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

This is Part 28 of the 70-part series. 348 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For further information, also see Part One (which contained eleven stories about prisoners from a variety of countries, mostly captured in Afghanistan, and including Yasser al-Zahrani, who died in Guantánamo in June 2006), and Part Two (which featured another eleven stories, mostly of prisoners who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001). Part Three featured another eleven stories, including some examples of prisoners who “returned to the battlefield” after their release, and the story of a Libyan prisoner whose fie is full of statements made by other Libyans, including Abdelhakim Belhaj, now active as a commander of the Libyan rebels, who were subjected to extraordinary rendition and torture in secret CIA prisons. Part Four told eleven more stories, of prisoners seized, for a variety of reasons, crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan after the US-led invasion in October 2001, and Part Five featured more of those stories, including four accounts of the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who persuaded the US they were held by mistake, but had to wait until 2006 to be freed, when they were resettled in Albania, and not in the US, which accepted that it could not return them to China, but refused to allow them to live in America. Part Six involved more stories of Saudis and Afghans, including the particularly unfortunate story of a Saudi-born Uighur, who was tortured by Al-Qaida for allegedly plotting to assassinate Osama bin Laden, liberated from a Taliban prison, and then sent to Guantánamo. Part Seven featured more Saudis, a Yemeni, two Kazakhs, an Iranian and some Afghans, including some prisoners with serious mental health issues (and one juvenile prisoner), and the sad — and unresolved — story of Mani al-Utaybi, another of the three prisoners who died in June 2006, and this part features more mental health issues, another juvenile, three men sent to live in Albania because it was not safe for them to be returned to their home countries, and the last of the three prisoners who died in June 2006. Also see Part Nine and Part Ten.

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

Abdullah Al Qahtani (ISN 652, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how, after his release, Abdullah al-Qahtani, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, told the newspaper Asharq Alawsat that, in Afghanistan, he had taken part in the Taliban’s military conflict, which he described as “skirmishes with the Russians and allies such as Ahmad Shah Massoud,” and also said that, after the US-led invasion began, he and a number of other Arabs negotiated a surrender with the Northern Alliance, and were surprised when they were handed over to the Americans.” In contrast, the Pentagon’s limited allegations are here.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Qahtani was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated December 3, 2004, in which he was also identified as Abdulla Hamid al-Qahtani and Abdullah Mohammed, born in 1979, and it was also noted that he had latent TB, in common with many of the prisoners, but refused therapy “after three treatments.” It was also noted that he had “been seen for tooth decay” and “had a left 5th metatarsal fracture (foot) noted on x-ray after ankle injury,” for which he “received therapy” — for “chronic ankle pain.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, after one year of high school, “he worked for his father in a family owned business,” and then, in January 2001, met Abdallah Aiza al-Matrafi (ISN 5, released in December 2007, and also identified as Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi) who was identified as “the national director of Al-Wafa in Afghanistan/Pakistan.” A Saudi-based charity which was demonstrably involved in humanitarian work in Afghanistan, Al-Wafa was also regarded as a front for terrorism, and was blacklisted by the US, and defined by the Intelligence Interagency on Counter Terrorism (IITC) “as a Tier 2 NGO,” meaning an organization that has “demonstrated the intent and willingness to support terrorist organizations willing to attack US persons or interests.”

Al-Matrafi apparently recruited al-Qahtani, and his cousin Jabir al-Qahtani (ISN 650, released in November 2007), “to establish an Al-Wafa organisation in Lahore, Pakistan,” and in early February 2001 gave him $200 for travel expenses. After he and his cousin took a three-week vacation in Egypt, they met al-Matrafi in Lahore in April 2001, and “were driven to a large storage facility in Lahore,” where al-Matrafi told them “they would be accountable for all goods received from the United Arab Emirates and take regular inventories.” They apparently “lived on the second floor of the storage facility and were told by [al-Matrafi] to keep a low profile and not to be seen by the local populace.” Al-Jabrani explained that he “was told this [was] because he was a foreigner and it would make people in the area suspicious,” and said that he was also “introduced to a local Pakistani, Muhammad Gola, who was the acting director of the Al-Wafa office in Lahore, PK, and was told if he needed anything [to] talk to Gola.”

In September 2001, having not been paid, al-Qahtani said that he asked al-Matrafi “to pay him so he could travel back to Saudi Arabia,” and al-Matrafi told him that “if they travel[ed] to Afghanistan they would be paid the back wages plus any time worked while in Afghanistan.” He and his cousin agreed and traveled to Kabul, where they met al-Matrafi “in his villa” in the Wazir Akbar Khan District of Kabul, and where, according to al-Qahtani, he “was only paid $3000.00 USD.” He and his cousin then “continued working for Al-Wafa in the Wazir Akbar Khan District until captured by Northern Alliance on [sic] November 2001.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 3, 2002, allegedly to “provide information on the following: Activities of the Al-Wafa organisation under Abdul Aziz aka Abdallah Aiza al-Matrafi, Aspects of Al-Wafa funnelling financial support to illicit purposes, Lahore, PK, and Kabul, AF, offices of Al-Wafa [and] Recruitment procedures and network for Al-Wafa in Mecca, SA.”

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

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

Given what he said after his release, it may be worth considering that, in this latter period, he may not have been working for Al-Wafa as he stated, but I see no reason to dispute the whole of the story of his humanitarian work with Al-Wafa, although this is what the Task Force did. Noting that he was assessed as being “affiliated with Al-Wafa” and “a member of Al-Qaida and/or its global terrorist network,” the US authorities were deeply suspicious about al-Qahtani’s claim that he “was promised over $6000.00 USD for working six months in Pakistan,” which was regarded as “an excessive amount of money since the average employee of Al Wafa was paid between $250- $300 USD per month.” It was claimed that Al Wafa “was known for providing money transfers for Al-Qaida” (although this allegation was never actually tested in an objective manner), and that, as a result, it was “possible that [al-Qahtani] was involved in that activity or distributing money to Mujahideen as they were exiting Afghanistan.”

In addition, it was noted that it had been “assessed that he [was] possibly a higher-ranking employee in the Al-Wafa or other extremist organization and received weapons training at Al-Wafa’s training camp in Kabul, Afghanistan (AF), and did not work in an alleged ‘warehouse’ in Lahore, PK, which research has proven to be non-existent.”

As a result of all these doubts, al-Qahtani was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a high force protection threat,” with “a past history of aggressive behaviour,” and “multiple acts of assault on his disciplinary record,” who had “routinely been aggressive and ha[d] two incidents of forced cell extractions,” had “incited disturbances on many different blocks and fail[ed] to act within the detention facility SOP.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Saudi Arabia, although he was not released for another 17 months, when he was repatriated to be put through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Khudaidad (ISN 655, Afghanistan) Released February 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Khudaidad (aka Khudai Dad), who was 45 years old at the time of his capture, was seized in a night-time raid by Afghan soldiers in Uruzgan in April 2002. It was alleged that his compound was used by Mullah Berader, a senior figure in the Taliban, that he himself was a Taliban official and that he was supposed to “assume a prominent leadership role in Kandahar,” but he said that he was actually just a poor farmer.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khudaidad was an “Update Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated March 6, 2004, in which he was identified as Kudai Dat, born in 1957, and it was noted that he had been “diagnosed with Schizophrenia,” although it was also claimed that he was “otherwise in good health.”

In fact, Khudaidad had severe mental health problems, as was revealed in an attachment from the “JTF GTMO Behavioral Health Service and the Behavioral Science Consultation Team,” who reported that he “began to report symptoms of anxiety in November 2002, which resulted in his being hospitalized for acute symptoms of psychosis.” In January 2003, “he was referred to the transfer assessment team, which conducted a final interrogation,” and “was not interrogated again” for several months “while his file was being processed.” According to JTF GTMO’s daily incident reports, “he often refused his medication during this period,” but “[h]is condition improved, and he was cleared for a polygraph examination.” However, when this was to take place, he “began to have hallucinations again, and the polygraphers determined he was mentally unfit to examine.” It was also noted that it was “consistent with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia, controlled with medication, for an individual to react to increased stress with psychotic symptoms.”

In July 2003, “he was started on a monthly dose of an antipsychotic to assist with compliance with his medication regimen.” It was noted that he then “responded well” to monthly does of Haldol Decanoate, and was “free of psychosis.” However, it was also noted that he could “be expected to experience intermittent difficulties related to psychosis over time without constant supervision of medication compliance,” and would “require continued psychiatric follow-up upon return to his native country.” Regarding his planned repatriation, it was noted that he would “require a mental health escort and supplemental medications ‘as needed’ in-flight,” and it was also noted that “[h]is long-term prognosis appear[ed] poor.”

Despite this, the “Update Recommendation,” following up on a recommendation that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another movement,” which was based on an assessment that he “was not affiliated with Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader” (dated March 22, 2003), included “New Information,” which led to Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller’s recommendation that he be retained in DoD control, and was “contrary to his statements that he [was] nothing more than a farmer.”

According to “sensitive reporting,” which was not specified, Khudaidad was “referred to as a Mullah,” and “was possibly involved in negotiations between Mullah Omar and other Pashtun commanders for control of Kandahar during the disintegration of the Taliban regime.” According to this account, he “would have been acting in a leadership position,” but this was not convincing, given the use of the word “possibly.”

It was also noted that, “according to new information,” his claim that “he had only two brothers,” was untrue, as “he may have as many as seven brothers,” although, again, this was not presented as a hard fact. Related to this was a claim that he “supplied biographical information on a senior Taliban facilitator by the name of ‘Zainullah,’” who was regarded as a “possible brother” of his.

In addition, although it could not be confirmed that there was any significance to the claim that the compound where he was seized was “identified as the last known location of Mullah Berader and other top Taliban commanders,” and Khudaidad “denie[d] any knowledge of these individuals or of Taliban involvement in his town,” it was noted that his home “remain[ed] the center of Taliban resistance to the current government of Afghanistan,” and the authorities were deeply suspicious about that.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” It was also noted, evidently by the guard force, and evidently without having ever been apprised of his severe mental health issues, that he had “shown by his actions in the cell that he ha[d] little regard for himself and [would] not listen to authority,” and that he had “refused medications, banged his head against the floor, exposed himself to others, and in general ha[d] been non-compliant.” Most alarmingly, given what was indicated elsewhere about his mental health, it was also noted that, “at many times, [he] trie[d] to make it appear that he [was] suffering from a mental breakdown,” when, in fact, he probably was.

As a result of the Task Force’s intelligence and threat assessments, Maj. Gen. Miller made his recommendation, although the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) disagreed, having assessed him as a low risk. However, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF [deferred] to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] pose[d] a medium risk.” CITF’s opinion may eventually have prevailed, but not for another 23 months.

Rashid Al Uwaydah (ISN 664, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One),” I explained how Rashid al-Uwaydah, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo that he arrived in Pakistan in July 2001 “to escape possible arrest by the Saudi authorities for drug dealing,” but hoped nevertheless to buy drugs in Pakistan to sell in Saudi Arabia. After losing his passport, he was arrested in Islamabad with some Libyans he had met, who, he said, were from an official group recognized by the Libyan government, but who the Americans claimed were “helping Arabs get out of Pakistan.” It has not, to date, been possible to identify what happened to the Libyans seized with al-Uwaydah.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Uwaydah was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated October 15, 2004, in which he was also identified as Rashid Awwad Rashid al-Uwaydha, born in 1976, and it was noted that he was “in good health, although he complain[ed] of acid reflux.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he said, as he did in his review board at Guantánamo, that he “left Saudi Arabia to avoid being arrested for selling and smuggling pills in Saudi Arabia,” and “was advised by a Pakistani hashish smuggler” to go to Pakistan, where he was provided with a contact. He apparently arrived in Pakistan in June 2001, and planned to stay for a month before returning to Saudi Arabia.

Al-Uwaydah said that “he never attended any Taliban or Al-Qaida (AQ) affiliated training camps,” either in Pakistan or in Afghanistan, where, he said, he had never set foot. On approximately January 20, 2002, he was arrested by the Pakistani police “while residing at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Islamabad.” He was transferred to US custody on April 5, 2002, and the circumstances of his transfer to Guantánamo were not known to the Task Force, as it was stated that he was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, which was obviously impossible, and, in addition, it was “not documented in [his] file why he was sent to JTF GTMO.”

In assessing his story, the Joint Task Force noted, bluntly, that his “cover story of going to Pakistan to buy drugs and never entering Afghanistan [was] untrue,” although there was little information provided to establish if this was indeed the case. The Task Force noted that it was “unclear if [he] was arrested with a group of Libyans that were operating in the same hotel,” as he claimed, but the US authorities had no witnesses to any of his activities, only a few dubious claims that his name was found on Al-Qaida-related documents recovered from house raids.

Particularly significant was the fact that his name “was listed as one of 77 Saudi nationals whom a visiting Saudi Delegation considered to be of low intelligence value,” and “indicated the Government of Saudi Arabia would be willing to have these 77 detainees transferred to Saudi Custody for possible prosecution.”

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium to high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” although it should be noted that he was assessed as being a high risk, and the words “medium to” were added in a hand-written note. In assessing the risk he allegedly posed, the Task Force claimed that he “appear[ed] to be well connected to key facilitators in the Al-Qaida’s [sic] intemational terrorist network, ha[d] probably participated in terrorist training and hostilities against the US and coalition forces, and maintain[ed] the capability to continue to do so if released,” and therefore, it was “imperative” that he be ”retained in the custody of the US Government or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Govenment,” because his “continued detention [would] allow for further exploitation of his past affiliation with various terrorist groups and prevent him from engaging in further terrorist activity.”

The Task Force also declared him to be “an extremely hostile, radical Islamic,” whose threat assessment was “high,” because he had “a past history of aggressive behaviour,” had “aggressively assaulted the guards and ha[d] made many threats towards the guards.” As a result, it was perhaps surprising that Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended him for transfer to continued detention in Saudi Arabia, although it was noted that this decision only applied “if a satisfactory agreement can be reached that allows access to detainee and/or access to exploited intelligence,” and that, “If a satisfactory agreement cannot be reached for his continued detention in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he should be retained under DoD control.”

The Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) disagreed, having assessed him as “a medium risk on 7 May 2004,” but CITF deferred to JTF GTMO’s assessment that he posed “a medium to high risk,” in “the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders,” but even with the Task Force’s conditions, he was not released for another 19 months, and was then put through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program.

Zakirjan Asam (ISN 672, Russia) Released in November 2006 (in Albania)

In The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Zakirjan Asam (aka Zakirjan Hassam), from Saratov Oblast, part of the Russian Federation bordering Kazakhstan, who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three prisoners released in Albania in November 2006 because the US authorities feared for their safety if they were returned to their home countries, although he was actually cleared for release in 2005. He was one of the 38 prisoners cleared of being “enemy combatants” after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo which took place from July 2004 to March 2005, and which led to the swift release of all 38, except a Uighur and Saudi resident, Saddiq Ahmed Turkistani (ISN 491, profiled here), and those who could not be safely repatriated — five Uighurs profiled in Part Four and Part Five, and the two others released in Albania in November 2006, who are profiled below — the Egyptian Ala Salim (ISN 716), and the Algerian Fethi Boucetta (ISN 718).

In Chapter 14, I explained how Asam, a refugee, said in Guantánamo that he was deported from Kazakhstan to Afghanistan in spring 2001, and was betrayed, after the US-led invasion began, by Afghan villagers anxious to avail themselves of the reward money offered by the Americans for vulnerable individuals who could be passed off as members of Al-Qaida or the Taliban. He explained that the inhabitants of two villages in Kunduz province negotiated between themselves and asked him to pay them a $3,000 bribe or they would hand him over to the Americans. He said that “they knew they could sell me to the Americans for $5,000,” and that they explained to him that “because I am a Muslim they lowered the price for me.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Asam was  an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated March 25, 2005, in which he was misidentified as an Uzbek, and it was noted that he was born in May 1974. It was also noted that he “was diagnosed with a major depressive disorder with psychotic features and a non-specific psychosis,” and that he “suffer[ed] from migraine headaches.” It was also noted that he was taking “three psychiatric medications to control his illness,” and that the only restriction on his ability to travel (in other words, to be released from Guantánamo) was the requirement “to have his migraine and psychiatric medications available for the flight.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, according to his own account, after working as an auto mechanic, he moved to Kazakhstan in 1999, where he “was employed as a wheat farmer and construction laborer” until the spring of 2001, when Kazakh officials arrested him “due to lack of identification paperwork.” He was then apparently turned over to Tajik government officials “and was housed for two and a half months in a house with two unarmed guards,” before being “placed on a helicopter with a ‘Red Crescent’ emblem on the side and flown to Afghanistan,” where he was “put in a truck and transported to Kunduz.”

There, he said, he studied in a mosque, and, from May to November 2001, shared a house outside of the city “with eight women and three other males,” where he “maintained the generator for room and board.” When the US-led invasion reached Kunduz, he “fled to the mountains where he stayed for three days,” until Northern Alliances forces captured him “while he and two Uzbek-ethnic Afghans were sitting by a fire,” although “he was the only individual arrested.”

He was then taken to Dasht-e-Archi, where he was held in a house with “a group of unidentified Afghans for 25 days,” and where his captors said that, if he could raise $300, he would be freed. They then “released him to be able to acquire the funds,” but he “was later recaptured and jailed for one month before being turned over to US forces.” He was sent to Guantánamo on June 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: IMU [Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan] and their activities in Tajikistan and Afghanistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that Asam was “assessed as being a probable member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,” although no witnesses were found who had identified him, and all that the Task Force had to go on were similarities to the stories of others, which is hardly very convincing. It may be that he was an IMU recruit, as his story was full of holes, although there were certainly also a number of other strange stories circulating, concerning Afghanistan, the IMU and the countries to the north, indicating that men like Asam had been deported to Afghanistan, or deported and pressed into military service, meaning that his willingness, if he was indeed recruited, was difficult to gauge.

Above all, though, his mental health problems plagued his case, and, it seems to me, made any kind of objective assessment impossible. He was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” but part of that assessment involved a claim that his “psychological disorders may make him vulnerable to recruitment or manipulation by Islamic extremist organisations, who would exploit this vulnerability to utilize him to conduct terrorist activities.” It was also noted, in an analysis of his conduct (presumably submitted by the guard force) that he was “extremely violent and ha[d] been labeled as a psychiatric patient,” that he had “a past history of aggressive behaviour,” and that he had “six self-harm incident reports on record.”

Although it had been recommended that he be retained in DoD control on December 20, 2003, Brig. Gen. Hood drew on “information obtained since [his] previous assessment” to recommend that he be transferred to another country for continued detention, although this “information” was not specified. Of course, as the government evidently regarded it as unsafe to return him to Russia, the transfer recommendation was meaningless, as no third country would accept a former prisoner and then imprison them on America’s behalf. As a result, the trigger for his release was the decision, by his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, that he was not an ‘enemy combatant,” although it still took over a year and a half for a country to be found — Albania — that was prepared to accept him.

Since his release, no information has been provided regarding his mental health issues or how he has coped with his new life in a country that has offered him shelter, but very little in the way of support.

Salah Ahmed Al Salami (ISN 693, Yemen) Died in Guantánamo June 2006

As I explained in Chapter 19 of The Guantánamo Files, al-Salami (generally identified in Guantánamo as Ali Abdullah Ahmed), who was 25 years old at the time of his capture in Afghanistan in December 2001, was one of three prisoners who died at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006. having allegedly hanged themselves in a coordinated suicide pact. The other two were Yasser al-Zahrani, a Saudi (who was just 17 at the time of his capture), and Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi, and all three were long-term hunger strikers, who had been force-fed on a daily basis for many months before their deaths.

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

In an attempt to stifle further dissent, and to bolster their view that the three men were hardened terrorists, the Pentagon released details of the allegations against them, which served only to highlight almost everything that was wrong with the system at Guantánamo. In the case of al-Salami, one of 15 men seized in a raid on a student house in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002, the same night that Abu Zubaydah, who was later tortured and became one of the CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoners,” was seized. After al-Salami’s death, the Pentagon alleged, without providing any evidence at all, that he was “a mid- to high-level Al-Qaida operative who had key ties to principal facilitators and senior members of the group.”

Although none of the men had taken part in any tribunals, more detailed allegations against al-Salami surfaced in the alleged evidence against him in his CSRT, although a close inspection of the allegations reveals that they were mostly made by unidentified “members” of Al-Qaida, either in Guantánamo or in other secret prisons: “a senior Al-Qaida facilitator” identified him, another senior Al-Qaida figure — a “lieutenant” — identified him as being “associated with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and the “Al-Qaida weapons trainer from Tora Bora” allegedly identified him from his time in Kabul and at the Khaldan training camp. He was also identified as “an Al-Qaida courier,” and as someone who “worked directly for Osama bin Laden’s family.” Shorn of these allegations, which summon up images of various supposedly “significant” prisoners being shown photos of tier fellow prisoners — in what was known as the “family album” — in painful circumstances, the only other allegation was that the “Issa” guest house received the equivalent of jihadi junk mail: apparently, the residents of the house “routinely received endorsement letters from a well-known Al-Qaida operative” to attend the Khaldan camp.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to al-Salami was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated October 1, 2004, in which he was not identified by his real name, but only as Ali Abdullah Ahmed and Ali Abdullah Saleh, and it was noted that he was born in August 1979, and was “in good health,” although it was also noted that he had “a history of hunger striking and nephrolithiasis (kidney stones).”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, according to his own account, he “was a street vendor who sold clothing,” but “had been thinking about religious education for a long time and was prompted to travel to Pakistan to receive this education upon hearing God’s calling.” Around May 2001, “he quit his job, left his young wife, spent $500 USD on a passport, visa, and plane ticket,” which “was good for a return trip up to one year after purchase,” and flew from Sana’a to Karachi.”

After a week in Karachi, he took a bus to Faisalabad, where he “enrolled in Jamea Salafia University and began religious studies.” He said that he “was living in on-campus dormitories for five to six months,” but, about one month after the 9/11 attacks, “was asked to move out of the dorms on-campus,” and, “with several other Arab students, moved to an off-campus safehouse ran [sic] by a man named Issa.” He explained that, by the end of March 2002, he “was planning on staying in Pakistan until his plane ticket was just about to expire (another month and a half), but his plans were cut short” when Pakistani authorities raided the house, which was identified as the Crescent Textile Mill, on March 28, 2002.

He was then turned over to US authorities, and was sent to Guantánamo on June 19, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on: The safehouse in Faisalabad, PK, which was used to house foreign students who were attending the Jamea Salafia University [and] Routes of ingress between Yemen and Pakistan.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force stated its belief that he was “using the guise of studying Islam at the Jamea Salafia University while residing at the Issa safehouse as a cover story to conceal his true activities in Pakistan/Afghanistan.” An analyst pointed out that the Jamea Salafia University was “a religious madrassa (school) and not a state-funded or state-regulated school,” and that “[r]eligious madrassas in Pakistan are perceived to encourage militancy, religious extremism, and intolerance while thriving on anti-Western sentiment,” which may well have been true, but it did not mean that al-Salami was not a student.

It was also noted that he was captured “with fifteen others, many of whom have been identified by senior Al-Qaida personnel,” although this claim was extremely difficult to corroborate. What was clear was that Abu Zubaydah had some sort of connection with the house, but it was unclear exactly what that connection was, beyond being a place where, on occasion, men fleeing Afghanistan — whether as combatants of civilians was unclear — could be housed.

It was certainly not appropriate for the Task Force to declare that “The Issa safehouse was under the control of Abu Zubaydah, an Al-Qaida top lieutenant and aid to Osama bin Laden,” as the house was under the control of the Pakistani named Issa, and the claims about Zubaydah were and are wildly exaggerated.

As  a result, it was worth regarding with skepticism an analyst’s note that, although ”[s]everal Arabs captured at the Issa safehouse ha[d] used the same rigid cover story that they were merely educating themselves and studying Islam,” it was possible that “the house could have been used as a collection point for Al-Qaida members seeking and returning from Al-Qaida terrorist training.”

There are also grave doubts about the legitimacy of a raft of other claims made by Zubaydah and others seized with him in another house raid in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002. Zubaydah, for example, allegedly “identified” al-Salami, claiming that he had seen him in Kandahar with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and that “he might have seen detainee in Kandahar three or four times,” but there is no reason to trust this statement, and nor is there any reason to trust a statement made by Abu Yasir Al-Jaza’iri, described as “a senior Al-Qaida facilitator,” who “identified” al-Salami, and made a number of outlandish claims about him, as al-Jaza’iri was a “ghost prisoner,” also seized in Pakistan in March 2003, whose whereabouts have never been explained by the US government. Either held in secret CIA torture prisons, or in Pakistani custody, his testimony is, therefore, probably as unreliable as that of Abu Zubaydah.

Al-Jaza’iri apparently said that al-Salami’s cousin was arrested on arrival in Karachi in 1999 “due to visa violation issues,” and al-Salami “was sent by the family to secure his cousin’s release from jail.” He also said that he first met al-Salami at a guesthouse in Kandahar in the spring of 2000 and “place[d] him back in Pakistan in late 2000 assisting in efforts to release his cousin.” It was also al-Jaza’iri who claimed that he was “an Al-Qaida courier,” and he also claimed that he “was the younger brother of Assadallah al-Sindhi, a popular Al-Qaida member killed in 1996,” and also, most outrageously, it seems to me, that al-Salami “and his cousin Nadim were responsible for caring for the logistics of the families of [Osama bin Laden]‘s son-in-laws, Awa al-Madani and Abdallah al-Madani, that included travel arrangements, lodging, and healthcare arrangements.” An analyst noted that this claim “establishe[d] the detainee’s stature in relation to UBL and adds validity to Zubaydah’s statements identifying that detainee associated with Senior Al-Qaida Operational Planner KSM,” but it does no such thing, as there is no indication that any of it is true.

Other dubious claims were made by Noor Uthman Muhammed (ISN 707, captured with Zubyadah), and described as the “Al-Qaida trainer from Tora Bora,” who allegedly identified al-Salami as having been in Kabul and at the Khaldan camp, although no further details were provided to corroborate his claims, and Walid bin Attash (ISN 10014), another “high-value detainee” held in secret CIA prisons, and sent to Guantánamo in September 2006 with Zubaydah, KSM and 11 others. Bin Attash, described as a “senior Al-Qaida operational planner,” said that he “recognized detainee by his distinct birthmark, but cannot remember any details,” which is also meaningless as an allegation.

In conclusion, the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium to high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he had “a history of aggressive behaviour in the camp, often defiantly failing to comply with instructions.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be retained under DoD control, and he went on to resume the “history of hunger striking” and resistance to his detention identified in his file until his death 20 months later. What is particularly sad, reading through this file, is that, although JTF GTMO notified the Criminal Investigative Task Force of its recommendations on October 1, 2004, CITF did not agree, having “assessed [him] as a low risk on 12 April 2004.”

In spite of the government’s official account of the men’s deaths, the claim that they committed suicide was doubted by their fellow prisoners at the time, and also by other commentators, although it was not until December 2009 and January 2010 that serious doubts were expressed in a concerted and thoroughly researched manner.

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

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

Jamal Kiyemba (ISN 701, Uganda) Released February 2006

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Jamal Kiyemba, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, was born in Uganda, but had been a British resident since the age of 14, when he was granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK following the death of his father and came to live in the UK with his mother, eventually embarking on a degree in pharmacy at Leicester De Montfort University that he never completed.

Although he lived in the UK for eight years, Kiyemba never claimed British citizenship, and on his release, he was sent to Uganda, and home secretary Charles Clarke prohibited him from setting foot in the UK again. As was reported in an article about him in the Mail on Sunday after his release, he told his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, “I may not be British according to some bit of paper but in reality I am a Brit and always will be. My doctor, my local mosque, my teens, my education, employment, friends, taxes, home and above all else my family — it is all in Britain.” In contrast to this account, the limited allegations against him in Guantánamo are available here.

Kiyemba was arrested in March 2002 in Pakistan, where he went to study Arabic and the Koran because it was “very cheap,” without ever having set foot in Afghanistan, although he admitted that he was taught how to use a Kalashnikov by a Pakistani he met, and that he “left England with the intention of finding a way to fight jihad” in Afghanistan, “to defend the Muslims who were being killed.” After his arrest, he was held for two months, beaten by Pakistani intelligence officers, threatened with torture and then transferred to Bagram.

In Chapter 14, I explained how, in describing Bagram, Kiyemba recalled a 48-hour period, when he was “hung on the door for two hours and then allowed to sit for half an hour but never allowed to sleep,” and was then taken for interrogation for two hours at a time, adding, “I had to kneel on the cold concrete throughout the interrogations with my cuffed hands above my head.” He was also interviewed by MI5 officers, who showed him photos of supposed terrorists in the UK and told him they would only be able to help him if he helped them, but he didn’t know any of them. He recognized Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada, but had only ever seen them on TV.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Kiyemba was an “Administrative Review Board Input,” dated November 3, 2004, in which the Joint Task Force recommended that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention,” following his last assessment, dated August 2, 2004, in which he was actually recommended for “Release or transfer to the control of another country for continued detention (TRCD).” The full details of this assessment were not included , although it was noted that he was assessed as being of low intelligence value, and of posing a medium risk.

In assessing his threat level, the Task Force claimed that he was “an admitted jihadist who attempted travel to Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks,” and that he was “committed to defending Islamic nations against aggression, citing any system like democracy which tries to end Islamic law is worthy of Jihad against it,” and “adding that such systems are ultimately oppressive.”

It was also claimed that he “had acquired support in the UK and abroad from tiered organisations” including the vast, apolitical missionary organization Jamaat al-Tablighi (which was regarded by the US authorities as a front for terrorism), and the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Tayiba, and, additionally, it was claimed that he “received military training in the use of the AK-47 while in Peshawar, PK, from support members belonging to the LET.”

It was also noted that “Pakistani police arrested [him] near Peshawar where he was attempting to enter Afghanistan with three other men who also ended up in Guantánamo — Mohammed al-Amin (ISN 706, a Mauritanian released in September 2007, but described as having been “assessed as a low level jihadist”), Mustafa al-Hassan (ISN 719, a Sudanese prisoner released in October 2008, but described as “a suspected Al-Qaida operative”), and Amir Yacoub al-Amir (ISN 720, another Sudanese prisoner, released in May 2008, but “assessed as a probable Al-Qaida operative”).

On his return to Uganda, Kiyemba was “confined to a ‘safe house’” for two months, according to the Ugandan press, although it would seem fairer to explain that he was held under a form of house arrest for this period. On April 17, 2006, he told a reporter, Emmy Allio, “I am now a very happy man because I am free to live my life. I have visited all my relatives. This is the first time I am free since 2002.” He also said, “I did not expect anything good in Uganda but I was instead treated quite fairly. I thank the Uganda security for being good to me. I thank all Muslims in Uganda and elsewhere who have been praying for me.”

He added, “Last week, the Uganda security told me that I am a free man. The officer told me, ‘You are free to go out and live your life but be careful with wrong groups out there.’” A security source told the reporter that the Ugandan government “did not find any cause to continue to detain him,” although the official added, “He is a free man, but we shall nab him if he falls in wrong groups.”

Even so, as the reporter described it, “his joy upon being released has quickly brought misery. Kiyemba is afraid of the future, saying he does not know what to do, having dropped out of university in 2001 to join ‘an Islamic cause against western imperialists in Afghanistan’ after the Taliban fell.” At the time, he said, “I was ready to assist my brothers there in any possible way, financially or by holding a gun, to defend them,” but now, he said, “I am looking for a job. I want to complete the university course. I want to be independent. I need help. I am determined to complete my studies but I need my independence. I need to sustain myself, not be a burden to relatives.”

He was unwilling to speak about his experiences in US custody, stating only, “In Guantánamo Bay, it was more of psychological torture. As a Muslim, you must be prepared to suffer and die for your religion. Being in Guantánamo Bay taught me one thing: to be patient and to put my trust in God.”

There have been no recent reports about Jamal Kiyemba.

Ala Salim (ISN 716, Egypt) Released November 2006 (in Albania)

In The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ala Salim (aka Allah Saleem), a religious scholar who was 34 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three prisoners released in Albania in November 2006 because the US authorities feared for their safety if they were returned to their home countries, although he was actually cleared for release in 2005. He was one of the 38 prisoners cleared of being “enemy combatants” after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo which took place from July 2004 to March 2005, and which led to the swift release of all 38, except a Uighur and Saudi resident, Saddiq Ahmed Turkistani (ISN 491, profiled here), and those who could not be safely repatriated — five Uighurs profiled in Part Four and Part Five, and the two others released in Albania in November 2006, who are profiled in this article — the Russian Zakirjan Asam (ISN 672, see above), and the Algerian Fethi Boucetta (ISN 718, see below).

In Chapter 13, I explained, drawing on the Pentagon’s documents, how Salim was one of several dozen prisoners seized in house raids in Pakistan in 2002 (mainly in April and May) who were mostly working for charities regarded by the US authorities as fronts for terrorism. Those seized were, in general, office workers or teachers, but in some cases people who just happened to live at an address regarded as a house where “terror suspects” were being “harbored” were also seized.

Salim, who became an influential figure to the Arabs in Guantánamo, had lived until the age of 22 in Egypt, where, like thousands of other young men, he was arrested several times but never charged, and after living in Saudi Arabia he moved to Pakistan, where he was distributing humanitarian aid to Afghanistan for the International Islamic Relief Organization at the time of his capture.

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Salim, identified as Abd al-Maqsut Muhammad Sagim Mazruh, spoke to reporter Matthew Schofield, although the reporter noted upfront that, “After years of imprisonment, alleged torture, countless interrogations and unrelenting psychological pressure, there are some things that Abd al-Maqsut Muhammad Sagim Mazruh won’t talk about. He won’t say why he was in Pakistan in late 2001 or early 2002, when he was arrested. He won’t talk about how he made a living. He won’t discuss why he can never return to Egypt, his country of birth, or his three previous arrests and — according to documents filed with the Albanian government — torture in those prisons.”

He did, however, discuss why he thought “there can be no doubt that he’s innocent of all terrorism charges and suspicions, and why “there can be no doubt that the US never had any evidence against him.” As he said (via an interpreter), “I’m sitting here, aren’t I? Is there any reason to believe that if the United States could produce any evidence against me, any evidence at all, they would have set me free? I was innocent when I was arrested. I am innocent now.”

Mazruh (Salim) said that “a US military tribunal at Guantánamo told him in 2005 that he was innocent.” McClatchy noted that “there are no public records to confirm that,” but added that the decision to “declare him no longer an enemy combatant” was “the closest [the US government has] come to admitting that it made mistakes.”

Describing him as a “timid, soft man,” the McClatchy article also noted that he recalled that the allegations against him — and specifically, a claim that he was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden — “created waves of laughter” from his fellow prisoners, who, he said, told him, “You were his bodyguard? And he’s still alive? He’s still free, and he hires the likes of you to protect him? You need a bodyguard; how could you be one?”

Turning to his limited freedom in Albania, McClatchy noted that it was not “a freedom he cherishes.” Living in “a small room in a refugee center, in a walled complex on the edge of the capital, in a neighborhood of rutted and pitted gravel roads cut through by a trash-filled creek,” he was, in Schofield’s words, “trapped without knowing the language, without work or even a permit to work. His wife and children wait in northern Africa, and he’s filed a petition with the Albanian government to allow them to join him, a petition that other former detainees are watching closely because they haven’t seen their families since they were arrested, either.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Salim was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated July 2, 2004, in which he was identified as Allah Muhammed Salim, born in January 1967, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although he “had a lung biopsy prior to detention,” had “a history of migraines,” and had also been a hunger striker.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that, after graduating from an Egyptian university in 1989, he was sponsored by a mosque in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to travel to Islamabad to assist Afghan refugees. After explaining that he was “not allowed to train or fight in the Soviet-Afghan War due to his poor hearing and vision,” he said that he traveled to Peshawar, where he worked as an assistant storage supervisor for the [International] Islamic Relief Organization” until 1991, when he began ten years of religious study — six at a university in Peshawar, and four more at a university in Sadiqabad.

After the 9/11 attacks, however, “he heard that Americans were rounding up Arabs in Pakistan,” and an acquaintance “advised him to go to a larger city [Lahore] and stay with a Pakistani man called Wasim.” He did so, staying at the house “with five unidentified men,” but just ten days after his arrival he was seized by Pakistani police. he said that he “spent nearly 70 days in a Lahore, PK, prison, followed by two months in an Afghanistan prison.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because he “possibly has information pertaining to: Beit Al-Ansar, a Saudi charitable organization operating in Peshawar, PK [who he stayed with for ten days in 1989], A facility near the Pakistan border belonging to Jalal Al-Din Al-Haqqani [the Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani] in 1989 [and] Refugee operations and weapons training taking place at the “Center” [elsewhere described as being close to the Afghan/Pakistan border, and a place where, in 1989, he reportedly "went to see a famous, but unidentified, fighter who fought against the Russians"]. Ironically, when it came to attempts to justify his detention, the Task Force noted that he had “admitted that he [was] a jihadist, that he traveled to Pakistan to assist the Muslims in Afghanistan who were fighting the Soviets,and that he would kill Russians if he had the opportunity” — exactly the same sentiments that, when he traveled to Pakistan in 1989, were being financially supported by the US government to the tune of billions of dollars every year.

Despite having no information about him indicating that he was involved in any way with militancy or terrorism, the Task Force nevertheless stated that he had been “associated with three terrorist organisations” — Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Al-Qaida and Harkat Ul-Mujahideen (HUM), a Pakistani militant group that he allegedly “attempted to train with,” and with whom he allegedly worked, at “the Center,” which was “affiliated” with Jalaluddin Haqqani, according to US analysts. The main problem with this allegation was that this alleged involvement took place in 1989, when Haqqani was a US-funded ally against the Soviet Union.

The US authorities suggested that he had been “arrested twice in Egypt for distributing propaganda for the EIG [Egyptian Islamic Jihad],” and that he admitted in one interrogation that he was actually deported from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, rather than being sponsored by a mosque, but it is uncertain how much truth there is to these accounts, or how relevant what Salim was doing in the late 1980s was to his activities nearly 15 years later.

No satisfactory reason was given for his alleged involvement with Al-Qaida, although, in assessing the risk he posed, the Task Force stated that it was assessed that he was “very intelligent/educated” and had “provided support to multiple terrorist groups by organizing their finances and personnel.” Even though no evidence was provided to support this assertion, it was further claimed that his “poor vision and hearing and other medical problems [we]re probably valid, but this would make the perfect cover as being not useful to the fighting force and being underestimated by anti-terrorist forces.” In addition, it was claimed that “[t]hese disabilities would not hinder him from distributing material, collecting data, organizing records and delegating tasks to be completed by junior personnel.”

In conclusion, he was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” because of the groundless assessment above, and an additional claim that, “by examining his attitude to pursue jihad,” the Task Force had decided that he had “performed hostilities against the US and coalition forces by supporting terrorist organizations in an administrative role.” It was also noted that his “overall behavior ha[d] been generally non-compliant and aggressive,” that he had been “preaching and teaching to the other detainees in an angry manner,” and, “[w]hen asked to stop, he continue[d],” that he had “involved himself in a riot,” had “participated in hunger strikes,” and had been “caught hoarding food.” In general, this section concluded, he had “refused to follow the guard force’s instructions.”

For this, he was, no doubt, regularly punished, but for the authorities, all that counted were the assessments of the risk he posed and his intelligence value, leading to Brig. Gen. Hood’s recommendation that he should be retained in DoD control, which lasted until a tribunal concluded, instead, that he was not an “enemy combatant,” and should be released, setting in motion the process that eventually led to his release in Albania.

Fethi Boucetta (ISN 718, Algeria) Released November 2006 (in Albania)

In The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Fethi Boucetta, a teacher who was 38 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three prisoners released in Albania in November 2006 because the US authorities feared for their safety if they were returned to their home countries, although he was actually cleared for release in 2005. He was one of the 38 prisoners cleared of being “enemy combatants” after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo which took place from July 2004 to March 2005, and which led to the swift release of all 38, except a Uighur and Saudi resident, Saddiq Ahmed Turkistani (ISN 491, profiled here), and those who could not be safely repatriated — five Uighurs profiled in Part Four and Part Five, and the two others released in Albania in November 2006, who are profiled in this article — the Russian Zakirjan Asam (ISN 672, see above), and the Egyptian Ala Salim (ISN 716, also see above).

In his tribunal in Guantánamo, Hamad Gadallah (ISN 712, released in July 2005), who was a Sudanese accountant for a charity, the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, that had fallen under US suspicion, mentioned that his downstairs neighbor, who did not work for the RIHS, had also been seized on the same day as him, May 27, 2002. The neighbour was Fethi Boucetta, one of three teachers, working in a school run by the Saudi Red Crescent, and the other two teachers were also captured at the same time. The Pentagon’s limited allegations against him are available here.

A doctor who fled Algeria in 1996 to avoid military service, Boucetta sought asylum in Pakistan, where he was taken on as a teacher by the Red Crescent. Speaking of the circumstances of his arrest, his lawyer told the Washington Post in May 2006 that the Pakistani police “went to his house and asked to speak with somebody else [Hamad Gadallah], and Fethi said he didn’t know that person and that he wasn’t there. [They] came back with Americans in plain clothes, and they said they wanted to question him. That’s when he was arrested.”

Despite being arrested by mistake, it took until May 2005 for the Americans to accept that he was a completely innocent man, and in the meantime the allegations that mounted up against him were staggering. It was alleged that he “reportedly was an active member of the Islamic Salvation Front” (the Algerian political party whose suppression by the army in 1992 provoked the civil war that began the following year), that he traveled to Afghanistan from the Yemen, where he taught from 1993 to 1996, “at the request of the Taliban” (he actually travelled to Pakistan and carried on teaching), that he “reportedly organized combatants to fight for the Taliban,” and that he “reportedly has organized extremist networks in Arab countries and has contacts throughout the Middle East.”

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Boucetta, identified as Abu Mohammed, told the reporter Matthew Schofield that, “[o]n the night the soldiers came for him, [he] was resting at home with his pregnant wife and five children.” He added that they “showed him a list of the men they were looking for,” and that “[t]he address for his building was on the list, but his name was not.” He added, “As they turned to leave, he asked the soldiers what they needed, but was told it was none of his concern.”

However, the soldiers returned 15 minutes later, and “asked whether they could look through his apartment.” He said that he remembered “thinking he had nothing to hide, so he stepped aside,” and was handcuffed, while the soldiers searched the house. They then “uncuffed him, apologized for the inconvenience and departed,” but they returned for a third time, and it was on this occasion that his nightmare began, when “they asked him to accompany them to a nearby office, to answer questions.”

Boucetta told McClatchy’s reporter, “I did not like to leave my family at night, but knew in my heart I had done nothing wrong, and I was not on their list — they showed it to me — so I knew I had nothing to fear.” That should have been the case, but instead, he did not see his wife and children again, and still had no idea “why he was taken away that night or why he then was told he was being taken home but instead was shackled, then flown to a US prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. Or why, after two months there, he was told that he was being taken home to his family but instead was flown to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, half a world away, where he was kept locked up for four more years, including 18 months after he was told that he was, in effect, innocent of charges that he says were never fully articulated.”

After asking, “So why was he arrested?” McClatchy analysed the supposed evidence, noting that, beyond simply dismissing the charges against him as laughable — the claim that he was a member of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, that he left Yemen for Afghanistan at the request of Al-Qaida, and that he helped recruit fighters — Boucetta “said he doubted that these could really be the reasons he was picked up.”

He explained that the Islamic Salvation Front “formed after he left Algeria in 1989,” and in any case he “was never a member,” and he also explained that he had ”worked as a doctor for a non-governmental organization in Afghanistan until 1992,” adding that it “would have been easy to find out that he hadn’t been back since,” and that “he’d been working for and with the United Nations and Red Crescent, the Islamic-nations version of the Red Cross, from that point on.”

The details in his story were pretty compelling. He explained that, from 1996 to 2002, his “medical license and passport needed to be renewed,” but he had “refused to return to Algeria and instead lived in a United Nations refugee camp in Pakistan,” where “he taught math and Arabic in a Red Crescent-sponsored school.” As a result, “there were multiple witnesses to his presence and many sign-in documents, none of which was brought before the tribunal” at Guantánamo. This was unsurprising, as the presumption was that everyone had been correctly designated as an ‘enemy combatant” on capture, even though no effort was made to ascertain whether or not prisoners had been seized by mistake, and it was, therefore, something of a miracle that even 38 prisoners were, like Boucetta, found not to be “enemy combatants” by their tribunals.

Highlighting further omissions, Boucetta said that, “although United Nations workers could have vouched for his presence in Pakistan — and, according to his attorney, spent years working for his release — US officials refused to listen to them,” and in the end he “boycotted his own hearing because he thought it was a sham.”

He also explained that throughout his detention — “both in Afghanistan, where he was made to stand for hours with his hands cuffed high above him, and in Cuba, where the punishment was far more psychologically than physically challenging” — he was repeatedly interrogated about Algeria, even though, as he said, “I told them, ‘I have not been in Algeria for 15 years.’” Despite this, he said, “They would ask about political movements there, and I had to say, honestly, that I had no idea what they were talking about.” All the questions, he explained, related to radical Islamist groups which “formed after he’d left Algeria.”

After explaining that he had been in Guantánamo “with two men he used to commute to work with in Pakistan, men with whom he was seen every day teaching at school and who, like him, were subjected to occasional home searches as refugees,” he said that the fact that he had become a refugee in Pakistan had aroused US suspicions, but stated that the reasons he didn’t want to return home had nothing to do with terrorism, and were, instead, to do with “a personal feud.”

As a result, he was stuck in Albania, reflecting on a broken promise by officials at Guantánamo, who “had promised him a home, a place where he could bring his family and start a new life.” Instead, he said, there was no work, and “no hopes of ever being able to provide a home and education for his children.” When asked about his life, he replied, “My life here? I wake in time to go to breakfast at the refugee center. That’s my life. There is nothing more.”

Even though he had so obviously been seized by mistake, the US authorities were determined to find reasons to justify his detention, hence the long list of allegations that I mentioned in The Guantánamo Files, which duly surfaced in the classified documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. The file relating to him was a “Transfer Recommendation to Another Country for Continued Detention,” dated August 30, 2003, in which he was identified as Fatai Busita, born in 1963, and it was noted that he had been diagnosed with latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force presented all the allegations that were later dismissed by his tribunal at Guantánamo. It was noted that the left Algeria in 1987 after completing medical school, but an analyst claimed that this was because of the alleged terrorist connections that he later dismissed. It was also noted that he stated that he then traveled extensively through Afghanistan and Pakistan from 1989 to 1993, working for five different NGOs, including the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, which were all regarded as “known cover organisations for several terrorist groups including Al-Qaida,” even though this was generalized scaremongering at its worst, as the organizations he was working for were actually involved in humanitarian aid and charitable work.

The Task Force noted that he then traveled to Yemen in 1993, where, he said, he “got married, and found employment until 1996, when he bought a forged passport, and moved back to PK because he feared a crackdown on non-Yemeni Arabs,” and added that he “claimed” that “he worked as a teacher for primary and middle school, and as an Arabic teacher at a school funded by the Saudi Red Crescent Organization.”

Regarding his capture, it was stated that the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence Directorate arrested him in Lahore “as part of a crackdown on Arabs in Pakistan in May 2002,” which was perhaps not meant to be what it sounded like — a confession that social cleansing was taking place, using terrorism as a cover. In further explanation, the Task Force claimed that the ISI “conducted a series of raids against suspected Al-Qaida residences and support facilities connected with the Afghan Support Committee,” adding that “[n]ine individuals were arrested including the detainee, all on suspicion of being Islamic extremists,” but neglecting to mention that Boucetta’s arrest was, very literally, an afterthought. It was also noted that he was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of NGOs in the Peshawar, PK area.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force claimed that he was “of minimal intelligence value to the United States,” but posed “a medium threat to the US,” because he had been “assessed as being a member of Al-Qaida,” and, more specifically — again without anything resembling evidence — that he was “an Al-Qaida member and ha[d] severed [sic] in that capacity for many years, becoming a hardened and trusted terrorist operative.” It was, however, particularly noted that he was “considered a high threat risk to the government of Algeria,” and also “a significant threat,” who “may be wanted there for his subversive activities.” In addition, although the Task Force claimed that he “refuse[d] to be cooperative concerning his role as an operative” — because he had no role as an “operative” — it was nevertheless claimed that he “may still also possess intelligence information that the Algerian government would find beneficial in its efforts to curtail extremism within Algeria.”

As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III of the US Army, who signed the memo, recommended him for transfer to another country for continued detention, although he was not actually released for another three years and three months, and, after his tribunal intervened to discredit the allegations against him and to conclude that he was not an “enemy combatant,” it was also obvious that he could not be returned to Algeria, hence the long search for another country that was prepared to take him.

Shams Ullah (ISN 783, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six ‘Ghost Prisoners’,” I explained how Shams Ullah was seized by US forces, some months before his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002, and, as I also explained in “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo” and “WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo,” was just 16 or 17 years of age when he was seized.

According to the US military, he had fired “a whole magazine of ammunition” at the American and Afghan soldiers who had stopped him during a patrol, but although Shams himself had vague recollections of the events, his uncle, Bostan Karim (ISN 975), who was seized some months later by US forces (and is still held in Guantánamo), noted that he had “a mental problem,” and gave an alternative explanation for the circumstances surrounding his capture, when he appeared as a witness at his review board hearing. “When the Americans came to our house there was a Kalashnikov in our house and he knew that the Americans would take this gun,” Karim said. “So, he took the gun and went to the mosque. The Americans asked him to stop and he didn’t stop, so they shot him and he became lame.”

As with all but three of the 22 confirmed juveniles held at Guantánamo, Shams was never treated with anything approaching the kind of care that juveniles are required to receive under the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, and in fact, in his book Enemy Combatant, the released British prisoner Moazzam Begg explained how the authorities’ disregard for Shams’ age — and his wounds — was apparent when they were held together at the US prison in Kandahar airport. “Shams had been shot in the upper thigh, and the bone was shattered so he couldn’t walk,” Begg wrote. “He couldn’t make it to the toilet, he couldn’t get his own medications, or his water, or his food. And he couldn’t wash, so he started smelling quite badly.”

Begg ended up teaching the boy how to walk again, and also explained the story of his capture, as it had been explained to him, which backed up the story told by Bostan Karim: “Shams told me the story of his wounds: US helicopters had descended one night and attacked his house during a sweep of the area. He fired his uncle’s weapon at them. They fired back. He was hit, and captured.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Shams Ullah was an “Administrative Review Board Input,” dated October 26, 2004, in which, essentially confirming his story, it was noted that he “was captured during a raid on his family compound in Khost, Afghanistan (AF), conducted by US Special Forces and Afghani Military Force (AMF) personnel,” and that, when the raid began, “he grabbed his AK-47 and went to hide it,” and, when the AMF ordered him to stop, “a firefight broke out,” and he fired his magazine full of ammo at the AMF forces, threw down his weapon and attempted to flee,” but “was shot in the hip and captured.”

It was also noted that the compound he was captured in belonged to his uncle, Bostan Karim, described as “a suspected Al-Qaida cell leader and bomb-maker” (although this has not been proved) “who was captured by Pakistani Forces at the Khurgi checkpoint in Pakistan on 13 August 2002 along with Abdallah Muhammad aka Wazir” (ISN 976, released in December 2007).

In addition, it was claimed that he was “a member of the Arbaqi security group,” which “provide[d] security to all merchants and their businesses at the bazaar located in Khost,” and, when it came to assessing him, the Task Force concluded that he was “of low intelligence value,” and that, “[a]fter extensive searches on national-level counter-terrorism databases, no further intelligence ha[d] been collected or found” concerning him. It was also noted that he was assessed as posing “a Medium threat to the US and its allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be retained in DoD control, dated November 11, 2003, in which he was assessed as being a high risk, and of medium intelligence value, recommended instead that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention (TRCD),” although he was not released for another two years.

Abdul Salaam (ISN 826, Afghanistan) Released February 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Abdul Salaam, who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, was part of a family of businessmen from Bermel, in Paktika province, who were caught up in what the Americans described as “a sweep of the Bermel town bazaar,” which was as random as it sounds. Khan was seized with his brother Haji Osman Khan (ISN 818, released in March 2004), who was 50 years old, and 19-year old Noor Aslam (ISN 822, also released in March 2004), who was his cousin, and the family ran a hawala (a money exchange/forwarding business) with branches in Pakistan and the UAE. Salaam explained in a review board at Guantánamo that he was seized at his shop by American and Afghan soldiers, but he insisted that he was an honest businessman and had never received money on behalf of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. He also explained that the money the family received at the hawala was from families outside the country who were supporting their families in Afghanistan.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Abdul Salaam was an “Update Recommendation to Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country (TR),” dated May 13, 2005, in which he was also identified as Abdul Salam Ghulamjohn, born in 1975, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although he had been seen for “chronic low back pain, acid reflux, and constipation,” and was “currently on Zantac and Metamucil.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force managed only to flesh out the story he and his relatives had repeatedly told, Abdul Salaam said that his family business, established 30 years before, consisted of a “Hawala (money exchange/forwarding business), telephone public call office business, and limited travel reservations,” and that, after living with his family as a refugee in Miram Shah, Pakistan from 1983 to 2000, where he and his cousin opened a money transferring business that they operated for nine years, returned to Afghanistan and opened another money transferring business in Bermal with his brother, Haji Osman Khan.

It was also noted that, when pressed about the money transferring business, he “finally admitted to transferring large amounts of money, the largest being 2.5 million rupees, which equals to [sic] about 42 thousand US dollars,” and also explained how the business also involved another branch in the UAE, couriers, and an accountant in Afghanistan responsible for keeping money in a safe and distributing it.

The intention of all these questions was, of course, to demonstrate that the hawalas had been involved in transferring significant funds for Al-Qaida and/or the Taliban, but there was no truth in those suspicions, as the US authorities finally realized, although not until after he had been seized, sent to Guantánamo and held for up to three years before his innocence was more or less admitted.

In telling the story of his capture, he said that he “went to work on the morning of 7 September 2002,” but, approximately twenty minutes later, “three Afghan army soldiers and three US soldiers entered his shop” and “took his telephones and searched his store,” and “also confiscated five personal photographs that he had of himself, relatives and friends.” The soldiers also searched the shop next to his, where his accountant had his shop (and the safe), and then “led him away from his shop and took him to the Afghanistan Government building in town.” He “did not know why he was arrested, but believed that someone must have provided false information to the US or Afghan Governments,” which sounds like an accurate analysis.

After his capture, he was held first at Bagram, and was then sent to Guantánamo on October 28, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide information on the following: Economic issues in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Foreign trade in Pakistan, Afghanistan,and the United Arab Emirates [and] Hawala money transfer system in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force concluded that he was “of low intelligence value to the US,” and also that he posed “a low risk, as he is unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” This was, to be honest, another example of over-classification, as he was clearly of no intelligence value and did not pose a threat to the US at all, because, in a more thorough analysis of his case, it was stated unequivocally that he was “assessed as not being a member of the Taliban and/or Al-Qaida’s terrorist network,” and that, although it “was first assessed [that he] was involved in money laundering operations,” the Task Force had concluded that “nothing ha[d] been found to support this claim,” after “reviewing all of the available documentation.”

It was also noted that it was “highly probable” that his “statements that he and his family [we]re honest businesspeople, ha[d] no connections to the Taliban or Al- Qaida, and ha[d] never transferred any money for or on behalf of the Taliban or Al-Qaida [we]re truthful.” The Task Force added “Through debriefings with relatives of detainee and other individuals who operated Hawalas in Pakistan (PK) and Afghanistan, it cannot be confirmed [he] was doing anything illegal.”

It was also noted that his “overall behavior ha[d] been generally compliant and non-aggressive,” and, as a result, the only remaining problems with his case were that, even after his release was recommended by Brig. Gen. Hood, it took another nine months for him to be freed, at which point he had pointlessly spent three years and four months in Guantánamo.

Qadir Khandan (ISN 831, Afghanistan) Released October 2006

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Qadir Khandan, who was 32 years old at the time of his capture, was a pharmacist, who seems to have been a victim of the warlord Pacha Khan Zadran and his nephew, Jan Baz Khan, who lied about him to the Americans to get him arrested. Zadran was a US ally until it was finally realized that he was using them for his own ends, but along the way he was responsible for sending several men to Guantánamo on the basis that they were involved in anti-coalition activities, when they were actually his own enemies.

Khandan insisted in Guantánamo that he was “enemy number one of Jan Baz and Pacha Khan,” and got into trouble with them because, he said, he realized that, when they were working with the Americans, they were using them for their own ends. Arrested at his home in September 2002 and accused of running a safe house for a bomb-making cell, Khandan pointed out that he was working for the Karzai government in the National Security Office in Khost, and that, as a pharmacist, bombs were “truly against my ideology.”

He also explained that he was badly abused by American soldiers in a prison in Khost. “They put tight round glasses around my eyes, had my ears shut with plugs and I was covered with a bag,” he said, adding, “I was ordered to stand up 24 hours for 20 days in a row. I had blood coming out of my body and my nose for days because I was tortured so much.” Describing what appear to be otherwise unreported murders in US custody, he also said, “I saw four people die right in front of me.”

In an interview conducted for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners that was published in 2008, Khandan (identified as Qadar Khandan) he said that, “no matter how many times the American soldiers struck him,” he insisted that “he’d worked as a nurse for warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s organization during its fight against Soviet forces in the 1980s — when the US supported Hekmatyar — but that he’d broken off all links afterward.”

He told the same story to McClatchy’s reporter, but Ismail Khosti, the head of the Khost office of the Afghan Commission for Peace and Reconciliation, said that, despite sticking to is story, Khandan “was closely aligned with Hekmatyar.” Khosti said, “He was a commander for them in this province, not the top commander, but a commander. When the Taliban left Khost, there was a mujahideen (holy warriors) council formed, and Khandan was the only representative of Hezb-e-Islami on that council.”

McClatchy’s reporter noted that this association “appear[ed] to be what sent US troops to his door,” although Khandan was concerned to explain how US forces had abused him, stating that, when Special Forces operatives “took him to a nearby base and questioned him,” they “made him stand for two days straight with no food or water,” and “frequently punched him” and “played loud music and brought dogs in to bark and snap at him.”

Khandan “said he wouldn’t break down and confess,” and, McClatchy’s reporter noted, “it appears that he never did,” also noting that he remained angry about his experiences in US custody. From Khost, where, he said, he was deprived of food and water, he was sent to Kandahar for four days and then to Bagram for about five months.

On arrival at Bagram, he said, “he and a group of other detainees were stripped naked and photographed,” and then the questioning began again, and the Hekmatyar allegations that he persistently denied. “They told me to accept their charges or they would send me to isolation,” he said. “I told them they could send me to isolation for 10 years and those things would still not be true.”

He added that he was indeed sent to an isolation cell, “a small plywood box with metal bars over the top,” where guards “hung him by his wrists from the bars” and “left him there for 20 days, taking him down only for three 15-minute meal breaks and for the bathroom when he needed it.” He explained, “My heels weren’t touching the ground, only my toes, and I had on earphones, goggles and a hood. Three or four times I became unconscious. The guards would open the gate and come in and punch me in the stomach.”

Discussing Guantánamo, where he was sent early in 2003, Khandan said that his “experience with the interrogators was the same,” but that “no one hit him at Guantánamo.” He also said that he “told them, repeatedly, that he’d left Hekmatyar’s fold many years before,” but “was questioned every day during his first month,” although “then the sessions dropped to once a month, then once every two months and, at one point, almost a year.” He also said that “he spent much of the time between interrogations in isolation cells, twice for seven-month stretches,” and estimated that “he spent some 17 months in isolation” during his three and a half years at Guantánamo.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, the file relating to Khandan was a “Recommendation for Transfer to the Control of Another Country with Conditions (TWC), Subject to the Conclusion of an Acceptable Transfer Agreement,” dated September 3, 2005, in which he was identified as Khadan Kadir and Khandan Kadir, born in 1969, and it was noted that he was “in good health,” although he had “a history of a panic disorder with agoraphobia.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force noted that he attended school at a refugee camp in Pakistan, and then “participated in an Afghan refugee medical training program,” and “received his nursing certification in 1989 and worked at a Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) hospital during the war against the Soviets.” It was also stated that he “worked with HIG between 1987 and 1992, and completed high school in Peshawar, PK, in 1991.”

It was also noted that, from 1995 to 2002, he worked at his own pharmacy in Khost, and claimed he also worked in the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in Khost, during the Karzai government, “working in office number 7, which was responsible for monitoring open sources  i.e. radio, newspapers.” He also admitted that “he owned a Kalashnikov and a pistol, but he only used these weapons for protection,” and also insisted that he had “never been a member of any terrorist organization.”

The Task Force also noted that US and Afghan forces came to his house in Khost on September 20, 2002, but he “jumped a fence, and hid in a room housing women and children,” until one of the women told US forces that the was hiding there. After he surrendered, he was “found to have several documents and a small address book.” After being held at Bagram, he was sent to Guantánamo on February 6, 2003, to “provide information on the following: Security services, Security forces, Intelligence, security programs and capabilities, Counter Intelligence services [and] International terrorism.”

In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that he was apparently seized with Pacha Khan Zadran’s son, Abdul Walid, and his nephew,Jan Baz, but an analyst, revising history to erase the fact that Zadran was initially a US ally, described him as “a significant warlord who appointed himself governor of the Paktia province, AF, undermined US and Coalition forces along the Afghan/Pakistan border, [and] opposed the Afghan Transitional Administration (ATA), and President Hamid Karzai’s appointments for local leadership positions in Khost, Paktia, and Paktika Provinces.” It was also claimed that he was related to Pacha Khan Zadran, and it was noted that he said he “was jailed for not supporting Zadran’s bid for Provincial Governor.”

There were more allegations concerning Khandan’s supposed ties to three other Guantánamo prisoners — Bostan Karim (ISN 975, still held), Obaidullah (ISN 762, also still held) and Shams Ullah (ISN 783, released in October 2006, see above), which will be discussed in detail in articles dealing with Karim’s and Obaidullah’s cases.

Overall, his story was quite confusing, and I’m not sure that the US authorities knew what to make of it either. However, he was assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” and of posing “a medium risk, as he may pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” It was also noted that he was “assessed as a low-moderate threat from a detention perspective,” because his “overall behaviour ha[d] recently been compliant and non-hostile to the guard force and staff.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Hood, updating a recommendation that he be transferred for continued detention in Afghanistan (on August 20, 2004), recommended him for “transfer with conditions,” although he was not released for another 13 months.

After his release, following the McClatchy interview, Khandan was also interviewed by the BBC, when, in a broadcast in June 2009, he said, “They did things that you would not do against animals let alone to humans. They poured cold water on you in winter and hot water in summer. They used dogs against us. They put a pistol or a gun to your head and threatened you with death.” He added, “They put some kind of medicine in the juice or water to make you sleepless and then they would interrogate you.”

Nothing more was heard about Khandan until January 15, 2010, when the Pentagon responded to a FOIA request submitted by the ACLU in April 2009, and released the first ever list of prisoners held at Bagram, as of September 22, 2009, when Khandan, identified by his Guantánamo number, and named as Khadan Kadir, was included, although no further information has been provided to explain what he was supposed to have done to be recaptured, when it took place, and whether he was still held.

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

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, 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.

Last year, however, the D.C. Circuit Court — dominated by right-wingers, including Senior Judge A. Raymond Randolph, notorious for supporting every piece of Guantánamo-related legislation that was later overturned by the Supreme Court — began to fight back, pushing the lower courts to accept that very little in the way of evidence was required to justify detentions.

I have long railed against the inability of the executive, lawmakers or the judiciary to address the built-in problems of detention policies in the “War on Terror” — the Bush administration’s dreadful decision to equate the Taliban with al-Qaeda, thereby ensuring that both soldiers and terror suspects were held as interchangeable “detainees” at Guantánamo, and continue to be held as such.

This remains a huge problem, almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media in the US, although it is matched by the media’s lack of interest in what has happened since the D.C. Circuit Court began to dictate detainee policy, even though that has led to success for the government on every appeal, with the Circuit Court reversing or vacating the lower courts’ rulings in six habeas petitions, and has also led to the last eight habeas petitions (since July last year) being refused (see here, here, here, here and here for the evidence).

One of the prisoners who won his petition, but remains held while the government appeals, is Ravil Mingazov, a citizen of the former Soviet Union, whose story I told in detail when his habeas petition was granted by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr, in May 2010, in an article entitled, “Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web.”

One of Ravil’s lawyers, Allison M. Lefrak, who is the litigation director at Human Rights USA, described as “a nonprofit organization in Washington working to bring US laws in line with universal human rights standards,” recently wrote an article for the National Law Journal, describing the lack of progress in Ravil’s case, and her most recent visit to see him in Guantánamo.

This is a fascinating insight into the man behind the government’s propaganda, and also into the shocking delays and manipulation in his case, with, as Lefrak reports, the government’s appeal “now stayed in light of the government’s motion to present the lower court with ‘new’ evidence — evidence the government purportedly only located recently, eight years after Ravil was arrested in Faisalabad,” and which, according to the government, “would persuade Kennedy to reverse his decision and deny Ravil the writ of habeas corpus.”

That, I think, is the injustice of Guantánamo in a nutshell, and I hope you have time to read Allison Lefrak’s article in full.

Justice denied at Guantánamo
By Allison M. Lefrak, National Law Journal, September 19, 2011

As we always do at the onset of our meeting with Ravil Mingazov, my interpreter and I spread a variety of food items on the table in front of us — crusty bread, cheese and an array of sweets. We’ve gone through this same ritual every three months for five years now. And while things change for us in the outside world — marriages occur, babies are born, holidays are celebrated — for Ravil, there is very little that has changed from our first meeting back in January 2006.

Ravil remains in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — [nine and a half] years after the night he was arrested at a house for refugees in Faisal­abad, Pakistan. He remains in Guantánamo more than three years after the US Supreme Court issued its opinion in Boumediene v. Bush extending the writ of habeas corpus to Guantánamo detainees and giving the lower courts great discretion in how to handle these cases.

He remains in Guantánamo, 18 months after a week-long trial at the US District Court for the District of Columbia before Judge Henry Kennedy Jr., in which the facts of his case were presented in a closed courtroom. He remains in Guantánamo more than a year after Kennedy issued a comprehensive 42-page opinion [PDF] methodically analyzing each piece of evidence presented by the government, and concluding that, after eight years of detention, the government failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Mingazov was “a part of or substantially supported” al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Ravil Mingazov remains in Guantánamo three and a half years after newly elected President Obama issued an executive order providing for the closure of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay within one year.

Ravil tears off a piece of bread, spreads a generous portion of cheese on it and looks up with eyes surprisingly full of light. “So,” he says slowly, “what should we talk about today?”

I look down at the agenda that I prepared for the meeting and begin, just as I have many times before, to explain why he still remains locked up in Guantánamo and why all of our efforts to date have been essentially futile. As I launch into my detailed explanation of the basis of the government’s appeal of Kennedy’s order granting him the writ of habeas corpus, I pause after every few sentences and stare closely at his face as he registers my words while they are spoken in Russian by the interpreter. His expression does not change — though his eyes continue to have a light in them, as if he is smiling when in fact he’s not.

I hear myself saying these words, “The US court of appeals has not affirmed a single decision ordering the release of a detainee.” I explain to my client that the government’s appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is now stayed in light of the government’s motion to present the lower court with “new” evidence — evidence the government purportedly only located recently, eight years after Ravil was arrested in Faisalabad. I tell him that the government argues that this evidence would persuade Kennedy to reverse his decision and deny Ravil the writ of habeas of corpus. At the end of this lengthy update on the legal status of his case, I pause for the last time and ask Ravil if he has any questions.

“No,” he says. And then he smiles. “But you forgot to mention the good news.” I know him well enough to realize that he is setting me up for a one-liner. “We will all see each other again in three months.”

Some may argue that this glacial speed with which the Guantánamo detainees’ cases move one step forward and two steps back in the courts is unfortunate yet necessary to ensure that a potential terrorist is not mistakenly released. It is true that district court judges are entrusted with a great responsibility when they are considering the habeas cases of Guantánamo detainees and that there is much at stake in each of these cases.

Kennedy’s thorough and thoughtful opinion, like many of the other opinions both granting and denying the habeas petitions of Guantánamo detainees, speaks for itself. District court judges are doing what they are supposed to do, and they are doing it well. It is true, this takes time. But there are limits.

The longer Ravil Mingazov and other detainees sit languishing in Guantánamo as their cases gradually make their way through the courts (only to face near inevitable denial of the writ from the D.C. Circuit), the more credibility the US judicial system loses. As Chief Justice Warren Burger noted, “A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people … Delay will drain even a just judgment of its value.”

I wonder how many more times I will have to explain to Ravil that, despite the Supreme Court’s mandate to promptly process detainees’ habeas claims, the president’s promise to close the prison and his own victory in federal court, it is more likely than not that we will meet again in three months in this overly air-conditioned cell on a steamy island very far away from his elderly mother, his loving wife and his growing son that Ravil last saw eight years ago when he was a baby.

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

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

This is Part 13 of the 70-part series.

In late April, WikiLeaks released its latest treasure trove of classified US documents, a set of 765 Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) from the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Compiled between 2002 and January 2009 by the Joint Task Force that has primary responsibility for the detention and interrogation of the prisoners, these detailed military assessments therefore provided new information relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba throughout its long and inglorious history, including, for the first time, information about 84 of the first 201 prisoners released, which had never been made available before.

Superficially, the Detainee Assessment Briefs appear to contain allegations against numerous prisoners which purport to prove how dangerous they are or were, but in reality the majority of these statements were made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners, in Kandahar or Bagram in Afghanistan prior to their arrival at Guantánamo, in Guantánamo itself, or in the CIA’s secret prisons, and in all three environments, torture and abuse were rife.

I ran through some of the dubious witnesses responsible for so many of the claims against the prisoners in the introduction to Part One of this new series, and, while this is of enormous importance in the cases of many of the men still held (and also in the cases of some of those released), it is not particularly relevant to the overwhelmingly insignificant prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004, whose detention was so pointless that the authorities didn’t even bother trying to build cases against them through the testimony of their fellow prisoners.

As a result, the stories of these prisoners are particularly important in demonstrating how many innocent men or insignificant foot soldiers for the Taliban, engaged in combat with the Northern Alliance before the 9/11 attacks, and unconnected with international terrorism, were held at Guantánamo (and specifically how this latter category included many unwilling Afghan recruits).

What is also worth bearing in mind (and which is not spelled out in these documents) is that many prisoners were pointlessly rounded up because the Bush administration ordered the military not to screen the prisoners on capture, leading to a dragnet of “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, as was noted by Maj. Gen, Michael Dunlavey, a commander of the prison in 2002, and also offered substantial bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects to the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies.

In a five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” I began analyzing, transcribing and condensing the stories revealed in the documents released by WikiLeaks, looking at 84 stories of prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 that had never been told before. The work of extracting information from the files and presenting it in edited form, with commentary based on my extensive research and experience, is a project that will take up the rest of the year. The next step is this ten-part series revisiting the stories of the 114 other prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004. That was the point at which the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) began, a military review process that, in turn, led to the first official release of documents relating to the prisoners in 2006, providing the material that I analysed and transcribed for my book The Guantánamo Files.

While this ten-part project is underway, I also propose to begin examining closely the files relating to the 171 prisoners still held, supplementing the series of articles that I produced last fall, entitled, “Who Are the Remaining Prisoners in Guantánamo?” This is important not just because the remaining prisoners have largely been abandoned by the mainstream media, even though 89 of the 171 have been cleared for release, and only 36 were recommended for trials by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, but also because, in the US, attorneys for the prisoners have only just won the right to look at the files (and not to download, save or print them), and the media in general is unwilling to subject them to much scrutiny because of how they became public in the first place.

So with thanks to WikiLeaks — and whoever leaked these documents — the eighth part of my ten-part analysis of the 114 prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 (in addition to the 84 stories covered in my previous series) is below. When lies and distortions are covered up on this scale, and an experimental prison built on torture and abuse remains open, even under a Democratic President who promised to close it, everyone who believes in justice should publicize what has been revealed, and, if you agree, I hope that you will share this information widely. Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Nine and Part Ten of this series.

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Eight of Ten)

Abdul-Karim Ergashev (ISN 641, Tajikistan) Released July 2004

In Chapter 19 of The Guantánamo Files, I briefly mentioned Abdul-Karim Ergashev (identified as Abdulrahmon Rajabov), based on an interview he conducted with RFE/RL in January 2005, in which I noted that he said that, in Guantánamo, he developed hepatitis C after being denied “consistent medical care.”

In that interview, he stated that “he went to Afghanistan to search for his brother who had disappeared there,” but was then seized by Northern Alliance soldiers and handed over to the US military. He also described in detail what had happened to him during the two and a half years that he had spent in US custody, until his release from Guantánamo in 2004. He explained that US military interrogators had used psychological pressure to force him to falsely confess to fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan: “They told me you have ties to the al-Qaeda and the Taliban. I said I don’t know al-Qaeda; the Taliban I know were in control of most of Afghanistan. I didn’t think the Afghans would hand me over to the Americans and that the Americans would take me to Guantánamo. I [still] don’t know why. I didn’t understand what the Americans wanted from me.”

Describing what happened to him during his time in Guantánamo, Ergashev said that he was often kept in solitary confinement, and added that whenever a detainee clashed with the authorities the other prisoners would be punished for it. He also stated that he suffered from a liver ailment during his detention, and that it was the lack of medical care that led to him being diagnosed with hepatitis C. “I was sick and I asked to see a doctor,” he explained. “The soldier told me tomorrow. The next day I told another soldier that I’m feeling worse. He also said, ‘tomorrow.’ After three days I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I told the soldier, ‘three days has passed, why are you lying to me?’ but he told me, ‘no more talk.’ So I threw some water on his face. After that, several persons came, chained and stripped me but they didn’t beat me. They left me only in my underwear in a [cold] cell with iron walls.”

In August 2007, Ergashev announced that he was suing President Bush for damages, and told the website Ferghana.ru more about his experiences, explaining that, at the time of his capture, he was staying with Uzbek refugees, who had fled their homeland to escape the brutal regime of President Islam Karimov, often taking their entire families with them. In the RFE/RL interview in 2005, he had said that “supporters of Juma Namangani, the former military leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, often helped him in Afghanistan,” and in 2007 he explained:

I was a driver in their camp. Everyone scattered when the Americans invaded Afghanistan and bombardments began. I wanted to go home too but couldn’t because I did not have any papers or even money. Closer to the end of winter [2001], I drifted to the town of Tahor and the rais or chairman of a nearby village offered me a job. He said I would become his personal driver. I said “Why not?” It was a chance to earn my fare back. The man said the auto was waiting in one of the kishlaks (settlements) in Mazar-e-Sharif and we went there to collect it. The man brought me to some household and asked me to wait while he went and fetched the keys. The Afghani police broke into the building as soon as he left. They had me handcuffed and blindfolded in no time at all and turned me over to the waiting Americans. The Americans had been waiting nearby, you know. They ordered me to don a special blue coverall marking me as a POW. It occurred to me then that they had deliberately left me in the house in order to sell me to the Americans as a terrorist or Talib … I was taken to the city of Bagram where I was imprisoned with very many others for March-May 2002. It was Kandahar after that and finally Guantánamo, in September that year.

Describing the situation in Afghanistan at the time of Ergashev’s arrest, in the months following the US-led invasion in October 2001, the reporter for Ferghana declared, “The Americans paid $5,000 for a Talib soldier and twice that for [an] officer. The Afghani police found it quite to their liking. When they discovered that there was nobody else to be sold to the US Army, they turned on pedestrians. As a matter of fact, some men the Americans ended up with were mental cases.”

In addition, although RFE/RL stated that Ergashev was “receiving medical care” in Tajikistan in January 2005, Ferghana’s reporter described him as still suffering from “grave health problems,” and determined to sue President Bush because the US authorities had shown themselves to be “absolutely indifferent” to his plight and “disinclined to offer him any recompense or aid.”

Another aspect of his “grave health problems” was reported by a fellow prisoner, Airat Vakhitov, in an interview with Cageprisoners in 2005, as I reported in Part Five of this series. Vakhitov said that, although Ergashev “was quite healthy when arrested, when he was in Cuba he was, as many of us were, infected with Hepatitis B. He started complaining and even declared a hunger strike because they didn’t provide any medical assistance for him in spite of him asking for it constantly. He was given pills which I think were much stronger than opium or heroin, because some of the guys tried them as well and the effect was much stronger than the real ones. One day, he overdosed and they stopped giving it to him, and then they took blood from him, and his condition of Hepatitis B didn’t stop developing because the problem is not only contained in the gall bladder. When he got back (from Guantánamo) some of the doctors and professors examined him and commented saying there was no justification for them to do that.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, Ergashev’s file (in which he was described as Abdul Karim Irgashive, born in 1965), was dated March 16, 2004, and was a “Transfer Recommendation.” In the Task Force’s account, a much more colorful picture emerged, although it is unknown how much of it was true. Dealing with Ergashev’s life long before his capture, the Task Force claimed that he “was a conscript in the Soviet army in the mid-1980′s and spent 4 years in prison for stabbing a fellow soldier,” and that, “after his release from prison in 1990, [he] became a career criminal and attempted to join the Tajik resistance movement but was rejected.”

He then reportedly joined the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in 1999, and allegedly “volunteered to fight in Afghanistan for the Taliban because he believed the Taliban would one day come to the aid of the Mujahideen fighting to overthrow the secular governments in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.” It was also claimed that, after completing “advanced training as a sniper and an explosives expert, [he] was airlifted into northern Afghanistan in 2001, along with 200 other IMU and Uighur fighters to support the Taliban against the US lead Northern Alliance [sic].”

The circumstances of his capture were not replayed, but it was noted that he was sent to  Guantánamo on June 8, 2002 (not September as he stated), “because of his affiliation with the Taliban as a foreign fighter and his membership in the IMU.” However, as I explained in my article, How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

The Task Force also noted in particular that he had “a personal affiliation with several IMU leaders,” which was something that he had essentially admitted, although his claim that he was a driver was rather different than the US claims about him being “a sniper and an explosives expert,” and it was also noted that he had “participated in fighting against the US and its allies,” which was also not verified elsewhere. In addition, it was noted that the Tajik government had interviewed him and had “confirmed [his] membership in the IMU and his extensive criminal history,” and had also “informally requested that [he] be returned to their custody for further prosecution,” but if all this was true it was inexplicable that, on his return, Ergashev was not imprisoned, and was not prosecuted unlike other Tajik prisoners.

As a result, the entire case put together by the Task Force must be regarded with suspicion. Certainly, when it came to backing up its claims, the Task Force was less confident, noting that Ergashev had been determined to be “of low intelligence value to the US,” although “he may provide the Tajik government with additional intelligence concerning the IMU’s insurgency within Tajikistan.” It was also noted that he had been “generally cooperative” and had not been “violent or overtly aggressive while  in detention,” However, as a result of the litany of claims outlined above, it was also noted that he was, in the Task Force’s opinion, “highly vulnerable to re-recruitment back into the IMU if he were released outright.” As a result, and because he was assessed as posing “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention,” although it was also noted that the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF), which also contributed assessments, had not, as of March 16, 2004, made an evaluation of Ergashev. Just four months later, he was a free man.

Mohammed Tahir (ISN 643, Afghanistan) Released May 2003

In Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how 26-year old Mohammed Tahir and 21-year old Rostum Shah (see Part Seven), who were both released in May 2003, were Taliban conscripts from Helmand who had been sent to fight in Bamiyan province, where they were captured by Hazara soldiers of Hezb-e-Wahdat, one of Afghanistan’s two main Shia Muslim factions, who were implacably opposed to the Taliban. Imprisoned for four months, they were then handed over to the Americans. On his release, as explained in “Afghans Bitter Over Guantánamo Detention,” an Associated Press article published on May 9, 2003, Tahir said that he suffered mentally and had “difficulty remembering things,” and underlined the failures of the screening process. “I’m just angry that the Americans waited until we were in Guantánamo to interrogate us,” he said. “Had they questioned us here in Afghanistan it would have saved us a lot of trouble. They could have realized a lot sooner that I was innocent.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated March 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that he was born in 1975, and it was noted that he had “worked for years as a common warehouse laborer in Tehran, Iran,” but returned to Afghanistan in October 2001, after the US-led invasion, because “he feared for his elderly father’s safety.” However, while he was at home, he was forcibly conscripted by the Taliban, taken to Bamiyan province and “dropped off with two other conscripts at an observation outpost,” where he served as a guard for about 15 days. The Task Force noted that, although he was given an AK-47. he received no military training.

After the fall of the Taliban, he “tried to walk back home,” but was captured by Hazara militia and held for about five months. He was transferred to US control in April 2002, and was sent to Guantánamo on June 9, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of Taliban leaders and their disposition in the mountains of the Bamiyan Province of Afghanistan.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [643] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer or release to the control of another government.”

Mirza Muhammed (ISN 644, Afghanistan) Released March 2003

As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six ‘Ghost Prisoners,’” according to press reports in March 2003, when the first large group of Afghans was released (18 in total), Mirza Muhammed, who was 28 years old at the time of his capture, said that he was seized by the Taliban and forced to fight with them, and added that he was captured by the Northern Alliance after just five days, and was then sold to the Americans. Described in a report in the Washington Post as Merza Khan, he explained that “Americans in Kandahar tied him up and alternately forced him to lie face down on the ground, then squat with his hands on his head for hours. He also said he saw American soldiers throw the Koran on the ground and sit on it while in Kandahar.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 5, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” he was described as Mirzam Mohammed, born in 1964, and it was noted that he was a farmer who was “forcefully conscripted to fight with the Taliban Army against the Hezb-e-Wahdat in Bamiyan Province,” where he “worked primarily as a cook.” He stated that “he did not see any combat while serving the Taliban,” and on November 5, 2001 was “captured at gunpoint by two people in his village, and turned over to the American forces patrolling the village.” He told his interrogators that he “assumed that these people turned him in because, for some unknown reason, they held a grudge against him.” He was sent to Guantánamo on or about June 11, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his general knowledge regarding the Taliban order of battle and command personalities in Bamiyan Province.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [644] is assessed as neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” The second page of the assessment was missing, but it was clear from the subject line, “Transfer Recommendation,” that the Task Force recommended his transfer or release.

Haji Faiz Mohammed (ISN 657, Afghanistan) Released October 2002

In Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Haji Faiz Mohammed, who was 70 years old but thought that he was 105 years old, was one of several prisoners seized in raids by US Special Forces in Uruzgan province. Mohammed, who was seized in a clinic, said on his release, “I don’t know why the Americans arrested me. I told them I was innocent. I’m just an old man.”

In a CBS News report at the time of his release — with two other Afghans, Jan Mohammed (ISN 19, see Part One) and Mohammed Sadiq (ISN 349, see Part Five) — it was noted that the men, “looking frail and tired but in good spirits, said they had had no contact with their families since being taken away by the Americans from various places in Afghanistan. They said they were chained up during frequent interrogations by Americans, but that they were not mistreated and were allowed to practice their religion while in detention.” Haji Faiz Mohammed (described as Mohammed Hagi Fiz) said, “They interrogated us for hours at a time. They wanted to know, ‘Where are you from? Are you a member of the Taliban? Did you support the Taliban? Were your relatives Taliban? Did the Taliban give you weapons?”‘

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 27, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was noted that he was born in 1932 and had been “diagnosed with Senile Dementia, which is expected to worsen with time.” In assessing his story, the Task Force noted that, in April 2002, he “visited a friend and wanted to see a doctor to get more medicine,” but was seized by US forces while staying the night in a mosque in the Deh Rawood district of Uruzgan province. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002, although the Task Force admitted that “[t[here is no reason on the record for [him] being transferred to Guantánamo Bay detention facility.” This is the first time that I have come across an assessment in which no reason for transferring a prisoner was presented at all, even though, as I have repeatedly made clear, all the reasons for transfer were bogus, and grafted on afterwards.

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [657] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida and as not being a Taliban leader.” In addition, it was noted that he “has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who was the commander of  Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Bismillah (ISN 658, Afghanistan) Released March 2003

In Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how 49-year old Bismillah, like Haji Faiz Mohammed (ISN 657, see above) was also seized in a raid by Special Forces in Uruzgan province. After his release, Bismillah said that he was seized because he is hard of hearing. “At 2 am Americans came to our house and asked me to show them where the Taliban are,” he said. “Since I am deaf, I couldn’t understand what they said so they arrested me. It took them more than a year to realize I am innocent.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 27, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Bismillah Muhammed, born “around 1952,” a variation on this story was reported, which provided slightly different details, but did nothing to reassure anyone that US forces had applied any intelligence to the rounding up of prisoners. Bismillah told his interrogators that he “was sleeping on the roof of his house” in Uruzgan province “when US forces arrested him in April 2002 during a raid to apprehend Mullah Baradar,” a senior Taliban leader who was reportedly killed in August 2007 and then reportedly captured in February 2010.

Bismillah “stated that he did not know Mullah Barader, although he had heard that the Mullah’s father lived somewhere in the Deh Rawood district.” The only other information about him that the Task Force had gathered was that he “purportedly served as a soldier for two years in approximately 1993 to 1994 (no further details available).” He was sent to Guantánamo on June 12, 2002, although, as with Haji Faiz Mohammed (ISN 657, see above), the Task Force admitted that “[t[here is no reason on record as to why [he] was transferred to Guantánamo Bay detention facility.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [658] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida and as not being a Taliban leader.” In addition, it was noted that he “has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Dunlavey recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Reda Fadel El Weleli (ISN 663, Egypt) Released July 2003

In the Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, El-Weleli’s was one of 14 missing files, as I noted in my article, “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files.” In that article, I explained how he was identified by the US authorities as Fael Roda Al-Waleeli, born in 1966, and how he was the first Egyptian transferred from Guantánamo to Egypt. He arrived in Cairo on July 1, 2003, and subsequently disappeared, although, as I reported in an article in April this year, entitled, Torture and Terrorism: In the Middle East It’s 2011, In America It’s Still 2001:

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.

Said Abassin (ISN 671, Afghanistan) Released March 2003

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how 19-year old Said Abassin was one of two taxi drivers, along with Wazir Mohammed (ISN 677, see below), who were seized by Afghan soldiers in April 2002. Abassin, an admirer of Western culture, who told the BBC after his release that he had been beaten up by the Taliban for playing music in his taxi, was traveling from Khost to Kabul when a loud explosion rocked the US garrison in Gardez. Stopped at a checkpoint and taken to the local police station with his passenger, 33-year old car dealer Alif Khan (ISN 673, see below), he and Khan were accused of being members of al-Qaeda, as was Mohammed, a friend of Abassin, who was captured after asking what had happened to his friend. According to the journalist Ashwin Raman, Taj Mohammad Wardak, the governor of Khost at the time, “was informed of the arrests.” Raman added:

Without bothering to check the facts, Wardak called the US Special Forces who took the two taxi drivers away … When the father of Abassin and the brother of Wazir tried to plead with the governor, they were beaten. Later, some town elders managed to convince Wardak that the young men were innocent. Wardak promised to do all in his power to have the taxi drivers released. Nothing happened. Abassin’s father wrote to the US Ambassador in Kabul, but received no reply. A reminder was sent, but to no avail.

Held in Bagram for 40 days, Abassin described a regime of “sleep deprivation, 24-hour lighting and guards banging on cells and shouting to keep detainees awake.” He said that he was not hit, but was forced to stand, sit and kneel for prolonged periods, and explained that “being forced to kneel for four hours a day felt worse than being beaten.”

He also gave an example of the random injustices that were prevalent in Guantánamo. “While I was there, I had problems with my knees,” he said. “I was told by the military doctor to do exercises, and when I started doing them a guard came and locked me up in a container for five days. I hadn’t done it by my own choice, I was told to do it by the doctor.”

“My life is ruined,” Abassin said after his release. “Why? For which crime? I’d heard that in America or Europe when they arrest someone they have proof. I saw none of that. I was just driving. Arrested and taken to prison. My hands were tied behind my back. They put a sack over my head and took me away in a helicopter.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated October 29, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Said Abassi Rochan, born in 1982, the randomness of his capture was acknowledged by the Task Force. It was noted that he was a taxi driver in the Khost area, and that, “[w]hile traveling through Gardez on his way to Khost, local Afghanistan authorities arrested [him] and the vehicle occupants at a checkpoint based on the suspicion that one of the passengers [Alif Khan, see below] was a relative of a Zadran tribal leader named Pacha Khan.” What was not mentioned was that Pacha Khan had initially been regarded as an ally of the US, and had been responsible for sending other men to Guantánamo for money, and on the basis of false information.

The Task Force also revealed how a 20-minute period sealed Abassin’s fate for the next eleven months, although the role played by Taj Mohammad Wardak was not mentioned. The Task Force noted, “All of the taxi occupants were taken to the local police station where the detainee spent about 20 minutes before being turned over to US forces and later transported to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, arriving on 13 June 2002.” The spurious reason given for his transfer was “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khost and Kabul based as a result of [sic] his frequent travels through the area as a taxi driver” — a thoroughly weak post-detention piece of reasoning, and something that, if required, could have been obtained from Abassin simply by asking, rather than by brutalizing him and transporting him halfway around the world.

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [671] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader.” In addition, it was noted that he “has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Dunlavey recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Alif Khan (ISN 673, Afghanistan) Released March 2003

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Alif Khan, who was a passenger in a taxi driven by Said Abassin (ISN 671, see above), was held in Bagram and Kandahar, and described similar treatment to that mentioned by Abassin. He said that the Americans made him kneel for an hour with his hands above his head. “One of them was standing in front of me, the other was pointing the Kalashnikov,” he explained. “If we moved our face to the side they would make us stay for a further two hours. If we moved just slightly it would increase to three hours. We would become unconscious.”

A businessman, Khan told the BBC in November 2003 that, while he was in Guantánamo, “his business rivals grabbed his assets,” including a number of shops, from him, and that, since his release he had “fought to get his property back.” He explained that both he and Said Abassin (described as Sayed Abassin) “were handed in to the Americans in return for bounty payments of several thousand dollars each,” and he said to the BBC, “I told them that in Afghanistan there are many personal disputes. They handed me to you because of some personal feud. I am not Taliban, not a terrorist, not Al-Qaeda. People handed me over because someone wanted to gain influence — dollars or because of a personal dispute.”

This was Khan’s description of his journey to Guantánamo:

They put cuffs and tape on my hands, taped my eyes and taped my ears. They gagged me. They put chains on my legs and chains around my belly. They injected me. I was unconscious. I don’t know how they transported me. When I arrived in Cuba and they took me off the plane they gave another injection and I came back to consciousness. I did not know how long the plane was flying for. It might have been one day or two days. They put me onto a bed on wheels. I could sense what was going on. They tied me up. They took me off the plane into a vehicle. We go to a big prison and there were cages there. They built it like a zoo.

And this was his description of the conditions in Guantánamo:

Each container housed 48 cages. Everyone was in a cage individually. Every cage had a tap, a toilet and water for washing. There was room to sit but not enough to pray. We were praying with difficulty. My joints were damaged. The light was very bright there as well. They were switched on all the time. Because of that our eyes were damaged and from constantly having to look through the netting. There were other blocks and we were not allowed to speak to the people on the other blocks. If we talked to them, they would draw the curtains and they would take our bedding and blankets and they wouldn’t give them back for three days. We would just have our towels to sit on.

What was also notable about his case was that he was mistakenly thought to be a cousin of the renegade warlord Pacha Khan (aka Pacha Khan Zadran), who was trusted by the US, only to betray them, and whose baleful influence extended to other prisoners. As Ashwin Raman reported in March 2004, “There is ample evidence that rogue warlords like Bacha Khan Zadran [aka Pacha Khan Zadran] have palmed people off to US forces as terrorists in return for dollars.”

In 2008, Khan was able to explain more of his story when he was interviewed by Tom Lasseter for a major McClatchy Newspapers series on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners. He told Lasseter that, after his return from Guantánamo, the Taliban in Khost province “sent word that he should join them. Avenge your time in prison, they said, and take up arms against the infidels.” He added that “they asked him to move to the Pakistani province of Waziristan and join the Taliban struggle,” and, when he refused, spread rumors that he had only been released from Guantánamo because he was a spy. As a result, he was living in Kabul, “selling cars and property, and quietly slipping back to Khost once a year to see his family.” He explained, however, that he hadn’t been able to rebuild much of his life, because “he had to spend about $5,000 to buy his business and property back from the warlords who’d seized it when he was detained.”

At Guantánamo, Khan recalled, “he received occasional letters from his family through the Red Cross: ‘Hello and greetings from your brother Dawood. We the whole family and relatives are ok. We pray for your release.’ The US military blacked out large parts, however, citing security concerns. ‘I thought that if they don’t even allow entire letters to come from my family that it meant they would kill us,’ Khan said. ‘I didn’t think I would ever return to Afghanistan.’”

He also “pulled out a laminated card that was signed by the noncommissioned officer in charge of detainee operations at Bagram, where he landed when he returned from Guantánamo,” which was fascinating because it confirmed that some paperwork existed declaring definitively that prisoners were not a threat. The card, which had his name and detainee number on it, said, “This individual has been determined to pose no threat to the United States military or its interests in Afghanistan.”

Khan also “said he had no idea what to think about being at Guantánamo,” stating, sadly, “I was living in a cage in the middle of the ocean.” He added, “I saw Arabs try to hang themselves, but the guards came in time and took them to the hospital. Maybe it was because they were there for a long time, because they had no hope.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated October 29, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was noted that he was born in 1967 and had been diagnosed in Guantánamo with latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, and also with hepatitis C, although it was also noted that he “currently does not require treatment,” and that he was “otherwise in good health.”

In a twist on the story of his capture, it was revealed that he “was a self-employed owner of a car dealership” in Khost province, and that his capture had something to do with two people “whom he apparently had done business with in the past,” named Fazel and Sharif, at least one of whom — Sharif — appears to have been a corrupt policeman. As the Task Force described it, they “stopped [him] on the road from Gardez to Khost. Sharif extorted 9,000 rupees from [him] after holding him for three days at the Gardez Police Department. After paying Sharif for his release, Fazel then demanded a vehicle from [him]. [He] refused and was subsequently turned over to American forces.”

Speaking to Tom Lasseter, Khan provided further details, explaining that the men who had seized him — presumably Fazel and Sharif — “had arrested him a few days earlier, on the way to Kabul, but released him when he paid a bribe with a stack of Pakistani rupees and a Rado watch. This time, however, the men dragged him to their headquarters, beat him on his feet with sticks, then handed him over to the Americans.”

Lasseter also explained that the security chief in Gardez at the time of his capture, Abdullah Mujahid, was also held at Guantánamo “after being charged with organizing attacks on American troops,” and that his men “had a reputation for corruption — extortion was a frequent pastime — and for drumming up charges against their political and tribal enemies.” Lasseter added that Afghan security and political officials interviewed in Kabul, Khost and Gardez “said they’d never heard of Khan, which suggests that if he had ties to Islamic militants, they weren’t very strong.” Lasseter also pointed out that Khan’s “relatively fast exit from Guantánamo suggests that whatever the allegations against him were, they either weren’t very serious or were found to be false.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his possible knowledge of an Afghan Machas Refugee Camp located near Miram, Pakistan,” a statement that doesn’t even seem to make sense, and that, noticeably, fails to mention the Pacha Khan connection that was supposed to have justified his detention in the first place.

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [673] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader.” In addition, it was noted that he “has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Dunlavey recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Timur Ishmuradov (ISN 674, Russia) Released March 2004

Like five other prisoners freed from a Taliban jail in Kandahar and then, inexplicably, sent to Guantánamo (see, for example, the story of Jamal Al Harith, ISN 490, in Part Five), Timur Ishmuradov, a 26-year old from Tyumen Oblast (part of the Russian Federation, in the Urals), said that he was imprisoned by the Taliban in summer 2001, and was then freed but sent to Guantánamo, along with another prisoner, Arkan al-Karim, an Iraqi.

On his release, Ishmuradov was particularly incensed at the treatment he received at the hands of the Americans. In an article entitled, “Russians sue US government for torturing them at Guantánamo camp,” which was published by the Associated Press on February 4, 2005, he said, “I have traces of their tortures on my body [and] scars on my back after being dragged on the ground. They would beat me during interrogations and also while taking me from one place to another.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 5, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Timur Ravilich Ishmurat, born in 1975, it was noted that he had been diagnosed with hepatitis A and C, latent tuberculosis (in common with many of the prisoners) and “antisocial personality traits,” although it was also noted that he was “otherwise in good health.”

The Task Force also stated that he was “a former oil worker,” who had joined the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in 1999 in Tajikistan, “where he received basic military training,” and then traveled to Afghanistan, “[w]hen the Tajik government moved the IMU to Kunduz, Afghanistan, under the patronage of the Taliban in January 2001.” He then reportedly moved with the IMU to Mazar-e-Sharif, where they “took over an old Russian facility that was provided to them by the Taliban,” but retreated to Kunduz when Mazar fell to the Northern Alliance, and then surrendered.

According to this account, he was never imprisoned by the Taliban at all, but, fearing that he would be handed back to the Russians because of ties between the Russian government and the Northern Alliance, he fled, only to be “captured while entering the first Afghan village he encountered,” and then transferred back to the custody of the Northern Alliance. Rather confusingly, it was stated that he was then “sent to join an Afghani-Uzbek group” and “was later taken to the village of Iskamish, where he stayed until soldiers of the new Afghan government arrived and arrested him in April 2002.” He was then “taken to Mazar-e-Sharif and interrogated for one week,” and was then transferred to Bagram and sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because of “his knowledge of Hizbunadzad Tajik Islamic insurgency group, of its leader, Saeed Abdullah Nuri, of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and its military/political leadership, and of a training facility located near Mazar-e-Sharif.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [674] is assessed as not affiliated with al-Qaida or as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes.”

It was also noted that, “During a visit to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 14 to 19 November 2002, Russian Intelligence officers interrogated [ISN 674] and stated that their government would accept custody of [him] if released by the US government.” Crucially, it was also noted that, “Since the Russian government has agreed to incarcerate [him] upon his transfer, he poses no future threat to the US or its allies. In addition, the Russian government has agreed to share all intelligence derived from him while under their control with the United States.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of the Russian government.”

After their return to Russia, these punitive demands were not exactly followed, although the men suffered at their own government’s hands. All seven ex-prisoners “were initially held in a detention center in the southern town of Pyatigorsk that is run by the FSB, the domestic successor of the KGB,” as the Washington Post explained in an article in September 2006. The Post further explained that all seven were released in June 2004, “after prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to hold them,” but also noted that their release “did not end official interest in the men.”

This was confirmed in “The Stamp of Guantánamo,” a report by Human Rights Watch in March 2007 in which it was noted:

Faced with the return of seven former detainees from Guantánamo, Russian law enforcement might legitimately have been expected to keep an eye on whether the men were engaged in any suspicious activity after they got home. Such surveillance could have been conducted while also respecting the ex-detainees’ human rights. It was not.

The detainees and their family members uniformly complained of being frequently called, followed, and threatened by the FSB, UBOP [Russia's brutal organized crime squad], and other police officials after their return.Some family members reported that their homes were searched without warrants, in violation of Russian and international law. Some reported, in fact, that their homes were so frequently searched that they were unable to provide exact dates of those searches.

Timur Ishmuratov told Human Rights Watch that he “also experienced beatings at the hands of the FSB and the UBOP,” and explained that, just before their release from Pyatigorsk, “a high-ranking FSB official met with all of them and told them that ‘the Russian government has no complaints against you,’” and that, “if you live according to the law, then you won’t have any harassment. He cited the Russian leadership. I believed him.”

In contrast, Ishmuratov was harassed after an explosion, early in the morning of January 8, 2005, on “a small pipeline delivering home heating fuel to a residential section of Bugulma, a city in southern Tatarstan, several hundred kilometers east of Moscow.” He and his wife “lived in a small town not far away.,” but although there were “no casualties in the explosion,” Ishmuratov was “called in for increasingly aggressive questioning and harassment” over several months, and was then “taken into custody on April 1, 2005, from the Bugulma mosque where he worked as a guard.”

In a statement smuggled out of the Almetevsk detention facility, he explained how the FSB forced a false confession out of him, forcing him to strip, and then punching him and kicking him violently. He added that they also “threatened to call in my mother and my pregnant wife for questioning,” and abused the Koran, and that eventually he agreed to make a false confession. “I agreed to give them the testimony,” he said, “being unable to withstand the physical and psychological pressure, and also out of concern for my wife and unborn child. They warned me that I had to stick to the testimony in all my interrogations, otherwise they’d beat me up again.”

Ishmuratov’s mother also told Human Rights Watch that “security service officers brought Ishmuratov in handcuffs to the maternity hospital, where his wife had just delivered a baby, to put pressure on his family not to hire a lawyer to pursue complaints of abuse,” and his brother explained how he too had been beaten by police, while handcuffed to a radiator, “to coerce him to admit that he had witnessed preparations for the crime.”

Ishmuratov later recanted his confession in both his 2005 trial and 2006 retrial, but was sentenced to 11 years and one month in prison, in large part because of his coerced confession. For another angle on the alleged plot, see the story of Ravil Gumarov, ISN 203, in Part Three, who received a 13-year sentence for his alleged involvement in the pipeline explosion.

In conclusion, in April 2005, Ishmuratov “asked for a criminal case to be opened against the men who had beaten him in detention,” in which he stated, bluntly and powerfully, “I ask you to help me escape from torture and obtain justice. I’m a former prisoner of the American camp at Guantánamo, where I endured the bullying of the American military, and now I’m treated even worse by the special forces and law enforcement authorities of Russia.”

Wazir Mohammed (ISN 677, Afghanistan) Released November 2003

Before the release by WikiLeaks of the Detainee Assessment Briefs, all that was known of Wazir Mohammed was that he was a taxi driver, seized after his friend Said Abassin, another taxi driver (ISN 671, see above), was arrested by Afghan forces, along with his passenger Alif Khan (ISN 673, also see above).

Clearly he — like Abassin and Khan — should never have been seized, let alone transferred to Guantánamo, and this was confirmed in his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 30, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Wazir Zalim Ghul, born in 1977, and it was noted that he “stated that he was arrested on 4 April 2002 by Gardez security forces in the city of Gardez, Afghanistan,” while traveling from Kabul to Khost “with four passengers in his taxicab,” and while he was “carrying his cab license, identification papers, taxi permit, and other related documents for the vehicle.” The Task Force added that “[n]o weapons or equipment were found with him at the time of his arrest,” and explained the circumstances of his capture as follows:

While stopped at [a] checkpoint, [he] was asked by the security forces whether he knew another taxi driver who had also stopped at the checkpoint. The other taxi driver [Said Abassin] had a man in his cab [Alif Khan] whom was thought to be working for a rival warlord in Paktia, AF. While detainee does know the other cab driver, he did not know any of the passengers [and] believes that he was taken into custody because of a misunderstanding.

This was something of an understatement, as there was clearly no reason whatsoever that he should have been held for more than a cursory amount of time in Gardez, before being freed, and his ignorance of anything to do with militancy or insurgency was apparent from the Task Force’s comment that, although he “admits he knows who the local leaders are, he had never met them nor does he work for them.” In a further insult, the spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo on June 14, 2002 was “because of his suspected knowledge of local warlords and their activities.”

In reviewing his case, the Joint Task Force assessed him as “being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” who was “of no intelligence value to the United States,” and who posed “a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III of the US Army, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

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

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, 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.

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

This is Part 11 of the 70-part series.

In late April, WikiLeaks released its latest treasure trove of classified US documents, a set of 765 Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) from the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Compiled between 2002 and January 2009 by the Joint Task Force that has primary responsibility for the detention and interrogation of the prisoners, these detailed military assessments therefore provided new information relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba throughout its long and inglorious history, including, for the first time, information about 84 of the first 201 prisoners released, which had never been made available before.

Superficially, the Detainee Assessment Briefs appear to contain allegations against numerous prisoners which purport to prove how dangerous they are or were, but in reality the majority of these statements were made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners, in Kandahar or Bagram in Afghanistan prior to their arrival at Guantánamo, in Guantánamo itself, or in the CIA’s secret prisons, and in all three environments, torture and abuse were rife.

I ran through some of the dubious witnesses responsible for so many of the claims against the prisoners in the introduction to Part One of this new series, and, while this is of enormous importance in the cases of many of the men still held (and also in the cases of some of those released), it is not particularly relevant to the overwhelmingly insignificant prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004, whose detention was so pointless that the authorities didn’t even bother trying to build cases against them through the testimony of their fellow prisoners.

As a result, the stories of these prisoners are particularly important in demonstrating how many innocent men or insignificant foot soldiers for the Taliban, engaged in combat with the Northern Alliance before the 9/11 attacks, and unconnected with international terrorism, were held at Guantánamo (and specifically how this latter category included many unwilling Afghan recruits).

What is also worth bearing in mind (and which is not spelled out in these documents) is that many prisoners were pointlessly rounded up because the Bush administration ordered the military not to screen the prisoners on capture, leading to a dragnet of “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, as was noted by Maj. Gen, Michael Dunlavey, a commander of the prison in 2002, and also offered substantial bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects to the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies.

In a five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” I began analyzing, transcribing and condensing the stories revealed in the documents released by WikiLeaks, looking at 84 stories of prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 that had never been told before. The work of extracting information from the files and presenting it in edited form, with commentary based on my extensive research and experience, is a project that will take up the rest of the year. The next step is this ten-part series revisiting the stories of the 114 other prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004. That was the point at which the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) began, a military review process that, in turn, led to the first official release of documents relating to the prisoners in 2006, providing the material that I analysed and transcribed for my book The Guantánamo Files.

While this ten-part project is underway, I also propose to begin examining closely the files relating to the 171 prisoners still held, supplementing the series of articles that I produced last fall, entitled, “Who Are the Remaining Prisoners in Guantánamo?” This is important not just because the remaining prisoners have largely been abandoned by the mainstream media, even though 89 of the 171 have been cleared for release, and only 36 were recommended for trials by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, but also because, in the US, attorneys for the prisoners have only just won the right to look at the files (and not to download, save or print them), and the media in general is unwilling to subject them to much scrutiny because of how they became public in the first place.

So with thanks to WikiLeaks — and whoever leaked these documents — the sixth part of my ten-part analysis of the 114 prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 (in addition to the 84 stories covered in my previous series) is below. When lies and distortions are covered up on this scale, and an experimental prison built on torture and abuse remains open, even under a Democratic President who promised to close it, everyone who believes in justice should publicize what has been revealed, and, if you agree, I hope that you will share this information widely. Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten of this series.

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Six of Ten)

Mahmud Sadik (ISN 512, Afghanistan) Released July 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One),” I told the story of Mahmud Sadik, an Afghan who was 50 years old when he was seized, drawing on an interview Sadik (described as Mohammed Saduq) undertook in 2008 with Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers, who tracked him down as part of an investigation that included interviews with 66 released Guantánamo prisoners. Saduq told Lasseter that he “wasn’t surprised” when Pakistani troops came to his house to detain him, in the border town of Chaman, in late 2001. “I was a Taliban, so I didn’t bother asking why they arrested me,” he said. Held for three weeks in Pakistani custody, he was then transferred to American control, and was taken first to Bagram and then Kandahar.

Saduq explained that he had told US interrogators that he had been appointed to run an orphanage north of Kabul, and was not a major player in the Taliban, and this was confirmed by Shir Mohammed, the first governor of Helmand province under Hamid Karzai, who told Lasseter that he had arrested Saduq in the early days of the Taliban, but added, “He was not a military guy, he was not a minister, but he was someone the Taliban consulted with because he was seen as someone who understood politics.” As Lasseter explained, his relatively swift release “suggests that American interrogators didn’t consider him a threat or an important figure in the Taliban,” and that he “appears to be one more in a long line of detainees of little intelligence value,” who remained in US custody — often for three or four years — and were then released.

Speaking by phone from Chaman, Saduq told Lasseter that, at Bagram, the interrogators “seemed bored to hear about his job at the orphanage, but they perked up when he told them that on several occasions he’d met Mullah Omar,” even though he “had no idea where Mullah Omar could be hiding,” and was “also in the dark about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts.” He added that even if he had had any information, he “wouldn’t have passed it along after the soldiers who guarded him on the plane from Pakistan punched and kicked him.”

At Kandahar, Saduq said that he was “stripped naked and given new prison clothes, then was taken to the piece of plywood he would sleep on, underneath a plastic tarp,” and was again questioned about Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. “During my fourth interrogation,” he said, “a man was asking me these same questions, and when I answered he became very angry. He said I was not telling the truth. He began insulting me; he shouted that he would let his soldiers rape me. He was punching the table.” Saduq added, however, that he was “never hit during interrogations but that guards often beat his head against a wall on the way there and back.”

At Guantánamo, it appeared that the interrogators had already given up on him. He said that he was interrogated every three or four weeks, but that he was questioned daily about his health before his release, as the authorities had discovered that he had tuberculosis, and he “figured that they were afraid he’d fall seriously ill after he got home.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated April 26, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Mahmed Sadik, born in 1952, he provided further information about why he was seized, explaining that, although he did not know exactly why it was, he “assume[d] it was because he urged some acquaintances to advise Mullah Omar to give himself up before the US bombing campaign.” Apparently, he had “publicly told people to oppose Mullah Omar and his regime because it was hurting Afghanis.” This was obviously not a good reason for being sent to Guantánamo, but many Afghans who were opposed to the Taliban ended up at Guantánamo, often betrayed by rivals who succeeded in ingratiating themselves with the Americans, whose intelligence regarding the political situation in Afghanistan was almost non-existent.

Confirming his standing, the Task Force acknowledged that he had “a personal relationship with the former Governor of Kandahar, with whom he [had] shared a long friendship,” because “[b]oth men owned houses in Chaman and were introduced by Seik Mohammad who [was] the former governor’s best friend.” As the Task Force explained it, Sadik “wished to prevent a US invasion or bombing campaign, so he phoned a connection he had through the governor to tell him to call Mullah Omar and tell him to turn himself in.” He “then approached the former governor and asked him to advise Mullah Omar to get Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan if he was still in the country (as was rumored), so that the bombing campaign could be avoided.” After speaking to the former governor, he “returned to his home in Pakistan,” and “[i]t was soon after the meeting that [he] was arrested and turned over to US custody” — presumably because someone he knew had betrayed him.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 9, 2002, allegedly “because of his knowledge of personalities associated with the upper levels of the Taliban government ministries.” However, as I explained in my article, How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [512] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Israr Ul Haq (ISN 515, Pakistan) Released March 2004

As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (8) – Captured in Afghanistan,” drawing on an interview Israr Ul Haq conducted in 2008 with Tom Lasseter for McClatchy Newspapers’ major series on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners, he was 21 years old at the time of his capture, and he came up with an unlikely-sounding story that he “went to Afghanistan in August of 2001 because he was having breathing problems, and a doctor suggested that he visit religious shrines to seek a cure.” As Tom Lasseter noted, however, “stranger things have happened in the lawless corners of Afghanistan.”

Whatever the truth, he was seized and then held by the Northern Alliance, along with Ehsanullah (ISN 523, see below), and around a dozen other men, “in a small room in a mud house for about three months,” before being sold to the Americans. Given the doubts about his story, Lasseter asked why he should be believed when he stated that the guards at Bagram “hit and kicked him, and picked him up several times and body-slammed him to the ground,” that the guards at Kandahar “often kicked the Koran across the floor of his tent, and at other times pressed their knees into his back as they pummeled him with their fists,” and that, in Guantánamo, when he protested about abuse of the Koran, the guards “sprayed him in the face with pepper spray, dragged him out, slapped and kicked him, then tied him to a chair and shaved his beard to humiliate him”?

The answer, of course, is that these claims are far from unusual, and are, in fact, so widespread — throughout all the different prisons used in the “War on Terror” — that there is no reason to doubt his story at all. However, what was unusual about his interview was that he complained, above all, that the interrogators at Guantánamo were dishonest. He said that they often told prisoners “that the men in the cells next to them had become informers, that they’d given up detailed information about the militant activities of other prisoners.” “They said the person in the cage next to me said he saw me with al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders,” he explained. ”But the interrogators were lying; no one had told them that. They lied to everybody. They told the men next to me that I had said they were in this battle or that one; but we talked with each other in our cages and realized they were making all of this up.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 27, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” he was described as Israr Al-Haq, born in 1981, and it was evident that, in Guantánamo, he had told the same story that he later told Tom Lasseter. The Task Force noted that he “stated that he traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan (AF) shortly after the 9/11 attacks to visit a religious shrine,” because “he was having health problems and wanted to pray at the shrine for better health.” He said that he “stayed in Kabul, AF for 35-40 days, praying each day at the shrine, which is a 20-minute taxi ride from where [he] lived near a bazaar in Kabul,” and “was arrested 3 days prior to the start of Ramadan (mid-November, 2001) because he was a Pakistani.” He added that “he was held for three months in an unknown location and beaten regularly,” and was “then transferred to US custody.” He was sent to Guantánamo on June 12, 2002 on the spurious basis that it was “because of his affiliation with the Taliban as a foreign fighter,” even though that was not something he had ever admitted.

However, the Task Force noted that his “creditability” [sic] was “considered poor and he [had] repeatedly changed his story,” and also because, in previous interviews, he had “admitted to traveling to Afghanistan to fight the Jihad against the US,” and had also stated that “he lived for more than a month at the former Taliban Defence Minister’s home while he waited to train, before going to the front lines” — a claim which, it should be noted, sounds distinctly untrustworthy.

Although he was “assessed as not being a member of Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader,” and was also assessed as being “of minimal intelligence value to the United States,” he was regarded as posing “a medium risk to the US, its interests or its allies,” primarily because he was “arrested after the fall of the Taliban and it [was] assessed that [he] intended to fight Jihad and may still pose the will to continue Jihad, if released.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.” It was also noted that the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) had “non-concurred [his] transfer on 10 September 2003,” because there was “an insufficient amount of information in [his] file to make an accurate threat assessment” at that time.

Ehssanullah (ISN 523, Afghanistan) Released May 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (8) – Captured in Afghanistan,” I told the story of Ehssanullah (described as Ehsanullah), a farmer who was 24 years old when he was seized, based on an interview he conducted with Tom Lasseter for  McClatchy Newspapers’ major report, in June 2008, on 66 former Guantánamo prisoners. In a phone interview from Helmand province, where, he said, “Taliban militants would kill him if he met with a Westerner,” he explained that the Taliban had “made a lot of trouble for him during his life.”

Forcibly recruited as a conscript, like many others who ended up at Guantánamo, Ehsanullah said that he was sent to northern Afghanistan to fight the Northern Alliance without any training. “There was no training,” he explained. “They said, ‘This is the trigger; pull it.’” Describing the circumstances of his capture, he said that, as soon as he heard, in November 2001, that the Taliban government in Kabul had fallen, he tried to return home, but Alliance soldiers “stopped him in the capital and arrested him with a group of other fighters, some of them Pakistani militants who were trying to flee the country,” kept them “in a small room in a mud house for about three months,” and then sold them to US forces. “The commander told the Americans that he had arrested high-ranking Taliban and got $5,000 for each of us,” he added.

They were then flown to the US prison at Bagram airbase for a week, and then on to Kandahar where, he said, things were “rough.” “When the guards took me to interrogation they hit or kicked me,” he explained. “And when they searched our tent, they punched us.” He also said, like many other prisoners, that he had seen a soldier throw a Koran into a bucket that was used as a toilet, and that this was a transgression that infuriated him. “I was thinking,” he said, “that if I could arrest one of these soldiers I would cut a gram of flesh off his body every day.”

After five or six months, he was flown to Guantánamo, where, he said, life was “much easier,” as he was not physically abused, and was rarely interrogated. He added that his interrogators “seemed uninterested.” “They kept asking me why I was arrested,” he said. “They told me that the (Northern Alliance) commander had sold me to them, and they were trying to figure out what the truth was.” On his return to Afghanistan, Red Cross representatives in Kabul “gave him about $12 worth of Afghan currency, which got him to Kandahar but not all the way to his house in Helmand province,” and he explained that “[s]ome strangers at a bus stop gave him enough for the rest of the trip.” He added that he was now living as he had before his bizarre ordeal, growing wheat and opium poppies. “My only concern,” he said, “is how to feed my family.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 27, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” he was described as Aiysan Ollah, born in 1977, and the Task Force told, essentially, the same story that he later told Tom Lasseter. It was stated that he was a farmer who was forcibly conscripted by the Taliban, and served as a guard at a Taliban facility in Nahrin, in Baghlan province, for about three months. When Nahrin fell to the Northern Alliance, he fled and was captured by a Northern Alliance commander, and was then transferred to US forces, and sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002 on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of the Taliban leadership in Nahrin, Afghanistan, and about a Taliban staging area in the vicinity of Nahrin.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [523] is assessed as not affiliated with Al- Qaida, and as not being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Mohammed Anwar (ISN 524, Pakistan) Released September 2004

In Chapter 9 of The Guantánamo Files, Mohammed Anwar was briefly mentioned as being 21 years old at the time of his capture, and I also noted that he was probably seized with two other recruits from villages in Sindh province — 20-year old Abid Raza (ISN 299), and 59-year old Mohammed Ilyas (ISN 144, see Part Three).

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated February 21, 2004, which was an “Update Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” it was noted that he was born in 1980 and had been “diagnosed with Hepatitis B and a left Orchiectomy for Testicular Cancer,” but was “otherwise in good health.” It was also noted that, on December 14, 2002, Maj. Gen. Miller had recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government,” based on anassessment that he “was not affiliated with Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader,” but that new information indicated that, in 1998, he was recruited by the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LT) and attended a training camp in Pakistan for three weeks, and that, in July 2001, he spent three months at Tarnak Farms, an Al-Qaida-affiliated training camp near Kandahar, “preparing food for Taliban forces.” No source was provided for either of these claims, which may, as a result, have been produced under unknown and dubious circumstances by Ansar’s fellow prisoners, along with another extraordinary allegation — that he had been “identified through sensitive reporting as a Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate agent”; in other words, as an agent for Pakistani’s largest and most notorious intelligence agency, which seems highly unlikely.

Noting that he was “non-compliant and belligerent” and had “not been forthcoming or cooperative during his detention at GTMO,” the Task Force assessed him as being “of medium intelligence value to the United States,” and as “a member of LT, which has been identified as a terrorist organization according to Executive Order 13224 and has been classified as [a] Tier 1 terrorist organization (defined as terrorist groups, especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests).” It was also noted that he was “suspected of having attended advanced training at Tarnak Farms,” and that he posed “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests or its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “Retained in DoD control.” It appeared, however, that the Criminal Investigative task Force (CITF) did not agree with the Task Force’s assessment, as it was also noted that, “ln the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders CITF [would] defer to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] pose[d] a high risk.”

Abdul Hanan (ISN 531, Afghanistan) Released May 2003

As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (8) – Captured in Afghanistan,” before the release of the Detainee Assessment Briefs by WikiLeaks, what little was known of Hanan, who was 44 years old when he was seized, came from a report in the Chicago Tribune, “Third Detainee Dies in US Custody in Afghanistan,” published on June 24, 2003. He explained that the time he spent imprisoned at Bagram and Kandahar before being transferred to Guantánamo was the worst part of his detention. “In five months in Kandahar, we didn’t wash our faces with water, and our nails were growing very long,” he said. “We didn’t have a right to talk to many people, and if we talked too much, we were forced to sit on our knees for 20 minutes or a half hour.” He also explained that he was seized while searching for his younger brother, a Taliban conscript, in northern Afghanistan in late 2001.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 5, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was noted that he was born in 1958 and had been diagnosed with latent tuberculosis (in common with many of the prisoners), and also with “a recurrent major depressive disorder,” but was “otherwise in good health.” The Task Force also confirmed his own story, told briefly after his release, acknowledging that, on November 12, 2001, he “traveled to Kunduz, Afghanistan, to locate his brother, Manan, who was forcibly conscripted by the Taliban,” and adding that he “believe[d] that he himself was not conscripted because of his age and poor health.” He also explained that, “[a]fter twelve days of discreetly searching for his brother in Kunduz and getting no results, [he] decided to visit the bazaar to ask where he could contact the Taliban,” but, instead, “found Ghafar, a man who had also been conscripted from [his] village,” who “informed [him] that he was unable to provide information regarding Manan’s location because he and [Manan] had been separated shortly after arriving in Kunduz.” Abdul Hanan added that he “was reluctant to personally question the Taliban because he knew that they would not help him,” so he “decided to return home to Zabul, Afghanistan.”

After stopping in Pul-i-Khumri, in Baghlan province, where he “spent the night with a family whom he had met at the mosque,” he was seized by Northern Alliance soldiers and taken to the garrison, where, he said, “he remained for approximately three months because he refused to pay the $10,000 that they demanded for his release.” He was then transferred to US forces, and was sent to Guantánamo on June 7, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his possible knowledge of al-Qaida activities, as well as terrorist biographical and psychological information.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [531] is assessed as not affiliated with al-Qaida or as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Tarek Dergoul (ISN 534, UK) Released March 2004

In Chapter 4 of The Guantánamo Files, drawing on an interview with David Rose that Tarek Dergoul conducted after his release, I explained how the British citizen, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture, spoke of his capture in Afghanistan and his treatment in US custody.

Prior to his horrendous experiences in US custody in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo, Dergoul described himself as a non-practicing Muslim, born to Moroccan parents in London’s Mile End, who had been a mini-cab driver and a carer in an old people’s home. He said that he went to Pakistan for a holiday in July 2001, intrigued by descriptions of the country provided by British friends whose parents were from Pakistan, and added that, having decided, with two Pakistani friends, to invest in property in Afghanistan in the hope that they could sell it for a profit after the war, the three men were close to securing a deal, and were spending the night in an empty villa in Jalalabad, when it was hit by an American bomb.

Dergoul said that his friends were killed, and that he was wounded and unable to walk, and he explained that he only survived for a week — until he was discovered by Northern Alliance soldiers — because a water tap was still working, and he had a few biscuits and raisins in his pockets. Although the soldiers treated him well, taking him to a hospital, where he had three operations on his left arm, which had been badly injured by shrapnel, they subsequently sold him to the Americans, who insisted that he had fought in Tora Bora and eventually forced a false confession out of him.

In Chapter 15, I included Dergoul’s comments about the Emergency Reaction Force (ERF) or Immediate Reaction Force (IRF) in Guantánamo, a group of five armed guards responsible for forced cell extractions, and also for punishment, in which he confirmed previous claims that their attacks were largely prompted by minor disciplinary infractions, and also described their actions as “an act of deliberate provocation.” Explaining what happened to him on one of the five occasions that he was ERFed — for refusing to agree to a third cell search in a day — he said:

They pepper-sprayed me in the face and I started vomiting; in all I must have brought up five cupfuls. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed. They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows.

Dergoul was also the first released prisoner to point out that each ERF attack was filmed, by a sixth member of the team with a video camera, and this was confirmed by a spokesman for Guantánamo in 2004, who said that they were used to monitor whether or not excessive force had been used. He refused to discuss how many times the ERF had been used, but in July 2004 the Pentagon said that “only 32 hours” of the tapes showed the units using “excessive force.”

In Chapter 19, I reported Dergoul’s comments about an early hunger strike at Guantánamo, from “The Guantánamo Prisoner Hunger Strikes & Protests: February 2002 – August 2005,” an important report by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was published in September 2005. The first large-scale hunger strike, involving 194 prisoners, had run from February to May 2002, and had become a protest against the prisoners’ indefinite detention and their harsh living conditions, ands a second mass hunger strike took place in October 2002. Dergoul reported that another strike — prompted by mistreatment of the Koran — began in December 2002 and continued for six weeks. “People were fainting left, right and center,” he said, adding, “I felt very weak and ill and could only do a hunger strike for three days at a time.”

In 2008, Tarek Dergoul was interviewed by Matthew Schofield for a major report by McClatchy Newspapers on 66 former Guantánamo prisoners, in which he told his story, beginning in June 2001 “as he was preparing to leave London, where Moroccan parents raised him.” There, as Schofield described it, “[h]e’d been a petty thief, hanging out with other petty thieves, smoking dope, losing his religion.” He told Schofield, “I decided I needed to get away, to make some money, clear my head. I was choosing between Pakistan and Australia. I know today that seems stupid, but this was before Sept. 11. I chose Pakistan. It was a bad mistake.”

As Schofield conceded, his story of how he ended up in Afghanistan sounded “improbable.” Dergoul said that he and a friend, with whom he was traveling, had slightly more than £10,000 ($16,000), which, they figured, would go “a lot farther in Afghanistan than it would in England.” In Pakistan, noticing “a steady stream of refugees fleeing the war” in Afghanistan, they apparently “decided they could make a lot of money in real estate by moving in during the chaos, buying property cheaply from Afghans eager to flee and reselling when Afghanistan was stable again.”

Shifting to the circumstances of his capture, and his wounding, Dergoul reiterated that he was in Jalalabad in October 2001, “looking over a villa he planned to buy, when a bomb landed.” His two friends in “the real estate scheme” were killed, and he was “buried under the rubble.” When locals saved him and took him to hospital, doctors had to amputate his left arm. While recuperating, he noticed that an armed guard was stationed outside his room, but it was not until afterwards that he realized that this was because he had already been designated for US custody.

Once he recovered sufficiently to be moved, he said, “he was put in an ambulance and driven to a flat, open area outside town where a helicopter with a US flag had landed. He said he overheard the American and Afghan guards mention the sum of $5,000, and that he thought that was the bounty paid for him.” With “his shoulder screaming in pain,” he ended up at Bagram, “on the freezing floor of a large prison cell,” where “he remembered hearing screams, sporadic gunfire and the harsh voices of the guards, who he said threatened him if he talked to a neighbor or moved.” He added that guards “took him into an interrogation room at gunpoint and asked where he’d last seen Osama bin Laden. When he said he didn’t know bin Laden, they said he was lying.”

He also explained that, although he “begged for medical attention and told his captors that he needed antibiotics and that his feet hurt and were freezing,” the guards “laughed at him until a medical officer came by, looked at his surgical wounds and determined that his right foot, which he said was oozing by this time, needed immediate attention.” This was followed by “what he called ‘the oddest’ experience”:

He claimed that he was taken into a medical room where a medical trainee was being instructed in how to amputate his toe. He claimed that he wasn’t given anesthesia for the operation. Instead, he said, he was given just enough painkiller to stop the pain from being overwhelming, but not so much that he couldn’t answer interrogators when they started asking questions again.

“It was unreal,” he said. “A doctor was telling a nurse how to hack off my toe — I could feel him cutting on me — while a guy is asking me, ‘Where is Osama bin Laden?’ I pretended I was too out of it to understand.”

From Bagram, Dergoul was taken to the US prison at Kandahar airport, and from there to Guantánamo on May 1, 2002. Reiterating the episode in which guards “held his head in the toilet, flushed it and punched him,” he described the totality of his experience in Guantánamo as “torture light,” stating that the guards “deprived him of food, sleep, light, exercise, conversation,” and that he “frequently was pepper-sprayed,” which he described as “a common response to unruly prisoners.”

In response, Dergoul said, he “turned to religion.” He told Matthew Schofield, “It wasn’t really until I was in Guantánamo that I learned the importance of my faith. As everything around me was going crazy, I turned inwards, and to the Quran.” He added that this was “the positive side of his experience.”

Schofield also noted that Dergoul “isn’t considered dangerous or high risk in England,” although this was not how he was perceived by the US authorities at Guantánamo. In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated October 28, 2003, which was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” it was noted that he was born in 1977 and it was claimed that, in July 2001, he had spoken with a Bangladeshi friend about “going to Afghanistan and participating in Jihad.” In this version of events, he and his friend stayed in a guesthouse in Kabul in August 2001, where Dergoul “underwent weapons training.” He then traveled to Jalalabad in September 2001, where he stayed for two months in a village or small town outside the city, and then, in November, was wounded while he was in the Tora Bora mountains, where, according to the Task Force, he “spent 19 days hiding in the caves,” and was “taken into custody by the Pakistanis after he fled Tora Bora into Pakistan,” subsequently being “turned over to the Americans.” He was sent to Guantánamo on May 2, 2002 on the spurious basis that it was “because of his affiliation with White Chapel mosque [sic] and its role in facilitating recruits to fight on behalf of the Taliban and Al-Qaida.”

In its assessment, the Task Force claimed that Dergoul had “not been cooperative or forthright during his detention.” He was also “assessed as having been recruited to fight on behalf of the Taliban” and as having “probable Al-Qaida affiliations and links with known Al-Qaida supporters in the UK.” As a result, he was regarded as being “of moderate intelligence value to the United States,” and also as posing “a high threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” so that Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.” Five months later, however, he was a free man.

For further information, see this interview with Cageprisoners, from 2004.

Mohammed Omar (ISN 540, Pakistan) Released September 2004

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (8) – Captured in Afghanistan,” and also in my November 2008 article, “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo,” I drew on an interview that Omar had conducted in 2008 with Tom Lasseter for a major review by McClatchy Newspapers of the stories of 66 former Guantánamo prisoners.

In that interview, Omar, who was 17 at the time of his capture, told Tom Lasseter that in October 2001 he had become fed up with his madrassa (religious school), which his father had forced him to attend, and that as a result he decided to run away. He claimed that he had told an older man at the madrassa about his plans, and that this man had “offered to take [him] with him to an acting academy,” which, for Omar, who was “always watching Indian movies … sounded like a dream.” He stated, however, that the man had tricked him, and that he was handed over to a group of men who “pushed him into a car and took him to Herat, Afghanistan.” “They said you are in Afghanistan and the Taliban are in charge here,” Omar explained. “I told them I wanted to go home. They had lied to me. They made a fool of me.” Despite Omar’s youth, he explained that the interrogators at Kandahar “kept asking me where Mullah Omar was,” and “if I was on a jihad mission, where I got my training.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated May 31, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that he was born in 1986, and was, therefore, just 15 years old when he was seized, but it was also stated that he had been subjected to a “bone density scan,” which had established that he was “19 years old +/- 15 months”; in other words, that “when he was in-processed in Guantánamo Bay, June 2002, the youngest he could have been was 16 years and 9 months.” It was also stated that “[a]nother very significant factor [was] that his long bone growth plates [were] fully mature indicating that he ‘[was] an adult, anatomically.” Even if this was the case, Omar would still have been a juvenile at the time of his capture, and should have been rehabilitated rather than punished under the terms of the UN Optional Protocol to the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, in which juvenile prisoners are defined as those who are under 18 at the time that their alleged crimes took place.

In analyzing his story, the Task Force claimed that a student at his madrassa, Hussain, spoke to him about “running way to Afghanistan to receive combat training,” which he “understood … to be hand to hand combat training as he had seen in movies.” It was also noted, reinforcing Omar’s evident youth and naivety, that he “believe[d] a jihad is when a person travels to a foreign land and is separated from his family,” and that, “while Hussain had mentioned the Taliban it was not a major issue discussed.” The two students then traveled to Quetta, where they waited 10-14 days for “Taliban guidance in entering Afghanistan.”

Hussain then fled, but Omar “continued with four other Pakistanis,” reportedly traveling to the Tarnak Farms training camp near Kandahar, where he stayed for approximately one week, but was unable to communicate as he did not speak Pashtu. He then apparently managed to convey his desire to receive combat training, and was flown to Mazar-e-Sharif, and then taken to Faryab (a province in north western Afghanistan), but he was unable to train “due to two weeks of constant, heavy air bombardment of the area.” He then decided to return to Pakistan and “took a ride with a vehicle full of Taliban members fleeing the area,” but when a group of Afghans in Golran (in Herat province) offered them food, they imprisoned them instead, holding them for two months in “a large hall-like room.” He was then transferred to US custody, and held in Kandahar until on or about June 11, 2002, when he was sent to Guantánamo, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of a training camp (Tarnak Farms) located outside Kandahar city limits.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [540] is assessed as neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Mahmud Nuri Mert (ISN 543, Turkey) Released March 2004

In Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Mahmud Nuri Mert, a 30-year old Turk (released in March 2004), was married with four children and had been working as a lottery agent in Turkey. When the job came to an end he left the country in search of work, traveling first to Iran and then Afghanistan, where he was captured by the Taliban and imprisoned in Herat for three months before being handed over to US forces.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 16, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” he was described as Mahmud Nuri Marti, born in 1971, and it was also stated that he had been “diagnozed with Panic Disorder without Agoraphobia,” but was “otherwise in good health.” In relating his story, the Task Force essentially reinforced what he claimed after his release, noting that he “stated that he was a ‘small business’ man doing odd jobs, while also buying and reselling various items he would acquire by barter,” and that, “[a]fter taking a loan of approximately $10,000,” which “he was unable to repay,” he “was forced to flee across the Afghani-Turkish border in order to avoid being caught by the people he owed money to,” and “traveled around Afghanistan (AF), in the Herat area, doing odd jobs,” until he was “arrested by the Taliban and imprisoned in November 2001 because they suspected he was a spy.” Held in a prison near Herat “until Northern Alliance forces took control of the prison,” he was then turned over to the US. He was apparently not sent to Guantánamo until January 2003, and the spurious reason given for his transfer was  that it was because he was “suspected of being a foreign fighter.”

In its assessment, the Task Force stated that he was “assessed as not being affiliated with any extremist group,” and described him as being “of low intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “a low threat to the US, its interests and its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer.”

Sajin Urayman (ISN 545, Pakistan) Released July 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (8) – Captured in Afghanistan,” and also in my November 2008 article, “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo,” I drew on an interview that Urayman had conducted in 2008 with Tom Lasseter for a major review by McClatchy Newspapers of the stories of 66 former Guantánamo prisoners.

Urayman, described as Saji Ur Rahman, who was just 15 at the time of his capture, told Lasseter that he and four friends had decided to go to Afghanistan “as tourists,” to “see what the Taliban regime was like and to visit the graves of Islamic scholars.” “We were very into the adventure of it,” he said. “We had handicams with us; we had cameras. The richer friend had a Thuraya,” a satellite phone. Like Mohammed Omar (described above), Rahman said that he ended up in Herat, where both added that they were seized and imprisoned in Herat’s central jail for three months, and then transferred to Kandahar for five to six months before Guantánamo.

Rahman also described the monotony of the US interrogators’ questions. “The questions were always the same,” he said. “Why did you come to Afghanistan? Who did you meet in Afghanistan? Where did you hide your weapons?” As I explained in my previous account, “These were, of course, questions to which every single prisoner was subjected, and it’s impossible to know how long it took the authorities to realize that he and Mohammed Omar knew nothing whatsoever about the Taliban or al-Qaeda, even as they ignored, or failed to acknowledge the fact that they were too young to be held as ‘terror suspects’ in an insanely novel form of detention without charge or trial.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated January 25, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which it was claimed that he was born in 1984 rather than 1986 (but would still have been under 18 when seized), the Task Force found no reason to doubt his story, stating that, on or around October 10, 2001, Urayman and two friends took a bus to Kandahar, and, from there, “flew to Mazar-e-Sharif to visit holy shrines for about one month.” After Mazar fell to the Northern Alliance, he “became separated from his two friends and fled the city on a pickup truck,” but was seized by Farsi-speaking Afghans outside Herat, who imprisoned him for 12 days in Gulran before transferring him to official Afghan custody. He was then held for approximately three months before being handed over to US forces, and was sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his general knowledge of conflict in the region.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [545] is assessed as neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

It was also stated that,”During a visit to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 3 to 10 August 2002, Pakistani Intelligence officers interrogated [ISN 545] and concluded that he had little or no intelligence value. They stated that their government would accept custody of [him] if released by the US government.”

Bader Zaman Bader (ISN 559, Afghanistan) Released September 2004

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Bader (who was 31 years old and married with three children) and his brother Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost (who was 41 years old, and married with nine children) were seized at Muslim Dost’s house in Peshawar on November 17, 2001, and also explained:

Both were talented and capable men: journalists and gemstone dealers, Bader was also a university professor and Muslim Dost operated eight non-Islamist schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Held in solitary confinement in Pakistan for three months, while the ISI cooked up charges against them and offered them the opportunity to bribe their way to freedom — which they refused on principle, as they had done nothing wrong — they were then sold to the US authorities, who accused Muslim Dost of serving as an al-Qaeda contact in Herat, which he had never even visited. Released in 2004 and 2005, they were, without doubt, picked up by the ISI and sold to the Americans because, although they had been living in Pakistan since their family fled Afghanistan in 1982, they had published several satirical magazines and had written newspaper articles in which they not only criticized the Taliban but also pointed out the role of the ISI in creating and supporting the regime.

On his release, Bader explained more about the reasons that he and others were sold to the Americans, describing it as a common practice in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. For the ISI, he said, “it was just a question of keeping the Americans busy with false suspects. They never stopped playing the international community.” In his specific case, he added, “I spent two months and twenty-two days in Peshawar prison, fourteen days at Bagram, two months and eight days in Kandahar and two years and four months in Guantánamo, solely because I denounced their practices.” He also told the story of a taxi driver in Guantánamo, who was sold for $5,000. “The Pakistanis had just made a raid to find Arabs close to al-Qaeda and hadn’t found anybody, so they arrested him,” he said. “The officer who sold him to the Americans told him, ‘Look here, it’s worth it to sell people like you to keep the Americans from coming to make war on Pakistan.’”

In an article in Newsday, in October 2005, Bader explained more about how the US authorities had failed to understand who they were, or why they had been seized. “For months,” the article stated, “grim interrogators grilled them over a satirical article Dost had written in 1998, when the Clinton administration offered a $5-million reward for Osama bin Laden. Dost responded that Afghans put up 5 million Afghanis — equivalent to $113 — for the arrest of President Bill Clinton.” Bader added, “It was a lampoon … of the poor Afghan economy” under the Taliban, and explained that the article “carefully instructed Afghans how to identify Clinton if they stumbled upon him,” stating that “he was clean-shaven, had light-colored eyes and he had been seen involved in a scandal with Monica Lewinsky.” He added that “the interrogators, some flown down from Washington, didn’t get the joke,” and explained, “Again and again, they were asking questions about this article. We had to explain that this was a satire. It was really pathetic.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated April 14, 2004, which was an “Update Recommendation [for] Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TR),” in which he was described as Abdul Badr Mannan, born in November 1970 (and was also described as Badruzzan Badr), it was noted that he had been “diagnosed with Anxiety disorder,” but was “otherwise in good health.” It was also noted that, in an assessment on November 11, 2003, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained in DoD control,” based on an assessment that he “may be affiliated with Al-Qaida or another Islamic extremist group.” However, under “New Information,” extensive evidence was provided demonstrating that he and Muslim Dost had been seized by mistake.

The Task Force explained that “[f]urther exploitation” had “determined, with a high degree of certainty, that [he had] no ascertainable linkage to Al-Qaida,” and that, although he was “thought to have some affiliation with the Jama’at Ul Dawa Al Qurani (JDQ) group,” it transpired that he “may have been writing a book (detainee and his brother are published authors) concerning Islamic extremism and had merely established contacts to further his research and writing.” It was also noted that, in his writings, he had been “extremely critical of the Pakistan Intelligence Service and their overt connections to extremism and Al-Qaida,” and that, as a result, the brothers “may have been arrested on that pretense and turned over to US authorities, who were misled as to [their] affiliations.” It was also noted that the Pakistani government had “never provided any information concerning [Bader's] alleged Al-Qaida affiliations,” and that “[n]o established membership link [had] been found between [Bader] and any other extremist group.” In addition, it was noted that, “while in detention, [he had] provided a great deal of information willingly, and some of the information [had] been successfully corroborated,” and also that he had “consistently maintained his innocence and [had] provided evidence to substantiate his claims.”

After declaring that his intelligence value had been “fully exploited,” the Task Force noted that he was assessed as “not a member of Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader,” and that he posed “a low risk, as he [was] unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Mitchell Leclaire, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “released or transferred to the control of another country for continued detention” — even though there was no basis for recommending him for continued detention. It was also noted that JTF GTMO notified the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) of this recommendation on 29 March 2004,” and that “CITF was unable to make a risk assessment on 10 November 2003.”

Despite the fact that he was, essentially, cleared thoroughly of any suspicion of involvement in wrongdoing before his release, the US authorities refused to acknowledge that they had done anything wrong. The Newsday article mentioned above explained that, in summer 2005, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico, declared that “there was no mistake” in the brothers’ detention because it “was directly related to their combat activities [or support] as determined by an appropriate Department of Defense official.” This was a clear example of how, in Guantánamo, the normal rules — of guilt and innocence, and of right and wrong — simply did not apply.

In July 2006, Bader and Muslim Dost released a 453-page book, Da Guantánamo Maatai Zawlanai (Broken Chains of Guantánamo), recounting their experiences. Afterwards, Muslim Dost was once more arrested by Pakistani forces.

Rustam Akhmyarov (ISN 573, Russia) Released February 2004

In Chapter 16 of The Guantánamo Files, I referred to Rustam Akhmyarov, although all I knew about him at the time (apart from his date of birth, place of birth and release date) was that he had spoken about the joint Pakistani-Egyptian national, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, an innocent man who was seized in Indonesia and rendered to torture in Egypt, before being sent to Bagram and then Guantánamo.

Madni told Akhmyarov of his time “in an underground cell in Egypt, where he never saw the sun and where he was tortured until he confessed to working with Osama bin Laden,” and added that he “recalled how he was interrogated by both Egyptian and US agents in Egypt and that he was blindfolded, tortured with electric shocks, beaten and hung from the ceiling.” Akhmyarov also said that Madni was in a particularly bad mental and physical state in Guantánamo, where he “was passing blood in his feces,” and recalled that he overheard US officials telling him, “we will let you go if you tell the world everything was fine here.”

In “The Battle for Guantánamo,” a New York Times article by Tim Golden, discussing the prison-wide hunger strike in 2005, Akhmyarov (described as Rustam Akhmiarov, a 26-year-old Russian who was arrested in Pakistan and ended up in Guantánamo) told Golden, “Every country has its own way of torturing people. In Russia, they beat you up; they break you straightaway. But the Americans had their own way, which is to make you go mad over a period of time. Every day they thought of new ways to make you feel worse.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 5, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” he was described as Rutan Solekhyanovich Akhmerob, born in 1979, and it was also noted that he left Russia in December 2001 to study at an Islamic university in Karachi, which he achieved by flying first to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, where he stayed with a friend, Yessin, for ten days, until the two men traveled to an unknown village, where they “spent one night before crossing into Afghanistan by digging under barbed wire.” They then took a taxi to the Pakistani border, and continued to Karachi by bus. They then stayed with one of Yessin’s friends for three days, and were then taken to a guesthouse, where they stayed for another three weeks until they were seized by the Pakistani authorities on or about February 13, 2002. Akhmyarov was sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002 on the spurious basis that it was because of “his knowledge of a Pakistani-run guesthouse that hosted several high profile Arab guests, some of which included Abdul Hakim, Abdul Aziz, Yakub, Zahir, Sala’a, Zukhail, and Jalad” (it is not known who these men are).

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [573] is assessed as not affiliated with al-Qaida or as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes.”

Crucially, it was also noted that, “Because of the Russian government’s agreement to incarcerate [him] upon his transfer, and provided that he remains incarcerated under the control of the Russian government, the detainee poses no future threat to the US or its allies.” The second page of the DAB was missing, but it was clear from the DABs of other Russian prisoners that it stated, more or less, “In addition, the Russian government has agreed to share with the United States all intelligence derived from this detainee in the future.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of the Russian government.”

After his release, he and the six other Russians repatriated from Guantánamo were initially held in a detention center run by the FSB, the domestic successor of the KGB, and although they were released in June 2004, they continued to be scrutinized and harassed, with three of them — Rasul Kudayev (ISN 82, see Part One), Ravil Gumarov (INN 203, see Part Three) and Timur Ishmuratov (ISN 674) — ending up in prison, and another man, Ruslan Odizhev (ISN 211, also see Part Three), being shot and killed as an alleged terrorist.

On August 27, 2005, Akhmyarov and former Guantánamo prisoner Airat Vakhitov (see Part Five), were seized by Russian security officials from the apartment of Geydar Dzhemal, the chairman of the Islamic Committee of Russia. According to Dzhemal, the officials were concerned because Akhmyarov and Vakhitov were soon to visit the UK — in November 2005 — as guests of Amnesty International at a conference about Guantánamo, and they were worried that they would testify about human rights abuses in Russia, as well as Guantánamo. He predicted they would be arrested on trumped-up charges, and they apparently were, although they were freed just five days later.

There has been no recent news about Rustam Akhmyarov.

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

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, 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.

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

This is Part 10 of the 70-part series.

In late April, WikiLeaks released its latest treasure trove of classified US documents, a set of 765 Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) from the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Compiled between 2002 and January 2009 by the Joint Task Force that has primary responsibility for the detention and interrogation of the prisoners, these detailed military assessments therefore provided new information relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba throughout its long and inglorious history, including, for the first time, information about 84 of the first 201 prisoners released, which had never been made available before.

Superficially, the Detainee Assessment Briefs appear to contain allegations against numerous prisoners which purport to prove how dangerous they are or were, but in reality the majority of these statements were made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners, in Kandahar or Bagram in Afghanistan prior to their arrival at Guantánamo, in Guantánamo itself, or in the CIA’s secret prisons, and in all three environments, torture and abuse were rife.

I ran through some of the dubious witnesses responsible for so many of the claims against the prisoners in the introduction to Part One of this new series, and, while this is of enormous importance in the cases of many of the men still held (and also in the cases of some of those released), it is not particularly relevant to the overwhelmingly insignificant prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004, whose detention was so pointless that the authorities didn’t even bother trying to build cases against them through the testimony of their fellow prisoners.

As a result, the stories of these prisoners are particularly important in demonstrating how many innocent men or insignificant foot soldiers for the Taliban, engaged in combat with the Northern Alliance before the 9/11 attacks, and unconnected with international terrorism, were held at Guantánamo (and specifically how this latter category included many unwilling Afghan recruits).

What is also worth bearing in mind (and which is not spelled out in these documents) is that many prisoners were pointlessly rounded up because the Bush administration ordered the military not to screen the prisoners on capture, leading to a dragnet of “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, as was noted by Maj. Gen, Michael Dunlavey, a commander of the prison in 2002, and also offered substantial bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects to the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies.

In a five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” I began analyzing, transcribing and condensing the stories revealed in the documents released by WikiLeaks, looking at 84 stories of prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 that had never been told before. The work of extracting information from the files and presenting it in edited form, with commentary based on my extensive research and experience, is a project that will take up the rest of the year. The next step is this ten-part series revisiting the stories of the 114 other prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004. That was the point at which the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) began, a military review process that, in turn, led to the first official release of documents relating to the prisoners in 2006, providing the material that I analysed and transcribed for my book The Guantánamo Files.

While this ten-part project is underway, I also propose to begin examining closely the files relating to the 171 prisoners still held, supplementing the series of articles that I produced last fall, entitled, “Who Are the Remaining Prisoners in Guantánamo?” This is important not just because the remaining prisoners have largely been abandoned by the mainstream media, even though 89 of the 171 have been cleared for release, and only 36 were recommended for trials by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, but also because, in the US, attorneys for the prisoners have only just won the right to look at the files (and not to download, save or print them), and the media in general is unwilling to subject them to much scrutiny because of how they became public in the first place.

So with thanks to WikiLeaks — and whoever leaked these documents — the fifth part of my ten-part analysis of the 114 prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 (in addition to the 84 stories covered in my previous series) is below. When lies and distortions are covered up on this scale, and an experimental prison built on torture and abuse remains open, even under a Democratic President who promised to close it, everyone who believes in justice should publicize what has been revealed, and, if you agree, I hope that you will share this information widely. Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten of this series.

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Five of Ten)

Aziz Khan Zumarikourt (ISN 348, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

As I explained in Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, discussing around 65 prisoners captured in Afghanistan and transferred to Kandahar in late 2001 and early 2002, “45-year old Aziz Khan Zumarikourt, the father of ten children (released in March 2004), was arrested at his home in Paktia province for having four Kalashnikovs. Speaking after his release, he said of his captors, ‘They had very bad treatment towards us. Americans are very cruel. They want to govern the world.’” He also said that “he was sometimes kept in chains and sometimes ‘put in a place like a cage for a bird.’”

His Detainee Assessment Brief, dated February 26, 2004, was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” in which his date of birth was listed as 1962. In previous assessments, Maj. Gen. Miller had recommended that he be “retained for continued detention, based on [an] assessment that [he] was likely a Taliban Intelligence Official,” but he was “no longer assessed as being a Taliban Intelligence official,” because there was “nothing to directly link [him] to the Taliban documents and equipment recovered at the same time of his capture [sic].” This, it was also made clear, was because “[t]he compound where [he] was captured belonged to his brother-in-law,” who was “a representative of the Karzai government and was responsible for gathering equipment, weapons, etc. from surrendering Taliban members.”

As a result, the Task Force determined that Zumarikourt posed “a low risk as he [was] unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and it was also noted that the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) had assessed him as “a low risk” on May 22, 2003, so that both JTF-GMTO and CITF agree[d] on [his] threat assessment … as a low risk.”

Mohammed Sadiq (ISN 349, Afghanistan) Released October 2002

As I explained in Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, discussing around 65 prisoners captured in Afghanistan and transferred to Kandahar in late 2001 and early 2002, “Of the Afghans captured at this time, at least 30 were subsequently released. Most slipped away quietly in 2003 and 2004, without their stories being told, although there were a few notable exceptions. Mohammed Sadiq, from Paktia province, was 88 years old when he was captured, apparently because his nephew had worked for the Taliban [as the journalist Ashwin Raman explained in an article in March 2004]. One night in January 2002, US forces bombarded his house, blasted his door with rockets, confiscated his belongings and took him to Kandahar. Although he was one of the first prisoners to be released, in October 2002, it took the Americans eight months to decide that he did not pose a threat to them. After his release, with his house in ruins and his belongings gone, he moved in with his relatives and was ‘unable to come to terms with what happened to him.’”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 27, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was noted that he was, indeed, born in 1913, and that he was “undergoing medical evaluation for prostate cancer.” It was also noted that his “medical issues include[d]: Major Depressive Disorder, Senile Dementia, and Osteoarthritis, for which he receive[d] prescribed treatment.”

Backing up his story, which remains one of the most shamefully inept in a prison full of people seized for little or no reason, the Task Force explained that coalition forces had take him into custody at “a compound where he resided” in Yahya Kheyl, which is actually in Paktika province, on January 7, 2002, because “[a] Thuraya Satellite phone, which belonged to [his] neighbour Abdul Rahman, and a list of phone numbers associated with suspected Taliban figures were discovered on the premises,” this document having apparently been discovered by a 13-year old friend of his son. Eventually, the authorities discovered that “[t]hese items could not be directly linked to [Sadiq], and he did not know how to operate the phone,” and also discovered that he “had no knowledge of other assorted documents in the compound and attributed some of them to his son Mohammed.” Sadiq explained that he “did not know who might have given any documents to his son,” and it was also noted, “He said his son is crazy.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 4, 2002, allegedly “because of the telephone, phone numbers, and various documents found in the vicinity of his capture, including a letterhead document related to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan National Directorate of Intelligence.”

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

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

In a sad postscript, the Task Force repeated that Sadiq “could not provide any information” about any of the items that were supposed to be the reason for his transfer halfway round the world from Afghanistan, and also explained that he had taken a polygraph examination, “which revealed no deception on his part as he denied any connection with the materials.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [349] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida and as not being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.” It was also noted that he was “elderly,” and had “diagnosed medical problems involving senile dementia and depression, and that, “[d]uring initial interviews in AF, [he] gave his true name to US forces rather than an alias.”

Ehsanullah (ISN 350, Afghanistan) Released March 2003

As I explained in Chapter 8 of The Guantánamo Files, discussing detention in the US prison at Kandahar, Ehsanullah, a 28-year old Afghan, was one of several prisoners who noted the abuse of the Koran. He said that soldiers in Kandahar hit him and taunted him by throwing the Koran in a toilet. “It was a very bad situation for us,” he explained. “We cried so much and shouted, ‘Please do not do that to the Holy Koran.’”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 27, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Ihsan Morzai, born in 1973, it was noted that he was an unwilling Taliban conscript. “Taliban forces forcibly removed [him] from his farm and held him captive after kidnapping his father,” the Task Force stated, adding that he “was told his father would be released if he paid the Taliban three million Afghani dollars [sic] or agreed to fight for the Taliban, so he agreed to fight.” He was then “placed in a unit, sent to Mazar-e-Sharif, and surrendered to General Dostum’s forces in November 2001, after the city fell.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 9, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of Taliban activity in the area of Askar Abad and Mazar-e-Sharif, recruiting practices by the former Taliban regime, and familiarity with several Afghani subjects, who were with him at a house in Mazar-e-Sharif” — a particularly weak reason in an ocean of feeble attempts to justify the largely random industrial-scale rendition of men after the event.

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [350] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida and as not being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Abdul Razaq (ISN 356, Afghanistan) Released May 2002

The first prisoner to be released from Guantánamo, Abdul Razaq (also identified as Abdul Razeq and Abdul Razak) was a notorious schizophrenic, as I explained in Chapter 8 of The Guantánamo Files, in which I discussed detention in the US prison at Kandahar, and drew on the testimony of Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of a former interrogator at Kandahar and Bagram, as described in his book The Interrogators:

In keeping with the violent treatment to which the prisoners were subjected on arrival and during processing, their detention was also punctuated by acts of random brutality. This was unsurprising, given that the prison was referred to by the soldiers as “Camp Slappy,” and that they dehumanized the prisoners by referring to them all as “Bob,” so that, for example, a grievously wounded prisoner was referred to as “Half-Dead Bob,” and Abdul Razeq — a schizophrenic, who was held in a cage on his own, where he ranted and raved and ate his own excrement — became “Crazy Bob.”

In Chapter 14, drawing again on Mackey’s testimony and on a May 2002 article in Newsweek by Sami Yousafzai, I explained:

As Kandahar wound down, Mackey was left with a dwindling prisoner population. One of the last things he saw was the return of “Crazy Bob” — the schizophrenic Abdul Razeq — who taxed the interrogators at Guantánamo to such an extent that they sent him back after just a few months. Mackey noted that he arrived “strapped down in the centre of the plane like Hannibal Lecter.” The first prisoner to be released from Guantánamo, he was taken to a maximum security cell in a hospital, where the journalist Sami Yousafzai interviewed him.

The ethnic Uzbek, a native of Mazar-e-Sharif, explained that he was captured a week after Mazar fell to the Northern Alliance. “The Americans stopped me near the city and asked me where I was from,” he said. “I told them, ‘I am an Afghan.’ They didn’t believe me. They said, ‘No, you are a foreigner.’ And they took me. They took me to America to treat my mental problems. I was taken to a very good hotel [Kandahar] and after a month they shifted me to a place where they kept Chechens and Pakistanis [Camp X-Ray]. I was the only Afghan. Afterwards, they flew me back to Afghanistan.” Razeq had no complaints about his brief stay in Guantánamo, although he didn’t know why he was persistently interrogated about the whereabouts of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, but Yousafzai wondered why the US authorities took so long to diagnose his schizophrenia.

in the classified military files released by WikiLeaks, the Detainee Assessment Brief for Razaq was an urgent-sounding memo from Brig. Gen. Mike Lehnert, the first commander of Guantánamo, to the Commander in Chief of US Southern Command, dated February 9, 2002, and entitled, “Recommendation for Removal of Detainee from JTF Control, and Subsequent Repatriation.”

In this tragic document, which fully revealed how random the process of transferring prisoners from Afghanistan to Guantánamo was, and how those on the ground in Afghanistan were prohibited from conducting any meaningful screening by those directing the war (including the detention operations) from Camp Doha in Kuwait, the full extent of Abdul Razaq’s mental illness was revealed, in a document that was also useful for describing “the three critical objectives” of “detainee operations aboard US Naval Base Guantánamo Bay” — to “provide tactical intelligence on current and future operations,” to “remove Al-Qaida and Taliban forces from the battlefield, reducing the threat to ongoing operations within US Forces’ Area of Operations in Afghanistan,” and to “facilitate the prosecution of those detainees who have committed crimes.”

Brig. Gen. Lehnert noted that all the prisoners arriving at Guantánamo were subjected to a psychiatric evaluation, intended to screen them “for emotional stressors or possible behavioural disorders that could cause them to become difficult or impossible to draw intelligence from during JIIF interviews,” adding, “Any detainee deemed mentally unstable or severely mentally impeded against providing valuable information during these screenings does not qualify for the JIIF interview process.” He also explained that, at the time, the Task Force was holding only one detainee who met tis category — Abdul Razaq, described as Modullah Abdul Raziq,who he described as being “unfit to be held by Joint Task Force-160 (JTF-160) for either intelligence gathering or military commission purposes.”

After explaining that he was “captured by Anti-Taliban Forces” and was “identified as a combatant member of the Taliban, with 5 years’ experience, and by judging his training a low ranking fighter,” Brig. Gen. Lehnert also noted that he had been registered as “having marital difficulties, an admitted addiction to narcotics, and was reported to have shown symptoms of schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder.”

Lehnert also explained that he was “transported to GTMO on 20 Jan 02, and had caused difficulty for the air transport guards to the extent that he was sedated and physically restrained,” and added that, “[s]ince his arrival date, [he] has exhibited extreme psychotic behaviour.” In a list of examples, it was noted that he had “repeatedly ripped off his uniform, tying pieces of cloth to his extremities and genitals,” and had “consumed his feces on multiple occasions while drinking shampoo, and had spread feces on his body and within his cell.” It was also noted that he had “attempted to fashion weapons in his cell on multiple occasions,” and had “urinated in his canteen and [had] thrown soiled water on XRay guard personnel, as well as spitting on personnel on multiple occasions.” It was also noted that the Internal Reaction Force (armed guards responsible for forced cell extractions and brutal punishment of even minor infringements of the rules) had “been called to deal with  [him] on multiple occasions,” and that he had “been removed from his cell or placed in isolation on numerous occasions.”

In addition, a psychiatric examination revealed that Razaq had a “[b]ehavior pattern reflecting long-term behavioural disorder,” that “the disorder [was] psychotic in nature, most likely schizophrenia,”  and that “[t[he prognosis for significant improvement [was] poor.” Apparently unconcerned about his mental health for any reason other than how it related to his ability to be interrogated, the staff psychiatrist stated that he was “unlikely to be capable of providing accurate testimony.”

In further calls for his repatriation, Brig. Gen. Lehnert conceded that, although “[t]he objective of removing [him] from the operating area of US forces [had] been accomplished,” and repatriation would reverse that, it was “unlikely that Afghan officials would allow him the freedom to join hostile forces.” He added that interviews had “determined that he [was] not a member of Al-Qaida,” and that he had been “deemed incapable of providing reliable intelligence of any nature.”

Lehnert also explain that his “diminished mental state and behaviour [had] caused a significant disturbance to Camp XRay’s operation and a severe burden on manpower for US Forces operating the camp,” adding that, “[o]nce Camp XRay [was] filled to near capacity, US Personnel [would] lose the ability to isolate [him] from the detainee population during his outbursts.” Lehnert also noted that Razaq was ‘a security problem within Camp XRay in that his actions agitate the other detainees, and force US Personnel to focus on him, taking away from security details throughout the facility.”

Mohammed Sargidene (ISN 358, Afghanistan) Released March 2003

As the Washington Post explained, when he and 17 other Afghans were freed, 24-year old Mohammed Sarjudim (as he was described) “was one of several men who said they were forced to fight with the Taliban after the United States declared war on terrorism.” When he and other conscripts “tried to surrender and go home,” they were “betrayed” by Northern Alliance commander, Gen. Rashid Dostum, who, he said, “‘sold’ them to American forces for cash.” In his own words, Sarjudim said, “America wanted to capture terrorists and Dostum just wanted the money, so he sold me.” The Post‘s article added that, on his return, he left the jail in Kabul “carrying medical records in English, which he could not read, indicating he had received regular medical care at Guantánamo, including psychological counseling for ‘life circumstances issues,’” and the Post also noted that he said, “The American soldiers treated me well. I am very happy with them.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 5, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was noted that he was born in 1977, and had been diagnosed with latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, and also “recurrent tonsillitis,” although he was regarded as being “otherwise in good health.”

It was also confirmed that he had been an unwilling Taliban conscript. The Task Force stated that he was a driver in Arghasan, in Kandahar province, where he “attracted the attention of the Taliban because they needed drivers in northern Afghanistan.” After being informed that “he had to either serve three months as a Taliban driver, or pay 500,000 Afghanis to exempt himself of this duty,” he “chose to serve as a driver and was conscripted in mid-September of 2001.” He was then flown to Kunduz, and taken to a guest-house where he stayed for two months, transporting new conscripts from Kunduz to Takhar in a 4×4 pick-up truck provided by the Taliban. After being told by his immediate boss that the Taliban were surrendering to General Dostum’s forces at Yanghareq, in the desert outside Kunduz, he “and several hundred Taliban prisoners were placed in shipping containers and transported to Shebergan Prison near Mazar-e-Sharif” — a coy reference to “the convoy of death,” in which thousands of prisoners were killed, mainly through suffocation, while being transported to Dostum’s prison in containers.

After 20 days in Sheberghan, he was handed over to US custody and taken to the prison at Kandahar, and he arrived in Guantánamo on June 11, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his general knowledge of Taliban travel routes and recruitment procedures.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [358] is assessed as not affiliated with al-Qaida or as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Murtazah Abdul Rahman (ISN 361, Afghanistan) Released March 2003

As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar,” Murtazah Abdul Rahman (described in a BBC report as Murtaza), one of 18 Afghans released in March 2003 (along with Mohammed Sarjudim, above), explained that he had been fighting with the Taliban when he was arrested in Kunduz province, but said that he had been forced to join the militia. Speaking after his release, he stated, “Initially they told us it would take one month for the investigation and we would be released immediately if we were proven innocent.” He added, however, “We spent two months in Sherberghan, five months in Kandahar, and more than one year in Guantánamo and finally now they release us because we are innocent.” Referring to his time in Guantánamo, he said, “We were in two-meter long cages. Some of us were interrogated 20 times, others 50 times, others 60. But the food was good and they did not beat us.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated February 1, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which it was noted that he was born in 1976, it was also stated that he was another unwilling Taliban conscript. The Task Force noted that he was from Helmand province, “where he farmed his family’s land and drove a taxi,” and explained that, on October 31, 2001, he “was conscripted by Mir al-Fazel Mohammad, a local Taliban official, to serve for three months with the Taliban,” adding that he “believed that his family would be imprisoned or the water would be shut off at the family farm for failure to comply with this Taliban edict.”

Tasked to serve as a driver based at a police station in Kandahar, he said that he “mostly ran errands by picking up groceries and supplies with Mullah Sabib who was in charge of finances and often went with [him] on errands.” After just three weeks, he was told that the Taliban were surrendering at Yanghareq, outside Kunduz, and he apparently traveled there to surrender, and was then, with others, “placed in shipping containers before being transported to Sheberghan Prison” — another coy reference to “the convoy of death.” He was sent to Guantánamo on June 9, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his specific knowledge of logistics support provided to the Taliban in Kunduz, Afghanistan.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [361] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer or release to the control of another government.”

Mohammed Yusif Yaqub (ISN 367, Afghanistan) Released May 2003

As I explained in Chapter 9 of The Guantánamo Files (and also in an article entitled, “If the US administration had behaved intelligently, ex-Guantánamo inmate who blew himself up would never have been released“), Mohammed Yusif Yaqub was reportedly the name used by Taliban commander Mullah Shahzada as part of his successful ploy to fool the US authorities into releasing him.

Shahzada reportedly gave the Americans a false name (according to a major report on Guantánamo in the New York Times in June 2004) and claimed that he was an innocent rug merchant who was captured by mistake. Released in May 2003, he seized control of Taliban operations in southern Afghanistan, recruiting fighters by “telling harrowing tales of his supposed ill-treatment in the cages of Guantánamo,” as an article in Time explained, and masterminded a jailbreak in Kandahar in October 2003, in which he bribed the guards to allow 41 Taliban fighters to escape through a tunnel. His post-Guantánamo notoriety came to an end in May 2004, when he was killed in an ambush by US Special Forces.

However, while right-wing commentators seized on the release of Shahzada — and reportedly five other Taliban fighters who subsequently returned to the battlefield — as evidence that no one should ever be released from Guantánamo, a rather different interpretation was offered by Gul Agha Sherzai, a US-backed warlord, and the post-Taliban governor of Kandahar, who pointed out that Shahzada would never have been freed if Afghan officials had been allowed to vet the Afghans in Guantánamo. “We know all these Taliban faces,” he said, adding that repeated requests for access to the Afghan prisoners had been turned down. Sherzai’s opinion was reinforced by security officials in Karzai’s government, who blamed the US for the return of Taliban commanders to the battlefield, explaining that “neither the American military officials, nor the Kabul police, who briefly process the detainees when they are sent home, consult them about the detainees they free.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 14, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which it was noted that he was born in 1960, the false story he told was more fully revealed — if that was indeed the case, as no evidence has been provided to demonstrate that Mohammed Yusif Yaqub was actually Mullah Shahzada. According to the Task Force, on approximately November 20, 2001, he was in Archi, Afghanistan, “waiting to acquire rugs for resale in southern Afghanistan,” when he heard about the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, and traveled to Kunduz to await transportation back to southern Afghanistan. Unable to leave, because of the mass surrender of the Taliban, he stated that he was seized on November 26, 2001, sand transported to Sheberghan, arriving on November 30, presumably as a survivor of “the convoy of death.” He was held in Sheberghan for approximately 50 days before being handed over to US custody and taken to the US prison at Kandahar. He arrived in Guantánamo on June 15, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his general knowledge of Taliban members and facilities.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [367] is assessed as not affiliated with al-Qaida or as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

Brahim Yadel (ISN 371, France) Released July 2004

As I briefly explained in Chapter 7 of The Guantánamo Files, Brahim Yadel, a 30-year old Parisian, arrived in Afghanistan in July 2001, apparently accompanied by Redouane Khalid, who was also from Paris. Yadel was reportedly a friend of Hervé Djamel Loiseau, a convert to Islam (also from Paris), who died as he tried to leave Afghanistan for Pakistan with two other Frenchmen, Mourad Benchellali (see Part Three) and Nizar Sassi (see Part Four). Connections with other French prisoners came about because Khaled bin Mustafa, from Lyons, had met Redouane Khalid at his wedding in Paris, and Imad Kanouni (also see Part Three) had reportedly traveled in Afghanistan with some of the other French prisoners. Yadel, like Benchellali and Sassi, was released in July 2004, while the others were freed in March 2005.

At the time of writing The Guantánamo Files, the only additional information I had about Brahim Yadel was that, when the French prisoners were released from Guantánamo, all were freed on bail, except for Yadel, the only one with a track record of militancy, who had apparently been “sentenced in his absence to seven years in prison for his alleged participation in waves of attacks in France in 1995.”

In 2008, Brahim was interviewed by Matthew Schofield for a major report on 66 former Guantánamo prisoners by McClatchy Newspapers. He conceded that he “trained with Taliban forces and with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network,” and that he “learned to handle weapons and even took advanced al-Qaida courses in electronics that would have led to bomb making,” but he “maintain[ed], however, that he never raised a weapon against US soldiers and that by October 2001, disgusted by the 9/11 attack on civilians, he was fleeing Afghanistan to head back to his home in France.” Explaining his philosophy, he told Schofield, “I always differentiated between war to defend Islam and terrorism. I went to Afghanistan to defend Islam, for jihad. Had this been a military engagement, I would have stood and fought. Of course, it was not, and I wanted nothing to do with it.”

After noting that Yadel “spent two years in a French prison for affiliating with terrorists, which is a crime in France,” Schofield asked an important question: if his “experience training with people who became enemies of the US [made] him an enemy combatant if he didn’t fight, or try to fight, Americans?” For Yadel, the answer was no, and he reported that his interrogators “always seemed to agree with his assessment of the situation.” He told Schofield, “I simply told the truth, that I wished to be a soldier to fight soldiers, that I had no intention of fighting civilians. I always told the entire truth. I think they respected that.”

Telling Schofield his entire story, Yadel explained how he was the child of secular Algerian immigrants, who had become obsessed with Israel’s oppression of Palestine in the early 1990s, when “he was living alone, working nights and feeling isolated” and “his parents began what became a nasty divorce.” After stating, “I came to Islam through political engagement, and stayed politically active,” he said that he was “outraged by the oppression of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya,” and admitted that he had been “jailed in 1998 for having links to Algerian terrorists, which he acknowledged were real.” However, he also explained that, “while he was in jail, he realized that he wasn’t going anywhere on his present path.” He became more devout, visited Saudi Arabia for a month of study, and then, “through the contacts of a good friend,” decided to visit Afghanistan in March 2000.

“We were going there to train, to engage spiritually and politically,” he said. “It was a Muslim government, and we were going to defend it against the oppressors.” He added that he trained primarily with other Algerians, and “was in an al-Qaida camp in October 2000, when the destroyer USS Cole was attacked off Yemen, killing 17 American sailors,” and commented, “I knew bin Laden was against the Americans. In the logic of war, attacking a warship made sense. It wasn’t my battle, but I could understand it.”

After 9/11, however, his ideas changed. “Unlike the Afghans, I’d grown up in Western culture, which means American culture,” he said. “They didn’t understand the enormity of what had happened. I did. It was horrible. I didn’t believe in this war.” According to his account, which, Schofield noted, “French prosecutors have accepted in their case against him,” he stated that “he and several Algerians immediately decided that they wanted no part of defending such actions and fled.”

Wounded by shrapnel from a bomb, he was seized by Northern Alliance soldiers in the Tora Bora mountains, who “locked him in a basement and whipped him until he signed a note saying that he was involved with al-Qaida.” He added that “they told him that this would increase the bounty the Americans paid.”

Once in US custody, he was taken to Bagram, where, he said, “he was interrogated during surgery to remove the shrapnel.” Schofield noted, “It seems highly unorthodox, but other former detainees also have claimed to have been questioned in the midst of medical procedures.” Nine days later, he was taken to Kandahar, and soon after to Guantánamo, where, he said, “the treatment was consistently awful, demeaning and dehumanizing.”

Recalling a lighter moment, he explained how the authorities had tried to prey on the prisoners’ modesty, stating that once “a skimpily dressed woman” had been sent to interrogate him. “Perhaps this is something that unsettled the Arabs, who were not used to women dressed in such ways,” he said. “But I am French. It was nice.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated January 31, 2004, which was a “recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” he was described as Gha’im Yadel, born in March 1971, and much of what he told Matthew Schofield was reiterated, with a suspicious twist. It was noted that, in March 2000, he “traveled to the United Kingdom, to help facilitate his further travels to Afghanistan (AF) and to participate in Jihad against the Northem Alliance on behalf of the Taliban,” and that he arrived in Afghanistan in August 2000, trained at al-Farouq for six weeks, and then “traveled to an Algerian safehouse in Jalalabad,” where he was allegedly “given specialized instruction in explosives and electronic circuitry.” He then reportedly “remained in Afghanistan where he continued to receive training into 2001.”

According to the US authorities, after 9/11, directly contradicting Yadel’s detailed account, he reportedly “traveled throughout Afghanistan participating in the fighting, and facilitating the travels of other GSPC [the Salafist Group for Call and Combat] and Al-Qaida members.” According to this version of events, “As the Taliban began to break apart on the battlefield, [he] fled to the Tora Bora Mountains along with other members of Al-Qaida, until he was captured by the Northern Alliance and turned over to US Forces.” He was sent to Guantánamo on January 25, 2002, and the reason that was grafted on afterwards was that it was “because of his affiliation with Al-Qaida.”

In a litany of apparently damning analyses and associations, it was claimed that he had “never been cooperative or forthright during his time in detention,” had “consistently lied in order to misdirect any investigative leads,” and had also “refused to reveal any concrete information about his associations.” Despite this, the Task Force stated that he was “a probable member of Al-Qaida, with direct affiliations and memberships to [sic] several other extremist groups,” including the GSPC, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and the Tunisian Combat Group, and added that all three organizations had “alliances with Al-Qaida.” Through “sensitive reporting,” it was also claimed that he had “direct terrorist associations with Al-Qaida members who were involved in planned attacks in several Western countries,” and a GSPC plot in Strasbourg in late 2000 was mentioned (when he was already in Afghanistan) as well as “affiliations with the group that carried out the murder of the Afghan Northern Alliance commander [Ahmed] Shah Massoud,” who was assassinated on September 9, 2001.

As a result of all these allegations, the Task Force assessed Yadel as “a probable member of Al-Qaida and a confirmed member of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat,” and also described him as being “of high intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be retained under DoD control. It was, however, also noted that the Task Force “notified the Criminal Investigative task Force of this recommendation on 6 January 2004,” and, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders CITF will defer to JTF GTMO’s assessment that the detainee poses a high risk,” which clearly indicates that CITF were not convinced.

Since their release from Guantánamo, Yadel and four of the other ex-prisoners –Mourad Benchellali, Nizar Sassi, Khaled bin Mustafa and Redouane Khalid — have faced a long ordeal in the French courts. In 2007, they were convicted of “criminal association with a terrorist enterprise,” and given one-year sentences, but they were not imprisoned because of the time they had already spent imprisoned in Guantánamo. However, their convictions were overturned on appeal on February 24, 2009, because, as the New York Times explained, “The court ruled that information gathered by French intelligence officials in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, violated French rules for permissible evidence, and that there was no other proof of wrongdoing.”

On February 17, 2010, the Court of Cassation, a higher court, ordered a re-trial of the five men, and that trial began on January 20 this year, with lawyers drawing on US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks to argue that the case should be dropped. As the Miami Herald reported, “defense lawyers presented at least three US diplomatic cables citing French anti-terrorist investigators,” and “argued that it was inappropriate for French investigators to have discussed the ex-inmates’ cases with American authorities.” In April, it was noted by a French researcher for Cageprisoners that the men’s conviction had been upheld by the Court of Cassation.

There have been no publicly reported comments from Brahim Yadel since 2008, but Matthew Schofield concluded his article by stating, “Yadel now goes to the mosque only occasionally. He thinks that he’ll get his life back to normal eventually.” See here for a video interview (in French, from September 2007).

Abdul Maula (ISN 442, Pakistan) Released July 2003

As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar,” Abdul Maula, a 32-year old taxi driver from a village in Malakand district (described as Abdul Mulla), was “extremely bitter” about his detention, and did not want to talk about it when the BBC tracked him down with other released prisoners in November 2003. “What purpose will it serve?” he asked the reporter. “You are all infidels.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated April 26, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” he was described as Abdul Mowla, born in 1969, and it was noted that he was “blind in his right eye” and had “a G6PD deficiency” (a glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, which is the most common human enzyme defect), but was “otherwise in good health.” It was also noted that, “[o]n or about October 2001, [he] heard a speech at a local mosque about participating in Jihad against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan,” and “traveled to a local bazaar, which was being used as a recruitment center,” where “[t]here were several thousand Pakistanis waiting for transportation into Afghanistan.” All these recruits were then “loaded into several hundred Datsun trucks,” which set off for Afghanistan, arriving at Mazar-e-Sharif after spending a night each in Jalalabad and Kabul.

On arrival, however, “the US bombing campaign against Taliban forces was in full effect and [he] fled the area.” He then “sought refuge in an Afghan village for approximately two months and was eventually turned over to the Northern Alliance,” and then to US forces. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 11, 2002 on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of Taliban safe houses in Jalalabad, Kabul, and Mazar-e-Sharif.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [442] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government.”

Jihan Wali (ISN 444, Pakistan) Released May 2003

As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar,” Jihan Wali (described as Jehan Wali), who was 34 years old when he was seized, was released in May 2003 with a baker called Shah Mohammed (ISN 19, see Part One), but did not speak about his experiences. Instead, Mohammed, who was quite talkative (although it was later revealed that he was deeply traumatized by his ordeal), told a BBC reporter that Wali had “not talked to anyone for the past eight months.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated October 29, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Jan Wali, born in 1966, it was noted that he was suffering from “both depressive and personality disorders,” as well as the latent tuberculosis common to many of the prisoners. The Task Force added, however, “Otherwise, he is in good health.” It was also noted that, “along with forty to fifty individuals, [he] left for Afghanistan after listening to a speech given by Sufi Said calling on all Muslims to travel to Afghanistan to fight in the jihad,” and that he “stayed in a Taliban facility” in Jalalabad, where he “supported” the Taliban “by cooking and cleaning.” He “was then sent to Mazar-e-Sharif as a cook,” and was captured by the Northern Alliance “as he tried to flee the city” around the time of the US bombing campaign in November 2001. He was then turned over to US forces, and he was sent to Guantánamo on June 11, 2002 on the spurious basis that it was because of “his possible knowledge of the role of a Taliban foot soldier” — a particularly vague explanation for transporting him halfway around the world.

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [444] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Dunlavey recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

It was also stated that,”During a visit to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 3 to 10 August 2002, Pakistani Intelligence officers interrogated [ISN 444] and concluded that he had little or no intelligence value. They stated that their government would accept custody of [him] if released by the US government.

Jamal Al Harith (ISN 490, UK) Released March 2004

As I explained in Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files, discussing around 65 prisoners captured in Afghanistan and transferred to Kandahar in late 2001 and early 2002, Jamal al-Harith was one of five prisoners found in a Taliban prison in Kandahar, initially mentioned in the New York Times, who, inexplicably, were later sent to Guantánamo:

The most unfortunate group of prisoners captured at this time were five men who were held by the Taliban as spies in a prison for political crimes in Kandahar: Jamal al-Harith, a 35-year old Briton (released in March 2004), Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, a 23-year old Syrian Kurd, Airat Vakhitov, a 24-year old Tatar (released in March 2004), and two Saudis, Saddiq Ahmed Turkistani, a Uyghur who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia (released in June 2006), and 46-year old Abdul Hakim Bukhari. When the Taliban vacated Kandahar, 2,500 prisoners — including 1,800 in the political prison — were released, but the five foreigners were made to stay behind. “We want to release these men,” the prison’s new warden said, “but for their security we are requiring them to stay here as guests. If they walk into the bazaar, the people will think they are from al-Qaeda and will kill them.”

The five men had found themselves on the wrong side of the Taliban in different ways. Jamal al-Harith first revealed his story to the journalist Tim Reid [of the Times], who met him at the prison and gained his trust by bringing him some antiseptic cream and a shortwave radio, which he had requested. Born Ronald Fiddler to parents of Jamaican heritage, he had converted to Islam and had changed his name in 1992, after reading Malcolm X’s autobiography. A website designer, he went to Iran to learn more about his religion in 1993, and traveled to Pakistan in September 2001 for a three-week holiday to continue his studies.

His problems arose when the US-led invasion began, and he decided to return home. Having paid a lorry driver to let him travel with him to Turkey via Iran, he had no idea that they were going to travel through Afghanistan, and after a few days they were stopped by three Taliban soldiers. According to al-Harith, “It all turned to hell” when they saw his British passport. Stripped of his belongings, he was accused of being a spy, beaten for three days and sent to the prison in Kandahar, where an American prisoner died after a particular brutal beating. “I am sure I would have got the same treatment,” he said, “but I made sure that every time my guards saw me I was praying. The Taliban liked me because I always had the Koran in my hands. I was beaten very badly, but not as badly as most of the other inmates.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated July 9, 2003, which was a “Revocation of Recommendation to Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Government,” it was stated that he was born in 1966, and the Task Force described how he was “traveling by truck through Pakistan when the vehicle was hijacked,” on October 3, 2001, and he was transported to the Sarposa political prison in Kandahar, run by the Taliban, “where he was accused of being a British or American spy,” and “incarcerated and interrogated” until Kandahar fell to the Northern Alliance. At that point, despite having been imprisoned by the Taliban, he was transported to the US prison at Kandahar airport, where he remained until he was sent to Guantánamo in early February 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because he was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics.”

It is difficult to capture quite how despicable it is to have transferred a former Taliban prisoner to Guantánamo, and then to have tried to justify that by stating that the prisoner in question is being exploited for intelligence about the Taliban’s methods of detention and interrogation. What makes it worse is the extent to which the US authorities sought to justify al-Harith’s detention by scrabbling around to find information that could be made to fit him up as someone engaged in terrorism. This was the general modus operandi of Guantánamo, of course, but it appears to be nakedly cynical when the process was enacted on former Taliban prisoners, as in al-Harith’s case, and that of his four companions in Sarposa, as well as a handful of other Guantánamo prisoners who were liberated from Taliban jails and then re-imprisoned by the US.

On September 27, 2002, Maj, Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that al-Harith be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government,” based on an assessment that he “was not affiliated with Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader,” but under “New/unexploited information,” the Task Force decided that, “[a]ccording to sensitive information,” he was “probably involved in [a] former terrorist attack,” an outrageous allegation that was not explained further, except to note that he had “not been questioned on his ties with those involved in this attack, nor [had] he been questioned on his own involvement.”

It was also claimed that his “timeline [had] not been fully established to include his extensive travels in the Middle East from 1992-1996,” which included an allegation that he traveled to Sudan in 1992 with “a well-known Al-Qaida operative,” and other allegations for which nothing resembling evidence was produced. In addition, it was stated that, [a]ccording to British Embassy personnel” at Sarposa “when the five political prisoners were released,” al-Harith “was indicated as being the ‘leader’ of the five prisoners,” and they added that he was “cocky and evasive, stating that he had provided all that he was going to provide the British Embassy personnel.” These were deeply alarming reasons for regarding him as a potential “enemy combatant,” but the criticisms continued. “This” — being “cocky and evasive” — “was after he had sent a request to the British Embassy through the Red Cross to get out of Afghanistan,” the US authorities added. Whether, as a result, it was solely because of US insistence that he was taken to Guantánamo is unknown, but the British do not come out of it well either, as the inference must be that they did nothing to defend al-Harith when the transfer was decided, especially given what we now know about the involvement of British ministers — including Tony Blair and Jack Straw — in approving the transfer of British prisoners to Guantánamo.

Because of all this additional information, al-Harith was reassessed “as being affiliated with al-Qaida; however, not a Taliban leader.” He was described as being “still of intelligence value to the United States and should be detained for further intelligence purposes,” and also of “possess[ing] a high threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Maj. Gen. Miller revoked the previous recommendation for release or transfer. It took another eight months for these claims to unravel sufficiently for him to be returned to the UK.

Airat Vakhitov (ISN 492, Russia) Released February 2004

As I explained in Chapter 10 of The Guantánamo Files,  drawing on an article in the St. Petersburg Times in December 2002, Airat Vakhitov (less accurately identified as Aryat Vakhitov), a Tatar from the town of Naberezhniye Chelny, was another of five prisoners found in a Taliban prison in Kandahar, who, inexplicably, were later sent to Guantánamo.

Vakhitov was sent to a newly-opened madrassa at the age of 14 by his mother, who hoped to keep him away from the town’s notorious street gangs. Within five years he became an imam, but his opportunities to preach were limited in Tatarstan, which was still ruled by a heavyweight Communist, so he made his way to Chechnya, visiting several times in the years up to 1999. On the last occasion, however, a former colleague accused him of being a spy, and he was held in a pit for two months and beaten severely, until another Tatar arranged to take him home. Soured by his experience, he apparently became far more militant as a preacher, and was watched by the secret police. Soon after, the Grand Mufti in Tatarstan asked him to stand down, and the following day he was arrested for “participating in illegal armed formations in Chechnya,” but was released due to a lack of evidence.

Before the secret police came calling again, he fled to Afghanistan, where he and a companion were immediately arrested by Taliban soldiers, who accused them of being Russian spies and imprisoned them in Kabul. When the US-led invasion began, he was transferred to the jail in Kandahar, and when a French reporter spoke to him in December he had some particularly grim tales to tell. “I spent seven months in Afghanistan, locked in a total darkness,” he said. “Two nights a week we were beaten until dawn and they screamed, ‘Confess, you brute, that you are a KGB agent.’ They slit my friend Yakub’s throat in front of me, then hung me up by my hands and whipped me with electrical wire.”

In Chapter 8, drawing on a Jamestown Foundation article by Andrew McGregor from June 2006 (“A Sour Freedom: The Return of Russia’s Guantánamo Bay Prisoners”), I mentioned a specific interrogation session with CIA and FBI agents who were demanding to know the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. According to the report, “he promised to tell his captors where he had seen bin Laden in exchange for much-needed blankets and warm food. After receiving coffee, pizza, and two blankets, [he] told his inquisitors that he had seen bin Laden on the cover of Time magazine.” In return, he was “punched in the face” and held for another six months before being transferred to Guantánamo.

In Chapter 15, I drew on a statement Vakhitov made prior to visiting London for a conference organised by Amnesty International in November 2005, when he discussed the use of torture at Guantánamo, whereby, prior to interrogations, prisoners were frequently moved into isolation blocks, where they remained for days, weeks or even months, and where the air conditioning was usually turned up full, so that the cell was freezing. Vakhitov recalled, “During the interrogations they left you in a cold room for a few weeks … We weren’t given anything to lie on — no carpet. All of us have problems with our kidneys because we slept on the iron [floor] with [the] air conditioning on. It was freezing cold. The ceilings began to be covered with condensation from the cold. We were held like that for months. I was in the isolation ward for five months.”

In 2008, Vakhitov was interviewed by Tom Lasseter for a major report on 66 former Guantánamo prisoners by McClatchy Newspapers. Describing his story as “a swirl of Russian politics, separatist Uzbek Islamic guerrillas, Tajik soldiers, Taliban prisons and American troops,” Lasseter explained that Vakhitov had only agreed to be interviewed by phone because “he worried that Russian officials would detain and torture him if a Western journalist were seen going to his house in Tatarstan.” Lasseter added, “His voice was steady during most of the three-and-a-half-hour conversation, but it dropped to a mumble when he was asked about the hard times, the times when his sanity began to fade.”

Vakhitov told Lasseter that “his journey to Guantánamo began when he was 22,” when Vladimir Putin was vowing “to crush Muslim rebels in Chechnya,” but “[t]he crackdown extended to other provinces in Russia with significant Muslim populations, including Tatarstan.” An imam, he “was jailed for two months and charged with being a member of an illegal militia,” but was “released as a goodwill gesture during legislative elections.” However, when the police “came to his mother’s house, looking for him” on the day after the elections, “he fled to Tajikistan to stay with relatives.” There, in June 2000, he claimed that he “was kidnapped by members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,” and taken to Afghanistan by helicopter after an agreement was made between the Tajik government and the IMU.

This may sound far-fetched, but it was the kind of thing that was happening at this time, although Wahid Mojdeh, a former Taliban diplomat, “laughed when he heard Vakhitov’s kidnapping story, and said it was ridiculous,” according to Lasseter. He “said that the only instance of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan keeping prisoners in Kabul was when its members had a dispute about splitting up the money they got from the Japanese government when they freed four kidnapped Japanese geologists and started kidnapping one another,” and explained, “I went to their house often; there were a lot of Chechens and Kazakhs, speaking Russian, and none of them had been kidnapped.”

However, when Tom Lasseter asked Vakhitov “why he didn’t tell the Tajik troops that he was a hostage, that he wasn’t a fighter loyal to the Islamic movement,” he replied, “I was terribly intimidated. I didn’t know who was who … I didn’t know who to talk to.”

Vakhitov provided further information in a Cageprisoners interview in December 2005, when he explained what had happened when the Taliban abandoned Sarposa prison:

We requested the mission of the United Nations, which at that point started its work in Kandahar, so our request was to be handed over to our embassies in Pakistan so that we would be granted the status of political asylum over there. The UN representatives had passed this request to the government of the Northern Alliance, the new government asked the Americans; he Americans at that point were buying all the foreigners, so the military intelligence or police people (Americans) arrived and basically bought us and took us to the airport concentration camp in Kandahar. There I spent 6 months, and from there I was taken to Guantánamo.

Describing his time in Kandahar, he said, “The interrogations at Kandahar took place only 2 or 3 times, because it was quite obvious to them I had nothing to do with the terrorist activities. Nevertheless I was transferred to solitary confinement for 3 months because I wasn’t polite to the interrogator.” Talking of Guantánamo, he spoke particularly of beatings, the desecration of the Koran and sexual humiliation, and gave the following response when asked, “how did you remain strong throughout your ordeal?”:

I don’t consider myself being strong, I just took it all with a smile on my face. Even when they were beating me, I was still smiling. Once I can recollect the incident that I was tied up and on the floor, and there were four people attacking me and they were beating me. I was just smiling and laughing at them, and the rest of the prisoners reacted and were cheering and supporting and saying, “yes, go on like that.” That made the guards absolutely crazy. They couldn’t believe it but they couldn’t do anything about it. It happened in the place in the area where we walked, so quite a few of the blocks witnessed this, so basically the impact was huge as a lot of people saw that and they all cheered and supported, so there was a huge reaction to it. And I realised that whenever they want to harm you and to do something bad to you, all you have to do is smile and laugh at them, that’s the only way to deal with it. They just can’t stand or bear that, and that brought me a lot of moral satisfaction.

Vakhitov also spoke of particular medical mistreatment, explaining:

I can recollect the guy under the name of Lutvi [Lotfi Lagha, ISN 660] from Tunisia. They amputated 11 of his toes and fingers and they justified this by saying he had infected blood and gangrene. And really it was only inflammation, and his fingers and toes could have been saved easily. He told me that the doctor who operated on him was the one who interrogated him after that and while interrogating him he was beating him in all the places where he had just operated on him, this happened in Kandahar and when he was taken to Cuba, they stopped giving him any medical assistance. And then that’s where he developed real gangrene and he even had leeches in his legs. Around 10 people declared hunger strike in protest of his condition and only after that, a few days after that, they started to provide him medical assistance and provided wound dressing.

I remember the Uzbeki guy, Zakirjan [Zakirjan Asam, ISN 672], he complained in Bagram he had a stomach ache and they operated on his appendix, and when they finished operating on him they said you have cheated on the American soldiers, you don’t have any appendicitis, and because of that they began beating him on the operating table in the operation theater. And that was just because he only complained about having a stomach ache.

There was another Kazakhstani under the name of Yaqoob [Yakub Abahanov, ISN 526], he was absolutely healthy when he arrived in Cuba, he had been injected a few times by the Americans and after that his mental condition has changed, there was something wrong with him; he couldn’t sleep. When he was more or less recovering from these injections, the guys around him tried to make him do some sort of exercise or do some normal activities. The guards would take him to the psychiatric unit and when they would bring him back he would be absolutely abnormal again; he would have saliva dripping from his mouth, he wouldn’t be able to sleep and he would not understand what was going on around him.

I also saw, when I was in the psychiatric unit, the people were given pills and after taking them, they would develop high fever, they would be extremely sick and they would have terrible headaches and after that the nurse would arrive and she would write down all the symptoms every 5 minutes. It was obvious they were experimenting, or trying some sort of medication on them.

If you want to, I can carry on like that forever, but I can mention another incident about Abdur-Rahman Rajabov [aka Ergashev, ISN 641] from Tajikistan. Again, he was quite healthy when arrested, when he was in Cuba he was, as many of us were, infected with Hepatitis B. He started complaining and even declared a hunger strike because they didn’t provide any medical assistance for him in spite of him asking for it constantly. He was given pills which I think were much stronger than opium or heroin, because some of the guys tried them as well and the effect was much stronger than the real ones. One day, he overdosed and they stopped giving it to him, and then they took blood from him, and his condition of Hepatitis B didn’t stop developing because the problem is not only contained in the gall bladder. When he got back (from Guantánamo) some of the doctors and professors examined him and commented saying there was no justification for them to do that. These are only a few examples I have given to you, I can go on forever.

In Vakhitov’s Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 5, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was clear that the US authorities believed they had made a mistake in seizing Vakhitov from a Taliban prison and sending him to Guantánamo. He was described as Dirat Vakhitov, born in 1977, and it was also stated that he had been “treated for posttraumatic stress disorder,” as well as having latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, although he was also described as being “otherwise in good health.”

Explaining how he ended up at Sarposa prison, the authorities stated that, on December 29, 1999, Vakhitov left his home, traveling through Tajikistan to Imam Sab, on the Tajik-Afghan border. “Soon afterwards,” the Task Force noted, “[he] was arrested by the Taliban on suspicion of espionage, and incarcerated at the Sarposa prison complex in Kandahar.” He was “subsequently transferred to US forces,” and was sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because of “his possible knowledge of an American citizen killed at the Sarposa prison complex while he was there.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [492] is assessed as neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes.”

It was also noted that, “During a visit to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 14 to 19 November 2002, Russian Intelligence officers interrogated [ISN 492] and stated that their government would accept custody of [him] if released by the US government.” Crucially, it was also noted that, “Since the Russian government has agreed to incarcerate [him] upon his transfer, and provided that he remains incarcerated under the control of the Russian government, the detainee poses no future threat to the US or its allies. In addition, the Russian government has agreed to share with the United States all intelligence derived from this detainee in the future.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of the Russian government.”

In Chapter 18 of The Guantánamo Files, I noted how particular deals were alleged to have accompanied the release of the seven Russians. Vakhitov said that a US military intelligence officer told him that the original terms of his release called for a prison sentence in Russia of 15 years, together with round-the-clock access for CIA and FBI investigators. Andrew McGregor of the Jamestown Foundation explained that their release may have been “a public display of magnanimity,” as Moscow sought the release of two Russian agents held in Qatar for the assassination of the Chechen President. Once the assassins were returned, however, he noted that the prisoners were no longer needed as pawns in Russia’s foreign relations, and faced “a dark and uncertain future,” and this was indeed the case.

As I explained in Part Three, discussing Ravil Gumarov, another of the Russian prisoners, the punitive demands (mentioned by McGregor) were not exactly followed on their return, although the men were initially held in a detention center run by the FSB, the domestic successor of the KGB, and although they were released in June 2004, they continued to be scrutinized and harassed, with Gumarov and two others ending up in prison, and another man, Ruslan Odizhev, being shot and killed as an alleged terrorist. Nothing has been heard publicly from Vakhitov since the McClatchy interview in 2008, but in this case no news may be good news.

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

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, 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.

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

This is Part 8 of the 70-part series.

In late April, WikiLeaks released its latest treasure trove of classified US documents, a set of 765 Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) from the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Compiled between 2002 and January 2009 by the Joint Task Force that has primary responsibility for the detention and interrogation of the prisoners, these detailed military assessments therefore provided new information relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba throughout its long and inglorious history, including, for the first time, information about 84 of the first 201 prisoners released, which had never been made available before.

Superficially, the Detainee Assessment Briefs appear to contain allegations against numerous prisoners which purport to prove how dangerous they are or were, but in reality the majority of these statements were made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners, in Kandahar or Bagram in Afghanistan prior to their arrival at Guantánamo, in Guantánamo itself, or in the CIA’s secret prisons, and in all three environments, torture and abuse were rife.

I ran through some of the dubious witnesses responsible for so many of the claims against the prisoners in the introduction to Part One of this new series, and, while this is of enormous importance in the cases of many of the men still held (and also in the cases of some of those released), it is not particularly relevant to the overwhelmingly insignificant prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004, whose detention was so pointless that the authorities didn’t even bother trying to build cases against them through the testimony of their fellow prisoners.

As a result, the stories of these prisoners are particularly important in demonstrating how many innocent men or insignificant foot soldiers for the Taliban, engaged in combat with the Northern Alliance before the 9/11 attacks, and unconnected with international terrorism, were held at Guantánamo (and specifically how this latter category included many unwilling Afghan recruits).

What is also worth bearing in mind (and which is not spelled out in these documents) is that many prisoners were pointlessly rounded up because the Bush administration ordered the military not to screen the prisoners on capture, leading to a dragnet of “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, as was noted by Maj. Gen, Michael Dunlavey, a commander of the prison in 2002, and also offered substantial bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects to the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies.

In a five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” I began analyzing, transcribing and condensing the stories revealed in the documents released by WikiLeaks, looking at 84 stories of prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 that had never been told before. The work of extracting information from the files and presenting it in edited form, with commentary based on my extensive research and experience, is a project that will take up the rest of the year. The next step is this ten-part series revisiting the stories of the 114 other prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004. That was the point at which the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) began, a military review process that, in turn, led to the first official release of documents relating to the prisoners in 2006, providing the material that I analysed and transcribed for my book The Guantánamo Files.

While this ten-part project is underway, I also propose to begin examining closely the files relating to the 171 prisoners still held, supplementing the series of articles that I produced last fall, entitled, “Who Are the Remaining Prisoners in Guantánamo?” This is important not just because the remaining prisoners have largely been abandoned by the mainstream media, even though 89 of the 171 have been cleared for release, and only 36 were recommended for trials by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, but also because, in the US, attorneys for the prisoners have only just won the right to look at the files (and not to download, save or print them), and the media in general is unwilling to subject them to much scrutiny because of how they became public in the first place.

So with thanks to WikiLeaks — and whoever leaked these documents — the third part of my ten-part analysis of the 114 prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004 (in addition to the 84 stories covered in my previous series) is below. When lies and distortions are covered up on this scale, and an experimental prison built on torture and abuse remains open, even under a Democratic President who promised to close it, everyone who believes in justice should publicize what has been revealed, and, if you agree, I hope that you will share this information widely. Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten of this series.

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Three of Ten)

Ejaz Ahmad Khan (ISN 135, Pakistan) Released November 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar” (one of 12 additional online chapters, telling stories that were not available in The Guantánamo Files, either for reasons of space, or because they were not known at the time), I told Ejaz Ahmad Khan’s story, based on an article by Tom Lasseter for an important series on 66 former Guantánamo prisoners that was published by McClatchy Newspapers in 2008.

Lasseter had interviewed Khan — identified as Ijaz Khan — in Islamabad, and stated that he had been 26 years old when he was seized in northern Afghanistan after the fall of Kunduz, and transported to a prison in Sheberghan run by Northern Alliance commander General Rashid Dostum, on a journey that is known as “the convoy of death,” because thousands of prisoners died, mainly of suffocation, in containers that were used to transport them.

Khan admitted to Lasseter that he had traveled to Afghanistan as a fighter, and explained that he had ended up in “the convoy of death” after surrendering to General Dostum’s men at Kunduz. “They threatened to kill us,” he said. “They pointed their guns like they were going to shoot us, then they made us get in the containers. When I woke in the morning, there were piles of bodies lying around me; I don’t know if they were dead or alive.” On arrival at Sheberghan, after he had “stumbled over the mounds of bodies and out into the daylight,” Dostum’s men, he said, “herded the prisoners” through the gates “by hitting them with sticks and iron rods.”

He added, “The commanders were treated differently than the common Taliban. They were taken away for three days, and when they came back they were unable to lie down, they were urinating on themselves … they had injuries all over them, they had bruises on every part of their skin. The normal fighters like me were hit with sticks and punched and kicked. They would take me out of the cell to beat me; it was too crowded to do it in the cell. They beat me unconscious many times.”

After a month, he said, he was taken to Kandahar, where he was stripped naked, thrown to the ground, so that “gravel tore into his skin,” and subjected to an anal probe. He also explained how the prisoners had tried to resist the everyday brutality of the guards. “We protested,” he said, “we made a lot of noise. We were shaking the fence walls of our cells. It gave us some kind of release. I’m not a human? Why did they keep me in this cage? I’m not an animal. I don’t keep my pets in a cage in my house. But the Americans caged us.” He added, “Luckily I have not lost my mental balance, because it was nothing short of madness.”

Although he declined to talk about Guantánamo, he made it clear that his experiences in Kandahar had tainted the rest of his life. He said that he “frequently lost his temper and that he was very angry about how the Americans had treated him,” and added, as an example of his lingering fury, that “he once saw a guard at Kandahar toss a Koran into a bucket that detainees used as a toilet. The Koran, he said, is at the very center of his life; it is the reason he lives.” He told the reporter, “You can imagine what I felt when I saw this.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 2, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was noted that he was born in 1975, and was “diagnosed with Chronic Hepatitis B,” but was “otherwise in good health.” After identifying him as a graduate with a mechanical engineering degree “from an unidentified university in Pakistan,” who had worked as “a natural gas pump attendant and a natural gas plant operator,” the Task Force confirmed that he had traveled to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban, stating that, on November 6, 2001, he left his home, “bound to fight in the jihad.” By “word of mouth,” he then joined a group of Taliban fighters in Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, where he “fought on the front lines for two days and was then shot in the right thigh at which time he was taken to the hospital in Kunduz.”

Soon after, he was told that the Taliban were surrendering, and was also told that, “after surrendering, the Mujahideen/Taliban would be permitted to go home.” He and 10-12 others then set off for Mazar-e-Sharif to surrender, but encountered the forces of Northern Alliance commander General Rashid Dostum at Yanghareq, on the outskirts of Kunduz, where they were seized. The “convoy of death” was not mentioned in his assessment, but what was mentioned instead was that, on June 11, 2002, he was sent to Guantánamo, allegedly “because of his knowledge of routes of travel into AF [Afghanistan].”

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

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

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [135] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee poses a low threat to the US, its interests and/or its allies.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of  Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer.”

Salahuddin Ayubi (ISN 138, Pakistan) Released September 2004

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar,” I explained how Salahuddin Ayubi, who was 27 years old when he was captured, was one of 35 Pakistani prisoners released from Guantánamo on September 17, 2004 and subsequently held for questioning in Pakistan. Speaking to the Associated Press on his release from Pakistani custody in June 2005, he said, “During interrogation, whenever I would make a reference to the Koran, they would hit me in the face with a copy. They would tear it into pieces. They would tell me that Koran teaches us terrorism. They would throw the Koran against the roof, which would tear it into pieces, and they would say, ‘This is the real source of terrorism.’”

Speaking to the Nation, he reiterated his complaints, saying, “American soldiers having nefarious designs against Muslim Ummah, have been committing desecration of the holy Koran at Guantánamo,” and in the Pakistan Daily Times it was reported that he joined with Mohammed Hanif (ISN 305, see Part Four), who was 19 years old when he was seized, and another freed prisoner, Hafiz Ehsan Saeed (ISN 98, see Part Two of this series) in saying that the prisoners were prevented from practicing their religion for the first year of their imprisonment, but that they were “given some religious freedom after the Red Cross’s intervention.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated January 25, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that his name was Salahodin Ayubi and that he was born in 1974. It was also stated that he had “latent tuberculosis, [was] a chronic Hepatitis B carrier, ha[d] constant pain in the left shoulder due to a previous shrapnel injury, and suffer[ed] from general anxiety,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

It was also stated that, in July 2001, he had traveled to Kunduz to participate in Jihad against the Northern Alliance,” and “was trained to provide medical assistance to Pakistani military personnel associated with the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) Organization,” a Pakistani militant group. He explained that he received 10 days’ training before traveling to Kunduz, and then “worked at a JEM clinic” until November 26, 2001, when it was damaged during the allied bombing campaign. He then fled to Khawaja Ghar, but was wounded by a mortar explosion, and taken to hospital in Kunduz for a week, and then to a JEM clinic for two weeks. He was then seized by Northern Alliance soldiers and sent to Sheberghan, perhaps having avoided “the convoy of death.” After a month in Sheberghan, he was transferred to US control, and was sent to Guantánamo on approximately January 17, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of the Jaish-e-Mohammed Organization.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [138] is assessed as neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

It was also noted that, “During a visit to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 3 to 10 August 2002, Pakistani Intelligence officers interrogated [ISN 138] and concluded that he had little or no intelligence value. They stated that their government would accept custody of [him] if released by the US government.”

Hafiz Liaqat Mansoor (ISN 139, Pakistan) Released November 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar,”, I told Hafiz Liaqat Mansoor’s story, based on an article by Tom Lasseter for an important series on 66 former Guantánamo prisoners that was published by McClatchy Newspapers in 2008.

Mansoor, described in the interview as Hafiz Liaqat Manzoor, was 24 years old when he was captured by troops loyal to General Dostum, and was interviewed in Islamabad, where, over four years after his release from Guantánamo, he was a third-year law student. He explained that, after being seized, he was held for about three weeks in Sheberghan, and was then transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airport, which was used to process the prisoners for Guantánamo. His recollections match those of many other released prisoners who have described how brutal the regime was at Kandahar (and which is discussed at length in Chapter 8 of The Guantánamo Files).

The McClatchy report noted that Manzoor said that, on the plane to Kandahar, “US soldiers struck him with their guns every time he moved his head.” After he landed, “a soldier shaved off his beard,” and he spent his first night “naked and shackled, sleeping on the floor of an airport hangar with about ten other men, surrounded by concertina wire.” The next day, “guards gave him clothes and a number, 18, and told him that was his new name.” He explained that he spent about 17 days in Kandahar, but “was interrogated only once — he was asked basic questions such as his name and place of birth — then was left sitting in a tent outside for the rest of the time,” although he added that other prisoners “often came back bleeding” after interrogations. He also noted that on one occasion, “during a search of the tent next to his, a guard threw a Koran into a bucket that detainees used as a toilet.”

Describing his experiences at Guantánamo, he said, “They caged us there, in cages similar to what we use for poultry,” and proceeded to explain that, in his first interrogation, about 20 days after he’d arrived, “I told them I went to Afghanistan for the fight … They said, ‘You have been fighting against us. Do you know that?’ I said, ‘Yes, I know that; I accept that.’” Despite this admission, he said he “wasn’t interrogated again for about six months, when he was called in to repeat his previous remarks,” and stated, “I said that I will only tell the truth: I was there fighting you.” Several months later, after a new prisoner was moved into the neighboring cell, he was interrogated again, when he was informed that his new neighbor was telling interrogators that he was “a top Taliban commander.” He explained that he denied the allegation, “asking why he’d acknowledge being a jihadi fighter in his first questioning only to lie later.”

Manzoor was clearly fortunate to be a Pakistani, as the Pakistani government’s cooperation with the US facilitated the return of prisoners even when, as in Manzoor’s case, they had traveled to Afghanistan to engage US forces. Had he been from another country, it’s probable that he would have been held for much longer, and would also not have been so easily able to shrug off the allegation that he was a Taliban leader.

At the conclusion of the interview, he explained that he was imprisoned for about a year after his return, but that he then decided to devote himself to the law. As the report described it, “The only lesson he learned, he said, was the importance of the law; it was something that occurred to him during his days of sitting in a cell at Guantánamo without a lawyer or a trial.” He added, “Whatever I have been through so far in my life suggests that law is the only field” for working toward justice.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated January 25, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that his name was Lequat Manzur and that he was born in 1977. It was also stated that, although he had “latent tuberculosis and chronic pain in the right knee,” he was “otherwise in good health.”

It was also stated that, in early August 2001, he “traveled by truck from his home in Islamabad” to “participate in Jihad against the Northern Alliance.” Reaching Kunduz, he worked as a guard at a Taliban compound, both in Kunduz and in Khawaja Ghar, before surrendering to Northern Alliance forces on or around November 26, 2001, which was essentially where the account he gave to Tom Lasseter began.

Despite being thoroughly insignificant, he was sent to Guantánamo on or about January 16, 2002 on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of a specific Harakat Al-Jihad Al-Islamic [sic] Training Center, where he received training in 1998, and of the Taliban guard force in Kunduz.” It is not known who was the neighbor who falsely — if understandably — told interrogators that he was “a top Taliban commander.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [139] is assessed as neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.”

It was also noted that, “During a visit to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 3 to 10 August 2002, Pakistani Intelligence officers interrogated [ISN 139] and concluded that he had little or no intelligence value. They stated that their government would accept custody of [him] if released by the US government.”

Mohammad Saghir (ISN 143, Pakistan) Released October 2002

A 49-year old woodcutter from Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, Mohammad Saghir (also identified as Mohammed Sagheer), was, as I explained in Chapter 3 of The Guantánamo Files, “also a missionary with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, a vast worldwide proselytizing organization whose annual gatherings in Pakistan and Bangladesh attract millions of followers. Over the years he had been involved in numerous preaching missions to Afghanistan, but on this occasion he and nine other missionaries were seized by Northern Alliance troops” after the fall of Kunduz. After his release, his story was told in association with a lawsuit he filed against the US government, in an article by James Meek in the Guardian in December 2003, and in an article in Newsline in February 2004.

The lawsuit, for $10.4 million, was because of “his illegal detention and suffering, torture and humiliation at the hands of US forces,” as Newsline described it. Saghir explained that he was “mired in debts accrued by his family — including his wife, six sons and three daughters — during his year-long absence. His sons spent whatever the family had on their sojourns to Afghanistan in search of their father … To provide for the family’s daily expenditure they took loans which they now need to pay back.” Saghir added, “The business is closed and it’s hard to cope with the situation. It’s difficult to make both ends meet.”

After his capture, Saghir was held for a night at Yanghareq, where the thousands of soldiers and civilians who surrendered after the fall of Kunduz were held, before their transfer to Sheberghan on “the convoy of death,” Saghir explained after his release that he “witnessed wounded and injured men buried alive with the dead,” and was then taken to Qala Zeini [en route to Sheberghan] and herded into a container. “The journey took five hours,” he said. “It was dark, hot and suffocating as there was not enough air in the container. Fifty out of the 250 prisoners died on [the] way.”

At Shebarghan jail, “he spent one-and-a-half months along with other prisoners from Kunduz,” as Newsline explained. Saghir stated that “[t]he conditions inside the prison were poor and the attitude of the troops extremely bad,” explaining, “We were given six loaves of bread and one pot (lota) of water for 70 persons. Our bodies were searched and we were deprived of all our belongings there as well.”

From Shebarghan he was taken along with 15 other prisoners to the US prison at Kandahar. He told James Meek that he “had not even had a cursory interview at Sheberghan before he was bound hand and foot, blindfolded and helicoptered to Kandahar,” where, he said, “They would just pick us up and throw us out [of the plane]. Some people were hurt, some quite badly.” He also explained how, before being flown to Guantánamo, the prisoners were shaved, ostensibly because they had picked up lice. “We resisted, but four or five commandos came and they had a machine and just shaved off my beard and moustache,” Saghir said.

On arrival in Guantánamo, after a 24-hour flight, Saghir said that, as with the arrival at Kandahar, the prisoners “were thrown off the plane on arrival.” He stated that “some had their noses broken,” and added, “I got a bruise under my left eye where my face hit the ground.”

In Camp X-Ray, Saghir told James Meek that “there was little tolerance for the practice of Islam, with its requirement of prayer five times a day.” He said, “In the first one-and-a-half months they wouldn’t let us speak to anyone, wouldn’t let us call for prayers or pray in the room. We were only given 10 minutes for eating. I tried to pray and four or five commandos came and they beat me up. If someone would try to make a call for prayer they would beat him up and gag him. After one-and-a-half months, we went on hunger strike.” Saghir also stated that he was locked up in solitary confinement, and also subjected to collective punishment, after “an Arab spat at a guard and the entire line of 24 cages was punished with solitary.” Speaking to Newsline, he said that he was held in solitary confinement on two occasions — once for two days and the second time for 16 days. “There was no light in the solitary confinement cell and they used to pump cold air inside the cell,” he explained.

Saghir also confirmed that the interrogators’ questions were monotonously repetitive. “They would ask: ‘Where is Osama? Do you know any of the al-Qaida leaders? Have you met them?’ Things like that,” he told James Meek. “They would not get angry with my answers. We would ask them and they would say: ‘We don’t know when you will be let free. Only our bosses know, we are here to do our job.’”

In 2008, Saghir traveled to Islamabad to speak to Tom Lasseter for McClatchy Newspapers’ report on 66 released prisoners, when much of what he had stated in his earlier interviews was confirmed. The interview also included an explanation of how his lawsuit had come to nothing, and how, on his return to Pakistan, he had “found out that he was responsible for 1.2 million rupees — almost $20,000 — in loans that his family had taken out to survive without his income and to finance trips to Afghanistan to search for him.” He added, “My family thought I had been killed in Afghanistan; people came to pay their respects,” until letters arrived from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Saghir also told Lasseter that he had “worked for more than five years and sold all his land to pay off the debt,” although he still owed some 400,000 rupees” — about $6,000.

Presenting additional information to that in the previous accounts, Saghir told Lasseter that, in Sherberghan, “he watched many around him die of infections,” and also spoke more about his time in Guantánamo, explaining that, when he” joined a hunger strike to protest rules that forbade detainees from talking to one another and prohibited prayer, and he went for three days without food,” the guards, in his own words, “came in with riot shields, grabbed me by the neck and gave me an injection. I fell down unconscious and woke up in the hospital. They had put a tube in me.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 27, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” his account was largely confirmed. The Task Force described him as “a farmer and missionary,” and also noted, contrary to his own statements, that his “missionary trip to Afghanistan with nine other individuals was the first time he left Pakistan,” for which he also “receiv[ed] his spouse’s permission.” The Task Force also stated that he had planned to preach for between two and four months, but was seized by General Dostum’s forces “while he was fleeing Kunduz for Pakistan after the bombing campaign started.” He was sent to Guantánamo on January 17, 2002, and the spurious reason given for his transfer was because of “his knowledge of General Dostum’s treatment of captured personnel transported from Kunduz to Sheberghan” — a low point in the feeble reasons given for transfer to Guantánamo, as it involved US forces suggesting that they took him halfway round the world to an experimental prison outside the law simply to find out more about how their close ally had been murdering prisoners of war.

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [143] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida, and as not being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.” It was also noted that the Pakistani government had “stated it [was] willing to accept the custody of [ISN 143], if released by the US government.”

Mohammed Ilyas (ISN 144, Pakistan) Released September 2004

In Chapter 9 of The Guantánamo Files, Ilyas was briefly mentioned as being 59 years old at the time of his capture, and I also noted that he was probably seized with two other recruits from villages in Sindh province — 20-year old Abid Raza (ISN 299), and 21-year old Mohammed Anwar (ISN 524).

In his Detainee Assessmernt Brief, dated May 28, 2004, which was an “Update Recommendation [for] Transfer to Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” his name was noted as Mohammed Euas, born in 1942, and it was also stated that he had “significant” medical issues, having been “diagnosed with diabetes mellitus type II, hypertension and hyperlipidemia,” all of which had apparently been “stabilized with medications.”

It was also stated that, on November 20, 2002, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, had recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government,” on the basis that he “was not affiliated with Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader, and [did] not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.”

After that, however, new information evidently derailed his release — specifically, a claim that, although he had “stated in May 2001 he went willingly to Afghanistan (AF) to preach the teachings of Islam,” he did so as part of Jamaat al-Tablighi, the vast missionary organisation, with millions of members, which, nevertheless, was regarded by the US authorities — at Guantánamo, if nowhere else — as “a Tier 2 NGO target.” These were helpfully described as organizations that “have demonstrated  the intent and willingness to support terrorist organisations and are wiling to attack US persons or interests.” Disgracefully, the Task Force added, “JT is a NGO that has direct ties to Al-Qaida.”

In addition, the Task Force claimed that a Saudi, Majid al-Harbi (ISN 158, released in February 2007), identified Ilyas as “an imam named Mohammed Elias in Lahore, Pakistan (PK), who issued a fatwah against US and Northem Alliance forces,” even though it was almost inconceivable that a Saudi, picked up crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan, would know anything about him. The Task Force also claimed that a Pakistani, Fazaldad (ISN 142, released in September 2004), claimed that Ilyas was “one of the recruiters and leaders at the Mansehra Jihad Training Camp” in Pakistan, which was reportedly controlled by Harkat Ul-Mujahideen Al-Alami (HUMA), described as “a Tier 1 terrorist target.” It was also claimed that Fazaldad had described Ilyas as “a leader of the Taliban in Kunduz,” because he saw him “using a walkie-talkie to communicate with and direct Taliban guards,” although, as with the Saudi allegation, there was no reason to presume that there was any truth in Fazaldad’s claims.

As a result, Ilyas was upgraded to “a high risk,” who “may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and was “of medium intelligence value.” Even so, the Task Force recommended that he “be transferred to the custody of another country for continued dentition,” but the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) disagreed. On May 19, 2003, “CITF stated that they were unable to make a risk assessment,” and as a result, JTF GMTO and CITF were unable to agree about his disposition, until someone gave the go-ahead for his transfer just four months later.

Hamood Ullah Khan (ISN 145, Pakistan) Released September 2004

As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar,” Khan, identified as Hamoodullah Khan, was interviewed by Tom Lasseter in Karachi in 2008 for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 former Guantánamo prisoners. Seized by Northern Alliance troops towards the end of 2001, when he was 30 years old, he told Lasseter that he was then “transferred to a series of Pakistani prisons and jails for nine and a half months,” and claimed that he had traveled to Afghanistan because he was a pharmaceutical sales representative, and was “trying to set up a business.”

Lasseter seemed doubtful, noting that, because Khan was released before the tribunals were convened, there was “no transcript that lays out the military’s case against him or any indication of what American interrogators thought about the credibility of his claim that he decided to take a business trip to Afghanistan in November 2001, when battles raged between Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters on one side and American troops and their Afghan allies on the other.” For his part, Khan seemed unperturbed by any doubts the authorities might have had towards him. He explained that “the interrogators told him that he was lying, but they didn’t seem too upset as they asked the same questions and he gave the same answers in one session after the next.”

His treatment had not always been so benign, however, and his account of his treatment in US custody in Afghanistan echoed that of Hafiz Liaqat Manzoor. He explained that, as the helicopter taking him to Kandahar from Sheberghan banked and his body “slumped over,” an American soldier “kicked him and yelled, ‘Don’t move!’ His body shifted again as the helicopter pitched downward toward the landing zone, he said, and the soldier hit him with a rifle butt and screamed at him to sit still.” He added, “After we landed they told us to get on the ground. A soldier sat on me and another soldier came up, grabbed my hair and beat my face into the ground. My nose started bleeding, then I passed out. When I woke up, I was naked. They gave me some clothes.”

After less than three weeks at Kandahar — where, “on the way to and from interrogations, walking in shackles with hoods on, ‘the guards would slam us against the walls, punch us on the stomach’” — Khan was transferred to Guantánamo, enduring random violence on the plane, on the bus to Camp X-Ray, and on arrival at the prison. He said he “got the message,” and spent the rest of his time as “a model prisoner. He didn’t participate in hunger strikes. He didn’t argue with guards. He remained quiet, kept to himself and looked at the ground when soldiers walked by his cell.” As a result, he said, “he was never hit or kicked in his cell,” although “he saw it happen to other detainees all the time.” Citing the example of Juma al-Dossari, the joint Saudi-Bahraini national released in July 2007, who attempted suicide on at least 13 occasions, he said that he’d “seen what happened when men stepped out of line … The psychological effects of repeated trips to isolation cells and regular beatings, he said, drove some detainees out of their minds.”

Khan spent the last year in Camp Four, where compliant prisoners shared rudimentary dorm-like facilities, and explained, “They said that my behavior was good, that I was not a danger to them.” He noted that the authorities were “particularly pleased” with prisoners who refused to take part in hunger strikes. “I never participated in the hunger strikes,” he said. “There was no use … the hunger strikes would not free us, so why go on a hunger strike?” Instead, he “spent most of his time at Camp Four the same way he had in his previous cellblocks: memorizing the Koran and praying.”

In 2008, Khan taught at a madrassa, and had only one abiding question about his imprisonment. “There is still one big question that remains in my mind,” he said. “Why was I there? I keep wondering about that.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated July 9, 2003, which was a “Revocation of Recommendation to Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Government,” it was stated that his name was Hamood Ullah Khan and that he was born in 1971, and it was also noted that he had latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, and also “serological evidence of prior Hepatitis B infection,” although it was stated that he was “not currently infectious,” and was “otherwise in good health.”

Reinforcing the story that he later told to Tom Lasseter, Khan told his interrogators that he and “a long-time friend, Abdul Kareem, owned a pharmaceutical business in Pakistan,” and that they “decided to travel to Afghanistan to sell pharmaceutical products there because of the high profit potential.” Khan said he was “concerned about going to Afghanistan because of the ongoing war,” but Kareem, whose parents were Afghans, was confident because of his “numerous trips” there, and because he had “the language skills and contacts necessary to do business in Afghanistan.”

According to Khan’s account, the two men arrived in Pul-i-Khumri in Baghlan province in November 2001, but he (Khan) became ill, and stayed indoors in a house while Hakeem sold all the pharmaceuticals. Hakeem then said he would visit relatives before heading back to Pakistan, but he did not return, and Khan, instead, sought help from a stranger, Muhammad Arif, who turned out to be a member of the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, who informed him that all the roads to Pakistan were closed, but said that he would help him.

The two men took public transport to Kunduz, “where they went to an abandoned school controlled by 10-15 members of Jaish-e-Mohammed,” and where Khan remained “for approximately one week and worked by helping the doctor dispense over-the-counter medication.” Khan added that, after a week, he and Arif departed for Kandahar, where they were seized by Northern Alliance troops. He was then taken to Sheberghan, perhaps on “the convoy of death,” and was sent to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of a Taliban training school in Kunduz; biographical information on Muhammad Arif; the Amson Pharmaceutical and Biological Company in Karachi where he had previously worked; the quantity and quality of medications available in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and on pharmaceutical products available in Pakistan for black market distribution in Afghanistan.”

That was quite a list of reasons for detention grafted onto his largely random presence in US custody, but primarily doubts arose because of his presence in Kandahar and because of one comment made by an unattributed fellow prisoner, who apparently “recognized” Khan as “being an associate affiliated with al-Qaeda,” even though, on November 20, 2002, Maj. Gen. Miller had recommended that Khan “be considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.” The Task Force acknowledged that “the source did not know his name or any further information concerning” Khan, but was worried about how he could have been captured in Kandahar, when the Northern Alliance was not, at that time, operating that far south.

The Task Force also worried that, at university, he had been “affiliated” with the Muhajir Quami Movement  (MQM), described in the file as “an extremist group, which has been tied to the murder of two Americans in Pakistan, in 1995,” even though the organisation is actually the student wing of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the third largest political party in Pakistan, and the largest liberal and secular political party. It was also noted that, after university, Khan “moved inexplicably to Malaysia (possibly fleeing Pakistan),” where he “lived for five years and continued his affiliations with MQM,” even though an innocent explanation was provided in the assessment, when it was noted that Khan “has relatives” in Malaysia.

This was a typical failure of intelligence on the part of the US authorities, but it contributed to Khan’s reassessment as someone who was “affiliated with several extremist groups that either have Al-Qaida links or who have targeted Americans,” and the decision to consider him “a serious threat to the United States” who “should be detained for further intelligence purposes.” He was, furthermore, described as “possess[ing] a confirmed high threat to the US, its interests, and its allies.” As a result, it took another 14 months until he was released.

Mourad Benchellali (ISN 161, France) Released July 2004

As I explained in Chapter 7 of The Guantánamo Files, Mourad Benchellali, who was 19 years old when he was seized, traveled to Afghanistan in summer 2001 from Venissieux, a poor suburb of Lyons, with his friend Nizar Sassi (ISN 325, see Part Four). He told his story to Le Figaro in February 2006, and in an op-ed in the New York Times in June 2006, and, according to these accounts, after attending a training camp, Benchellali and Sassi spent some time in Jalalabad, where they met up with Hervé Djamel Loiseau, a convert to Islam from Paris. Loiseau was a close friend of another French prisoner, Brahim Yadel, a Parisian who arrived in Afghanistan in July 2001, accompanied by Redouane Khalid, who was also from Paris. Completing the connections between the men, Khalid traveled in Afghanistan with Khaled bin Mustafa, from Lyons, who had met him at his wedding in Paris. Yadel, like Benchellali and Sassi, was released in July 2004, while the others were freed in March 2005.

From Jalalabad, where the men had been living before the US-led invasion, they fled to Pakistan in two groups. Benchellali explained that he had seen Osama bin Laden in Jalalabad, when the remaining Arabs in Afghanistan were asked to choose whether “to leave Afghanistan, or to take up arms,” and said that, having chosen to leave, “More than a thousand of us left by way of the mountains to get to Pakistan.” He and Sassi travelled with Loiseau, but their companion died on the way. When they arrived in Pakistan, they were captured by locals and handed over to the Pakistani army, who sold them for $5,000 each to the Americans.

When it came to his motivations, Benchallali acknowledged that he came from a family with aspirations to fight in defense of Muslims facing oppression. As I explained in The Guantánamo Files:

His father was a radical imam who had tried (and failed) to fight in Bosnia, his brother Menad had tried (and failed) to fight in Chechnya, and his brother, his father and even his mother had all spent time in French prisons, but he insisted that he went to Afghanistan for “an adventure” and as a way of enhancing his status, hoping that he would be “viewed differently” in his neighbourhood, and that his reputation might “match” that of his brother. He admitted that his sense of adventure was “misguided and mistimed,” and blamed his brother for encouraging him to go, and for arranging for him to attend a training camp. “For two months, I was there,” he wrote after his release, “trapped in the middle of the desert by fear and my own stupidity.”

Benchellali also described the abuse to which he and other prisoners were subjected in US custody in Kandahar and Guantánamo, which involved some very damaging claims:

[In Kandahar] they hit us. They piled us one on top of the other. Sometimes, they took photos of us completely naked. We were interrogated several times a day. They handcuffed us to hurt us. I was tied to a bar placed above my head or then they tied me up very low on my back. Americans peed on detainees. I saw the Red Cross, but its representatives told me that there was nothing they could do.

Then, in January 2002, I was transferred to Guantánamo. I was beaten up on the bus that was taking us to the camp. We were treated differently depending on whether or not we responded to questions. Those who did not “cooperate” were awakened every hour with the aim of preventing them from sleeping at all costs. They might put us in a room with the music very loud broadcast through large speakers or make us endure flashes of light for several hours at a time. Sometimes, they left us handcuffed for hours to a chair or then they turned down the air conditioning. The humiliations were numerous, in particular of a sexual nature. The Americans had prostitutes come into the camp. One of them planted herself in front of a Saudi — they were in the majority at Guantanamo — and smeared her menstrual blood on his face. The searches were constant and humiliating. They tied the Koran above us and took pleasure in batting it around.

In an interview with Matthew Schofield in 2008 for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 former Guantánamo prisoners, Benchellali reiterated that his trip to Afghanistan had been an “adventure,” and denied claims that he was driven psychologically to prove himself. He told Schofield, “It was June 2001, and I thought I’d take a vacation, be back in time for classes in September. Later, the papers would say I was a desperate outsider, trapped looking in on an uncaring nation. But that’s not true. I was happy. I was getting an education. I had a job. I had a fiancee. I just thought I wanted a bit of adventure.”

The interview also provided further information about the training camp that Benchellali and Sassi had attended, after he had been persuaded to go to Afghanistan by his brother. He stated that “there wasn’t much available to them” in Afghanistan, because “[t]hey didn’t speak a word of the local languages, Dari and Pashtu, nor Arabic, so they stumbled around for a few days before they met some Algerians who spoke French,” and who “suggested that they spend part of the summer at a Muslim camp.”

This was an al-Qaeda camp — the al-Farouq camp that provided basic training — but Benchellali reiterated that he felt “trapped.” He told Schofield that he and Sassi “studied the Quran, ate not quite enough and did physical training, which consisted of a lot of running and exercises.” He also said that they studied weapons, although he “claimed that he was never allowed to use one,” and talked about jihad.

Adding that they were “terrified,” he explained that they “realized that the only people who were able to leave were those who got sick, so they pretended to be sick.” However, there was a hospital in the camp, and it was only when Sassi really got sick, losing 45 pounds, that he was sent to a hospital in Kandahar, leaving Benchellali alone. It was at that point, he said, that “everyone was really excited, talking about how a great man was coming to speak to us.” He added that he “was ushered into an open area with 200 others,” where “everyone was chanting, ‘Osama, Osama,’ but because he “didn’t understand a word,” he “went back to his tent.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated March 27, 2004, which was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” it was stated that he was born in July 1981, and the Task Force ran through the story that Benchellali himself told after his release — how he was encouraged to travel to Afghanistan by his brother, how he and Nizar Sassi traveled first to London, and then to Islamabad on June 29, 2001, and how they then attended the al-Farouq training camp, and fled to Pakistan after the US-led invasion. The Task Force explained that, “along with several other French-speaking Arabs,” Benchellali and Sassi “traveled across the Pakistan border until they reached a large village where the local inhabitants locked them in the mosque. Pakistani officials arrested them the following morning, 15 December 2001, without incident.” Unsubstantiated in all this was a claim that they “likely participated in fighting against US and allied forces.”

No specific reason was given to purportedly justify Benchellali’s transfer to Guantánamo, although it was noted that he “possesses intelligence information.” Referring to how the Bush administration perceived its naval base in Guantánamo Bay, it was noted, under the heading, “Reasons for Continued Detention in Another Country,” that he had “possible connections” to the the Salafist Group for Prayer and Combat (GSPC). Also mentioned were the supposed terrorist connections of the owner of “the Algerian House,” a house he stayed in in Jalalabad, and extensive information about his family which had come from the French intelligence services.

In its assessment, the Task Force stated that it regarded Benchellali as “a member of Al-Qaida and having several ties to other global terrorist networks,” who had “demonstrated a commitment to Jihad, ha[d] links to key facilitators in Al-Qaida’s international terrorist network, ha[d] participated in terrorist training and hostilities against the US and coalition forces [this was never proved, of course], and maintain[ed] the capability to continue to do so.” He was, additionally, “assessed as a high threat because of his close ties with active elements of Al-Qaida, including several members of his immediate family who are known terrorists and who are active in the procurement and use of chemical weapons” (again, something that was not proved). As a result, JTF GTMO determined that he posed “a high risk, as he [was] likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” but, nevertheless, recommended that he “be transferred to the control of another country for continued detention,” despite knowing that the French government would not be able to hold him — or the other ex-prisoners — without charge or trial.

Since their release from Guantánamo, Benchellali and four of the other ex-prisoners — Nizar Sassi, Brahim Yadel, Khaled bin Mustafa and Redouane Khalid — have faced a long ordeal in the French courts, although they did not, of course, face “continued detention,” as envisaged by the Bush administration. In 2007, they were convicted of “criminal association with a terrorist enterprise,” and given one-year sentences, but they were not imprisoned because of the time they had already spent imprisoned in Guantánamo. However, their convictions were overturned on appeal on February 24, 2009, because, as the New York Times explained, “The court ruled that information gathered by French intelligence officials in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, violated French rules for permissible evidence, and that there was no other proof of wrongdoing.”

On February 17, 2010, the Court of Cassation, a higher court, ordered a re-trial of the five men, and that trial began on January 20 this year, with lawyers drawing on US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks to argue that the case should be dropped. As the Miami Herald reported, “defense lawyers presented at least three US diplomatic cables citing French anti-terrorist investigators,” and “argued that it was inappropriate for French investigators to have discussed the ex-inmates’ cases with American authorities.” In April, it was noted by a French researcher for Cageprisoners that the men’s conviction had been upheld by the Court of Cassation.

After his release, Benchellali also wrote a book about his experiences, Voyage Vers L’Enfer (published in May 2006).

Imad Kanouni (ISN 164, France) Released July 2004

Unlike the five French prisoners whose stories were somehow connected (see Mourad Benchellali, above), Imad Kanouni, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture, said that he traveled to Afghanistan “to pursue religious education,” as I explained in Chapter 7 of The Guantánamo Files, drawing on an Associated Press report that dealt with the start of the former prisoners’ trial in July 2006, at which his lawyer, Felix de Bellay, called the trial “intellectually as well as legally shocking.” Although Kanouni admitted that he was “ready to die for a good cause, [to] defend people who were attacked in their countries,” he insisted that he did not agree with the ideas of Osama bin Laden and had never visited a training camp.

When five former prisoners were convicted of “criminal association with a terrorist enterprise” in December 2007, Kanouni was acquitted, as the Associated Press reported. The AP report on the trial, reiterating Kanouni’s own account, stated that he “said he went to Afghanistan for spiritual reasons” and “was acquitted, as the prosecutor had recommended.” The report added that Felix de Belloy “said he would try to seek reparations on behalf of Kanouni, though he did not elaborate on how he planned to do so.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 27, 2003, which was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” he was described as Imad Achab Kanouni, born in March 1977, and he was also described as a Moroccan national, even though he is a French citizen. The Task Force broadly accepted his reason for traveling to Afghanistan, as stated after his release, but injected it with suspicion. After stating that he “claim[ed] he immigrated to Afghanistan (AF) in March 2000 to further his studies of Islam and live in a purist Islamic state,” the Task Force noted that, on arrival in Kabul, he “stayed at the Wazir Akbar Khan Mosque,which [had] been visited by many extremists and [was] in the same neighborhood as several Al-Qaida and Taliban safehouses, including one that Osama Bin Laden used,” where he met Abu Bilal, described as “a potential Al-Qaida facilitator, who helped him find an apartment.” The Task Force also attempted to shine a suspicious light on Kanouni’s claim that “he spent his time attending classes given by Sheik Abu Walid Ansari at Ansari’s home,” which, as the Task Force saw it, “may have been the Al-Ansar guesthouse, an Al-Qaida guesthouse located in Kabul.”

Dealing with the circumstances of his capture, the Task Force noted that, after the 9/11 attacks, he “claim[ed] he fled Kabul with 10 Arabs,” including two French prisoners described as being “connected to Al-Qaida,” staying briefly at “the Algerian guesthouse in Jalalabad,” before fleeing with other Arabs to Pakistan, where they were seized. He was flown to Guantánamo on February 11, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of Al-Qaida and Taliban facilities and personnel in the Kabul, AF, area, as well as persons known to associate [sic] or support the Taliban or Al-Qaida in the Kabul, AF, area.”

Mostly, however, the Task Force was suspicious about Kanouni in general. The authorities were worried about his statement that, “in the winter of 1999, he briefly left Germany to fight against the Serbs in Albania but returned to Germany in early 2000, [and] advised he left Germany for good in March 2000, where he decided to study Islam in Afghanistan through his own funding.” The authorities were also concerned that, “though cooperative,” Kanouni had “not been completely forthright,” and had “failed to explain the circumstances surrounding his travels to Albania to fight against the Serbs,” and had “been careful not to incriminate himself through his associations with any extremists he may have connections to through his attendance of several mosques in Germany,” which, according to the authorities, “were known at the time to promote jihad.” It was also noted that he “reportedly traveled extensively in the United Kingdom” but had “yet to explain those travels,” and suspicions were also expressed about his connections with the other French prisoners.

As a result, Kanouni was “assessed as being a possible member of Al-Qaida,” who was “of intelligence value to the United States,” and posed “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US its interests or its allies,” and Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “Retain[ed] under DoD control.” It was, however, also noted that the Task Force “notified the Criminal Investigative task Force of this recommendation on 8 December 2003,” and, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders CITF will concur with JTF GTMO’s assessment that the detainee poses a medium risk,” which perhaps indicates that CITF were not convinced. Whatever the case, he was freed seven months later.

Mehdi Ghezali (ISN 166, Sweden) Released July 2004

As I explained in Chapter 7 of The Guantánamo Files, Mehdi Ghezali, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, told Reuters after his release that he had traveled to Pakistan to study Islam in August 2001, and was visiting a friend in Jalalabad when the US-led invasion began. He decided to return to Pakistan when he heard that Afghan villagers were selling foreigners to the US forces, but was captured in a village near Peshawar by locals who sold him to the Pakistani police, who in turn sold him to the Americans.

Ghezali also explained that, in Guantánamo, he had initially cooperated with his interrogators, but “stopped talking” when they “kept asking the same questions.” He added that, in April 2004, “the military changed their tactics,” subjecting him to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were applied to at least one in six of the prisoners.

“They put me in the interrogation room and used it as a refrigerator,” he said, adding, “They set the temperature to minus degrees so it was terribly cold and one had to freeze there for many hours — 12 to 14 hours one had to sit there, chained.” After explaining that “he had partially lost the feeling in one foot since then,” he also said he was “deprived of sleep, chained for long periods in painful positions, and exposed to bright flashes of light in a darkened room and loud music and noise.”

“Speaking of the chaining in painful positions — known as “short-shackling” — he said, “They forced me down with chained feet. Then they took away the chains from the hands, pulled the arms under the legs and chained them hard again. I could not move.” After “several hours” of this, “his feet were swollen and his whole body was aching.” As he explained, “The worst was in the back and the legs.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated April 10, 2004, which was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” it was stated that he had traveled to Portugal in 1999, where he was reportedly “jailed for theft,” and had then traveled to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) in January 2000. Back in Sweden, he met a man who convinced him to travel to London with him, and from there they flew to Islamabad, and then traveled to Afghanistan. Ghezali told his interrogators that he stayed in a house near Jalalabad for approximately five months, and stated that “all he did for those five months ‘was to study the Koran and go for walks.’”

Ghezali said that, after the coalition bombing began, he left Jalalabad “with a group of women and children in fear of being captured and executed by the Northern Alliance because he was a foreigner of Arab descent,” although it was also stated that the man in whose house he was staying arranged for “Ali (a Moroccan) and Ismael (a Tunisian)” to take him to Pakistan. After a month, he and his companions were seized by the Pakistani authorities after crossing the border. Ghezali stated that “the Pakistani authorities confiscated his passport, driver’s license, and an unknown amount of money.” He was sent to Guantánamo on January 17, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide general-to-specific information on the cultural, religious, and ethnic recruitment of Muslim foreign nationals attending the Haj in Saudi Arabia.”

When it came to the “Reasons for Continued Detention in Another Country,” it was stated that he had been “uncooperative, unforthcoming and deceptive during interrogations,” and that he had “systematically recanted both the original and later versions of his story.” Various terrorism-related allegations were dug up from Sweden, and it was also claimed that he was “captured with 23 other Arabs from various countries to include Denmark, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, some of whom have admitted to being Al-Qaida or members of and associated with other Tier 1 terrorist organisations,” described as “terrorist groups,especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests.”

In its assessment, the Task Force described Ghezali as “a possible Al-Qaida member,” who “had gone to Afghanistan to support the Taliban.” It was also noted that he posed “a medium risk, as he may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and Brig. Gen. Mitchell R. Leclaire, the Deputy Commander of Guantánamo, recommended that he “be transferred to the control of another country for continued detention.” It was also noted that the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) had “not evaluated” him at all.

In September 2009, Ghezali was seized in Pakistan, with initial reports claiming that he had been captured with eleven other men, on suspicion of being involved with terrorism. It later transpired that he had been seized with two other Swedish citizens, “28-year-old Munir Awad and 19-year-old Safia Benaouda, and their two and a half-year-old boy,” and the three stated that they had traveled to Pakistan at short notice, as part of a tour of Muslim countries, and had been planning to meet up with representatives of the vast missionary group Jamaat al-Tablighi when they were captured.

The Swedes were released and flown back home on October 10, 2009, and Ghezali’s lawyers subsequently explained that, “despite Ghezali being released from Guantánamo in 2004 without being accused of any wrong doing, he and his family have been under the surveillance of Swedish security service Säpo ever since.” In an op-ed, the lawyers wrote, “The situation seems familiar to all of us who’ve read Franz Kafka,” adding that they felt that the Swedish media’s coverage of Ghezali was marked by “xenophobic undertones,” and stating, “As no government agency has ever accused him of terrorism or spying, it seems a reasonable request that the Swedish press corps can also abstain from formulating those types of accusations.”

Ravil Gumarov (ISN 203, Russia) Released February 2004

Ravil Gumarov, a former businessman, who sold fertiliser, is a Tatar from Bashkortostan, north of Kazakhstan, and was 39 years old at the time of his capture. He was one of four prisoners from the former Soviet Union who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001 (see Rasul Kudayev in Part One, and Shamil Khazhiyev and Ruslan Ogidov, below).

The massacre came about after several hundred prisoners had surrendered, as part of the fall of the city of Kunduz, apparently on the basis that they would be allowed to return home after doing so. However, after being transported to the fort, some of the men started an uprising, because of their betrayal, or because they feared that they were about to be killed, which was then suppressed savagely. Gumarov and the other survivors (86 in total) hid in the basement for a week, where they were bombed and, finally, flooded.

As I explained in Chapter 2 of The Guantánamo Files, drawing on an article in the St. Petersburg Times in December 2002:

Gumarov’s father said that his son’s desire to live under Islamic law grew so strong that, in 2000, he abandoned his wife, four children and elderly parents to travel to Afghanistan. “When I asked him what he would do abroad,” his father said, “Ravil said he was ready to tend sheep if he could live under the rule of Islam.”

Leonid Syukiainen, a Russian academic, drew parallels between the Russian prisoners and the idealistic Westerners who moved to the Soviet Union after the 1917 Revolution to help build a socialist society. “Of course, there had to be a combination of reasons for these people to flee to Afghanistan,” he said, “but I believe that their strongest motive was that they sincerely sought a fair Islamic society there.”

Igor Tkachyov, the head of a team of Russians who visited the prisoners at Guantánamo, made even more specific comments about what happened to the men. He said that [all but two of the eight Russian prisoners] traveled via Tajikistan, where members of the Islamic opposition to President Rahmonov helped them get to Afghanistan, and added that once they were there they “found themselves in a kind of totalitarian sect commanded by the Taliban … They were not allowed to be alone and had to do everything together, obeying strict regulations that left no time for anything but prayers.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 5, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that his name was Karji Omar Gumarof and he was born in 1962. It was also noted that he “arrived [in Guantánamo] with several bone fractures in his legs that have been treated and still require regular dressing changes, but they are steadily healing and he no longer requires inpatient care.” The Task Force also stated, explicitly, that he “traveled to Afghanistan to pursue religious freedom,” but that, on arrival in Afghanistan, “Uzbek soldiers detained and imprisoned” him, and “he was held prisoner in Kabul from August 2000 until August 2001,” when he “was tasked to repair and perform general vehicle maintenance.”

According to this account, he was “moved to Kunduz in August 2001, and to Mazar-e-Sharif late in November of 2001.” No mention was made of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, but it did not appear from this account that the Task Force considered that he had been responsible for his own movements in Afghanistan. He was sent to Guantánamo on or about February 11, 2002, and the spurious reason given for his transfer was that it was “based on his knowledge of several detainment facilities, and of Tahir Ildash, the leader of the detention facility in Afghanistan.” This was presumably a reference to Tahir Yoldash, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, although there may have been some confusion with Juma Namangani, the previous leader of the IMU, who was reportedly killed in the Qala-i-Janghi massacre.

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [203] is assessed as not affiliated with al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes.”

It was also noted that, “During a visit to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 14 to 19 November 2002, Russian Intelligence officers interrogated [ISN 203] and stated that their government would accept custody of [him] if released by the US government.” Crucially, it was also noted that, “Since the Russian government has agreed to incarcerate [him] upon his transfer, he poses no future threat to the US or its allies. In addition, the Russian government has agreed to share all intelligence derived from him while under their control with the United States.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of the Russian government.”

After their return to Russia, these punitive demands were not exactly followed, although the men suffered at their own government’s hands. All seven ex-prisoners “were initially held in a detention center in the southern town of Pyatigorsk that is run by the FSB, the domestic successor of the KGB,” as the Washington Post explained in an article in September 2006. The Post further explained that all seven were released in June 2004, “after prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to hold them,” but also noted that their release “did not end official interest in the men.”

This was confirmed in “The Stamp of Guantánamo,” a report by Human Rights Watch in March 2007 in which it was noted:

Faced with the return of seven former detainees from Guantánamo, Russian law enforcement might legitimately have been expected to keep an eye on whether the men were engaged in any suspicious activity after they got home. Such surveillance could have been conducted while also respecting the ex-detainees’ human rights. It was not.

The detainees and their family members uniformly complained of being frequently called, followed, and threatened by the FSB, UBOP [Russia's brutal organized crime squad], and other police officials after their return.Some family members reported that their homes were searched without warrants, in violation of Russian and international law. Some reported, in fact, that their homes were so frequently searched that they were unable to provide exact dates of those searches.

Ravil Gumarov told Human Rights Watch that officials from the FSB and UBOP called him at least once a week, beginning right away after he returned home from the Pyatigorsk prison to Naberezhnyi Chelny. They frequently requested that he come down to their offices for questioning, and a car followed his every movement outside the home for about a month after he returned. Two investigators from the FSB and the UBOP called so often that Gumarov’s mother recognized their voices and knew their names and telephone numbers.”They called Ravil in all the time, whenever anything happened. There was a shooting somewhere, and they called him in; somebody committed a murder somewhere, and again they called him in.”

After this harassment, Gumarov was finally detained on April 1, 2005, on suspicion of participating with Timur Ishmuratov (another former Guantánamo prisoner) in a gas pipeline explosion in January 2005. Human Rights Watch explained that “he confessed to the pipeline explosion as a result of torture by FSB and UBOP officials, even though he later recanted that confession in court testimony.” Nevertheless, he was convicted and sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment.

He told Human Rights Watch that he was “deprived of sleep for seven or eight days after his arrest,” and “was kept in a tiny cage, about one meter by half a meter, where he was allowed to sit on a tiny bench during the day while being interrogated, but at night he was fastened by one handcuff to the bars of the cage over his head.” He also explained that he “was continually asked to confess to the pipeline explosion.” Human Rights Watch also explained:

After a week or 10 days he was transferred to a room in the administrative building housing the FSB in Bugulma. There he was tortured using a common technique of Russian law enforcement: a gas mask is put over the detainee’s head and then the oxygen is turned off, producing the beginnings of asphyxiation and a sense of panic. This form of torture is known in Russia as “little elephant,” or “slonik,” because the tube dangling from the front of the mask resembles the trunk of an elephant.

Gumarov also told Human Rights Watch that investigators had “pulled hairs from his beard, and on one occasion poured an entire bottle of vodka down his throat, a particularly offensive form of mistreatment for an observant Muslim.” He said, “I hadn’t had any alcohol for seven years, they poured a bottle in me and I was out of it.”

He also told a Moscow press conference that:

[A]t one point, while he was being beaten on his back to force a confession, he said, “What are you doing? This is like 1937 [the height of Stalin's repression],” and they answered, “If this were 1937, you’d have been shot a long time ago.” He told his mother that investigators had drugged him with a special kind of tea to get him to sign a confession. Eventually, he did. In a handwritten letter that was smuggled out of the detention facility in Bugulma and brought to his mother, Gumarov wrote, “Mama, don’t listen to the authorities, no matter what they say about me My nerves gave in, I couldn’t take it. I spoke against myself and the worst thing is that I spoke against others. Everyone has a limit for what they can take, and many break sooner or later. They broke me too. It seems I’m destined to serve time for something I didn’t do.”

Shamil Khazhiyev (ISN 209, Russia) Released February 2004

Also a Tatar from Bashkortostan, north of Kazakhstan (like Ravil Gumarov, above), Shamil Khazhiyev (also identified as Shamil Khazhiev) was a police lieutenant, and was 30 years old when he was seized. He too was a survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, but less is known about him. According to the St. Petersburg Times, his colleagues said that, in 1999, “he was studying law at Ufa State University by correspondence and, upon finishing the course, he expected a career promotion.” Yamil Mustafin, the acting head of the town’s police force, was at a loss to explain what happened next. “We don’t know what happened to him or how to explain his escape to Afghanistan,” he said.

In the classified military assessments released by WikiLeaks, all that exists in Khaziyev’s case is a one-page memo, described as a “Deferment Assessment,” dated December 6, 2003, in which, after noting that his name was Almasim Rabilavich Sharipugg, the Task Force noted a disagreement between itself and the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF). On December 5, 2002, JTF GTMO “completed an assessment [and] concluded that he was a medium threat,” recommending him for transfer, whereas on December 6 CITF’s Behavioral Science Consultation team (BSCT) “completed a risk assessment [and] concluded that he [was] a high threat.” As a result, the Task Force noted, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, JTF GTMO will defer to the CITF assessment that the detainee poses a high threat.” Nevertheless, “The JTF GTMO recommendation for the transfer to the control of another government for continued detention remains unchanged.”

After his release from Russian custody in June 2004, as Human Rights Watch explained:

Shamil Khazhiev returned to Uchali, a small town in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, where his family lived. Human rights activist Alexandra Zernova, who met with Khazhiev on several occasions, said that he was repeatedly questioned by local FSB and UBOP officials after his return, and was briefly detained in Ufa, the Bashkortostan capital, in December 2004, on suspicion of membership in Hizb ut-Tahrir. He was released without charge. In September 2005, while riding on a train, he was questioned by UBOP officials from Samara. According to Zernova, Khazhiev has been unable to secure employment since his return from Guantánamo. He left Russia in March 2007.

According to Human Rights Watch, in a report in February 2009, Khaziyev “sought refuge in the Netherlands in 2007. The Dutch authorities subsequently granted [him] political asylum based on the harassment and abuse he suffered at the hands of the Russian intelligence services upon his return to Russia from Guantánamo.”

Ruslan Ogidov (ISN 211, Russia) Released February 2004

The fourth of the Russian survivors of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, Ruslan Ogidov (also identified as Ruslan Odizhev) was a Balkar from Nalchik, in Kabardino-Balkaria. 28 years old at the time of his capture, he reportedly left home partly because he had been tortured by the Russian intelligence services in 1999, but little else was known of his case until the WikiLeaks documents were released.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated December 5, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that his name was Ruslan Otijev, and that he was born in 1973. It was also noted that, as well as having latent tuberculosis, (in common with many of the prisoners), he suffered from “panic disorder,” and had been “diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, for which he received inpatient psychiatric care but was later released in November 2002″ although he was, reportedly, “otherwise in good health.”

As with Ravil Gumarov, the Task Force stated, explicitly, that he “traveled to Afghanistan for religious freedom reasons.” He had, apparently, “traveled to Chechnya on previous occasions to join in the fight for religious freedom, and to assist the anti-Russian resistance movements,” and had “moved from Chechnya to Kabul, Afghanistan, in November or December of 2000.” Soon after this, he “became ill with tuberculosis and was hospitalized, after which he was turned over to General Dostum’s forces,” and was “taken first to Mazar-e-Sharif” — a veiled reference to Qala-i-Janghi — “and after that to Sheberghan before being transferred to US forces,” although there was no clue in this narrative as to who had turned him over to Dostum’s forces in the first place. He was sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because of “his knowledge of Chechnya [sic]fighters in Afghanistan, interactions between Chechnya fighters and the Russian military, and information regarding Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan safe houses in Afghanistan.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [211] is assessed as not affiliated with al-Qaida nor as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes.”

It was also noted that, “During a visit to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 14 to 19 November 2002, Russian Intelligence officers interrogated [ISN 211] and stated that their government would accept custody of [him] if released by the US government.” Crucially, as with Ravil Gumarov, it was also noted that, “Since the Russian government has agreed to incarcerate [him] upon his transfer, he poses no future threat to the US or its allies. In addition, the Russian government has agreed to share all intelligence derived from him while under their control with the United States.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of the Russian government.”

After his release from Russian custody in June 2004, he returned to his family’s home in Nalchik. According to his mother, who spoke to Human Rights Watch:

[T]he harassment began immediately: “They came all the time, threatening, calling him all the time to the department, the first department, the sixth department [the UBOP, which was] well-known to us, the Gestapo.” She drew aside the curtain at the apartment’s window to point out to Human Rights Watch researchers where a modest, unmarked car used to be always parked, so the FSB could keep an eye on their movements.

His mother also explained that he was “unable to obtain his internal passport (national identity document), which was necessary to obtain formal work,” and she expressed her belief that “pressure from the FSB kept the local police from giving him the document because it was only through the intervention of a friendly FSB officer that Odizhev finally did receive his passport in spring 2005. However, he went into hiding soon thereafter, never having had a formal job after his release from Guantánamo.”

On June 27, 2007, he was killed in the centre of Nalchik, apparently while resisting arrest, although Geydar Dzhemal, of the Islamic Committee of Russia, stated that his guilt had not been established and that he could have been captured alive. A Pentagon report, citing the Russian authorities, claimed that he “had taken part in several terrorist acts including an October 2005 attack in the Caucasus region that killed and injured several police officers,” and that he “was found with pistols, a grenade, and homemade explosive devices on his body.”

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

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