the page –- I’m thinking in particular of Martin Mubanga’s poem “Terrorist 2003.” Martin’s a British citizen, who was released in 2005, and in his poem, without doubt, he expresses some anger at the United States, but I don’t really see any militarism. To the extent that it’s there at all, it’s glancing.

To turn to one of your other points, the fundamental misconception about Guantánamo is that the men inside are terrorists, and we understand exactly why people in America think like that, because that’s what they’ve been told by George Bush. They’ve been told that the detainees are the worst of the worst, they’re terrorists, they were picked up on a battlefield fighting American troops. “Trust us!” And you know, there was a time when a lot of us were willing to trust the Executive. When I got involved, I didn’t know if everyone in Guantánamo was a terrorist, I didn’t know if my clients were terrorists. I can dislike George Bush, and I can detest the idea of holding people without charge or trial, and not following the rule of law, but that doesn’t mean that the men in Guantánamo were necessarily innocent or not terrorists. But when I got involved –- even though all of my clients could have been terrorists –- my goal was to bring back the rule of law to Guantánamo, to give them a hearing –- an appropriate habeas corpus hearing –- and if they’re terrorists then we can decide whether to charge them, or if it’s appropriate to keep them in detention for a longer period; we can talk about that.

But the plain fact is that we went down to Guantánamo and we found that hundreds of these guys are in fact innocent civilians. So the problem is that the public has been hearing for six years that these people are terrorists, and it’s very difficult to get over that misconception. People think that I’m going down to Guantánamo to try to find technicalities to get detainees out of there, that they’re really terrorists, and I’m just trying to do some lawyerly hocus-pocus, and it’s far from the truth. We’re just asking for a hearing, in front of a judge, where the government has to put its evidence on the table, and the judge gets to look at it. When I look at the evidence, I’m not looking at it and saying, “Oh well, this is technically hearsay, and I don’t see a chain of evidence here, and therefore this guy should be released.” I’m looking at evidence that, if the ordinary person looked at it, they wouldn’t say, “Oh, this is technically inadmissible,” they would say, “This is absolutely, thoroughly ludicrous. Are you serious that this is why this guy is here?” I mean, I’m talking about triple or quadruple hearsay, where the original declarant was tortured or abused in some way. That’s the kind of quality of evidence. To compare Guantánamo to the Salem Witch Trials is bang on. That’s what we’re talking about: webs of incriminating statements from increasingly untrustworthy sources.

So, to move on: “if the men weren’t terrorists when they went in, they’ll be terrorists when the come out”? We have all sorts of DNA exonerations these days, where men who’ve been convicted of rape and murder have been exonerated ten, 15, 20 years later. Now, do you think those men are bitter for having spent all that time unjustly imprisoned? Sure. Do you think they may have become hardened and exposed to a criminal element? Sure. Do you really think that it would be appropriate to continue to detain these men because of the harm they may have experienced when they were in prison? Of course not, that’s absurd, but that’s where the debate is right now at Guantánamo.

Is there potential for some of the men in Guantánamo to have been radicalized by their experience? You know, it’s a relatively hard question to answer. For some of the men, the answer is absolutely no; it was like your next-door neighbour being thrown into prison. These are people, many of them with absolutely no radicalism about them to begin with, and they’re not going to become radicalized just because they’re surrounded by some men who are undoubtedly bad apples. There may be men who were picked up who were on the verge of going to an al-Qaeda training camp, or on the verge of signing on to some radical Islamist agenda. What happens when you throw those people into Guantánamo and mix them up with real al-Qaeda operatives? Sure, I can imagine that there’s some portion of men for whom Guantánamo represented the tipping point, and they were pushed over the edge. I can imagine it in theory. I don’t know if it’s true in fact, but I can imagine it. But the fundamental fact is that I think those are going to be few and far between, and, you know, we made a mistake doing what we did, and you can’t deny that something like that has happened in the past. This is what happened with Syed Qutb [the key ideologue for modern Sunni militants, who was executed in Egypt in 1966] and the Egyptian radicals; they were all tossed into prison in Egypt, and this is how all that started …

Andy Worthington: Well, sure, but it’s important to remember, as we’ve spoken about, that a lot of the people in Guantánamo didn’t come out as radicalized, because they didn’t have a radical bone in their body when they went in. And another thing that struck me, Marc, is that, apart from anything else, the administration has done absolutely nothing to help these people in any way, that if there were any people there who were going to be thinking about militancy, what is the American administration doing for these people there, to encourage them to learn about the West, to learn English, to learn about the law? They don’t do any of that.

Marc Falkoff: They could. I’ve spoken with my clients about this, and I’ve asked them, “Do you feel hatred towards America? What are you going to do when you get out?” and to a man they just want to go home and put this behind them. They recognize the difference between the Bush administration and the American people; they’ve no intent of joining some radical cause. Most of them were young when they got there, they just want to get married, have children, and go back and live with their families. So that’s one thing.

The second thing is, we definitely could be doing exactly the opposite of what we’re doing. We could be doing things to discourage them from radicalization. We could, for example, be teaching them English, something that my clients have asked for for years. I have tried to clear, through the military, English language primers, like Dr. Seuss’ ABCs –- they’ve been denied; English-Arabic dictionaries –- they’ve been denied. For the first time, a couple of months ago, the military floated the idea that the most compliant detainees might be allowed English language instruction. That’s one thing they could do, which they haven’t done yet.

Another thing they could do is engage in dialogue, like Judge Hitar’s project in the Yemen –- it’s controversial, certainly –- where men who’ve been picked up and accused of associating with al-Qaeda and terrorist organizations have been forced to sit down with learned scholars, and they put a Koran down in front of them and challenge them to find where in the Koran Allah says that it’s OK to kill innocent people. They engage in this dialogue and it turns out that most of those proto-terrorists really don’t know their Koran very well, and they’re dissuaded through these conversations from engaging in terrorism, and Yemen will frequently let the men out after this reeducation programme. Senator Lindsey Graham just told us about a week ago that this is exactly what the United States is starting to do in Iraq, and I think it’s a brilliant idea. I mean, essentially, if you realize that you aren’t going to be the world’s jailer, and that you’re going to have to release a lot of these people eventually, then engage them in some kind of dialogue, talk to them. It’s a battle of ideas, right? So engage at that level.

Andy Worthington: Thank you, Marc. I hope that one day you will be able to produce another, more comprehensive book of poems by the Guantánamo detainees –-

Marc Falkoff: I hope to get to do one by ex-detainees exclusively.

Andy Worthington: Absolutely, but in the meantime I think that the mixture of the poems themselves and the constraints placed on the detainees’ freedom of expression is a particularly powerful combination that paints the administration in a paranoid and vindictive light. I note also that three of the detainees in the book –- Juma al-Dossari, Abdul Aziz al-Oshan and Abdullah al-Anazi –- have been released since it was published, and I hope that augurs well for those who remain in Guantánamo. Before we finish, is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to mention?

Marc Falkoff: Only that I always like to make sure that people realize that any profits that this book makes are going to the Center for Constitutional Rights. I’m not making any money on this, and in fact none of the poets are making any money on this. This is all going towards the public interest law firm that has spearheaded the Gitmo litigation. I say this because I, in the past, have been accused of profiting on the dead bodies of our soldiers in Afghanistan, and other nonsense like that …

Andy Worthington: That’s a terrible thing, but it doesn’t surprise me. Well, that’s a good point to make then, Marc. Thanks for that, and thanks again for your time.

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 Nth Position.

“Ibrahim al-Rubaish was teaching in Pakistan when he was arrested by mercenaries and sold to allied forces. A religious scholar who dislikes hostility and was once a candidate for a judgeship, Rubaish has a daughter, born just three months before he was captured, who is now five years old. During a military administrative hearing, he was told, ‘If you are considered to be a continued threat, you will be detained. If you are not considered a threat, we will recommend release. Why should we consider releasing you?’ Rubaish’s response was, ‘In the world of international courts, the person is innocent until proven guilty. Why, here, is the person guilty until proven innocent?’”

ODE TO THE SEA
By Ibrahim al-Rubaish

O sea, give me news of my loved ones.

Were it not for the chains of the faithless, I would have dived into you,
And reached my beloved family, or perished in your arms.

Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain, and injustice.
Your bitterness eats away at my patience.

Your calm is like death, your sweeping waves are strange.
The silence that rises up from you holds treachery in its fold.

Your stillness will kill the captain if it persists,
And the navigator will drown in your waves.

Gentle, deaf, mute, ignoring, angrily storming,
You carry graves.

If the wind enrages you, your injustice is obvious.
If the wind silences you, there is just the ebb and flow.

O sea, do our chains offend you?
It is only under compulsion that we daily come and go.

Do you know our sins?
Do you understand we were cast into this gloom?

O sea, you taunt us in our captivity.
You have colluded with our enemies and you cruelly guard us.

Don’t the rocks tell you of the crimes committed in their midst?
Doesn’t Cuba, the vanquished, translate its stories for you?

You have been beside us for three years, and what have you gained?
Boats of poetry on the sea; a buried flame in a burning heart.

The poet’s words are the font of our power;
His verse is the salve for our pained hearts.

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.

While most media outlets have been content to treat their readers and viewers to headlines about the men’s release, backed up by very little comment or analysis, I have been able to build up a detailed picture of this latest group of men, based on the extensive research I conducted for my forthcoming book The Guantánamo Files, and through discussions with the detainees’ lawyers over the last few days.

Freed after five and a half years from the prison in which they were initially accused of being “the worst of the worst,” what the Saudis’ stories reveal most of all is the general ineptitude of the administration on all fronts –- from the circumstances of their capture, to the screening process in the US prisons in Afghanistan, to the quality of the “intelligence” gathered from them in Guantánamo –- which only serve to reinforce the need for tough action from the Supreme Court this fall.

Of the 16 men released on Thursday, not one deserved to be labeled as “the worst of the worst.” Two of the men –- Abdul Aziz al-Oshan and Abdullah al-Anazi –- recently came to prominence when poems they had written were declassified and included in Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, an anthology of Guantánamo prison poetry compiled by law professor Marc Falkoff, who represents a number of Yemeni detainees.

The poets

Al-Oshan, who marked his 28th birthday in Guantánamo the week before his release, went to Afghanistan in late September 2001, after taking his final exam at university, to find his brother Saleh (who was also captured, but released in July 2005), in order to persuade him to return to Saudi Arabia. Caught up, in late November 2001, in the fall of Kunduz, the last Taliban bastion in the north of Afghanistan, he was “tied down and taken with other detainees” to Qala-i-Janghi, the mud-walled fort of General Dostum, one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, where he survived a US-led massacre that followed an uprising by some of the prisoners.

Prisoners en route to Qala-i-Janghi, November 2001.

Despite the fact that he had not been involved in any kind of military training and had not raised arms against either the Northern Alliance or the US-led coalition, he explained to his tribunal in Guantánamo that he was afraid of being tortured, because he had previously been tortured in Afghanistan. “When I was first captured,” he said, “it was the Afghani police there. They were threatening me and torturing me. If I didn’t say that I was from al-Qaeda or Taliban I was tortured. I went to Kandahar and I was tortured there. The guy was speaking English saying ‘Al-Qaeda? Taliban? Al-Qaeda? Taliban?’ Evidence of the torture is that they broke my tooth which was fixed here.” He added, “Once I arrived here, things were a little better. There was no torture or things like that but, because of what happened in the past I was dwelling on the fact that, are these people treating me good and they are going to come back and torture me again?” Gentle, softly-spoken, literate and with a wry sense of humor that five and a half years in Guantánamo could not extinguish, al-Oshan recently wrote a critical account of the library facilities at Guantánamo that was published here in July.

The other poet, Abdullah al-Anazi, was rather less fortunate than Abdul Aziz al-Oshan. After responding to appeals for aid workers to help out with the “humanitarian crisis” in Afghanistan, which was publicized widely in Saudi Arabia both before and after 9/11, and which featured prominent sheikhs appearing on television explaining, as his lawyer described it, that “Muslims were in dire straits in Afghanistan, and that it was the responsibility of fellow Muslims to help them,” the 21-year old duly traveled to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid. After fleeing the Jalalabad region during the US-led bombing campaign, he was one of several dozen Guantánamo detainees caught in a bombing raid in the mountains near the Pakistani border, and was then taken to a hospital where one of his legs was amputated. Seized from his hospital bed by local warlords, he was then sold to US forces for a bounty (after which the people who had sold him and labeled him a terrorist disappeared with the money), and had his other leg amputated in US custody.

By the time he arrived at Guantánamo, on February 7, 2002, he weighed just 101 pounds (7 stone 3 pounds, or 46 kg). Described by his lawyer as “the gentle double amputee poet of Guantánamo,” the terrorist tag that his bounty hunters gave him clung to him in US custody, and, despite being “forced to walk on prosthetic limbs held together with duct tape,” as Marc Falkoff described it, lawyer Candace Gorman (citing Anant Raut, one of the lawyers for the Saudis) explained that one interrogator in Guantánamo assessed him as being “unsuitable for repatriation ever, because his lack of legs … would make him ‘less attractive to his wife,’ thereby making him a ‘prime candidate for suicide bombing recruitment.’”

Humanitarian aid workers and a missionary

Four more humanitarian aid workers were captured in Pakistan. 22-year old Zaban al-Shammari, who, according to one of his lawyers, “suffers from a form of epilepsy and experienced seizures” in Guantánamo, traveled to the southern Pakistani city of Karachi to work for a charity organization in July 2001, and was captured by bounty-hungry Pakistani soldiers 600 miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan, and Abdulhadi al-Sharikh, who was 19 at the time, had been in Pakistan for a year, on a mission to help the poor, when he too was seized without setting foot in Afghanistan.

Two others –- Fahd al-Fawzan and Mohammed al-Qurbi –- were not only captured in Pakistan, but also had to contend with allegations made by unspecified “members of al-Qaeda” –- either their fellow detainees, coerced or bribed, or, more worryingly, some of the “high-value” detainees in secret CIA-run prisons, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah –- that they had connections with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Al-Fawzan, who was just 17 years old when he was captured, had apparently been working for al-Haramain, a vast Saudi charity that was closed down in 2004, under pressure from the US government, which alleged that parts of the organization were used as a front for terrorist financing. Unwittingly tarred as a terrorist because of this association, what counted against him more was an allegation that he had been “identified by a senior al-Qaeda member,” who was probably also responsible for the claim that he had trained at a military camp, and that he had previously been in Afghanistan for ten months in 1999, when he was only 15 years old. In his defense, al-Fawzan stated that he wished to return to Saudi Arabia “to continue his laundry business and raise his family,” that Osama bin Laden was a “bad man,” and that “those types of attacks [9/11] are not a good reflection on Muslims.”

Al-Qurbi, who was 23 years old at the time of his capture, maintained that he was arrested by the Pakistani police in Quetta in October 2001, and was handed over to the Americans on November 25. He explained that he had traveled once to Pakistan via Syria and Malaysia, and had then traveled again to Pakistan, to attend a conference run by Jamaat-e-Tablighi, an enormous worldwide missionary organization, but was arrested before he got there. He insisted that he had never set foot in Afghanistan, even though it was alleged that he was identified as an al-Qaeda operative by one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards, that he had managed a hostel for the Taliban, and that he was part of the “security element” for Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged facilitator of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Captured in the UAE in November 2002, and held in secret CIA-run prisons until his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006, al-Nashiri may, therefore, have been the source of all these allegations.

Another non-combatant, 20-year old Rami al-Juaid, was arrested in Kohat, Pakistan, at the house of a Pakistani who had traveled with him from Afghanistan, after the US-led invasion began, in a car driven by an Afghan guide. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he accepted that he traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001, but denied receiving training at a “terrorist camp,” as alleged, saying that his training was religious, that it took place at a mosque in Kandahar, and that he had only planned on visiting Afghanistan for three weeks to see for himself the Islamic state run by the Taliban. When questioned by the tribunal, he explained that he was an only son, and that “If you are the only son/male child you are exempt in going to jihad.”

Military recruits

Four others were either accused of, or admitted taking part in military training, but none rose above the level of a foot soldier, and there are few, if any indications that any of them actually took part in any kind of combat. Abdulrazak al-Sharikh, the younger brother of Abdulhadi al-Sharikh, was only 16 years old when he arrived in Afghanistan in late 2000, and only 17 when he was captured in Pakistan, having crossed the border from Afghanistan after the US-led invasion began. Explaining his reasons for going to Afghanistan, he said in his tribunal that he wanted to receive training so that he could fight in Chechnya, where another of his brothers had been killed, but that although he had wanted to “go over there so I can die and meet up with him,” a friend of his brother’s had advised him that he “wouldn’t last one day” in Chechnya, and suggested that he went to Afghanistan instead. He added, “The Muslim scientists, or clergymen, were telling me to fight in Afghanistan. They convinced me to fight there, and told me how to get there, so I went.”

Although he admitted training for two months at the al-Farouq camp for Arab volunteers (where he attended a speech given by Osama bin Laden) and serving on the Taliban front lines for three months in Kabul and five months further north, with Pakistani members of the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, he explained that he never fired a weapon at anyone, and that there was little activity until after 9/11, when the Northern Alliance attacked them so hard that they retreated. He denied an allegation that he was “captured by Pakistan police while traveling with a group of Arabs and Afghanis, some of whom were security guards for Osama bin Laden,” saying, “This is not true. When I went to Pakistan, I only had two people with me. When I was turned over, they captured the Arab and Pakistani people. When they sent me to prison, I was taken along with the other group.” He added that he had traveled with two Pakistani guides, and that, after surrendering, he was met by a representative of the Saudi government, who knew of him because “I am from a very well known family.” Despite assurances from the representative that he would help him return to Saudi Arabia, however, he was then handed over to US forces.

Less is known about the three others accused of involvement in militancy. Khalid al-Sharif, who was 26 years old when he was captured crossing the Pakistani border, denied an allegation that he had attended the al-Farouq camp, but admitted that he had attended another military training camp. He refuted an allegation that he was second-in-command of a group of fighters in Tora Bora, however, insisting that he had never been to Tora Bora, and also refuted an allegation that he met Osama bin Laden, saying, “All I did was see a photograph of him. If I see a photograph of President Bush does that mean I met President Bush?”

The story of Salim al-Shihri, who was 20 years old when he was captured, is even more vague. Captured after the fall of Kunduz and taken to Qala-i-Janghi, where, he said, “I was there but I did not take part in the uprising,” he denied allegations that he traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001 “to join the jihad and fight with the Taliban,” and that he received military training and fought on the front lines, admitting only that he traveled to the front lines “for a visit,” and saying that he went to Afghanistan because he read a fatwa “calling for people going there to help people.” Asked to define the fatwa, he said, “I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t have the knowledge … I just know that an important sheikh talks,” and when asked what this particular fatwa was for, he said that it was “about helping those who needed help.” While this could have been a deliberately evasive response, it’s also possible that, like many others, he obeyed the fatwas unquestioningly, and did not really understand what he was getting into.

Northern Alliance soldiers rest a gun on the corpse of a Taliban soldier during the uprising at Qala-i-Janghi.

Even less is known about Fahd al-Harazi, who was 23 years old when he was captured. Although he had secured legal representation, he refused to meet his lawyers, and also refused to take part in either his tribunal or his review boards, so that the allegations against him went unanswered. While the first set of allegations –- that he traveled to Afghanistan in March 2001 “to fight the jihad,” attended “an al-Qaeda affiliated camp,” fought on the front lines against the Northern Alliance, and was wounded in Qala-i-Janghi –- seem plausible, additional claims –- that he was actually a trainer at al-Farouq, and that his name was found on a document at the “Military Committee al-Mujahideen Affairs Office,” which contained “nominees for the al-Qaeda Trainers Preparation Center” –- look more dubious, and may well have evaporated as the years have passed.

Detainees without lawyers

As with the 16 Saudis released just seven weeks ago, which I reported here, some of the latest group –- four in total –- had no legal representation, and, like Fahd al-Harazi, spent five and a half years in Guantánamo without seeing any non-military personnel except occasional representatives of the Red Cross. Two of these four men also refused to take part in their tribunals, and what little can be gleaned of their stories is taken from the Unclassified Summaries of Evidence for their tribunals. Majid Barayan, born in 1972, was captured on the Pakistani border and was accused of training at al-Farouq, where he allegedly “received weapons and explosives training,” and fighting on the front lines north of Taloqan against the Northern Alliance, where he was reportedly “in charge of an anti-aircraft missile launcher mounted on a truck.”

Also captured on the Pakistani border was Mousa al-Amri, born in 1978, who was subjected to conflicting allegations. Reportedly recruited after seeing fatwas issued by various sheikhs on bulletin boards around his hometown and in mosques, which called on Saudi citizens ”to travel to Afghanistan and help the Taliban,” it was suggested that, after arriving in Pakistan, a Saudi named Mohammed Abdul Razzaq facilitated his journey to Afghanistan and took him to a Taliban center near Kabul, which functioned as a reserve camp, providing training in small arms, medical care and guard duty. Other contradictory accusations involved him arriving in Afghanistan in March 2001, when he was promptly issued with a Kalashnikov and assigned to a position near the front lines, fighting on the front line in Bagram, and, in another scenario, staying in a Taliban house a few minutes from the Pakistani border, where Mohammed Abdul Razzaq (this time appearing as an Afghan) directed him to a supply center, where he spent six weeks loading trucks.

In his defense, al-Amri stated that he had actually been visiting mosques and teaching the Koran with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, and added that he told the Pakistani authorities that he fought with the Taliban because he was told that, “if he told the truth about performing missionary work with Jamaat al-Tablighi, the Saudi delegation would not help him.” He also said that he “never participated in military actions or affiliations of any type with the Taliban,” and that he ‘knows no one who is or has claimed to be with al-Qaeda, nor has anyone ever asked him to join the Taliban or al-Qaeda.”

The other two men are Bakri al-Samiri and Amran Hawsawi. Al-Samiri, who was 24 years old when he was captured, was accused of training in a camp run by the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT), fighting on the front lines against the Northern Alliance, and retreating from Bagram to Jalalabad, where he was wounded by shrapnel. Although he admitted that he met a man in Mecca who told him about the work of LeT, he insisted that he only went to Afghanistan for a few weeks’ vacation “to help others any way I could help.” Like all the men who refused legal assistance, he appears to have taken part in hunger strikes at Guantánamo, and at one point, in May 2006, his weight dropped to just 103 lbs.

The last of the four, Amran Hawsawi, had a less confusing story to tell, and joins the ranks of the wrongly imprisoned humanitarian aid workers and religious teachers described above. 26 years old at the time of his capture, Hawsawi, who taught the Koran in Saudi Arabia, traveled to an Afghan refugee camp near the border with Iran, where he suffered shrapnel injuries after a bombardment. He then tried to cross the border into Iran, but was turned back by Iranian officials, and made his way to Pakistan instead, where he was subsequently arrested in a Saudi Red Crescent hospital in Quetta, even though he was seriously ill. “Even the doctor refused but they took [me] by force,” he explained. “He [the doctor] said you can release anybody but this one.”

Like Fahd al-Fawzan and Mohammed al-Qurbi, Hawsawi also ran up against allegations produced, in dubious circumstances, by alleged members of al-Qaeda. It was stated that “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” who was “on the media committee along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” described him as a member of al-Qaeda, and it may have been this source that was also responsible for another groundless allegation: that he was “identified” in Kabul at the al-Farouq camp. Not only was al-Farouq nowhere near Kabul, but it was also alleged that Hawsawi traveled to Afghanistan in September 2001, which was when the camp closed down.

Prisoner of the Taliban and al-Qaeda

I have saved until last the story of Abdul Hakim Bukhari, a 46-year old former mujahideen fighter, who met Osama bin Laden 14 or 15 years previously while fighting against the Russians, when the CIA was covertly funding the anti-Soviet resistance that would, in time, become the basis of al-Qaeda. Although his motives were far from peaceful –- he admitted that he traveled to Afghanistan to fight the US after 9/11, because “President Bush declared war on the Taliban” and “the Taliban called a jihad” –- he never raised arms against either the US or its allies, but was instead suspected of being a spy after declaring that he admired Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance.

Fanatically opposed to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Massoud was assassinated two days before 9/11, and Bukhari’s admission resulted in his imprisonment by the very people he had traveled to help. “They got mad when I said I liked Massoud,” he said. “They are crazy. They don’t like him. If I had known they didn’t like him, I wouldn’t have spoken. For saying that, they punished me … they beat me, they hit me very badly. They accused me of being a spy. They are stupid.” Freed from a Taliban jail after the US-led invasion, he was one of at least eight Guantánamo prisoners imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban and/or al-Qaeda, who, instead of being released, were transferred to Guantánamo, where several of them still remain.

As the 16 released Saudis prepare –- after a suitable period of “reprogramming” –- to attempt to rebuild their shattered lives, their cases should demonstrate to the justices of the Supreme Court that the time is long overdue to conclude, emphatically, that the President and his advisors have no right to hold prisoners –- mostly innocent men or Taliban foot soldiers from an inter-Muslim civil war that long preceded 9/11 –- for over 2000 days without charge or trial, in circumstances that would try the hardest of convicted criminals on the US mainland.

It is also, I believe, incumbent on the justices to insist that the United States returns forthwith to the rule of law, reestablishing the inalienable right of anyone captured by US forces –- whether an American citizen or not –- to be treated as an Enemy Prisoner of War in accordance with the Geneva Conventions (in a war that is defined by time and place, rather than one that is nebulous and open-ended) or to be charged and brought before a reputable court of law, where the nature of much of the “evidence” produced in Guantánamo –- hearsay, and statements obtained through torture, coercion or bribery, as described in the stories above –- can be tested and shown up as the tissue of lies that so much of it clearly is.

The Pentagon’s disdain for the law was demonstrated, in a typically haphazard and arrogant fashion, when the Department of Defense released these 16 men without even notifying the lawyers of the 12 who had representation. And while dozens of other cleared detainees remain in Guantánamo, despite being approved for release through the administrative review process that is held up as providing fair and thorough investigations of their status, it also transpired that the 16 Saudis were released without being cleared, indicating that political maneuvering, rather more than justice, is driving the evacuation of the reviled prison.

As Anant Raut declared on the news of their release, “I hope this puts an end to the absolutely false argument that the only reason the US can’t transfer many of these prisoners out of Guantánamo is that their own countries don’t want them back. Clearly, the Saudis are willing to take their citizens home. The administration has said it only plans to charge some 30-60 of the prisoners; the remaining 300-plus it has no interest in keeping. If the Saudis are willing to take theirs back, my question is, what’s stopping the transfer of the others?”

The answer, sadly, is that up to 150 detainees remain in Guantánamo because the administration is finding it difficult to undo the lawless fiasco it has created. While two-thirds of the Saudis have now been released, almost all the Yemeni detainees –- 96 men, whose profiles largely match those of the Saudis –- are still there, apparently because the governments of the US and the Yemen cannot reach an agreement about the terms of their repatriation that will satisfy both parties.

Dozens of North Africans are also still stranded, unwilling to return to the countries of their birth, where, despite being cleared, they face the risk of torture. These men are being subjected to particularly cynical moves on the part of the US administration, which, with the UK government, is engaged in bypassing international anti-torture legislation preventing the return of individuals to countries where they face the risk of torture by securing “diplomatic assurances” and “memoranda of understanding” with the abusive regimes in charge of their home countries that are not worth the paper on which they are printed.

The tide of opinion may slowly be turning against Guantánamo in the United States, but although the release of the Saudis contributes to its closure, the circumstances of many others –- as touched on above –- reveals that it is much easier to set up an illegal interrogation camp and torture prison than it is to close it down.

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 the Huffington Post.

Note:

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

ISN 112: Abdul Aziz al-Oshan (Abdul Aziz Saad al-Khaldi)
ISN 514: Abdullah al-Anazi (Abdallah Faris al-Unazi Thani)
ISN 647: Zaban al-Shammari (al-Shamaree)
ISN 231: Abdulhadi al-Sharikh (al-Sharakh)
ISN 218: Fahd al-Fawzan (al-Fouzan)
ISN 342: Mohammed al-Qurbi
ISN 318: Rami al-Juaid (Rami bin Said al-Taibi)
ISN 67: Abdulrazak al-Sharikh (al-Sharekh or Abd al-Razzaq Abdallah Ibrahim al-Tamini)
ISN 322: Khalid al-Sharif (al-Barakat)
ISN 126: Salim al-Shihri (Salam Abdullah Said)
ISN 79 Fahd al-Harazi (Fahed)
ISN 51: Majid Barayan (al-Barayan)
ISN 196: Mousa al-Amri (Musa)
ISN 274: Bakri al-Samiri (Bader al-Bakri al-Samiri)
ISN 368: Amran Hawsawi
ISN 493: Abdul Hakim Bukhari (Bukhary)

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the eleven prisoners released from February to June 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 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, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here).

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

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

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

Mamdouh Habib

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

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

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

Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost

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

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

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

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

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

I found his comments on the “library” at Guantánamo to be an extraordinarily eloquent insight into the all-pervading repression of the regime at the prison. Unlike convicted criminals on the US mainland, who watch TV and have regular access to reading and writing materials, the prisoners in Guantánamo –- who have never been charged with a crime, let alone convicted –- are deprived of almost all “comfort items” to relieve the crushing monotony of their daily lives and the desperate uncertainty of their fate, and Abdul Aziz’ comments on the deliberate paucity of reading matter for the detainees is as damning, in its own way, as the stories related in the forthcoming book Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, which reveal how, in order to express themselves, and to shake off –- albeit temporarily –- the dehumanizing regime of mental and physical isolation, detainees scratched poems onto Styrofoam cups and passed them from cell to cell when the guards were not looking.

It also strikes me that, by failing to provide educational possibilities to the detainees –- offering English lessons, for example –- and by providing them with almost nothing to read except the Koran, the authorities in charge of Guantánamo are not only demonstrating the meanness of their spirit, but are also doing absolutely nothing to bridge the gap between their own culture and those of the detainees, reinforcing the bellicose aspects of the “War on Terror” at the expense of bridge-building exercises that would not only provide a shred of humanity, but would also provide opportunities to break down cultural barriers through mutual understanding.

This is the text of Abdul Aziz’ letter, as first reproduced on Cageprisoners:

“I was meeting with my attorney in Guantánamo Bay. After conversing about some legal questions related to my case, we turned to the issue of the Delta Camp library in Guantánamo, and about the false propaganda being spread by the camp administration about that library.

“Some people think that the Gitmo camp library is a big hall with large drawers, well-organized shelves, shiny marble floors, state-of-the-art electronic catalog system for a rich library in which the detainees browse morning and evening, choosing the best of the available books in all fields and sundry sciences, in many different languages –- just like that magnificent library I used to walk through five years ago when I was a student at Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud University in Riyadh, conducting my scholastic research work at the time.

“The truth, as all will attest, is that the Gitmo camp library is nothing more than two small gray boxes with which guards walk around in some cell blocks, carrying them above their heads to protect themselves from the burning sun, or, at best, dragging them on a dolly with two little wheels. Inside the two boxes, there are no more than a combination of old, worn-out books, with their covers and some of their leaves torn by rain and other adverse factors that surround these two boxes. Furthermore, they are the same books that have been passed by the detainees for years. Arabic-speaking detainees are given access to a collection of boring works of fantasy fiction in addition to books filled with atheism and possibly attacks on Islam and some of its precepts. After continuous, arduous efforts by detainees and their counsel, one religious book was finally allowed in Camp 4 [the camp for the ‘most compliant’ detainees] for each 40 detainees.

“Afghani detainees, on the other hand, are provided with several literary works in Pashto and Farsi. These books have not changed since the itinerant box library was formed some years ago. If we look at the books that are available in the other common camp languages, we will not fail to see a book or two in each language –- worn out and covered with cobweb[s]. The opposite –- and shining –- side of this itinerant box is the majority of reading material available in English, which is not spoken or read by the overwhelming majority of inmates. You will surely find books about American history and the founding fathers. The detainees can do no more than turn these books this way and that and enjoy their shiny covers, not knowing what the books are about or gaining any knowledge of their contents.

“In addition, you will find worn-out copies and old issues of National Geographic. A few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of that magazine from the ruins of books in that dilapidated box and was astonished that the issue I picked up was dated 1973 –- over 30 years ago. I asked the itinerant box carrier (the librarian, as the administration likes to call him) if I could have a more recent issue, dated 2000 or above. Evidently tired of carrying these boxes and walking around with them, he replied very calmly, ‘You have five more minutes to choose the books you want. This is all we have.’ I thanked him for performing this arduous task and making this strenuous effort, placed that magazine on top of the stack of books in the box, and told him as nicely as I could, ‘please take my number off the check-out list. As of today, I will have no need for your plentiful library.’ He smiled broadly, looked at his wrist watch, carried his box on his head, and retreated to where he came from.”

Note: For security reasons, Abdul Aziz does not wish to be identified by his surname.

The “library” in action.

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.

As published on the Huffington Post.

On the one hand, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, close adviser to Dick Cheney and convicted perjurer, had his two and a half year sentence –- for covering his boss’s ass and lying about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame –- conveniently dismissed by the President, who called it “excessive.” Libby, sensitive news outlets informed us, will still have to pay a fine of $250,000 and suffer two years of probation, but while his story, which emerged on 2 July, was still dominating the media, Independence Day itself was marked by an Associated Press article which focused on those at the other end of Bush’s scale of justice: the “enemy combatants” of Guantánamo Bay, who, we learned from the recently installed prison commander Navy Rear Admiral Mark H. Buzby, may, after 2,000 days of illegal imprisonment without charge and without trial, be allowed to watch a movie once a week.

Buzby explained that this privilege would initially be extended to the “best-behaved” prisoners, the 45 men –- mostly Afghans –- held in Camp 4, a communal block reserved for the “most compliant” prisoners, and explained that the authorities had recently started allowing these prisoners to watch soccer matches and other programs vetted for jihadi content, including nature documentaries and episodes of “Deadliest Catch,” a Discovery Channel series about crab fishing crews off the Alaskan coast. Buzby added that there were even plans to introduce TV-watching privileges to the 330 or so prisoners held in Camps 5 and 6, the blocks modeled on “Supermax” prisons on the mainland, where the prisoners are held in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day in windowless cells.

After describing plans to increase the almost non-existent recreational areas in both these camps, Buzby said that the authorities were considering a way to allow the prisoners in Camp 6 –- “and possibly Camp 5,” reserved for the “least compliant” prisoners, or those with purported “intelligence value” –- to watch some television, perhaps putting the TV set on a cart so that they could watch programs in the recreation area. “We’re proceeding cautiously forward with these initiatives and as long as everybody behaves themselves we will probably be able to provide these things,” the commander added.

There is, of course, more to this story than is at first apparent. What Buzby failed to mention was that those held in solitary confinement in Camps 5 and 6 include at least 80 prisoners who have been cleared for release for at least a year, and that, unlike prisoners on the US mainland –- say, for example, convicted mass murderers –- who are regularly allowed visits by family members, and, typically, have unlimited access to books, TV, music, pens and paper, the prisoners in Guantánamo have, for five and a half years, only been allowed to have a copy of the Koran, have never been allowed family visits, have persistently had all correspondence to and from their families either “misplaced,” delayed or heavily censored, have only had sporadic access to books, have had no access to TV, except when granted as a reward for cooperation by their interrogators, and have had no access to music –- with the exception of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” which was played every morning in the early days of Camp X-Ray, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which, until 2005, was regularly broadcast to interrupt evening prayers, and, it should be noted, the songs by, amongst others, Eminem, Li’l Kim and Rage Against the Machine that were regularly played at deafening volume, and for many long hours, as part of the process of “setting the conditions” for interrogations that were introduced by Major General Geoffrey Miller during his tenure as the prison commander in 2002 and 2003, when this aural assault was frequently accompanied by strobe lighting, and took place in rooms where the prisoners were short-shackled in painful positions and frequently left alone until they soiled themselves.

As for writing materials, a forthcoming book of poems by Guantánamo prisoners, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, edited and compiled by law professor Marc Falkoff, who represents 17 Yemeni prisoners, notes that poems written in Guantánamo by a wrongly imprisoned Afghan poet were scratched into a Styrofoam cup with a pebble and were then passed in secret from cell to cell. When the guards discovered what was happening, they smashed the cups and threw them away, fearing that it was a way of passing coded messages. As the military explained, poetry “presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defense] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language,” out of a fear that poetry’s allegorical imagery could be used to convey coded messages to militants outside.

Such is the military’s paranoia that when Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of the charity Reprieve, who represents several dozen prisoners in Guantánamo, met with Ahmed Errachidi, the wrongly imprisoned Moroccan chef who was recently released, he realized that there was no way that the recipes that Errachidi eagerly wrote out for him during their meetings would get past the military censors. Because Errachidi dared to speak out about the prisoners’ treatment in Guantánamo, he was regarded, erroneously, as an al-Qaeda commander, and Stafford Smith realized that his recipes would undoubtedly be construed by the authorities as coded plans for the construction of a nuclear bomb.

Small wonder, then, that when asked by the Associated Press for comments on the latest developments at Guantánamo, Marc Falkoff declared, “These Band-Aid measures are going to do nothing to help alleviate the hopelessness and despair that many of our clients are fighting,” and added, “I hope that learning about these ‘improvements’ will help the public understand how harsh our clients’ lives have been for more than five years.”

For more on the conditions in Guantánamo, see my book 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 CounterPunch.

Don’t miss Seymour Hersh’s essential article, The General’s Report, in this week’s New Yorker, based on interviews with former US army general Antonio Taguba. Ordered by the Pentagon to investigate abuses at Abu Ghraib by the 800th Military Police Brigade, Taguba was belittled by Rumsfeld and his acolytes after the report was published –- and was ultimately forced out of his job, even though he had not pointed out the culpability of senior officials because it was not in his remit. “They always shoot the messenger,” Taguba told Hersh. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal –- that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.”

More important is the following passage:

“From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These MP troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”

And this:

“There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff” –- the explicit images –- “was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

An eye for an eye, an ‘enemy combatant’ for an ‘enemy combatant’

Over at Tomdispatch, in Blowback, Detainee-Style, Karen J. Greenberg, the executive director of New York University’s Center on Law and Security, notes how the US administration has lost the high moral ground in the case of four Iranian-American scholars and activists held as “detainees” in Iran, and “accused of being spies and/or employees of the US government intent on fomenting dissent and disruption within Iran.”

Sounds familiar? Greenberg explains why:

In numerous ways, the US has robbed itself of the right to proclaim the very principles by which these prisoners should be defended. Though President Bush and his spokespersons may not see it, their past policies have set a trap for the government –- and for Americans generally. More than five years after setting up Guantánamo, and then implementing national security strategies based upon torture, secret prisons, and illegal detentions, the Bush administration has managed to obliterate the moral high ground they now seek to claim in relation to Iran.

And this:

At the inception of the war on terror, the Bush administration broke the very rules it now accuses the Iranians of breaking. As part of a high-stakes stand-off with countries associated with Islamic fundamentalism, it was the Bush administration that first collected individuals, some guilty of crimes, some simply swept up in the chaos –- initially off the Afghan battlefield and then off the global one. Often, they did so with very little knowledge of, or care about, whom they were rounding up. They incarcerated these prisoners for long periods without releasing their names or, often, their whereabouts; they refused to give them the established rights of prisoners of war; they defied the united protests of allies around the world; and they sought to justify this whole policy with the term “detainee.”

Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak

And on the front page of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, The Prison Poets Of Guantánamo Find a Publisher gives a welcome boost to Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, an 84-page anthology of poems by 17 Guantánamo prisoners. Edited by Marc Falkoff, an English Literature graduate, law professor and attorney for 17 Guantánamo prisoners from the Yemen, this slim but attractive volume will be published in August by the University of Iowa Press. Here’s a sample, by imprisoned al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj (translated from Arabic), describing the US authorities’ unsuccessful attempts to recruit him to spy on his al-Jazeera colleagues:

The oppressors are playing with me,
As they move freely around the world.
They ask me to spy on my countrymen,
Claiming it would be a good deed.
They offer me money and land,
And freedom to go where I please.
Their temptations seize
My attention like lightning in the sky.
But their gift is an empty snake,
Carrying hypocrisy in its mouth like venom.

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.