Lawyers and NGOs aware of Algeria’s poor human rights record disagreed, as did some of the Algerian prisoners themselves, to the extent that the last two Algerians sent home — Abdul Aziz Naji in July 2010 and Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed in January 2011 — had actively resisted being sent home, and had taken their cases all the way to the US Supreme Court, which had paved the way for their enforced return by refusing to accept their appeals.

In assessing whether or not it was safe for Algerians to be repatriated from Guantánamo, the US government was required to weigh Algeria’s established reputation for using torture against the “diplomatic assurances” agreed between Washington and Algiers, whereby, as an Obama administration official told the Washington Post at the time of Naji’s repatriation, the Algerian government had promised that prisoners returned from Guantánamo “would not be mistreated.” The US official added, “We take some care in evaluating countries for repatriation. In the case of Algeria, there is an established track record and we have given that a lot of weight. The Algerians have handled this pretty well: You don’t have recidivism and you don’t have torture.”

According to research I undertook after Abdul Aziz Naji’s enforced repatriation, by speaking to the men’s attorneys, the US government was able to justify its claims because there had been no recorded incidents of torture amongst the ten Algerians previously released from Guantánamo. Although they were held incommunicado for 12 days by the Department of Intelligence and Security (DRS), as permitted under Algerian law, none of them reported being physically abused. In addition, although they all faced dubious trials after their return — generally about 15 months after their repatriation — and although they also suffered prejudice because of the perceived “taint” of Guantánamo, they had not been convicted on trumped-up charges, and had been released after their trials.

I cannot guarantee that I was able to ascertain the exact details of what happened to each of the ten men, but until two weeks ago the most troubling information from Algeria relating to the Guantánamo prisoners appeared to be the 20-year sentence delivered in absentia against Ahmed Belbacha, one of the four Algerians cleared for release but still held, on trumped-up charges of “membership of a terrorist group active overseas.” As far as his lawyers can ascertain, this sentence only came about because Belbacha had been vocal in his opposition to being repatriated, based on his fears about the government, and about the Islamists who had prompted him to flee the country in the first place when they threatened him while he was working for a government-owned oil company.

On January 16, however, any comfort to be gleaned from the Algerian government’s refusal to imprison those returned from Guantánamo for the other Algerians who do not wish to be repatriated — and who, by my reckoning, are Nabil Hadjarab (PDF), Motai Saib and Djamel Ameziane (PDF), who were all cleared for release by military review boards under the Bush administration — dissipated when, as AFP reported, Abdul Aziz Naji received a three-year sentence “for membership of an extremist group active overseas.”

As AFP explained, “The prosecution had sought a 10-year prison sentence and a 5,000-euro ($6,330) fine” for Naji (described as Nadji Abdelaziz). Following the ruling, Naji’s lawyer, Hassiba Boumerdassi, said she would appeal, describing it as “an unprecedented ruling” in Algeria, although AFP pointed out that there was a precedent — the in absentia sentence against Ahmed Belbacha, and those who have studied what happened when Algerians were repatriated from the UK with “assurances” a few years ago are even less convinced. As a friend with close knowledge of the Algerians’ cases explained to me, one of them “was given the same sentence with the same accusation in 2007 when he returned home and another is still serving an 8 year sentence on his return.” She added, “Yet the Home Office claims that Algeria is now a country where it is safe to return the Algerian detainees here despite some of them still bearing the torture marks of Algeria’s torture chambers,” and the echoes with the US government’s view of the “safety” of Algeria are surely not coincidental.

Neverthless, this was the first sentence delivered in person against a former Guantánamo prisoner, and, as the legal action charity Reprieve noted in a follow-up report, Naji, an amputee “who is suffering from serious health complications due to the amputation of his leg,” has had his worst fears confirmed with his conviction. As Reprieve also noted, the charge against him “derived from the unsubstantiated accusations the US administration made against him in 2002.”

In an appeal, the NGO Cageprisoners also noted that, although Naji “returned to his family and tried to start a new life,” he “was deprived of any identity documents and suffered from depression, anxiety and other symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder due to his treatment in American custody.” Cageprisoners also explained that he was under “judicial supervision” and “had to sign a register every week at the local police station,” and also explianed that on the day of his trial he had been arrested without warning and taken to the court.

Reprieve added that, during his trial, “the prosecutor presented no evidence of Mr. Naji’s guilt — rather, the judge simply questioned him and produced a guilty verdict,” and also noted that he “is being held in the notorious El Harache prison in Algiers, where violent abuse of prisoners has been reported by Amnesty International.”

Reprieve also stated:

His family is deeply concerned about his rapidly deteriorating health, and his lawyer reports that his condition has become critical and is worsening by the day. He has not had access to adequate medical treatment while in prison.

Mustafa Bouchachi, the president of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights, visited Mr. Naji in prison on Wednesday and attested to Mr. Naji’s critical health condition. He reports that Mr. Naji is on hunger strike as “the only way that he has to protest his unjust treatment — first by the US authorities in Guantánamo and now in his own country.” Mr Naji further explained that his imprisonment in Algeria is bringing back to him his horrible and unjustified years in Guantánamo.

Katie Taylor, of Reprieve’s “Life After Guantánamo” project, added, “It is outrageous that Mr. Naji is being punished again for the same discredited accusations that the US used to hold him in Guantánamo for eight years without charge or trial — this time in his own country. Algerian authorities must restore his right to a fair trial and overturn his conviction on faulty charges for which the prosecutor did not even bother to introduce evidence.”

As Reprieve also noted, Abdul Aziz Naji is represented in the US by Ellen Lubell and Doris Tennant, who prepared the following profile with the Center for Constitutional Rights:

Mr. Naji was born in Batna, Algeria in 1975. After sixth grade, he began work in his father’s blacksmith shop and later completed his required military service in the Algerian Army. After his service, Mr. Naji, like many young Muslims, travelled to Mecca on pilgrimage and then, during early 2001, worked briefly with a reputable Pakistani charity, providing humanitarian assistance to needy Muslims and Christians in Kashmir. Offering to volunteer his services was important to his religious beliefs. While carrying food and clothing to poor villages one night with a group of other volunteers, Mr. Naji stepped on a landmine (one of many unexploded ordnance that lace the region) and sustained a serious injury, resulting in the loss of his lower right leg. He was taken to a hospital in Lahore, Pakistan where he was treated for several months and fit with a prosthetic leg. He spent many months after that in rehabilitation, living with a few generous families in the city who offered to board him.

An amputee with few resources and in need of the most basic assistance, Mr. Naji was directed by acquaintances to an Algerian in Peshawar to help find a wife. While visiting this man in May 2002, he and his host were arrested during a raid of the man’s house by Pakistani police, one of the many house raids in the area. The reason for the arrests was never explained. In fact, the Pakistanis told Mr. Naji that they would release him. But instead, he was taken by Americans stationed in Peshawar and transferred first to Bagram and then to Guantánamo where he was held for eight years without charge or trial before being forcibly repatriated to Algeria.

Note: In the hope of securing clemency from the Algerian government, Cageprisoners has drafted the following message to the Algerian Minister of Justice:

Monsieur le Ministre,

A la suite d’informations reçues de l’organisation britanique de défense des droits de l’Homme CagePrisoners, je vous exprime ma vive préoccupation concernant l’affaire d’Abdel Aziz Naji arrété le 16 janvier 2012 et condamné le jour même à trois ans de prison, accusé d’appartenir à un groupe terroriste opérant à l’étranger. Il apparaît que cette condamnation n’a pas été prononcée dans des conditions compatibles avec celle d’un procès équitable.

Alors que l’Egypte a mis fin à la détention injuste d’Adel Al-Gazzar, alors que des anciens détenus tunisiens de Guantanmo ont pu regagner leur pays d’origine en toute sécurité et alors que les nouvelles autorités tunisiennes se sont engagées à tout faire pour obtenir la libération de ses cinq citoyens toujours détenus sur l’île cubaine, l’Algérie incarcère un homme qui a déjà passé 8 ans à Guantanamo sans procès, et ce sur la base de vagues accusations et, semble t-il, de manière expéditive.

Je vous demande donc la libération immédiate d’Abdel Aziz Naji.

Je vous prie de recevoir l’expression de mes salutations distinguées.

The message can be sent by email, or by post to: M. Tayeb Belaiz, Ministère de la Justice, 8 Place Bir Hakem, El-Biar, Alger. The phone number is (213) 021-92-41-83 and the fax number is (213) 021-92-17-01.

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

This was not because of anything he had done, but because, as a critic of the regime, he had left the country in 2001, and had been in Pakistan, undertaking humanitarian work in a refugee camp when he was caught in a US bombing raid (which, with subsequent medical neglect on the part of the US authorities, led to him losing a leg). As a result, following his departure from Egypt, he had been given a three-year sentence in absentia by the Egyptian State Security Court for his alleged part in a supposed plot that was known as al-Wa’ad.

This, as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm explained, was “the first major terrorism case in Egypt” after the 9/11 attacks, in which the defendants — 94 in total — were charged with “attempting to overthrow former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime and infiltrate Palestinian territory.” However, the case “was widely condemned as an attempt by Mubarak to suppress his Islamist opponents,” and this was an interpretation that carried considerable weight, as “[m]ore than half of the suspects were subsequently released.”

From America, Adel al-Gazzar’s attorney, Ahmed Ghappour, “call[ed] for the charges to be dropped.” By phone from New York, he told Al-Masry Al-Youm, “I think primarily they should be dismissed on humanitarian grounds because of what he suffered.” That was an assessment of al-Gazzar’s time in US custody, but reflecting on the Egyptian side of his story, and the trumped-up charges that led to his in absentia sentence, he added, “Such cases were often used as a tool by the Mubarak regime to silence dissent.”

Al-Gazzar’s story, in his own words, can be found in an extraordinary interview conducted in Slovakia last year by former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, but to recap briefly, as Ahmed Ghappour explained in a press release yesterday:

Mr. al-Gazzar was handed over to the US while recovering in a Pakistani hospital from injuries sustained while volunteering with the International Committee of the Red Crescent on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. He was hit by a US air strike while helping refugees displaced by the onset of war.

In the midst of his recovery, he was transferred to a US prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was subject to severe beatings, exposure to freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation for days on end, and suspension by the wrists. He received no medical attention during his time in Kandahar, and as a result, his leg was infected with gangrene so severe that it had to be amputated.

Ahmed Ghappour stated, “Mr. al-Gazzar has literally lost life and limb as a result of his unlawful detention by the United States. The last thing he deserves is to return to prison for a sham prosecution that was initiated by the abusive Mubarak regime.”

Nevertheless, he told Al-Masry Al-Youm of his concerns that al-Gazzar would be convicted and imprisoned after another sham trial, even after the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s hated regime. “The Egyptians have a track record of abuse and one that we’ve seen continued in the post-Mubarak era,” Ghappour said, reflecting on the mixed record of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took over the government after Mubarak’s resignation in February — on the one hand, the announcement of the trial, in August, of former President Mubarak, his two sons Gamal and Alaa and businessman Hussein Salem, who will face charges of “intentional murder, attempted murder of demonstrators, abuse of power to intentionally waste public funds and unlawfully profiting from public funds for them and for others,” but, on the other, the sentencing of at least 7,000 civilians in military courts since Hosni Mubarak was ousted, a much higher number than before the dictator’s fall.

“I think there is a bigger picture here, to be honest,” Ghappour added. “The question is: how will the transitional regime receive him, considering that the prosecution was based on a political crime of dissent? Does Mubarak’s departure mark a game change for the post-9/11 cases? Will he be treated differently because he was in Guantánamo Bay?”

That question has not yet been answered. As Al-Masry Al-Youm reported, “Following his arrest, the officers allowed [al-Gazzar's] wife and four children to meet with him and check up on him at the airport after his lengthy absence from the country. The authorities then proceeded to begin the legal paperwork needed to send Gazzar to the prosecution so they could determine their position regarding his case.”

Abdul Ghappour also explained that he had spoken with al-Gazzar on Sunday, as he was preparing for his flight. “He seemed really hopeful to come back home,” he said, adding, “Mr. al-Gazzar, you’d call him a true patriot. He loves Egypt and he has been dying to go back home for 10 years to be reunited with his countrymen and his family.” As his London-based lawyers at Reprieve also explained:

He had not seen his family, including his wife and four children, for a decade. Efforts by his family to visit him in Slovakia were thwarted. And, recently, his mother suffered a cerebral haemorrhage which has left her paralysed and requiring full time care.

It is to be hoped that Adel al-Gazzar will be released soon, as he has already suffered more than enough. Held at Guantánamo for nine years despite being cleared for release back in 2004, he then found himself imprisoned again — in a detention center in Slovakia, described by local media as “a police detention facility for illegal migrants.” He and two other men released in Slovakia were held there while the government failed to sort out their status in the country, obliging al-Gazzar to embark on a hunger strike to raise awareness of their plight and secure them proper housing and residential status, but as another of his lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, explained:

This is the third time Adel has been punished for completely unsubstantiated allegations. [His] persecution … makes a mockery of everything the revolution stands for. Where is the new dawn? Justice and the rule of law must return to Egypt. We hope the Egyptian military will put an end to Adel’s decade-long ordeal.

This is my hope too, as it would be deeply disturbing if, after all he has gone through, and everything that was done to avoid him being tortured in Egypt, he were to end up abused by the successors to Mubarak’s reign of terror.

Dark ironies nevertheless pepper this case. At the time of his release from Guantánamo, for example, when the US government complied with his request not to be repatriated to Egypt, as he feared torture at the hands of the Mubarak regime, everyone who supported his release — relieved that he had been freed after a six-year wait — politely refused to point out how grimly ironic it was that al-Gazzar — and another cleared Egyptian, Sharif al-Mishad, who was released in Albania in February 2010 — couldn’t be repatriated because of fears that they would be tortured by the same torturers who had been some of the Bush administration’s closest friends when it came to torturing other prisoners seized in the “War on Terror.”

Two of those unfortunate prisoners were Mamdouh Habib, the Australian citizen rendered by the CIA from Pakistan, whose torture was personally directed by Mubarak’s spy chief Omar Suleiman, and Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, a Pakistani religious scholar rendered to torture from Indonesia, where he had been sorting out his late father’s affairs, on nothing more than the vaguest of hunches that he was involved in some way with terrorism (which he wasn’t).

There were others, detailed in an account I compiled for the United Nations in 2010, and undoubtedly others whose stories have not yet surfaced, but the most celebrated prisoner sent by the US to be tortured in Egypt was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan, who, after being picked up crossing into Pakistan form Afghanistan in December 2001, was sent to Egypt, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that two al-Qaeda operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. Although he recanted his false confession, it was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. As for al-Libi, after his usefulness was finally exhausted, he was rendered back to Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi disposed of him in May 2009, telling the world that he had committed suicide in a prison cell.

On Tuesday, the next step took place in Adel al-Gazzar’s case, as reported in the Egyptian media. Via Mohamed Za’er, the director of the Egypt-based Human Rights Association for the Assistance of Prisoners, Daily News Egypt explained that, on Tuesday, military prosecutors had referred him to “an appeals prison not usually used for political prisoners.”

Daily News Egypt also reported that the verdict against al-Gazzar was “contested … before the military court” on Tuesday, noting also that the court “is expected to look into the case within 60 days.” Mohamed Za’er explained, “If approved, al-Gazzar will be granted a re-trial, though it is no longer a crime to be a member in an Islamist group following the January 25 Revolution. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood now has an official political party after being banned for years.”

That ought to be a good sign, but in Egypt, still caught between the end of Mubarak’s rule and a hoped-for transition to free and fair elections, nothing is certain.

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

“For nearly a decade,” the article explained, “the US has conducted a major cloak-and-missile campaign against al-Qaeda, teaming up with friendly Arab leaders to swap intelligence, interrogate suspects, train commandos or carry out military strikes from Morocco to Iraq … Now popular movements sweeping the region have knocked some counterterrorism allies from power, and left others too distracted or politically vulnerable to risk open cooperation with the US. Intelligence-sharing has already slowed in some areas as the US struggles to identify reliable counterparts in reshuffled governments.”

One official said, “It’s difficult to share information when you don’t know who the players are.”

The article also claimed, “The upheaval has upended US foreign policy in the region, with old friends shaken or gone and the allegiance of emerging leaders uncertain. The effects on counterterrorism efforts are one of the aftershocks that worry the intelligence community the most.”

Barnes and Embus also quoted government officials as telling them that they had “lost track of many former Guantánamo detainees who had been sent home to the Middle East and North Africa,” and that losing track of these former prisoners was “a sign that unrest in the region is disrupting critical terror-fighting relationships America has built up since the Sept. 11 attacks.”

Why US intelligence officials’ statements to the Wall Street Journal are disturbing

There were problems with these claims that neither journalist picked up; namely, that the claim about “losing track” of former prisoners is, to put it bluntly, a lie, and also that the revolutionary “unrest” that has toppled the regimes of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt can legitimately be viewed not as “disrupting” what US intelligence agencies regard as “critical terror-fighting relationships” but as hugely popular revolutionary movements that have removed from power two hated dictators whose oppression of their people was only possible because they were backed by the US and by other Western countries.

For these home-grown revolutionary movements, the description of their hated dictators as “friendly Arab leaders,” with whom the United States was cosily involved in “swap[ping] intelligence” and “interrogat[ing] suspects,” will, if widely disseminated in the region, only reinforce the notion that America cannot be trusted. This is because one of the drivers of the revolutionary movement in Egypt was a thorough disgust at how the government’s “emergency powers,” enforced continually throughout Mubarak’s 30 years in power, underpinned an essentially unaccountable regime of torture prisons run by the state security services, and secretive courts handing down punitive sentences and laundering information derived through the use of torture, without anything resembling due process. Similar complaints also drove the Tunisian uprising, which lit the spark of revolution throughout the Middle East in the first place.

The tension between America’s perceived security needs and the desires of the people of the Middle East was clearly recognized in the Wall Street Journal article, which noted, “Publicly, the Obama administration has embraced the democratic tide, arguing that political freedoms will diminish the standing of al-Qaeda in the Middle East and beyond,” and quoting defense secretary Robert Gates stating that “the pro-democracy protests ‘give the lie’ to al-Qaeda’s message that change is possible only through violence,” and that they “are an extraordinary setback for al-Qaeda.”

This ought to be the key message that America takes from the upheavals sweeping the Middle East, although the Wall Street Journal also noted, “Privately, counterterrorism officials in the US and Europe are watching the sweeping changes with a mixture of alarm and dread,” worried about Yemen, long regarded as a dangerously unstable nation, and also “worried that the level of cooperation from security services in Tunisia and Egypt, longtime partners, will decline as new leaders distance themselves from past abuses.”

It should also be noted that, when Robert Gates referred to the pro-democracy movements giving the lie to al-Qaeda’s message that “change is only possible through violence,” he ought to have reflected that the same message should apply equally to the US. Such an epiphany seems unlikely, but although this places America in an unusual position with regard to the bigger picture of the upheavals in the region — largely confined to watching as people’s movements take the initiative themselves — on other details, such as claims about the value of America’s relationship with regimes notorious for their use of torture, and the significance of prisoners released from Guantánamo, it is more than possible to refute claims that seek to suggest that the crimes, mistakes and distortions of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” are in any way justified.

Why there is no threat from former Guantánamo prisoners in Egypt or Tunisia

In the first instance, to thoroughly undermine the claim that the US government is “losing track” of former prisoners — and to demonstrate that this encounter between the Wall Street Journal and US intelligence was therefore something of a propaganda construct — it is only necessary to consider that, in the only countries where “unrest” has toppled dictators — Tunisia and Egypt — only four former Guantánamo prisoners have been released, and none of them are even remotely involved in anything to do with terrorism.

In Egypt, one of the two men is Sami El-Laithi (aka El-Leithi, and spelled Allaithy by the US authorities). Now 55 years old, he had been teaching at the University of Kabul when the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began in October 2001, and, like many hundreds of others, he was seized and sent to Guantánamo after escaping to Pakistan. Unlike any other Guantánamo prisoner, however, El-Laithi was so brutally set upon by guards in Guantánamo one evening that they broke his spine, and he has been confined to a wheelchair ever since. Returned to Egypt on October 1, 2005, he was then held by Egypt’s state security agency at a special prison section in Cairo’s El-Qasr Al-Eini Hospital, and has stated his belief that, had he not been physically handicapped, he would not have been released. Now largely confined to his home village, outside Cairo, he is neither a threat nor an unknown quantity.

Had El-Laithi not been crippled, his thoughts about how he would not have been released from Egyptian custody reflect what happened to Reda Fadel El-Weleli (identified in Guantánamo as Fael Roda Al-Waleeli), the first Egyptian transferred from Guantánamo to Egypt, who arrived in Cairo on July 1, 2003, and subsequently disappeared. 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.

In Tunisia, the US government also knows the whereabouts of the two men it transferred to Tunisian custody in June 2007, who, it should be noted, had been cleared for release by a military review board convened under President Bush. Until very recently, both were in prison, having been imprisoned after show trials on their return, despite the signing of a “diplomatic assurance” between the US government and President Ben Ali, which purported to guarantee that they would be treated fairly when repatriated.

One of the two, Lotfi Lagha, was freed after his three-year sentence came to an end last year, and the other, Abdallah Hajji, was freed in February this year after the flight of Ben Ali. The eight-year sentence he had been given in 2007 was overturned, amidst the recognition that he had never been involved in any kind of terrorism, and was, instead, a member of Ennahdha, the Islamic opposition group, banned by Ben Ali, whose members were conveniently labeled as terrorists during the “War on Terror.” Both men can easily be found in Tunisia, as a former exiled political opponent of the regime, Fathi Messaoudi, explained to me when I met him a few days ago.

Having recently returned to Tunisia for the first time in 20 years, Messaoudi, a charismatic blind man who was regarded as such a threat by Ben Ali that he had been given a 75-year prison sentence by the former regime, told me that he met Abdallah Hajji and that, although he relished his freedom, he too was a broken man, and had been haunted, since his imprisonment on his return to Tunisia, by threats that his wife and daughters would be brought before him by the secret police and raped.

Why America’s intelligence services still love arbitrary detention and torture

In addition, another intention regarding the US claims about former prisoners in Tunisia and Egypt appears to be to cast doubts on the security of both countries following their popular revolutions and the flight of their dictators. This, too, is groundless, and is nothing more than scaremongering, because, although there are policing problems in Tunisia, the country is ruled by an interim government that consists primarily of Ben Ali’s former colleagues (in other words, America’s long-standing allies in the region). Similarly, in Egypt, the interim government — the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces — consists of Mubarak’s former colleagues, even though, in the end, the army’s senior generals chose to seize power themselves rather than entrusting it to Hosni Mubarak’s chosen successor, Omar Suleiman.

As was noted before Mubarak’s fall, if there was to be meaningful change in Egypt, it could not involve Suleiman, the former spy chief who not only symbolized the brutality of Egypt’s police state to its own citizens, but was also central to the key role played by Egypt as a partner in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” personally overseeing the brutal torture of terror suspects seized by the CIA, including the Australian Mamdouh Habib, the Pakistani scholar Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, and the Libyan Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan. Under torture — almost certainly at Suleiman’s hands — al-Libi falsely confessed that Saddam Hussein had met two al-Qaeda operatives to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons, a tortured lie that, although retracted by al-Libi (who was later returned to Libya and a suspicious death by “suicide” in 2009), was used by the Bush administration to justify its illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell was persuaded to use it in a key presentation to the United Nations the month before.

Even so, positive perceptions of Omar Suleiman and Hosni Mubarak are at the heart of the US intelligence officials’ complaints about the changing political landscape in the Middle East. “Obviously, our most important relationship over the last decade has been Egypt,” a senior US intelligence official told the Wall Street Journal. “And clearly that is in line for significant change. We won’t re-create the relationship we had with Mubarak.”

Examining the importance of that relationship, the article proceeded to mention — with obvious approval — how, “Before this year’s revolts, the secret police in authoritarian countries like Egypt and Tunisia had far more leeway than the US and its European allies to hold detainees indefinitely and use interrogation methods widely regarded by human-rights groups as torture to try to extract information,” and that the Egyptian government also “secretly held and interrogated Islamist militants who had been captured by the CIA and the US military under a practice known as rendition, widely condemned by human-rights groups.”

Remove the careful caveats from the sentences above, and what you have is a clear statement that the US and at least some of its Western allies enjoyed the fact that, under Hosni Mubarak, prisoners could be kidnapped anywhere in the world and rendered to Egypt, where they could be detained indefinitely and tortured — and it is, to be honest, rather disturbing to be hearing US officials stating so openly, in 2011, how they wish that torture was still something they could use.

Why there is no threat from former Guantánamo prisoners in Libya or Yemen

With the US intelligence services’ love of torture exposed, and the misinformation about former prisoners in Tunisia and Egypt debunked, it is clear that the central premises of the Wall Street Journal article — that former Guantánamo prisoners, unmonitored, are on the loose in the Middle East, and that the governments responsible for monitoring them have either been toppled or are too distracted by their own revolutionary movements — do not stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

Moreover, looking at countries other than Tunisia and Egypt, similar problems can be perceived. The article, for example, also specifically mentioned Libya and Yemen. “The flow of information from Libya, Yemen and other governments in the region about the whereabouts and activities of the former Guantánamo detainees, along with other Islamists released from local prisons, has slowed or even stopped,” officials told the Wall Street Journal, adding that “they fear that former detainees will re-join al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups.”

Again, on close inspection, what is portrayed as a problem engendered by the revolutionary movements spreading across the Middle East, and also as one on a significant scale, is easily dismissed when the facts are introduced. In Libya, for example, where, rather terrifyingly, the counterterrorism relationship between the US and Gaddafi, another blatant torturer, was described by a senior US official as “especially productive,” only two former Guantánamo prisoners have been released, and as I explained in a recent article, “Deranged Gaddafi Blames Ex-Guantánamo Prisoners for Unrest in Libya, Even Though Only One Ex-Prisoner Has Been Released,” one of these men is still imprisoned in Tripoli, and the other, freed last summer, is verifiably not involved in any al-Qaeda activities. Nor, outside of wild claims by Colonel Gaddafi, has there been any serious suggestion that al-Qaeda, as such, is involved in the Libyan people’s uprising against their hated dictator, which, as elsewhere, is led primarily by young people rather than religious organizations, and supported by trade unionists and intellectuals.

With this in mind, it is noticeable that the Wall Street Journal‘s commentary on the Guantánamo prisoners repatriated to Libya was nothing more than a succession of errors. “In Libya, the US has been completely cut off,” the article claimed, citing an Obama administration official stating, “It’s dead with Gaddafi. We don’t know the status of the people [the returned prisoners].” The article then falsely claimed that both men had been returned in 2006, when one was returned in October 2007, and although it was correctly stated that, since their return, “US officials have paid multiple visits to the men in Libyan prisons,” it was, again, mistaken to suggest that, “once the uprising in Libya boiled over into a full-blown rebellion and the US called for Col. Moammar Gaddafi to step down, American officials lost track of the two men,” because, as indicated above, one remains in prison, and the other can easily be traced, and is very clearly no threat to anyone — as the Americans realized when they released him in 2007.

Similarly, in Yemen, the explicit claims made in the article that “US and European officials are increasingly concerned that former Guantánamo detainees are no longer under much, if any, government surveillance” is, fundamentally, nothing more than unjustifiable scaremongering. The authorities may well be concerned because they have, according to the article, “detected an uptick in activity by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” with a senior counterterrorism official claiming that “the group is ‘very actively’ plotting new strikes against the US during the lull in American and Yemeni counterterrorism operations” caused by the revolutionary upheavals in Yemen in the last two months.

However, this has nothing to do with the prisoners released from Guantánamo. According to US intelligence, a handful of Saudi ex-prisoners released by President Bush have been involved in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but only one Yemeni ex-prisoner — Hani Abdo Shaalan (aka Hani Abdu Shu’alan), released in June 2007 and apparently killed by Yemeni security forces in December 2009.

To get the Yemeni story in perspective, only 23 Yemeni prisoners have ever been released from Guantánamo, and in the last 15 months, just one Yemeni — Mohammed Hassan Odaini, a student seized by mistake while visiting other students in a university dormitory in Pakistan, who won his habeas corpus petition — has been freed.

Of the other 89 Yemenis still held in Guantánamo, 58 were cleared for release by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed all the Guantánamo cases throughout 2009, but they are still held because of an ongoing and open-ended moratorium on releasing any Yemenis, which was announced by President Obama in January 2010, after it was claimed that the failed plane bomber on Christmas Day 2009, the Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen.

Of the prisoners returned to Yemen, it is not actually difficult to establish that the overwhelming majority of them can be located easily, and are trying, with varying degrees of success, to rebuild their shattered lives. I recently, for example, spoke to David Remes, the attorney for several of the released prisoners, who told me about his recent meetings with them on a visit to Yemen, and updated me about their working lives, their hopes and aspirations, and their families.

Behind the headline-grabbing fears, this is the norm for Yemenis returned from Guantánamo, and the biggest problem Yemen causes to the US, when it comes to Guantánamo, is not those who have been released, but those who have not, because clearing men for release, and then not releasing them because of the perceived threat of terrorism from Yemen in general, tars the entire Yemeni population as terrorist sympathizers, and is, essentially, “guilt by nationality,” which is a deep insult to the Yemeni people, and a guaranteed basis for ill-feeling. In addition, as I have been explaining all year, it makes those held into political prisoners, no longer held because of any just or judicial process, but because of the whims of an unaccountable government.

If the US should draw one obvious lesson from what is happening throughout the Middle East, it ought to be that it is time for the paranoia and state-sanctioned violence of the “War on Terror” to be brought to an end. After all, Islamist militants have been conspicuously absent during the upheavals, which have been led primarily by young people, and the Islamic groups who have appeared have shown themselves willing to take part in the democratic process.

Nearly ten years after the 9/11 attacks, there is now an historic opportunity for the US to recognize that it is time to move on from a decade dominated by the lawlessness and brutality of al-Qaeda, and the lawlessness and brutality with which America responded, and to learn a lesson from the revolutionaries of the Middle East — that living in hope is far better than living in fear.

POSTSCRIPT April 3: A misleading article in the Wall Street Journal has focused on the role played in the resistance to Gaddafi by former opponents with alleged ties to al-Qaeda; specifically, Sufyan Ben Qumu (aka Abu Sufian Hamouda or Abu Sufian bin Qumu), the former Guantánamo prisoner who was freed from Libyan custody last year, after returning to Libya in 2007 and being subsequently imprisoned. Described by the Wall Street Journal as “training many of the city’s rebel recruits [in Darna],” which may be true, but sounds like an attempt to beef up a suggestion that he has volunteered to join the resistance to Gaddafi, it was also claimed that he was a “Libyan army veteran who worked for Osama bin Laden’s holding company in Sudan and later for an al Qaeda-linked charity in Afghanistan,” whereas, as I explained in a recent article:

[H]e had served in the Libyan army as a tank driver from 1979 to 1990, but was “arrested and jailed on multiple occasions for drug and alcohol offenses.” Having apparently escaped from prison in 1992, he fled to Sudan, where he worked as a truck driver. In an attempt to beef up the evidence against him, the Department of Defense alleged that the company he worked for, the Wadi al-Aqiq company, was “owned by Osama bin Laden,” and also attempted to claim that he joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group … even while admitting that an unidentified “al-Qaeda/LIFG facilitator” had described him as “a noncommittal LIFG member who received no training.”

After relocating to Pakistan, [he] apparently stayed there until the summer of 2001, when he and a friend crossed the border into Afghanistan, traveling to Jalalabad and then to Kabul, where [he] found a job working as an accountant for Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, the director of al-Wafa, a Saudi charity which provided humanitarian aid to Afghans, but which was regarded by the US authorities as a front for al-Qaeda … while working for al-Wafa, he traveled to Kunduz “to oversee the distribution of rice that was being guarded by four to five armed guards.” In Guantánamo, it seems, even the distribution of rice can be regarded as a component in a military operation.

Please note that no evidence was ever produced to establish that al-Wafa was “an al-Qaeda linked charity,” as the Wall Street Journal suggested so casually, and everyone connected with the organization, including al-Matrafi, was released from Guantánamo.

Fathi Messaoudi, the Tunisian dissident mentioned above, also told me that I was incorrect in describing Abdallah Hajji, the former Guantánamo prisoner freed in Tunisia following Ben Ali’s fall (after serving over three years of a sentence he was given after a show trial on his return in 2007), as a member of Ennahdha, even though that has been reported widely for many years. According to Messaoudi, Ennahdha members sought refuge in European countries, and none of them traveled to Afghanistan or Pakistan like other opponents of the regime.

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.

In the last week, there have been two significant developments. In the first, former Guantánamo prisoner Abdallah Hajji (also identified as Abdullah bin Amor), who is 55 years old, was freed from prison in Tunisia “as part of a promise by the interim government to free all political prisoners.” A former member of the previously banned Islamist political party Ennahdha, whose leader, Rachid Ghanouchi, returned from exile in France just two days earlier, Hajji, who was seized in April 2002 in Pakistan, where he had been living with his wife and children since fleeing Tunisia in 1989, had, in 1995, been sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison, on terrorism-related charges that his lawyer was convinced had been extracted through the torture and abuse of other prisoners in Tunisian custody. When Hajji was forcibly returned to Tunisia in June 2007, he was abused and threatened in custody, and then subjected to a show trial in which he received a seven-year sentence. His release therefore overturns this sentence, and confirms that he was being held as a political prisoner.

In the press report announcing Hajji’s release, it was also noted that the other man repatriated from Guantánamo with him, who was not named but is Lotfi Lagha, is also a free man, having been freed last June, three years after his return and a show trial in October 2007, in which he was given a three-year sentence.

While the freeing of a political prisoner formerly held in Guantánamo vindicates Abdallah Hajji, and must provide hope for many other Tunisian political prisoners, both inside Tunisia and elsewhere, the news from Italy, which coincided with the announcement about Hajji, was rather less encouraging. Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri, who was transferred from Guantánamo in December 2009 with another Tunisian, Adel Ben Mabrouk bin Hamida Boughanmi, was convicted on Monday of “criminal association with the aim of terrorism and sentenced to six years in prison.” His lawyer, Roberto Novellino, said he would appeal the verdict.

Nasseri may well be guilty of the charges against him, but what concerns me is that, on his transfer to Italy, it was made clear that Italian prosecutors were relying on a key witness, Lazhar Ben Mohamed Tlil, a terrorist suspect turned informant, who was apparently having second thoughts about his co-operation.

What also concerns me is the weakness of the evidence against Nasseri from Guantánamo which, essentially, boiled down to a single claim that he was “the head of the Tunisians in Afghanistan.” As I explained at the time of his transfer to Italy:

[This] may, of course, be true, but what makes it suspicious in the context of the intelligence-gathering at Guantánamo is that it comes from an allegation that he was “identified by a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant as having trained at the Khaldan camp and that he eventually took over as the Emir of the Tunisian Group in Afghanistan.”

References to “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant” in proceedings at Guantánamo invariably refer to “high-value detainees,” who, at the time, were held in secret CIA prisons where they were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; in other words, where they were tortured.

There is, of course, no indication as to who this particular “high-value detainee” was, but as the reference is to the Khaldan training camp, it seems likely that the allegation was made either by Abu Zubaydah (the gatekeeper of the camp, and the CIA’s most well-known torture victim, along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) or by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the CIA’s most famous “ghost prisoner.” Tortured in Egypt in 2002, al-Libi made a false confession about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Rendered to various other prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA in the four years that followed, he was returned to Libya in 2006, where he died in May [2009], reportedly by committing suicide.

As for the other Tunisians held — or formerly held — in Guantánamo, the signs, as anticipated, are that the three men released in third countries (because of their legitimate fears that, if returned, they would be abused, subjected to show trials and imprisoned like Abdallah Hajji and Lotfi Lagha), would now like to return home, although, as yet, there is no sign that any formal application to do so has been made — or, indeed, if their host countries, or the US, would object. These men are Rafiq al-Hami, who was released in Slovakia last January with two other men (from Egypt and Azerbaijan), Saleh Sassi, who was released in Albania in February last year (with an Egyptian and a Libyan), and Hedi Hammamy, who was released in Georgia last March (with two Libyans).

Of the five men still held in Guantánamo, I noted two weeks ago the likelihood that only one, Lotfi bin Ali (also identified as Mohammed Abdul Rahman) has been cleared for release by the Obama administration’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed the cases of all the Guantánamo prisoners throughout 2009, and recommended that, of the 173 men still held, 89 should be released, 33 should face trials and 48 should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

I also noted that, since a judge intervened to prevent his involuntary repatriation in October 2007, “no new home has been found for bin Ali in the last three years and four months, although now, presumably, there is no obstacle to his release, which should be demanded immediately,” and I maintain that there should be immediate calls for his repatriation, as it is, presumably, no longer unsafe for him to return. On this point, however, it may be that the Obama administration, or Congress — which has unconstitutionally asserted that it has a right to review prisoner releases before they occur — may conclude that, although a US judge ruled that Tunisia under Ben Ali was an unsafe destination for the return of Tunisian prisoners, post-dictatorship Tunisia may not yet be regarded as a safe option on the basis of “national security” concerns. I sincerely hope that this is not the case, as it will only demonstrate, as wth Egypt, how much America loves its dictators, but I have to concede that it is not beyond the realms of possibility.

The other four men, however, remain in limbo. One, Ridah al-Yazidi, was cleared for relase under the Bush administration, although it is unclear if Obama’s Task Force reached a similar conclusion, and the other three apparently face extradition to other countries to face trial. The Belgian govermment has expressed an interest in extraditing Adel Hakeemy (also cleared for release under President Bush) in connection with terrorist allegations in Belgium, as it has with Hisham Sliti, who, in addition, lost his habeas corpus petition in December 2008, and the Italian government has expressed an interest in extraditing Abdul Ourgy (who was also cleared for release under Bush).

Given that four of the five men remaining in Guantánamo were cleared under President Bush, there is clearly an argument to be made that the simplest solution would be to repatriate all four men, but, as mentioned in relation to Lotfi bin Ai, there is no guarantee that, given the current political climate in the US, President Obama has any interest in proposing that any of the men currently held in Guantánamo should be released, and it may well be that the Tunisians will remain imprisoned — victims not of anything resembling justice, but of a state of political expediency on Obama’s part, and of hysteria in Congress and the right-wing media, which is preventing any moves being made to bring the sordid history of Guantánamo to an end.

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

For the most part, the suffering of the Tunisians at Guantánamo has been deeply depressing. Many, if not most were horribly abused, and when the Bush administration finally decided to clear the majority of them for release (largely in 2006), their nightmare was far from over. The men feared being repatriated, because they had all left Tunisia many years before, and were aware that all that awaited them at home was further abuse and imprisonment, followed by show trials based on information extracted through the torture of others in Tunisia, which had led to them receiving prison sentences in absentia.

The two Tunisians repatriated from Guantánamo in 2007

Nevertheless, the Bush administration, in furtherance of America’s close ties with Ben Ali, and long support for his oppressive regime, stealthily repatriated two Tunisians in June 2007 — 38-year old Lotfi Lagha and 51-year old Abdullah bin Omar — on the basis of “diplomatic assurances,” agreed between the US and Tunisia, which purported to guarantee that the two men would be treated humanely on their return.

Little was known of Lotfi Lagha, as he did not have legal representation in Guantánamo, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights three years before his release. As I explained in an article at the time, “all that exists in the public domain to mark his 2,000-day imprisonment are three pages of notes” from a military review board in 2005.

From this short document — full of unsubstantiated allegations about connections with terrorists — it was clear that Lagha, who was seized on the Afghan-Pakistani border in December 2001, had served in the Tunisian army as a young man, and had then fled to Italy, where he seems to have settled for many years. In early 2001 he traveled to Afghanistan, settling with other Tunisians in Jalalabad, and associating, at some point, with members of the missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi. According to his own account, he never trained in a camp in Afghanistan, never took up arms against the Americans or anybody else, and thought “al-Qaeda’s belief system strange and that they are not good.”

Only later did it emerge that he had had all his fingers, except for his thumbs, amputated in US custody at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, an act of supposed medical necessity that he maintained was unnecessary.

Bin Omar, as I explained in an article at the time, had worked as a mechanic for the Tunisian railways, but had left the country for Saudi Arabia in 1989, because of religious persecution. Soon after, he moved to Pakistan with his wife and children, where he was living when he was convicted, in absentia, by a Tunisian court for belonging to the Islamist political party Ennahdha, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Human Rights Watch reported that the “primary evidence” against him in this trial (in 1995) “appears to have been the statement that one of his 19 co-defendants made to the police in 1993, in which he claimed that [he] had taken a leadership position in an organization known as the Tunisian Islamist Front while in Pakistan.” Based on his experience of similar cases, his lawyer, Samir Ben Amor, explained that he thought it “likely that this incriminating statement was the product of torture and abuse.”

Captured in Pakistan in April 2002, during a frenzied few months when all manner of innocent Arabs were rounded up, bin Omar said in Guantánamo that he was sold to the Americans by the Pakistanis for $5,000. In his five-year detention, he was only allowed to meet a lawyer for the first — and only — time on May 1, 2007, when Zachary Katznelson of Reprieve met him, and explained that he “expressed severe concerns that were he to be returned to Tunisia, the authorities there would torture him to force him to confess or to become an informant.” Katznelson added, “When Reprieve later learned of Mr. Bin Omar’s Tunisian conviction in absentia — a conviction Mr. Bin Omar likely does not know about — Reprieve repeatedly requested additional visits with our client. The United States government failed to respond to any of those requests” — and, in fact, stealthily repatriated him before Reprieve could protest about it as Reprieve’s director, Cive Stafford Smith, explained in the New Statesman in July 2007.

Summing up bin Omar’s predicament, Katznelson also declared, after bin Omar’s repatriation, that he “finds himself a guinea pig in a potentially deadly diplomatic experiment. The United States is so desperate to send people out of Guantánamo Bay, they are willing to ignore Tunisia’s horrific human rights record. Now the world’s focus must shift to Tunisia. Tunisia is faced with a simple choice: will they do the right thing and show the world that they support human rights, or will they revert to their dark past? We are all watching.”

Abuse, show trials and prison sentences for the men returned from Guantánamo

The world may have been watching — or those part of the world that still cared about human rights in the “War on Terror” — but the Tunisian president didn’t care. In September 2007, when Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch tried to visit the men, who were being held in prison, she was prevented from doing so, but met local activists, lawyers, government officials and family members — some of whom had been allowed to meet them — who explained to her that they had been “telling visitors that things are so bad they would rather be back at Guantánamo Bay.”

Bin Omar had, on his return to Tunisia, apparently been slapped, subjected to sleep deprivation and told that his wife and daughters would be raped. Daskal added that the threats to his family “were more than he could take: he told his lawyer that he signed the paper that officials thrust at him, even though his eyes had deteriorated so badly and his glasses were so old that he had no idea what it said.”

He was then taken briefly before the military court that had sentenced him in absentia, and, for the next six weeks, was “held in solitary confinement in a windowless, unventilated cell that he called his ‘tomb,’” and was allowed no contact with any other prisoners.

Following these reports, Jennifer Daskal was not reassured when she asked Robert F. Godec, the US ambassador to Tunisia, to explain what the Bush administration was doing “to track the two men’s cases,” and was told that “he had ‘specific and credible’ assurances from the Tunisian government that they would not be abused,” adding, “we follow up on these assurances.” As she explained, she was concerned that he “would not say whether the treatment of [bin Omar] and Lagha had lived up to Tunisia’s pledges; nor would he say whether any US official had met with the two since their return home,” and she concluded, correctly, “This is disturbing: all we have are promises from a notoriously abusive regime, yet US officials will not even say whether they are following up on those assurances by talking to the detainees themselves.”

In October 2007, Lotfi Lagha, who had not spoken about his treatment, but had, presumably, been dealt with in a similar manner, as his lawyer reported that he had been held in solitary confinement for six weeks after his return, was sentenced to three years in prison. As I explained at the time:

[His trial] bore all the hallmarks of a show trial. Allegations that he received military training in Afghanistan and fought with the Taliban regime were dropped, and he was, instead, convicted of “associating with a criminal group with the aim of harming or causing damage in Tunisia,” even though, as the Associated Press reported, the Tunisian authorities “did not name the group that Lagha was said to participate in or specify what its planned violence was,” and even though Lagha himself insisted during the trial, “I haven’t been involved in any terrorist activity. I went to Afghanistan for work.” Speaking after the verdict was announced, his lawyer, Samir Ben Amor, said he was “disappointed” with the verdict, and stated that he would lodge an appeal, adding, “We thought he would get justice in his own country after what he endured at Guantánamo.”

In November 2007, as I explained at the time, Abdullah bin Omar received a seven-year sentrence, after being convicted of “belonging in times of peace to a terrorist organization operating in a foreign country,” and of preparing for attacks intended to “change the state through violence,” replacing the government with a “fundamentalist regime.” Zachary Katznelson, who was present at the trial, told me, “There was not a shred of evidence actually offered against him. No witnesses, no documents, nothing. Merely a statement from the intelligence services saying he was guilty. Accusation presented as fact.” He added that this was “all too familiar in the context of Guantánamo,” but that it was “horrible to see the consequences pronounced before my eyes.”

For Lotfi Lagha (who was supposed to have been released last October) and Abdullah bin Omar (three years into his seven-year sentence), the collapse of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s regime ought to be good news. I cannot confirm whether Abdullah bin Omar was a member of Ennahdha, as alleged, but there are grounds for describing both bin Omar and Lotfi Lagha as political prisoners, and, as the Guardian reported on Tuesday, “Tunisia’s new government appears on the brink of releasing political prisoners, including all members of the Islamist Ennahdha movement.” As the Guardian also explained:

Najib Chebbi, an opposition party leader who has joined the new government, claimed that all prisoners had been released, [although] Samir Dilou, a lawyer and Ennahdha leader, said: “We’ve spoken to the families. It is not confirmed. They are not free yet.” But the government could discuss a general amnesty as early as tomorrow.

Supporting the idea of Ennahdha’s involvement in Tunisia’s political future, Chebbi told the BBC Hard Talk programme: “To have democracy, we must integrate any people who want to respect the law and play the game of democracy. Moderate political Islam is a component of the Arab and Islamist landscape.”

A general amnesty would open the way for Ennahdha’s exiled leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, to come home. He has said he would wait for a general amnesty before returning to Tunisia from London.

The Tunisans still in Guantánamo, or freed in other countries

The uprising in Tunisia may also be good news for other Tunisians still held in Guantánamo, and those released in other countries.

Still in Guantanamo are five men — Lotfi bin Ali, Ridah al-Yazidi, Adel Hakeemy, Hisham Sliti and Abdul Ourgy, all cleared for release by the Bush administration — although it is possible that only bin Ali stands to benefit from the collapse of Tunisia’s dictatorship. Back in October 2007, before Lotfi Lagha and Abdullah bin Omar were sentenced, but after reports of their abuse had surfaced, a District Court judge in Washington D.C., Judge Gladys Kessler, destroyed the Bush administration’s reliance on “diplomatic assurances” with Tunisia, ruling that he “cannot be sent to Tunisia because he could suffer ‘irreparable harm’ that the US courts would be powerless to reverse.”

Despite this ruling, no new home has been found for bin Ali in the last three years and four months, although now, presumably, there is no obstacle to his release, which should be demanded immediately.

As for the others, the Obama administration ought to be reviewing their cases, and thinking long and hard about whether it wants to continue holding them. I can see no reason why Ridah al-Yazidi should not also be released immediately, but officials may have concluded that he is one of 48 men who should be held indefinitely without charge or trial, because they are regarded as too dangerous to release, even though the interagency Task Force that made these recommendations conceded that the supposed evidence used to make these appraisals would not stand up in any court.

For Adel Hakeemy, the problem is that the Belgian govermment has apparently expressed an interest in extraditing him in connection with terrorist allegations in Belgium, as it has with Hisham Sliti, who, in addition, lost his habeas corpus petition in December 2008.

As for Abdul Ourgy, the problem is that the Italian goverment has apparently expressed similar wishes, following the successful extradition of two other Tunisians from Guantánamo — Adel Ben Mabrouk bin Hamida Boughanmi and Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri — in December 2009. They, presumably, are unlikely to be returning to Tunisia any time soon, even though they have not been put on trial since their dubious extradition, unless, that is, the Italians suddenly decide that the collapse of Ben Ali’s regime is an excuse for them to repatriate all its unwanted Tunisians — something that may, indeed, happen not only in Italy, but across the EU.

To conclude on a brighter note, three other men who may benefit are those released in other countries since the collapse of the Bush administration’s “diplomatic assurances” — Rafiq al-Hami, who was released in Slovakia last January with two other men (from Egypt and Azerbaijan), Saleh Sassi, who was released in Albania in February last year (with an Egyptian and a Libyan), and Hedi Hammamy, who was released in Georgia last March (with two Libyans). All are apparently doing well in their new homes (although the men in Slovakia had to embark on a hunger strike in June to improve their living conditions), but they will no doubt be delighted to return home — if home is finally a country that has rid itself of tyranny.

In some cases this may be because their political opposition to Ben Ali’s regime is on the brink of being recognized as legitimate, and not condemned under the convenient rubric of terrorism, and in other cases it is because Ben Ali’s flight — and the continuing mobilization of what the Middle East expert Juan Cole recently described as “a populist revolution spearheaded by labor movements, by internet activists [and] by rural workers” — may finally promise an end to the ruinous poverty, and the plundering of Tunisia’s economy, that typefied Ben Ali’s reign, and that drove so many Tunisians abroad — to Europe, and, in some cases, to Afghanistan and Pakistan — in search of work and freedom.

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

In reality, however, it is reasonable to propose that Guantánamo is now a permanent institution for a variety of reasons. The first concerns a number of cynical moves by lawmakers in recent months, inserting provisions into a military spending bill that are explicitly designed to keep Guantánamo open — a ban on using funds to transfer Guantánamo prisoners to the U.S. mainland to face trials, a ban on using funds to buy or build a prison on the U.S. mainland to hold Guantánamo prisoners, and a ban on the release of any prisoner cleared for release by the President’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force (composed of representatives of government departments and the intelligence agencies) to countries considered dangerous by lawmakers — including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

On all of these challenges to his stated intentions — bringing at least some of the 33 men recommended for trials by the Task Force to the mainland to face federal court trials, holding them in a U.S. prison, and releasing some of the 89 prisoners “approved for transfer” by the Task Force — President Obama could have decided to override Congress. As was reported before Christmas, it was within the bounds of his authority to veto the legislation or to issue a signing statement striking down those parts of the spending bill that he considered to be an unconstitutional infringement of Presidential authority.

In the end, however, demonstrating what many observers now regard as typical cowardice, he chose not to do so. A veto was always out of the question, because it threatened Congressional authorization of billions of dollars to continue the ruinously expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that no one in authority has any wish to end, but a signing statement, declaring the provisions as an unconstitutional infringement of executive power, was a distinct possibly, despite the negative connotations of signing statements after George W. Bush’s excessive use of them during his Presidency. As David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, lawyers who served in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, explained in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Congressional efforts to block future trials by imposing spending restrictions on the president are unconstitutional and should be abandoned.”

Nevertheless, despite such trenchant criticism of Congress from Conservative commentators, Obama refused to go as far as Rivkin and Casey, choosing instead to restrict his opposition to some fine sounding, but ultimately toothless grumbling. As the New York Times reported, “He sharply criticized those restrictions, but did not claim that he had the constitutional authority to disregard them,” and, instead, merely said he “would ask Congress to repeal the restrictions, seek to ‘mitigate their effects’ and oppose any attempt to extend or expand them after they expired in September, at the end of the current fiscal year.”

Criticizing the ban on bringing prisoners to the mainland to face trials, Obama defended the prosecution of terrorist suspects in federal court as “a powerful tool in our efforts to protect the nation,” and described the ban imposed by Congress as “a dangerous and unprecedented challenge to critical executive branch authority to determine when and where to prosecute Guantánamo detainees, based on the facts and the circumstances of each case and our national security interests.” As a result of his refusal to overturn the provision, however, the 33 men recommended for trials by the Task Force will, for the most part, remain held without trial.

The administration is reportedly unwilling to proceed with trials by Military Commission, rightfully criticized as a second-tier judicial system by opponents, especially after the unjust and undignified plea deal arranged with former child prisoner Omar Khadr in October, and the main effect of Obama’s capitulation, therefore, is to hand victory to the lawmakers who inserted this provision specifically to prevent the President from proceeding with the federal court trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks This trial was announced by Attorney General Eric Holder last November, but it met with fierce resistance from misguided Republican ideologues who are still sold on the Bush administration’s ruinous and misguided notion that terrorist suspects are warriors and not criminals.

Criticizing the ban on using military funds to release any of the 89 prisoners cleared by the Task Force unless, as the Times described it, defense secretary Robert Gates “certifies that the country has met a strict set of security conditions,” the President stated this process of certification, adding to security concerns already undertaken by the government, would “hinder the conduct of delicate negotiations with foreign countries” and “interfere with the authority of the executive branch to make important and consequential foreign policy and national security determinations regarding whether and under what circumstances such transfers should occur in the context of an ongoing armed conflict.”

On this point, the effect will be less noticeable, as 58 of the 89 men cleared for release by the Task Force have already been held indefinitely without charge or trial for a year because they are Yemenis, and last January, following hysterical overreaction to the news that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had apparently been recruited in Yemen, the President announced a moratorium on releasing any Yemeni prisoners that is still in place, and shows no sign of being lifted. Of the other 31 men, the majority are awaiting third countries prepared to accept them, as they cannot be safely repatriated, because they face the risk of torture, and  the administration, Congress, and the D.C. Circuit Court have all acted to make sure that none of them can be released in the U.S. It is, therefore, unlikely that the Congressional ban will apply to any of these men.

The only prisoners not covered by this ban are those cleared for release after winning their habeas petitions in the District Court in Washington D.C. On this point, however, the President has done nothing but infuriate liberal supporters, when, on Monday, he repatriated an Algerian, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, against his will. Bin Mohammed had won his habeas petition in November 2009, but was terrified of returning to his home country, where, primarily, he feared being attacked by Islamist militants. On his behalf, the judge in his case, Judge Gladys Kessler, had strived to prevent his forcible repatriation, but had finally been overruled by the Supreme Court, paving the way for his return to Algeria on Monday.

The fact that the only man to be released since last August — and, very possibly, the only man to be released for the foreseeable future — was someone who was desperate not to be returned to his home country is a sad indictment of the position that President Obama has taken on the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, two years after he promised to close the prison, and one year after he failed to do so.

As I have explained above, by refusing to tackle Congress over its unconstitutional intrusions on his authority — and through his moratorium on releasing any Yemenis — he has ensured that there is no practical distinction between the 33 men proposed for trials by the Task Force, and the 89 men cleared for release, because almost all of them have now been consigned to indefinite detention without charge or trial for the foreseeable future.

Completing this picture are 48 other men, explicitly designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Task Force. This has been an unacceptable proposal, ever since it was first signaled by the President in May 2009, as the men in question are regarded as being too dangerous to release, even though the administration concedes that it has no usable evidence to prove these assertions. This, of course, indicates that giving credence to unreliable information derived through torture played a key role in these determinations. The plans are also troubling because they so explicitly perpetuate the position taken by President Bush when he established Guantánamo, and because they give succor to those who want to see indefinite detention without charge or trial used again in future, and on this front it was thoroughly depressing to hear, before Christmas, that Obama was considering issuing an executive order formally approving the indefinite detention of these 48 men, but guaranteeing that they would receive some sort of regular review of their cases.

A decision on this is expected soon, and it should be fiercely resisted by anyone who believes that the malignant experiment at Guantánamo has gone on for far too long, and that holding prisoners is only acceptable when they are either criminal suspects to be put forward for trials, or prisoners of war who can, in any case, be held until the end of hostilities. And if President Obama does go ahead and sign this executive order, it is incumbent on everyone opposed to the ongoing scandal of Guantánamo to point out that, with Congressional interference and Obama’s moratorium, it is not just 48 prisoners who are proposed for indefinite detention without charge or trial, but almost every prisoner still held at Guantánamo — 170 men in total.

High hopes that Guantánamo would be closed by Obama may have been dashed within months of him taking office, but even the most cynical observer would have been hard pressed to say at the time that, after two years, Obama would be presiding over a situation that was so similar to that created by Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 — where the entire population of the prison is, in effect, arbitrarily detained, held indefinitely without charge or trial, regardless of whether or not the majority of them are supposed to have been freed or put on trial.

As the prison begins its 10th year of operations, this is a deeply depressing state of affairs, and one that anyone concerned with justice for the remaining prisoners should campaign about, complain about, and publicize relentlessly.

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

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

In the time available, I was pleased to have the opportunity to explain, briefly, how, as the 9th anniversary approaches, we face the shocking possibility that very few prisoners at all will be released before the 2012 elections. With reference to the findings of the Obama administration’s own Guantánamo Review Task Force, I explained how the 89 men cleared for release are, for the most part, going nowhere, because 58 are Yemenis, whose repatriation has been prevented by both President Obama and by Congress, and 31 others are awaiting third countries prepared to offer them a new home. As I explained with regard to the Yemenis, “It’s been a year now since the President announced a moratorium on releasing any prisoner from Guantánamo to Yemen because of the uproar that came about because, at Christmas 2009, a Nigerian man tried to blow up a plane, and it came out that he was apparently recruited in Yemen. So Yemen is now this entire terrorist country. Nobody cleared for release from Guantánamo can be released there because of these fears that they will join some terrorist cell. That’s guilt by nationality. It’s collective punishment. However you want to look at it, it’s grossly unfair.”

Speaking of the other 31 men and the need to secure third countries prepared to offer them homes, I pointed out how, in the recent WikiLeaks revelations about the international horse-trading regarding these men, the failure of the US to take responsibility for any of these men had been overlooked. As I told Amy and Juan, “It remains a problem that, at every level, at the highest levels of government in the United States, everybody who could — the courts, Congress, President Obama — refused to accept cleared prisoners to be brought to live on the US mainland.”

Moreover, just this week, President Obama showed his disdain for those seeking justice for the Guantánamo prisoners by forcibly repatriating the first prisoner released since last August — Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian who had won his habeas corpus petition, but was desperate not to return home, and who, shockingly, was repatriated while a legal challenge to his forcible repatriation was underway.

I also spoke about the 48 men proposed for ongoing indefinite detention without charge or trial, noting how this designation — and the recent suggestion that President Obama will sign an executive order formalizing their indefinite detention, while providing for some sort of review process — is also fundamentally wrong. I also mentioned how the Task Force’s findings — through a secretive process initiated by the Executive — conflicts with the prisoners’ ongoing habeas corpus petitions, or involves designating for indefinite detention men who have lost their habeas petitions, even though the majority of the 19 men who have lost their petitions “were very peripheral foot soldiers in the military conflict that took place before the 9/11 attacks, in Afghanistan,” and are, explicitly, “not terrorists.”

Katie spoke about two submissions, filed in Spain today, relating to ongoing investigations of the US torture program, which are pending in the National Court of Spain. In the first, CCR and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) “submitted a dossier regarding former commander of Guantánamo, Geoffrey Miller, which collects and analyzes the evidence demonstrating his role in the torture of detainees at Guantánamo and in Iraq,” requesting that a subpoena be issued for Miller to testify before the court, and in the second, CCR and ECCHR “submitted an expert opinion that sets out the legal basis for holding the ‘Bush Six’ criminally liable under international criminal law,” which summarizes the key evidence against the defendants — David Addington, William J. Haynes II, Douglas Feith, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee. Further information about both cases — including the submissions — is available here, and also see this op-ed in the Guardian by CCR’s President, Michael Ratner.

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

A former professional footballer, Ahmed Belbacha fled Algeria for the UK in 1999 after receiving death threats from the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA), which, as Reprieve explained in its submission to the High Court (PDF), “targeted individuals who had served in Algeria’s military (and might again be called up), as well as employees of state-owned enterprises. Mr. Belbacha, who had completed a mandatory term of national service and worked for Sonatrach, the state-owned oil company, fitted both categories.”

Reprieve added that Belbacha “sought for a period to evade the GIA from within Algeria,” but that, “when the threats continued to escalate … he left the country for good,” subsequently settling in the UK, and living for nearly two years in Boscombe in Bournemouth, where, as has been previously reported, and as the Guardian explained, he “worked and studied English,” and, during one Labour Party conference, “was responsible for cleaning the hotel room of the then deputy prime minister, John Prescott,” who left him a tip and a thank-you note.

In the summer of 2001, Belbacha traveled from the UK to Pakistan and then on to Afghanistan,” which he would not have done had he had any militant aims, as his asylum claim was still pending in the UK. After the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, he returned to Pakistan, where he was seized. He was then held in a Pakistani prison (where he was abused), before being transferred to US custody, staying in the US prison at Kandahar from December 2001 until approximately February 9, 2002, when he was flown to Guantánamo, where he has been held ever since.

In the court submission, Belbacha’s lawyer, Cori Crider, stated that her client “seeks disclosure from the Secretaries of State tending to show that certain statements he is said to have made during detention were obtained by torture and mistreatment.” She added, “This information is necessary for two purposes: first, to make representations to US executive officials (and in the US courts) against his transfer to Algeria, and second, to have his coerced statements suppressed in the litigation of his substantive habeas claim.”

The torture of Ahmed Belbacha

Crider proceeded to explain how Belbacha was subjected to torture and abuse in US custody in Kandahar and Guantánamo, and how British agents, who interrogated him in both locations, helped to provide information that formed the basis of the false confessions that resulted from the more brutal sessions at the hands of US interrogators:

Mr. Belbacha has on several occasions told me that, during his detention at Kandahar and Guantánamo, he suffered serious mistreatment and was tortured. He alleges that the mistreatment included, among other things, beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and abuse, sensory deprivation, exposure to temperature extremes, dietary manipulation and the use of stress positions. [...]

Mr. Belbacha alleges that he was questioned by UK interrogators at Kandahar and Guantánamo during the period of his mistreatment. The interrogators knew of Mr. Belbacha’s employment history in the UK and questioned him about his connection with certain mosques in the UK. [...]

During his interrogations, Mr. Belbacha informs me that he made false statements and confessions as a result of his torture and mistreatment during custody and, in particular, due to his fear that his abuse would otherwise continue. He is unable to specify the precise details of the statements and confessions, as he has been questioned hundreds of times over the past nine years and because the memories are in many instances too painful, but much of his questioning by British officials related to his alleged association with the Finsbury Park mosque in the United Kingdom and how individuals at the mosque had allegedly assisted him in travelling to Afghanistan. Mr. Belbacha’s false confessions obtained under torture are the sole source of a number of allegations made against him.

None of this is surprising, of course, as the array of techniques to which Belbacha was subjected were common, in various permutations, in both Kandahar and Guantánamo, and because it has been established, in court proceedings in the case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, that the British security services provided information to their US counterparts while he was being held and tortured in Morocco. However, the chain of events is of particular interest in Belbacha’s case, as it suggests that the US interrogators stepped in after their British counterparts had obtained information from him directly, and indicates a very clear example of complicity in torture.

Reprieve’s aim, however, is not primarily to expose this aspect of the British security services’ activities, but, as stated in the lawsuit, to secure information in the possession of the British government to help prevent Belbacha’s forcible repatriation, and also to provide important evidence as part of his ongoing habeas corpus petition in the District Court in Washington D.C., where, since the Supreme Court gave the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas rights in June 2008, 57 cases have been decided, two-thirds of which have been won by the prisoners.

Resisting involuntary repatriation and seeking a new home for Ahmed Belbacha

This information is of great significance because of the particular circumstances in which Belbacha finds himself. Although Reprieve was notified on February 22, 2007 that Belbacha had been cleared for release from Guantánamo after an Administrative Review Board hearing the year before, he was desperate not to return to Algeria, because, as Cori Crider explained, “he fears that he would be mistreated by the Algerian state, having spent nearly a decade in US custody stamped as a would-be terrorist (and having vocally objected to returning to Algeria for many of those years)” and he “also fears retaliation from the contemporary descendant of the GIA — al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) — as he has been an equally vocal critic of the GIA’s attacks on civilians.”

On the former point, Belbacha’s fears appeared to be confirmed last November, when he was “convicted in absentia in Algeria of unspecified charges and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment.” Reprieve has been unable to establish the grounds for his conviction, and, as Cori Crider noted in her submission, “The sentence is particularly troubling because no other Algerian in Guantánamo was thus singled out. It appears likely that the sentence reflects a decision by the Algerians to retaliate against Mr. Belbacha, the earliest and most vociferous opponent of repatriation to Algeria from Guantánamo. I am not aware of any diplomatic or political assurances (credible or otherwise) that have been given by the government of Algeria in relation to Mr. Belbacha’s treatment on his return.”

As a result of Belbacha’s credible fears, Reprieve has spent nearly four years trying to secure resettlement for him in a third country. The British government has persistently refused to help, an application for asylum in the US was turned down in 2007, and although the town of Amherst, Massachusetts passed a resolution last year offering him a new home, this cannot happen because of legislation passed by Congress preventing the transfer of any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland except to face a trial (and even that last proviso is currently in doubt).

The closest Belbacha came to resettlement in a third country appears to have been in January this year, when representatives from Reprieve, Cageprisoners and the Center for Constitutional Rights traveled around Europe attempting to secure new homes for cleared prisoners who faced the risk — or the probability — of torture in their home countries. Crider noted that “The most advanced of those efforts, which targeted the government of Luxembourg, was apparently blocked by the US State Department,” and explained, in a footnote:

I know this because our efforts with the government of Luxembourg culminated in a meeting, on January 14, 2010, which was attended by myself for Reprieve, Moazzam Begg [for Cageprisoners], the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, and a member of staff at a partner group, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The discussion centred on two individuals — Mr. Belbacha and one of CCR’s clients — and during the meeting, Reprieve, with Mr. Begg’s support, proposed Mr. Belbacha as an appropriate candidate for resettlement in Luxembourg. We later learned from a contact in the Luxembourg Foreign Ministry that, as a result of this meeting, Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn had inquired of our client by name of the US authorities. The contact related that the US State Department officials had brushed off this approach, stating that Mr Belbacha “could go back to Algeria.”

This experience led Crider to conclude, as she explained, that “further efforts in this vein will be futile without additional exculpatory information or information that indicates that [Belbacha] will be at risk on return to Algeria. Without this information, the US government is unlikely to be willing to press [his] case for resettlement out of Algeria.”

Problems in the US courts

In seeking to prevent Belbacha’s involuntary return to Algeria, Reprieve has, after initial success, run up against renewed opposition from officials of the Obama administration and various US courts, which affects not only Belbacha but dozens of other prisoners as well. In July 2007, Reprieve asked the District Court in Washington D.C. to prevent Belbacha’s involuntary repatriation, and secured an injunction preventing his removal on June 13, 2008. This, however, only stood until the D.C. Circuit Court became involved, ruling in September 2009, in a case known as Kiyemba II, involving the Uighurs in Guantánamo (Muslims from China who won their habeas petition in October 2008, but feared torture in China) that questions relating to the transfer of prisoners — even when the risk of torture was involved — were solely for the executive branch of government to decide.

The court, out of nowhere, drew on Munaf v. Geren, a case from 2008 in which “two American citizens held in the custody of the United States military in Iraq petitioned for writs of habeas corpus, seeking to enjoin the Government from transferring them to Iraqi custody for criminal prosecution in the Iraqi courts.” In Munaf, the court ruled that “it could not enjoin the Government from transferring the petitioners to Iraqi custody,” because “that concern is to be addressed by the political branches, not the judiciary.”

As a result of the Kiyemba II ruling, which the Supreme Court refused to reconsider in March this year, Belbacha’s injunction was vacated by a District Court judge (in February), and attempts to have it reconsidered were refused. The last straw for Belbacha came in July, when, after protracted court dealings (mostly conducted in secret), the Supreme Court refused to prevent the administration from repatriating any of the six Algerians in Guantánamo at the time, leading to the immediate repatriation of one of these men, Abdul Aziz Naji, who promptly disappeared for a few days, before resurfacing with the threat of a dubious terrorism trial hanging over him.

As Crider noted in her submission, “because there is no injunction in place, the US government may forcibly repatriate Mr. Belbacha at any time.” She also noted that public criticism of the decision to transfer Naji against his will appeared to have paused further transfers, but stressed that the current situation — in which all the government needs to do is assert that it is “government policy not to transfer prisoners to torture” for all judicial inquries to come to an end — is deeply unsatisfactory, and, as a result, Ahmed Belbacha is now seeking to win his habeas corpus petition in the District Court in Washington D.C., and needs the documents in the possession of the British government as an essential part of his defense.

Explaining the importance of his habeas petition, Crider noted, that although “under current Court of Appeals precedent, the judge has no power to order the production of the prisoner in the courtroom; no power to order that the prisoner be released into the United States (or, it would appear, anywhere else); and no power to order the US not to send a petitioner, prevailing or otherwise, anywhere,” and that “The scope of the habeas remedy left to the US judiciary, in other words, is remarkably slim … there remains a category of prisoners that the US has never forced back to a country unwillingly: habeas winners.”

The importance of the British information about Ahmed Belbacha

After running through the poor history of disclosure in the US courts, where “government lawyers litigating the habeas cases have repeatedly claimed that they do not have access to the full set of relevant documents that might be implicated in a habeas action, and that to be required to search all of every relevant agency’s files (the DOD, the CIA, and so forth) for relevant material would be ‘unduly burdensome,’” and where, in the case of Binyam Mohamed, who was demonstrably sent to Morocco to be tortured, “Morocco never once appeared as a detention site on any document … in three separate orders from the district judge in [his] habeas action to the government to disclose all exculpatory information”, Crider’s submission ended with an appeal to the High Court to order disclosure of documents that might help prevent her client’s involuntary repatriation, and I believe this entire passage is worth quoting in its entirety:

A key category of information that is, in my experience, never disclosed is exculpatory information identifiably sourced from a foreign government. So, for example, even had the UK authorities generated reports of their interviews with the Claimants in Afghanistan and in Guantánamo and shared those reports with the US — something UK agents might well do — the US government has not disclosed and would not disclose such foreign-sourced material out of respect for the “control principle” [of not disclosing foreign intelligence sources] that was litigated at length in the English Binyam Mohamed litigation.

It is also, of course, likely that the UK produced internal reports about the situation in Afghanistan or Guantánamo that were never transferred to the US. Those reports, self-evidently, would be unavailable in any habeas disclosure process.

I am aware only of two instances in which exculpatory material originating with a foreign intelligence agency has been disclosed to a petitioner’s lawyer in a Guantánamo case: the case of Binyam Mohamed, and the case of Shaker Aamer. In both cases, the only reason such material was disclosed was as a result of Norwich Pharmacal litigation in England. I am cleared counsel of record in both cases, and have reviewed those disclosures at the Secure Facility in the US [where Guantánamo lawyers must travel to view all classified information]. In both instances, the UK disclosures were, by some margin, the most useful, illuminating, and exculpatory material that I saw in the habeas process.

For these reasons, the information sought is a vital part of having my client’s coerced statements suppressed in their habeas proceedings. I also believe it an essential component of persuading Obama administration officials not to transfer my client to Algeria against his will.

While I cannot know the scope of the information used by the Obama administration to determine whether and under what circumstances to transfer my clients, I do know that my own capacity to make effective representations to them has thus far been very limited. The reasons for this are simple: I have as yet had no information I could use to prove to the administration that my clients’ allegations of coercion, particularly during their early years in US military detention, were true. This, combined with the challenges of producing detailed statements on abuse (or, indeed, on the circumstances of capture) from prisoners who have been in Guantánamo for nearly nine years, has limited me to making fairly general statements: statements to the effect that I believe the clients were abused in custody, that the clients were never implicated in any terrorist act and never joined al-Qaida or the Taliban, and that the clients would pose no threat to anyone upon their release to a safe third country.

It is my view that the representations I could make if I had meaningful exculpatory information about Mr. Belbacha, and about how he was treated in US custody, would be qualitatively different. This, in turn, I believe would make the Obama administration more open to the prospect of resettling him, rather than simply forcing him back to abuse, an unfair trial and/or lengthy imprisonment in Algeria.

The Obama administration has stated, on more than one occasion, that it considers a prisoner’s individualized claim of fear of torture when it decides whether to repatriate a prisoner. In theory, of course, the question of the abuse a prisoner faces in Algeria and his fitness to be released elsewhere are distinct; in practice, however, I believe the lines blur. Proving to the Obama administration that Mr. Belbacha was tortured; that he gave false statements under torture; that, therefore, that allegations lodged against him are unreliable, particularly the most severe ones, is, I believe, an essential part of persuading the government that it would be unjust and inappropriate to return Mr. Belbacha to Algeria.

I wish Reprieve every success in this approach. The Norwich Pharmacal litigation mentioned above, which, in simple lay terms, involves appraisals of how parties (in these cases, the UK government) can become involved in “wrongdoing,” whether intentionally or not, for which a remedy may be sought, was invaluable in the case of Binyam Mohamed, and eventually led to his release. It has not yet had the same end result in Shaker Aamer’s case, although it led, last December, to the release of important documents in the possession of the British government, and it is clear, in the grounds for a judicial review submitted by Cori Crider (PDF), that it should also apply in Ahmed Belbacha’s case. As she explained:

Mr. Belbacha alleges that the Defendants have become involved in the wrongdoing of the US authorities in the following ways. UK officials:

(1) interviewed Mr. Belbacha in circumstances where it was standard practice for detainees to be mistreated prior to interviews to secure their cooperation, thereby facilitating further mistreatment;

(2) interviewed Mr. Belbacha in circumstances where this is likely to have prolonged his detention, in particular at Kandahar;

(3) failed to protest at the mistreatment, torture and/or unlawful detention of Mr. Belbacha, despite no doubt being aware of the circumstances of his detention;

(4) failed to take any or any sufficient steps to secure better treatment for Mr. Belbacha; and

(5) failed to take any or any sufficient steps to secure the release from detention of Mr. Belbacha.

If justice has not entirely vanished, it will lead, as intended, to Ahmed Belbacha winning his habeas petition, and the Obama administration accepting that it will no longer try to forcibly repatriate him, and will, instead, seek a third country prepared to take him.

And if there is any justice left over, that third country will be the UK, where he lived in a peaceful and law-abiding manner for nearly two years, and where there are many people wiling and able to help with his resettlement.

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

Bin Mohammed won his habeas corpus petition last November, but was so scared of returning to Algeria that the judge in his case, Judge Gladys Kessler of the District Court in Washington D.C., tried to prevent his enforced return, eventually losing that appeal in the Conservative-dominated D.C. Circuit Court, and then losing again on July 16, when the Supreme Court also refused to act on his behalf. When Abdul Aziz Naji’s appeal was denied by the Supreme Court the following day, the last obstacle to the enforced repatriation not only of bin Mohammed, but also of Nabil Hadjarab, Motai Saib, Djamel Ameziane and Ahmed Belbacha was also removed.

As the legal action charity Reprieve reports today, “the Algerian prosecutor’s office reported on Monday that Abdul Aziz Naji was charged with an unspecified offence and is now under ‘judicial supervision.’” This may well mean that he will now undergo long months of horrible uncertainty as the government prepares to try him, even though, in the cases of other Algerians who returned voluntarily between July 2008 and January 2010, no trial has resulted in a conviction.

However, as Human Rights Watch noted after Naji’s repatriation:

Although the Algerian detainees who were returned voluntarily to Algeria have not reported serious abuse, this should not be the basis for determining how future returnees will be treated. Some of the men who returned voluntarily were elderly, in ill health, or had wound up at Guantánamo as cases of mistaken identity. Some of the remaining detainees, though never accused of any crime, might be perceived by the Algerian government as more dangerous than those who previously returned.

Senior counterterrorism counsel Andrea Prasow added, “The US needs to consider the individual circumstances of each detainee before repatriation. Someone who would rather remain at Guantánamo than go home should at least be given the chance to explain why in a proper legal setting.”

While there are valid concerns for all the men’s safety and well-being if returned to Algeria, Ahmed Belbacha is particularly vulnerable, as he was tried in absentia in November 2009 and sentenced to 20 years in prison, for what his lawyers can only conclude was the crime of speaking out about his fears of being repatriated. As Reprieve explained, “In a disgraceful show trial, the court sentenced Ahmed to 20 years in prison for belonging to an ‘overseas terrorist group.’ Despite repeated requests and extensive investigation, Reprieve’s lawyers have been unable to discover what exactly Ahmed is supposed to have done. No evidence has been produced to support his ‘conviction,’ which appears to be retaliation against Ahmed for speaking out about human rights abuses in Algeria.”

Human Rights Watch has stated that “Under Algerian law, Belbacha has the right to a new trial upon his return to Algeria,” but after his conviction in November it is unsurprising that Belbacha does not trust the Algerian government to treat him fairly if he is returned. As Reprieve noted, “He faces a lengthy illegal prison term, torture, and persecution if returned to Algeria.”

In an urgent appeal, Reprieve has called on the governments of Britain, Ireland and Luxembourg to offer Belbacha a new home. His lawyer, Tara Murray, stated:

We know from bitter experience that Guantánamo prisoners cannot trust “diplomatic assurances” from rights-abusing countries like Algeria, and the Obama Administration should have known better. The US has betrayed Abdul Aziz Naji and we are fighting to ensure that our client Ahmed Belbacha does not suffer the same fate. Algeria’s government has a clear grudge against Ahmed and cannot be trusted. Ahmed has repeatedly pleaded for help and we are running out of time. Will the governments of Luxembourg, Ireland and the UK hear his pleas?

Ahmed Belbacha’s appeal for the British government to offer him a new home is long-standing, as he lived and worked here for nearly two years from 1999 to 2001, when, with his asylum claim ongoing, he decided to take an ill-advised holiday in Pakistan. A resident in Bournemouth, where he lived, has offered him a room, but the British government has been so indifferent to his fate that Reprieve and other organizations, including Amnesty International and Cageprisoners, sought help from Ireland and Luxembourg as well. He has also been offered a home in Amherst, Massachusetts, although a law passed by Congress, banning any Guantánamo prisoners from being brought to the US mainland except to face a trial, has prevented him from taking up this offer.

Last week, the London Guantánamo Campaign prepared a letter to foreign secretary William Hague asking him to secure Mr. Belbacha’s return to the UK. A slightly amended version of this letter is posted below (which readers can cut and paste), but please feel free to change it as you see fit. The letter can be emailed to the foreign secretary (email address here), or sent to: William Hague MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, King Charles Street, London, SW1A 2AH.

Dear Foreign Secretary,

I am writing to you as a matter of urgency, concerning the case of Ahmed Belbacha, a British resident who has been held at Guantánamo Bay for over eight years.

Mr. Belbacha is a 40-year old Algerian who lived in the UK for nearly two years, from 1999 to 2001, having fled Algeria where his life was at risk. While travelling in Pakistan, he was captured and taken to Guantánamo Bay. Cleared for release in 2007, he has chosen to remain at Guantánamo Bay, rather than face the risk to his life in Algeria. This risk was compounded in November 2009 when he was sentenced in absentia to 20 years in prison for “membership of a terrorist organisation overseas”. No evidence was produced to back this up.

On 17 July, a US Supreme Court ruling resulted in an Algerian national, Abdul Aziz Naji, being forcibly repatriated to Algeria, where he has been indicted on unspecified charges, and is subject to “judicial supervision”. His return, the first forced repatriation under the Obama administration, was strongly condemned by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations. There is a strong likelihood that in sending Mr. Naji back to Algeria, the US government has breached the principle of “non-refoulement” in the UN Convention Against Torture.

This ruling paves the way for the forced return of Ahmed Belbacha.

Mr. Belbacha’s return to the UK was not sought by the previous government. However, we maintain that, given his ties to this country, he should be allowed to return here on humanitarian grounds. Such a move would provide him with a safe haven, and act as a gesture of cooperation with the US in its efforts to find countries for prisoners who cannot be safely repatriated, thereby helping President Obama to close the prison. Several other European countries have taken this action, providing residence to non-nationals as a means of assisting the US.

I urge you to take urgent action for Ahmed Belbacha to ensure a safe end to his wholly illegal ordeal over the past eight years.

I look forward to your response,

Yours sincerely,

The London Guantánamo Campaign also recommended that supporters send the letter to their MP (find your local MP via TheyWorkForYou), and also to write to the Algerian Embassy and the Permanent Mission of Algeria at the United Nations, asking them not to accept the forced repatriation of prisoners who do not wish to return to Algeria, and to ensure that prisoners who are returned are treated fairly.

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

Cross-posted on Eurasia Review.

Given that, in its 2009 report on human rights in Algeria, the US State Department noted, “Local human rights lawyers maintained that torture continued to occur in detention facilities, most often against those arrested on ‘security grounds’” it was not entirely reassuring that an Obama administration official told the Washington Post that the Algerian government had “provided diplomatic assurances” that prisoners returned from Guantánamo “would not be mistreated,” and added, “We take some care in evaluating countries for repatriation. In the case of Algeria, there is an established track record and we have given that a lot of weight. The Algerians have handled this pretty well: You don’t have recidivism and you don’t have torture.”

Following Naji’s transfer, Human Rights Watch and the Center for Constitutional Rights issued immediate press releases urging the Obama administration to recognize its international obligations, and warning that Naji had legitimate fears of both the Algerian government and of extremists who might prey on him, and on Wednesday Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and Martin Scheinin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Protection of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism, issued a statement drawing attention to the Supreme Court rulings that paved the way for the enforced transfer of Naji and another Algerian, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, who won his habeas corpus petition last November, but is still held.

Criticism of Obama and the Supreme Court by the UN and the New York Times

The UN experts stated, “We are extremely worried that the lives of two Algerian detainees could be put in danger without a proper assessment of the risks they could face if returned against their will to their country of origin. While we appreciate the efforts of the authorities to close the Guantánamo detention facility, the risk assessment should be a meaningful and fair process, and the courts should be part of it.” The experts also called into question the Obama administration’s reliance on diplomatic assurances that Naji — and bin Mohammed — would be treated humanely, stating, “Diplomatic assurances are unreliable or difficult to monitor,” and reiterating that they “cannot substitute the sending country’s obligation to assess the real risk facing the individual.”

Over the weekend, the New York Times became involved, noting, in a sternly worded editorial, that “A prisoner who begs to stay indefinitely at the Guantánamo Bay detention center rather than be sent back to Algeria probably has a strong reason to fear the welcoming reception at home,” reminding the Obama administration of Naji’s belief that “he would be tortured if he was transferred to Algeria, by either the Algerian government or fundamentalist groups there,” and criticizing the decision to forcibly repatriate him as “an act of cruelty that seems to defy explanation.”

The Times also noted that Naji had asked for political asylum in Switzerland, which Ellen Lubell, one of his lawyers, elaborated on at the weekend, telling supporters, “We had applied for asylum in Switzerland for Aziz and his application was proceeding through the Swiss courts with support from many in that country.” The Times also ran through the outline of Naji’s story, noting that he was “picked up by the police in Pakistan in May 2002 and turned over to the Americans on suspicion of being a terrorist,” and adding that, although he “admitted working for the humanitarian wing of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist organization,” the Bush administration “never charged him with a crime, explained why he was being held, or demonstrated any connection to terrorist acts.”

Abdul Aziz Naji’s story

This was a fair précis of Naji’s case, although it is worth elaborating on in more detail. As the Center for Constitutional Rights explained (PDF), he was born in 1975 in Batna (about 300 miles east of Algiers), and, after completing his schooling, worked in his father’s blacksmith shop and then undertook his obligatory military service in the Algerian army. In early 2001, he traveled to Pakistan to provide humanitarian aid to Muslims and Christians in Kashmir, but one night, while carrying food and clothing to poor villagers with a group of other volunteers, he stepped on a landmine and sustained a serious injury, which led to the loss of his lower right leg.

After being treated in a hospital in Lahore, where he was fitted with a prosthetic leg, he was taken in by a few generous families while he recuperated, and was then recommended to visit an Algerian in Peshawar, near the Afghan border, who would be able to help him find a wife. While visiting this man in May 2002, he was seized in a raid by Pakistani police — one of many raids at the time that helped to fill Guantánamo — even though he was never told why he had been seized, and, in fact, was told by the Pakistanis who seized him that he would be released.

In Guantánamo, Naji told his interrogators that he was unaware that Lashkar-e-Taiba was affiliated with al-Qaeda, as the Americans alleged (which was understandable, as LeT’s humanitarian work was separate from its military operations), and was also obliged to counter an allegation that he had received de-mining training at an LeT camp, pointing out that the fact that he lost his leg after stepping on a mine made a mockery of the allegation, and explaining that it was something he had been forced to admit when he was tortured in the US prison at Bagram airbase after his capture. He also explained the meaning of jihad to a military review board that reviewed his case, telling the panel of three officers, “The jihad does not have to be a jihad where you fight. Jihad can be carrying food or helping others. It does not have to be fighting.”

The latest news from Algeria

After Naji’s return, there were alarming indications that the worst fears about the Algerian authorities had been confirmed, when the Associated Press reported that the state prosecutor’s office in Algiers had stated on Monday that Naji had been “indicted,” on unspecified grounds. It later transpired that this was not the case, and that, as Reuters explained, Naji had been reunited with his family after approximately a week in lawful detention (according to Algerian law, terror suspects can be held for up to 12 days before appearing in court). A judicial source “who did not want to be identified” told Reuters, “He is at home in Batna. He just needs to go every week to the local police station to sign a form.”

In a statement, the prosecutor’s office said Naji “was released after appearing before a judge on Sunday who placed him under judicial control — which means he has to report regularly to police pending a further decision on his case,” as Reuters described it. The statement also explained, “Contrary to what has been falsely reported, this person’s case has been dealt with in the most complete transparency and in respect for the law, whether in terms of procedure or the length of his detention.”

The Algerian government could still spring a surprise on Naji, by deciding to put him forward for a trial, but even if the authorities leave him unmolested, there is no guarantee that the extremists that Naji fears will do the same — and it remains deeply troubling that the Obama administration may still seek to forcibly repatriate four other Algerians, also cleared for release after the deliberations of the President’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, who are also terrified of returning home, as the Washington Post explained three weeks ago in an article entitled, “Six detainees would rather stay at Guantánamo Bay than be returned to Algeria.”

Although administration officials conceded last week that they would “continue to examine each case individually before any repatriation,” noting that some officials “have expressed some concern about returning one of the Algerians [Ahmed Belbacha] who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in absentia” last year (for speaking out about his fears of repatriation), it now appears, as I explained last week, that there is “no obstacle to prevent the Obama administration from sending the other four Algerians home whenever it feels like it.”

The other Algerians who fear enforced repatriation from Guantánamo

From what I can ascertain, given that the Obama administration has not released details about the men cleared for release by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, these men are, in addition to Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, Nabil Hadjarab (PDF), Motai Saib and Djamel Ameziane (PDF), who were all cleared for release by military review boards under the Bush administration, and who all have legitimate fears about returning to Algeria.

Last February, in an article entitled, “Guantánamo’s refugees,” I described Nabil Hadjarab, who was 22 years old when he was seized, as “a young Algerian from a broken home, with relatives in Lyon, who was only persuaded to travel to Afghanistan because he was caught in limbo between Algeria and France as his family disintegrated around him.” As Afghanistan descended into chaos following the US-led invasion in October 2001, Hadjarab, who had been living in Kabul and had then moved to the eastern city of Jalalabad, tried to flee across the mountains to Pakistan, but was wounded by a bomb and taken to a hospital in Jalalabad, where he was sold to US forces.

Returning Nabil Hadjarab to Algeria would be, to extend the New York Times’ comment about Abdul Aziz Naji, “an act of cruelty that seems to defy explanation,” because his extended family is in France, and is willing to take him in, and because he has almost no family connections in Algeria, making him particularly vulnerable to both the government and to extremists who might wish to prey on him. Given that a guard in Guantánamo described him as “a brilliant artist, a keen footballer, and a sweet kid,” it is apparent that the French government should offer him a home, as his lawyers at the legal action charity Reprieve have requested.

Motai Saib, who was 25 years old when he was seized crossing the Pakistani border, had also been living in Jalalabad, and had traveled to Afghanistan via France and London. As his lawyers noted in a court filing in July 2008 (PDF), in February 2008 the Department of Defense notified them that Saib “’has been approved to leave Guantánamo,’ but stated obliquely that ‘such a decision does not equate [to] a determination that your client is not an enemy combatant, nor does is it a determination that he does not pose a threat to the United States or its allies. I cannot provide you any information regarding when your client may be leaving Guantánamo as his departure is subject to ongoing discussions.” As Saib’s lawyers noted, “Saib has serious concerns that this ambiguous and damaging language will prevent his safe release from Guantánamo.”

Djamel Ameziane, who was 34 years old when he was seized crossing the Pakistani border, had also been living in Jalalabad. A Berber, he left Algeria in 1992 “in order to escape persecution and make a better life for himself,” and unsuccessfully sought asylum in Austria, where he worked legally for three years, becoming the top chef at an Italian restaurant in Vienna, until a new government clamped down on immigrants, and his work permit was denied without explanation. From there, he moved to Canada, where he obtained a temporary work permit and worked for an office supply company and for various restaurants in Montreal. In 2000, after five years in Canada, his asylum claim was denied, and, as his lawyers explained, “Fearful of being forcibly returned to Algeria, and with few options, [he] went to Afghanistan, where he could live freely without discrimination as a Muslim man, and where he would not fear deportation to Algeria.”

Ameziane fears returning to Algeria because of the stigma of Guantánamo and the instability in his hometown of Kabylie, where, as his lawyers explained, practicing Muslims are “targeted for arrests and detention by the government based solely on their religious practices” and “The stigma of having spent time at Guantánamo would alone be enough to put him at risk of being imprisoned if he is returned.”

Advice for President Obama

With the uproar over the return of Abdul Aziz Naji, the Obama administration must surely be having second thoughts about proceeding with further enforced repatriations to Algeria, and if any further encouragement is needed, senior officials should recall that, although there were periodic threats to stealthily repatriate Algerians against their will under the Bush administration (as I reported here), the Bush administration was aware of Algeria’s dubious human rights record, and refused to repatriate Algerians who believed that they faced the risk of torture.

I leave the final word of advice to the editors of the New York Times, who concluded their editorial on Sunday with the following words:

We support the administration’s efforts to close Guantánamo, and understand the concern that if there is a more heavily Republican Congress next year, doing so may become harder. That is no reason to deliver prisoners to governments that the United States considers hostile and that have a record of torture and lawlessness.

The government refuses to deport prisoners to Libya, Syria and other countries known for abuse. It could find a new home for the Algerians.

I doubt that we will hear anything about discussions taking place behind the scenes, but for the sake of President Obama’s credibility (and, sadly, that of the Supreme Court), I hope that discussions are ongoing regarding the return of Nabil Hadjarab to France, of Ahmed Belbacha to the UK (where he lived without incident for nearly two years), of Djamel Ameziane to either Austria or Canada, and of Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed and Motai Saib to countries where dubious “diplomatic assurances” are not required to ensure their welfare as refugees who have already lost over eight years of their lives for being in the wrong place at the wrong 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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Eurasia Review and The Public Record.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 60 prisoners released from February 2009 to mid-July 2010, 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); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini).