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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 19 of the 70-part series. 247 stories have now been told. See the entire archive here.

In late April, WikiLeaks pushed Guantánamo back onto the international media’s agenda by publishing 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, which drew on the testimony of witnesses — in most cases, the prisoners’ fellow prisoners — whose words are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion (sometimes not in Guantánamo, but in secret prisons run by the CIA), or because they provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantánamo.

As an independent media partner of WikiLeaks, I liaised both before and after the publication of these documents with WikiLeaks’ mainstream media partners (including the Washington Post, McClatchy Newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais), and then, after the killing of Osama bin Laden pushed Guantánamo aside once more, and allowed apologists for torture, and those who engineered its use by US forces, to resume their malignant, criminal and deeply mistaken defense of torture, and of the existence of Guantánamo, I began to analyze all of the Detainee Assessment Briefs in depth.

I began, in May and June, 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. These men and boys were amongst the first 201 prisoners released, and unlike the other prisoners, for whom information was released to the public from 2006 onwards, as a result of court cases involving Freedom of Information requests, no information had been officially released about the first 201 prisoners.

“WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo” was followed by a ten-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004,” published from June to August, 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.

As a result, of the 201 prisoners released between 2002 and 2004, I have, to date, published the most comprehensive reports available in one place on 198 of the 779 prisoners held, with just three stories currently unknown (of prisoners whose Detainee Assessment Briefs were missing, and whose stories have not surfaced in any other media).

For the next phase of this 70-part project (with 18 parts now complete), I have turned my attention to the period from September 2004 to the end of 2005, when 62 prisoners were released (see Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Five). This 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.

The tribunals were designed to review the evidence against all the prisoners (which they did from July 2004 to March 2005), to decide whether they had been correctly designated, on capture, as “enemy combatants” who could be held without rights. They were, however, a corrupt and inept process, designed essentially to rubber-stamp the administration’s prior decisions, and not to allow the prisoners to fundamentally challenge the largely flimsy basis of their detention. The prisoners were, for example, not allowed lawyers, and they were not allowed to either see or hear the classified evidence against them, although it was not until 2007 that the extent of the failings of the CSRTs became fully apparent, when their supposed integrity was thoroughly undermined in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham.

A veteran of US intelligence who had worked on the tribunals, Lt. Col. Abraham not only revealed how shambolic the process of compiling the supposed evidence for the tribunals was, but also how, when tribunals such as the one he took part in, disagreed with the authorities’ preconceived notions, by deciding that the man before them was not an “enemy combatant,” the officers were dismissed and “do-over” tribunals were convened until the authorities got the results they desired.

Despite the insuperable problems with the CSRTs, they — and their successors, the annual Administrative Review Boards — often provided the only opportunity for the prisoners to have their own voices heard, and they proved invaluable when I was researching and writing The Guantánamo Files.

Now supplemented with information from the Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks, the 62 stories in this five-part series cover 29 of the 38 prisoners who were the only ones, out of 558 prisoners in total, to succeed in convincing their tribunals, and the authorities overseeing the tribunals, they they were not “enemy combatants” — or, as the administration insisted, that they were “no longer enemy combatants.” The Pentagon’s document listing the 38 (PDF) describes them as “Detainees Found to No Longer Meet the Definition of ‘Enemy Combatant’ during Combatant Status Review Tribunals Held at Guantánamo.” The other nine were not freed because, in all but one case, it was unsafe for them to be returned to their home countries, and, as a result, they were not released until 2006 and 2009, when third countries were found that were prepared to accept them.

This series also covers the stories of 33 others released between September 2004 and November 2005 who were not cleared for release after the CSRTs, but were released anyway, and readers will, I hope, be able to see how much of the decision-making process involved political maneuvering rather than anything to do with justice.

I also hope that readers will bear in the mind the Bush administration’s refusal to concede that it made any mistakes, which is apparent in its refusal to accept that prisoners were “not enemy combatants,” and its decision to described them as being “no longer enemy combatants” instead, and will reflect on the problems of overclassification 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.

WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released After the Tribunals, 2004 to 2005 (Part Four of Five)

Adel Al Zamel (ISN 568, Kuwait) Released November 2005

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Adel al-Zamel, who was 38 years old at the time, was one of at least 15 prisoners seized in house raids in Karachi that led to the capture of Abdu Ali Sharqawi (ISN 1457, aka Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, and also known as Riyadh the Facilitator), who was regarded by the US authorities as a significant figure in Al-Qaida, although it was by no means clear that those seized in the raids had any connection with Sharqawi, or, indeed, whether his role was overplayed by the US authorities.

In Guantánamo, al-Zamel told his tribunal that, in 2001, he became the manager of the Kabul office of the Saudi humanitarian aid charity Al-Wafa, and took his wife and their eight children to Afghanistan, unaware that the humanitarian charity was under suspicion for activities related to terrorism (although noticeably, these were never proved, despite numerous Al-Wafa members, and the organization’s director, being held at Guantánamo).

Al-Zamel also said that he gave up his job in August 2001 after a disagreement with a more senior figure, who, he felt, was arrogant and was squandering money that had been given in good faith for charitable purposes. He then moved his family to Pakistan in September, but returned to help the family of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith move to Pakistan as well. He added that he had met Abu Ghaith on a few occasions in Kuwait, but insisted that he did not know, until after 9/11, “when he appeared on TV,” that he was a spokesman for Al-Qaida. Speaking of his capture, he denied all knowledge that he was staying in a safe house, as alleged, and said that he had been there for 16 weeks awaiting the opportunity to return to Kuwait.

In Chapter 14, I explained that, speaking of his time in Bagram, al-Zamel said, in an interview after his release (in which he was identified as Adil al-Zamil), “While walking to the place of interrogation, the guards would continuously hit me on my head with sticks, and every time I denied their accusations during interrogations (of being tied to Al-Qaida) the guards would hit me even more, hold me high up and then fling me to the floor.” He added that he was hooded and “stripped naked in front of women officers while they clicked photos, laughing all the time,” was intimidated by interrogators placing a gun on the table during interrogations, and was “suspend[ed] with one hand tied to the ceiling during interrogations, making it almost impossible to either sit or stand straight.”

Speaking of his transfer to Cuba, al-Zamel said, “I call the journey to Guantánamo ‘the journey of death.’ I discreetly wished that the plane would fall to end the pain I felt.” He also explained that, in Guantánamo, he was a victim of a monstrous policy whereby medical treatment was dependant on cooperation with the interrogators.

He said he was beaten on the head with handcuffs, but was refused medical treatment for several weeks until his wound became infected. He also said that the guards “used to give me pills which I didn’t know what they were, I think they were drugs because I was sleeping almost all the time.”

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners in 2008, al-Zamel maintained that he had traveled to Afghanistan purely for humanitarian purposes. “A former employee of the Kuwaiti national housing authority,” he confirmed that he moved to Kabul in August 2000 to head a branch of what McClatchy described as the “the Wafa Humanitarian Works Organization,” left Afghanistan in January 2002, and was seized in Pakistan the next month. Refuting the US authorities’ unsubstantiated claims about Al-Wafa, he said that “his work was solely charitable, distributing food and overseeing small infrastructure projects,” and that he was “merely an employee.”

According to the US military, however, “he was a key organizer and co-founder of its offices in three Afghan cities,” and in his tribunal and review board the authorities claimed that he “had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks and knew at least two members of bin Laden’s inner circle,” although this seems particularly suspect, as there are counter-arguments that Al-Wafa and bin Laden did not see eye to eye. Nevertheless, McClatchy noted that, in his interview, he failed to mention Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, although, to be fair, that could be simply because of the negative connotations attached to Abu Ghaith’s name, if al-Zamel’s version of events as explained at Guantánamo was true.

Whatever the truth, the connection haunted him in Guantánamo. He said that, on arrival, when “he was still sore from being punched in the face and kicked in the gut for two and a half months while in US military custody in Afghanistan,” and was being examined by a doctor,  an interpreter “looked at him, grinned and whispered over and over: ‘Do you want to kill yourself? Do you want to kill yourself?’” He was then taken to interrogation, where a soldier “with a tattoo of a dragon stretching down his forearm shoved a piece of paper in Zamel’s face” which featured a simple diagram — the letters “UBL” (for Osama bin Laden, or Usama bin Laden as the US military called him), an arrow to Abu Ghaith, and another arrow to his own name.

A McClatchy reporter spoke to al-Zamel in Kuwait, describing him as “a small, thin man with dark rings under his eyes. When speaking with friends, he jokes often, flashing his teeth in wide grins, and he talks in energetic bursts. When he’s silent, when his face is still, he looks tired and old.” Speaking of Guantánamo, he stressed to the reporter, “You must understand, the psychological torture was much worse than physical torture,” and spoke about the solitary confinement (for a month) to which all new arrivals were subjected.

After the guards took him “to what looked like a small metal box,” he said, “The cell was hot. I couldn’t sleep at night. The pillow was soaked with my sweat. There was a small opening in the cell wall; I used to push my nose to it. I used the bathroom on the floor; there was nothing else to do.” He added, “I thought they were going to kill me, and then I thought they were going to leave me in there until I died. I was losing my mind. I started to think that one day they were going to open the door and let a lion in to eat me. The world was getting smaller and smaller.”

After his introductory month in solitary, he was taken to a regular cell, and “was interrogated every day after that for at least a month, pushed to confess his ties to Al-Qaida and to describe what he knew about bin Laden.” He told the reporter, “They asked me what I thought about the events of Sept. 11, and I did not reply. If I said I denounced those events, they would call me a liar. If I said I supported it, they would call me a terrorist.” When the interrogators “thought he wasn’t telling the truth,” he added, “he was sent back to solitary.”

He also said that, in his last year at Guantánamo, after the torture program had largely been brought to an end, following the arrival of lawyers after the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in June 2004, the interrogators nevertheless “began to threaten to send him to Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan or Morocco, where security agents would torture him in ways that he couldn’t imagine.” He said that he took the threats seriously, and that finally he cracked. “I told them, ‘I am Osama bin Laden. Please kill me,’” he said. “I just wanted it to end.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Zamel was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated April 17, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in August 1963, and the outline of his story — working for al-Wafa as an office manager, and then resigning and being caught in a house raid in Karachi — were repeated, along with a claim that he had been part of a group involved in an assault in Kuwait on a female student.

It was also stated that he was sent to Guantánamo on May 1, 2002, allegedly to “provide general-to-specific information on: Personalities and activities associated with upper echelons of the Al-Wafa organisation, Information about Al-Qaida and Taliban associated safe houses in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul,” described as “a known former diplomatic district taken over by the Taliban and Al-Qaida for quarters and training,” plus “information about the Takfir Al-Hijra movement, [a] Kuwaiti Islamist group who seeks a return to Islam as practiced at the time of Muhammad, [and who] have conducted vigilante activity against young Kuwaitis engaged in what they perceive as immoral behaviour.”

This was a seemingly impressive list of reasons for his transfer, although, 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 seeking to justify his detention, the Joint Task Force claimed that details of his timeline had been “conflicting and vague,” and also cited the concerns of the Kuwaiti Security Service (KSS), which, it was alleged, had reported that al-Zamel was a member of Takfir Al-Hijra, described as “an anti-Kuwait government group”), had claimed that Abu Ghaith had “close relationships with members of this group, specifically naming the detainee,” and had also stated that al-Zamel “was convicted and sentenced (in absentia) to one year in prison by the Kuwaiti government,” and was “considered to be a ‘Most Dangerous Extremist.’” If all this was true, it was a wonder that al-Zamel was freed on his return to Kuwait, and, along with the four other Kuwaiti prisoners released in November 2005, was acquitted by a Kuwaiti court in May 2006 of “charges that they collected money for Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network” and of fighting alongside the Taliban.

In Guantánamo, however, until diplomatic pressure was exerted on behalf of al-Zamel and the other four men, he would not have been released. He was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” as a result of the claims against him, and it was also noted that JTF GTMO regarded him as “a member of the Al-Qaida support network, an Islamic Extremist, and to have traveled to Afghanistan with the intent to evade capture.” It was also suggested that he moved his family and Abu Ghaith’s family to Pakistan prior to 9/11, suggesting he “had knowledge of the attacks prior to their execution,” and it was also stated, with the addition of the information reportedly from the Kuwaiti Security Service, that he had been determined to pose “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” As a result, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “retained under DoD control,” even though, in reporting his behavior, the Task Force failed to portray a man who was a threat.

After noting that his “overall behavior ha[d] been generally compliant and non-aggressive,” the Task Force stated that his “only aggressive incident occurred on December 31, 2003, when he kicked dirt and gravel at a military working dog and handler,” adding, “Every other action [he] has completed is minor passive aggressive.”

Sa’ad Al Azmi (ISN 571, Kuwait) Released November 2005

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Sa’ad al-Azmi, who was 22 years old at the time, was, like Adel al-Zamel (see above), one of at least 15 prisoners seized in house raids in Karachi that led to the capture of Abdu Ali Sharqawi (ISN 1457, aka Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, and also known as Riyadh the Facilitator), who was regarded by the US authorities as a significant figure in al-Qaeda (and was tortured, as a US judge explained in 2010), although it was by no means clear that those seized in the raids had any connection with Sharqawi, or, indeed, whether his role was overplayed by the US authorities.

In Guantánamo, al-Azmi said that he was a friend of Adel al-Zamel, and that he spent three weeks with him in Kabul, and then ended up with him in the Karachi house. “The people I was arrested with were civilians,” he said. “They were not wearing uniforms. I did not know anybody there except al-Zamel.”

In Chapter 15, drawing on an interview after his release (in which he was identified as Saad al-Anzi), he spoke about the abuse he suffered at Guantánamo. He stated that, during one interrogation, the guards beat him so hard that they broke his leg, and he also spoke about the abuse he suffered as part of the implementation of specific “enhanced interrogation techniques” between late 2002 and the summer of 2004, which included the exploitation of prisoners’ phobias, through the use of dogs in al-Azmi’s case, as he said he was bitten by dogs while being hooded.

He was also subjected to levels of treatment introduced under the watch of Maj. Gen. Miller, which were entirely dependent on the prisoners’ cooperation with the interrogators. The most compliant, in Level 1, kept all their “comfort items” and also received a bottle of water a week, and the levels were graded down to Level 4, which involved prolonged isolation, in which the supposedly uncooperative prisoners were held completely naked, or were allowed just a pair of shorts, and all other “comfort items” were removed. Sa’ad al-Azmi was one of those who experienced Level 4 deprivation when he was held naked for two months.

Al-Azmi also spoke about medical mistreatment at Guantánamo, saying that he was “sprayed by a mysterious ‘red solution’ causing a burning sensation to his skin,” and, in response to claims that female interrogators were “sexually provocative” as “a way to break down devout Muslims,” he “confirmed that those incidents occurred to him too during his interrogations at Guantánamo.”

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released Guantánamo prisoners in 2008, al-Azmi maintained that he was an innocent man, detained for no apparent reason, although the McClatchy team was clearly alarmed by the many holes in his story. For example, he told the reporter that he’d never been to Afghanistan, contradicting what he said in Guantánamo, and failed to mentioned Al-Wafa or his connection with Adel al-Zamel, claiming instead to have been seized in a hotel room in Peshawar “during a routine police check of guests’ passports” in August 2001.

While this section of his story did not make sense, given what is known of the circumstances of his capture, it is probable that what he told the reporter about his experiences in Pakistani and US custody was more accurate. In Karachi, he said, “he was put into a dimly lit cell with about two dozen other men,” and “they were taken out one by one to an interrogation room where two American men — one tall and thin, one short and stocky with glasses — sat behind a table” and “introduced themselves as CIA officers.” They asked him about Al-Qaida, refusing to believe his story about being a businessman.

Al-Azmi added that “he spent about a month in that jail and was interrogated three or four more times,” and was then flown to Kandahar, where after two weeks, in which “American troops punched, kicked and humiliated him,” he was flown to Bagram, where he was held for a month and a half, and was then flown back to Kandahar for about three months before being sent to Guantánamo.

In the Documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Azml was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated April 17, 2004, in which it was noted that he was born in May 1979, and the Task Force established a narrative based on a variety of “claims” he had apparently made: that “he worked for Al-Wafa in Kabul,” that “one month after the ’9/11′ attacks (approximately October 2001), he moved to Peshawar,” and that, “in December 2001,he went to Karachi, PK, and stayed with Aziz from the Al-Wafa Organization,” and was captured in Karachi in February 2002.

It was also stated that he was sent to Guantánamo on May 1, 2002, allegedly to “provide general-to-specific information on: Personalities involved with Takfir Al-Hijra, The Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul,” described as “a known former diplomatic district taken over by the Taliban and Al-Qaida for quarters and training,” The Al-Wafa Organization stationed in the Wazir Akhbar Khan Area of Kabul, The Sanabel Association for Relief and Development NGO located in Wazir Akbar Khan Area of Kabul, [and] Aziz (LNU) who provided Arabs fleeing Pakistan with a means to leave the country.”

In seeking to justify his detention, the Task Force assessed him as “a member of Al-Qaida who has traveled extensively in the West, including travels to countries such as Switzerland, Germany and Bosnia,” although, with the exception of Bosnia, these claims seem more to mark him out as a Kuwaiti from a reasonably well-off family than as some sort of Al-Qaida scout, and Bosnia, of course, was a prime destination for the support of the Muslim population during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s.

It was also reported that, like Adel al-Zamel, he was involved with Takfir Al-Hijra, an extremist group that had attacked a female student in Kuwait, and that he was “wanted by the Kuwaiti government for crimes he committed while affiliated with several terrorist groups,” which was very vague. It was also stated, again in a very vague manner, that he “likely ha[d] knowledge of the Sanabel Association for Relief and Development NGO,” which was regarded as a front for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an organization opposed to the rule of Col. Gaddafi in Libya. The LIFG was also regarded by US authorities as being intimately involved with Al-Qaida, although that remains largely disputed.

As a result of the claims against him, al-Azmi was assessed as being “of high intelligence value,” and as “a member of Al-Qaida and/or its worldwide network,” who had “numerous close associations with known members of Al-Qaida or Al-Qaida associated organizations,” and “may have connections with European-based Al-Qaida members,” including an alleged “Spanish Cell” that later came to nothing when subjected to scrutiny. It was also assessed that his “travels to Bosnia were likely to obtain military training and participate in Jihad,” and as it was also claimed that he was “part of a large Al-Qaida contingent in Pakistan at the time of his capture, where he was living in an Al-Qaida safehouse with a key Al-Qaida facilitator,” and that he was a convicted Islamic extremist with known terrorist associations in Kuwait and he remains committed to Jihad.” As he was also allegedly “still wanted by the Kuwaiti movement for crimes he committed under Kuwaiti law,” the Task Force assessed him as “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and its allies,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.”

It was, however, noticeable that the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed, although, “in the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders,” CITF was obliged to “defer to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] poses a high risk.” Even so, on his return to Kuwait, he, along with the four other Kuwaiti prisoners released in November 2005, was acquitted by a Kuwaiti court in May 2006 of “charges that they collected money for Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaida network” and of fighting alongside the Taliban.

Saeed Abdur Rahman (ISN 581, Pakistan) Released March 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Saeed Abdur Rahman is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One),” I explained how Saeed Abdur Rahman, who was 36 years old at the time of his capture, was, as I described it, an “unfortunate victim of Pakistani zeal (or opportunism).” In Guantánamo (where, absurdly, he was identified as Shed Abdur Rahman), he said that he was at home in his village, scraping a living as a poor chicken farmer, when the police raided his house in January 2002, arresting him and telling him that he could not bribe his way to freedom.

Delivered to the Americans, he was accused of being Abdur Rahman Zahid, one of the Taliban’s deputy ministers of foreign affairs, and was later accused of having been a Taliban military judge and a prison guard in Kandahar, who “tortured, maimed and murdered” Afghan prisoners, even though Rahman said that, after he was handed over to the US forces, “An American told me I was wrongfully taken and that in a couple of days I’d be freed.”

What made these allegations all the more incomprehensible was that, in December 2001, Mullah Khaksar, a former Taliban minister who had actually been working as a spy for the Northern Alliance since 1997, said that Abdur Rahman Zahid “had deliberately created the impression that he entered Pakistan, but had in fact returned to his home village in Logar province.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 30, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Mollah Shed Abdul Rehman, born in 1965, it was also noted that, as well as being diagnosed with latent tuberculosis (in common with many of the prisoners), he had also been diagnosed with “Chronic Acute Hepatitis B,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force first acknowledged that he had been identified as an Afghan, but that a request had been sent to the relevant department to change his nationality to Pakistani, and then ran through the sad account of his capture, noting that he was “arrested by Pakistani authorities while in his home in the fall of 2001,” when he “was arrested and charged with the theft of antiquities even though [he] state[d] that they had no proof.” After being imprisoned in Quetta for 36 days, he was, by his own account, then “sold” to the US authorities in Kandahar.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 17, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because of his knowledge of the Sorkhab refugee camp, and information on fighting with the Mujahideen forces against the Russians.” These alleged reasons for his transfer expose clearly how desperate were the attempts to make sense of the process of sending prisoners to be the victims of an experimental offshore interrogation camp, when the very fact of detention — and some crazed ideas about creating a global “mosaic” of intelligence, no matter how small and seemingly irrelevant the components — was much more significant than whether there was any rational basis for the exploitation of the prisoners.

In his letters home, it was noted that he “wanted his family to keep up the chicken farm and to inquire about his ‘amanita’ which is translated as something precious or valuable that is given to someone else for safekeeping.” The confusion regarding his identity was also raised, with the Task Force noting that a name “very similar to the detainee’s” (Abdul Rehman, which is a very common name indeed) “was found in sensitive reporting identifying Taliban plans to send 39 individuals to Russia and countries of the Former Soviet Union to carry out unspecified terrorist acts.” Refusing to acknowledge that there was no reason to link this individual to the chicken farmer in their custody, the Task Force added, “There was a passport number associated with the document, however the US does not have a copy of detainee’s passport to match the passport numbers.”

In conclusion, the Task Force stated, “Based on current information, detainee [581] is assessed as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee is of low intelligence value to the United States. Based on the above, detainee pose a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Karama Khamisan (ISN 586, Yemen) Released August 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Karama Khamisan is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the extraordinary story of how Karama Khamisan (also identified as Karam Khamis Sayd Khamsan), a former Yemeni soldier who went to Afghanistan as part of a drug smuggling ring, and was held as a human guarantor until the deal was completed. was seized at the same time as two other men who also ended up at Guantánamo — Brahim Benchekroun, a Moroccan (see “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Seven of Ten)“), who said after his release that he was “rounded up by the Pakistani security forces at the end of 2001″ near Lahore, “at the time of the first round-ups of Arabs in the Koranic schools,” and Ahmed Errachidi (ISN 590, released in March 2007), a Moroccan chef, who had been living in the UK for 18 years, and who was seized in Islamabad, where he had been working in a jewelry store after visiting Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid to those affected by the US-led invasion. Khamisan explained that, following the US-led invasion, the drug dealers fled, leaving him near the border with Pakistan, where he was captured by Pakistani villagers.

Benchekroun described what happened to the three men once they were in Pakistani custody. “We were looking through the makeshift blindfolds that the Pakistanis had put on us,” he said, adding that Errachidi spoke English and was following the negotiations, when “people showed up with black suitcases and started bargaining with the Pakistanis over the price for handing us over.” When they agreed on a price of $5,000 a head, Benchekroun explained, they all applauded. He also said that Khamisan was singled out for unusual treatment: “The Pakistanis made him grow a beard and learn to pray. I taught him the basics about washing myself. We didn’t understand that it was so that they could sell him to the Americans, too.”

In Chapter 14, drawing on an interview conducted after his release (in “Guantánamo: Lives Torn Apart — The Impact of indefinite detention on detainees and their families,” an Amnesty International report from February 2006), I explained how Khamisan had a tough time in the US prison at Bagram airbase. Kicked and beaten while hooded, stripped naked and beaten with batons, he was then transferred to Kandahar, where he was “threatened with electric shocks,” and where, in a sign that Abu Ghraib-style abuse was already being practiced, “he and a group of other detainees were stripped and piled on top of each other naked, whilst the US officials, in full military uniform, laughed at them and took photographs of the pile of naked bodies.”

In Chapter 15, I explained how Khamisan also suffered in Guantánamo, ending up in isolation after being sexually threatened. He explained that on one occasion he was “taken to the shower room where guards attempted to sexually abuse him. As he pushed them away, ten guards entered the room and beat him before transferring him to a solitary cell where he was held for 25 days, naked. He said that he was only taken to use the toilet and shower once in this entire period and that he ate no solid food in order to avoid having to defecate in his cell.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Khamisan was an “Update of Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated December 6, 2003, in which it was noted that he was born in 1970, and had been diagnosed with latent tuberculosis (along with many other prisoners), and had been “treated for Gum Disease,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

The information about the circumstances of his detention were not included with this document (they were “Same as previously stated” in an earlier assessment), but reasons for his continued detention were given, including a far-fetched sounding claim that he was “a criminal who was jailed in Yemen for attempting to kill the governor of his province, which he stated he did ‘just for the heck of it.’” He also claimed he “escaped prison while being transferred to a minimum-security facility, and he may still be wanted in Yemen for this crime.”

It was also claimed that he “was asked a series of questions concerning his attitude toward the US during which [he] stated that he speculated that Osama bin Laden attacked the US because the US was killing Palestinians,” which he further explained by stating that Israel and the US were “exactly the same,” and adding that “any Arab would say the same thing abut the relationship between Israel and the US.” The oppression of the Palestinian people was indeed a major motivation behind bin Laden’s jihad against the US (along with the presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia), but it was inadvisable to say that in Guantánamo, or, I suspect, to criticise Israel either.

Nevertheless, although he was described, unconvincingly, as someone who “continues to express his commitment to Jihad during interrogations” (as he was not in Afghanistan for jihad), it was clear that, as he said, he was a member — whether willingly or not — of a drug-dealing group, which made the Task Force’s claim that his associate, “Mohammed,” had been “identified through reporting as being a supporter of the Taliban” rather dubious, despite the further information that “Mohammed and his criminal group ha[d] reportedly provided transportation, equipment and funding for the Taliban, who in turn protected him and supported his narcotics business.”

However, the most alarming part of the document relating to Khamisan was the reference to an allegation against him that was taken seriously by the authorities, even though, to skeptical eyes, it was nonsense, made by Yasim Basardah (ISN 252), a Yemeni known as the most notorious liar in Guantánamo, who told interrogators that Khamisan was “a trainee at the Al-Farouq training camp and part of an Arab group fighting the Northern Alliance where his alias was ‘The Murderer.’” As was conceded, however, “After further investigation it has been determined that this was a misidentification [a polite term for an outrageous lie] and in fact the detainee is known as ‘Karama the Hashish dealer,’ which substantiates other reporting concerning this detainee and some of [his] statements.”

In conclusion, he was “assessed as not being a member of Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader,” although he was also assessed as being “of intelligence value to the United States, and of posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and, as a result of Basardah’s allegations being discredited, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

On his return from Guantánamo, as the human rights NGO Al-Karama for Human Rights explained in April 2009, Khamisan (identified as Karama Khamis Said Khamisan) was held incommunicado for several months before being acquitted by the State Security court, on March 13, 2006, “on charges of trafficking narcotic.” An appeal was dismissed on April 30, 2006, and he was freed on May 10.

Al-Karama noted that he suffered from “a serious stomach ulcer that he contracted as a result of the torture he had suffered at Guantánamo,” for which he received medical treatment, but also explained that, on March 16, 2009, almost three years to the day after his acquittal, he disappeared while making his usual visit to his doctor. As Al-Karama also stated, “His family remained without news of him for over a week. Finally they learned that he was arrested while leaving a mosque by an officer of political security services and taken to its headquarters at Al-Ghaida in Al-Mahra governorate. Having found out this information, his family was able to receive confirmation of his detention and was even allowed to visit him. They later learned that no case had been filed against him. Since this single visit and despite many attempts by his family, the security policy refuse give any further concerning his future, to the point that he is now completely cut off from the outside world.”

Al-Karama appealed to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, asking it to urgently intervene with the Yemeni authorities, and Khamisan was finally freed August 16, 2009, after five months in secret detention. “Throughout this whole period,” as Al-Karama noted, “he was never brought before a judge nor were any charges brought against him.”

Khalid Al Asmar (ISN 589, Jordan) Released July 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Khalid al-Asmar is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the story of Khalid al-Asmar, who was 38 yeas old at the time of his capture, drawing on statements he made in Guantánamo (where he was described as Khalid al-Asmr), and in “Abandoned to their fate in Guantánamo,” an article by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, for Index on Censorship in 2005, based on interviews with former Jordanian prisoners after their release. The section on al-Asmar is cross-posted here.

Al-Asmar explained how he had been captured by the Pakistani police. A former mujahideen fighter against the Soviet Union, he married an Afghan woman, Fatima, whose parents and sister had been killed in a Soviet bombing raid in 1984, and moved to Pakistan, where he supported Fatima and their seven children by selling herbs and honey. In 2000, they returned to Afghanistan, settling in Kabul, which, at the time, was relatively safe, but when the war came to the city in November 2001 and US bombers planes destroyed a warehouse behind their home, they bundled the children into their white Toyota Corolla and set off for Pakistan once more.

Unfortunately, the US military associated white Toyotas with the Taliban, and, on the way to Pakistan, they were targeted twice by US bombers, narrowly avoiding death on both occasions when the Americans’ rockets failed to hit their target. When they reached Islamabad, al-Asmar found work and also contacted a Libyan charity that arranged flights to Jordan, where his parents still lived, but the day before their proposed departure he called his wife to say that he had been detained by the Pakistani police, and told her to leave without him. “I wasn’t worried,” Fatima said, “because I knew Khalid had done nothing wrong,” but seven months later she heard that he was in Guantánamo. Acknowledging that her husband may have aroused suspicion because he fought with the mujahideen, she said that he saw the Taliban’s role as different to that of the mujahideen. “This was a war for power,” she said. “Khalid wanted nothing to do with it. He said it was not for God.”

In an interview for McClatchy Newspapers’ major report on 66 released  Guantánamo prisoners in 2008, in which he was identified as Khaled al-Asmr, he explained how, in the three and a half years he was held in US custody, he persistently “told American interrogators that he hadn’t known bin Laden in the 1980s, when both of them were in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet army.” In his tribunal, he said, “The interrogators, every time they ask me, ‘Have you met Osama bin Laden?’ my response is that I’ve never met Osama bin Laden. What I told them is that I have seen Osama bin Laden from a distance for a period of maybe a few minutes.”

In his interview with McClatchy, however, he explained that he had, in fact, met bin Laden in the 1980s, and had “spent many hours chatting” with him, although he “didn’t remain in contact” with him afterwards. Primarily, at that time, he had worked with the “Services Office” (Maktab al-Khadamat), headed by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a mentor of bin Laden, who was assassinated in mysterious circumstances in November 1989. In some ways, Assam’s organisation was the precursor to al-Qaeda (literally, “the base”), but it was dedicated to tracking, recording and providing money for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and was not, as Al-Qaida’s “base” of contacts later became, an organization dedicated to terrorist attacks on the US and its interests. Al-Asmar admitted knowing Abdullah Azzam, but “said his relationship with Azzam had been indirect, that he’d worked with Azzam’s wife in an offshoot group.”

In Guantánamo, he was also accused of working for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, tarred as a front for terrorism, despite being a vast charity involved in important humanitarian operations around the world. He “denied that he was a member of Al-Haramain, but said that he dealt with the group occasionally through his food-trading business.”

In his interview with McClatchy, however, he reportedly “admitted to a long-standing relationship with Al-Hamarain and Azzam,” and told the reporter that, although he knew nothing about Al-Qaida’s operations, “he could have provided a thorough sketch of bin Laden and those around him,” which, McClatchy editorialized, was “possibly crucial information that might have helped the Americans better understand the terrorist mastermind in the early days of 2002.”

As it was, the Americans’ treatment of him meant that cooperation was out of the question. Describing his trip from Pakistan to Bagram he said that he and others picked up in Islamabad “sat on the ground of an airstrip, shackled, with hoods over their heads, and listened as someone walked passed them and counted out loud the number of prisoners. When the counting stopped, a man speaking English with an American accent said to the Pakistanis, ‘You’ve got seven of them here. We’ll give you $5,000 for each one.’”

He added, “Then they (US soldiers) started hitting and kicking me. They lifted me up to take me to the plane, still hitting me in the back and hitting me on my face, saying, ‘Taliban, huh?’” As a result, he said, “he decided to tell the Americans as little as possible,” although the reporter added, “It’s hard to know whether he’d have spoken more freely had he been treated better.”

After three weeks at Bagram, he was sent to the US prison at Kandahar airport, where he stayed for about three and a half months, and “faced harassment,” including “alleged fondling of his sex organs, which he said unsettled him more than rough treatment did.” As he explained, “Once they said, ‘We will conduct a medical checkup.’ They took me to a clinic, but instead of doing a checkup, a female soldier played with my sexual organs. When she was doing this, I prayed to God to help me, and my penis did not move.” He said the soldier in question “had brown hair and looked to be in her 40s,” and “didn’t do anything else during the exam but stroke his penis, wearing latex gloves.” He added, “There were male soldiers watching it happen. They were laughing and making jokes.” After this, he said, he was taken to interrogation. The interrogator “didn’t mention the episode in the clinic, Asmr said, but grinned, asked how his day was going and wondered aloud whether he might be ready to talk.” “No,” was his reply.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to al-Asmar was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated March 6, 2004, in which he was identified as Khalid al-Asmr or Khalid al-Asmr Wahad, born in December 1963. In running through his story, the Task Force stated that in 1985 he traveled to Pakistan to work with the vast missionary organisation Jamaat al-Tablighi, which, outrageously, the authorities at Guantánamo claimed was a front for terrorism, and confirmed that he then worked with Sheikh Abdullah Azzam coordinating aid to various groups involved with the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (who was funded by the US in the 1980s, but is now an implacable enemy of the US). Despite his evasiveness, the Task Force also recognized that, “In late 1987/early 1988, [he] met UBL [bin Laden] in the company of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.”

Moving to the events preceding his capture, it was noted that, in June 2000, he traveled to Kabul, where he was “an ‘unofficial’ employee of Al-Haramayn Islamic Foundation” (aka Al-Haramain), which, despite being a huge charity with a global reach, was described as “a Tier 1 NGO; which is defined as having demonstrated sustained and active support for terrorist organizations willing to attack US persons or interests, according to the Interagency Intelligence Committee on Terrorism CounterTerrorism Tiers, dated 10 December 2003.”

In late September 2001, he and his family fled to Peshawar, and “applied to the Qadafi Foundation [aka the Gaddafi Foundation] for assistance in returning home,” but “was arrested by Pakistani police in Islamabad, PK, and was subsequently turned over to US Forces.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 13, 2002, on the spurious basis that he “may be able to provide general or specific information on: Maktib Al-Kadmat [aka  Maktab al-Khadamat, Abdullah Azzam's "Services Office" for mujahideen in Afghanistan] and Al-Haramayn, [and the] Al-Khadafi Committee for Repatriation [aka the Gaddafi Foundation].”

In its assessment, the Task Force was deeply suspicious of his connections, noting that “he denie[d] having belonged to Al-Qaida or any other terrorist organization irrespective of the fact that JT [Jamaat al-Tablighi] and Al-Haramayn have been associated with Al-Qaida (which was not necessarily true, of course), and also drawing on a claim that he “spent a number of years associating with such individuals as Azzam and UBL,” which was true with reference to Azzam, but not bin Laden, and which, in addition, completely overlooks the fact that, in the 1980s in Afghanistan, he (and Azzam and bin Laden) were allies of the US (whether financially supported or not) and not enemies.

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 allies and interests,”  in particular because his connections suggested to the US authorities that he had “more ties to Al-Qaida than he claim[ed],” even though he was extremely well-behaved in Guantánamo, and was described as being “on the best behaviour level and liv[ing] with detainees who [we]re equally cooperative and non-aggressive.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained in DoD control,” although it was noticeable that the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed with the Task Force’s assessment, because, “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 [he] poses a high risk.”

Padsha Wazir (ISN 631, Afghanistan) Released April 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Padsha Wazir is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six “Ghost Prisoners”,” I told the story of Padsha Wazir, a shopkeeper from a village near Khost, Wazir, who was married with three children and was 29 years old at the time of his capture. In Guantánamo, he told his tribunal that the allegations against him — that he was involved with the renegade warlord Pacha Khan Zadran in a military capacity, and that he was responsible for  “securing” a village for him — were a pack of lies. The baleful influence of Zadran (one of the most dubious US allies in the years following the US-led invasion) permeates many of the Afghan stories in Guantánamo, and Wazir was clearly another victim.

Wazir added that he had only ever seen Zadran “for five minutes and that was after the Taliban left and the Americans came. He was with the Americans.” He explained that he was actually working with the local commander, Mohammed Yousef, helping to secure the area for the Americans, and also stated that he was arrested at a checkpoint, with his brother and two friends, while traveling to Miram Shah in Pakistan to see members of his family. He pointed out that, although the other three were released on the spot, the commander at the checkpoint (one of Zadran’s men), told lies about him to an American soldier after he refused to hand over his gun, for which he had a permit, which led to his capture and transfer to Guantánamo.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Wazir was an “Updated Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated November 22, 2003, in which he was identified as Bacha Wazir, born in 1972. In this document, the circumstances of his capture were not discussed, but the Task Force was deeply suspicious abut him although not necessarily with any reason. It was claimed that he “ha[d] not been forthright in his interviews.” He “claims to be a ‘simple shopkeeper,’” the Task Force noted, but “[t]his claim remains unverified.” The Task Force also speculated that he “may have connections to various persons affiliated with the former Taliban regime,” and that he “may be a Mid to High-level Taliban supporter and may have facilitated hostile actions against US interests.” It was also stated that he “need[ed] to be fully exploited concerning his suspected involvement with the local HiG insurgent movement [Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, the organization headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar].”

As a result of these doubts, he was “assessed as being a probable Taliban leader however not a member of Al-Qaida,” and as being “of intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies.” Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “[r]etain[ed] under DoD control,” although it was noticeable that the Criminal Investigative Task Force did not agree with this assessment. On November 6, 2003, CITF “categorized [him] as a Low Threat,” but CITF’s Behavioral Sciences Consultation Team was asked to “reevaluate their threat assessment.” The result of this is not known, but 17 months later he was finally freed.

Mushtaq Ali Patel (ISN 649, France) Released March 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Mushtaq Ali Patel is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I told the story of Mushtaq Ali Patel, born in India but a French national through his marriage to a Creole woman from Réunion, who was 39 years old at the time of his capture. Patel explained at Guantánamo (where he was identified as Mustaq Ali Patel), and after his release in an article in Libération (translated for Cageprisoners) that, although his wife and child were living in France, he had been working in Iran, where he taught at an Islamic school and traded in clothes and jewelry.

After setting out for Pakistan, via Afghanistan, in October 2001, he was abducted, in the countryside near Herat, by three Afghans, including a policeman, who stole his passport and his money, beat him with their fists and with electric cables, and took him to a police station in Ghazni, where he was forced to say that he was a Saudi, born in Medina, and that his name was Haji Mohammed. After several months, he was taken to Kabul to “some kind of a house that was like a prison,” where he was sold to the Americans for $5,000. He said that the Americans threatened him with death “and to cause problems to my family,” and then transferred him to Bagram, where they had “very hard attitudes,” and Kandahar, where he was “badly mistreated, interrogated in bad ways.”

Alarmingly, Patel’s weight in Guantánamo was disturbingly low throughout his detention, as was apparent from the weight records released by the Pentagon in 2007, which I analysed for a short report for Cageprisoners in June 2009, entitled, “Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation” (introduction here, report here). In that report, I noted how he had been chronically underweight throughout his detention, weighing just 89 pounds on arrival, and dropping to 76 pounds in November 2002, which was more or less where his weight remained for an alarmingly long period of his imprisonment. In his Libération interview, it became apparent that he had been very ill at Guantánamo, as he explained:

I became sick at Guantánamo. They took me to the health clinic. I stayed in hospital for 4 to 5 months the first time. I had chest and throat problems, and headaches. They gave me medication. I don’t know what it was. I slept sometimes, but not all the time. I was in bed. I had one foot and one hand enchained. I never got out, ever. I wanted to leave, but they did not let me. I was anguished being restrained all the time. They forced me to take medication, pills. I said “no,” but they forced me. That was the hardest time at Guantánamo. Some of the medicines had an effect on my sleep, kept me from sleeping and created respiratory problems. I could have refused to take them, but it was difficult as they forced me to swallow them in front of them. Sometimes there was the same medication for everyone, and you had to swallow it immediately.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Patel was a “Recommendation [for] Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” dated March 27, 2004, in which he was identified as Mustaq Ali Patel and Mohammed Ibn Ismael al-Akram (as well as Mohammed Haji and Haji Muhammed), born in January 1961, and his health issues were described in depth. The Task Force noted that he had “multiple psychiatric diagnoses, including depression and schizotlpal personality disorder, but [wa]s otherwise in good physical health.” It was also noted that his medications included “synthroid, celexa, zprexa, zantac, a multivitamin, and simethicone.” The Task Force added, “Schizotypal personality disorder is often characterized as having a belief in clairvoyance or telepathy, the use of metaphorical speech, paranoid ideations, and severe mood disorders. It is likely a genetic relation to schizophrenia, but the two should not be confused with each other.”

Because of his severe mental health problems, he told different stories about himself. In one version, he “claimed he was born in Medina, Saudi Arabia and claimed to be an ‘orphan,’ only to acknowledge later that his parents [we]re citizens of India and currently alive,” that they lived in India, and “were previously employed as foreign laborers in Saudi Arabia,” where, “[b]ecause they are not Saudi, the Saudi government will not grant citizenship to a non-Arab, regardless of birthplace.” In another version (the true one), he said that he was born in Shepura, India,  and was a French citizen by marriage (on Réunion), which the French government confirmed.

Clearly bewildered by him, and unprepared for what to think when confronted by someone with such severe mental health issues, the Task Force noted that, during interrogation on March 23, 2004, he admitted that his stories about the orphanage, about living in Saudi Arabia, and about selling fruit were lies, and that he traveled to France when he was 22 or 23, sold radios for a living, “had $10,000 USD on his person when captured,” and had lived briefly in Germany and Turkey, but had been living in Mashad, Iran, for 15 years before his capture in Afghanistan.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 8, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was to “provide general-to-specific information on Taliban and Al-Qaida forces operating in Kunduz and Takhar provinces as well as various illegal activities taking place in Afghanistan.”

In assessing him, however, the Task Force described him, without mentioning any mitigating factors, as someone who had “never been cooperative or forthright during his detention” and had “not revealed his true name or any of his affiliations.” He was also described as “a possible Al-Qaida operative based on his circumstance of travels and his suspected affiliations.”

Assessed as being “of medium intelligence value,” he was also assessed as being “a high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its allies, and interests until his true identity is known.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “transferred to the control of another country for continued detention until his true name and extremist affiliations have been determined,” although it was also noted that the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed with JTF GTMO on the assessment of Patel as “a high risk,” which, presumably, helped lead to his release a year later.

Mamdouh Habib (ISN 661, Australia) Released January 2005

In Chapter 16 of The Guantánamo Files, drawing mainly on an article published after his release (and not on the unsubstantiated allegations for his tribunal at Guantánamo), I explained how Mamdouh Habib, who was 47 years old at the time of his capture, was one of several dozen prisoners at Guantánamo who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” and were transferred to other prisons for torture, before their transfer to Guantánamo.

Habib, seized in November 2001, was traveling on a bus from Quetta to Karachi when it was stopped by Pakistani soldiers. Plucked from his seat as a suspected militant, he was moved from jail to jail for three weeks, interrogated by US agents and “repeatedly tortured” by the Pakistani authorities.

Born in Egypt, he left at the age of 18, drifted to Europe and settled in Australia in 1980, where he became a citizen, married a Lebanese woman, had four children, and ran a cleaning business. He later opened a coffee shop in a suburb of Sydney, but became “chronically depressed” and ended up on a disability benefit. In summer 2001, seeking “a purer Islamic lifestyle,” he set off for Pakistan to look for work so that he could bring his family over to join him, but when he was captured it became apparent to the Americans that they had caught someone with a radical history.

Habib admitted that one of his reasons for leaving Australia was because he was “caught between police who suspected him of terror links and an often hostile Muslim community that was sometimes suspicious of his activities,” and these suspicions were triggered after a visit to the US, when he met followers of the Egyptian-born cleric, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. Also known as the “Blind Sheikh,” Abdel-Rahman was a major source of inspiration for Osama bin Laden, and was serving a life sentence for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to blow up several New York landmarks.

Habib’s troubles began when he stayed in touch with Abdul Rahman’s associates in New York on his return to Sydney, and spoke out in his defense, but although there was nothing in his activities to suggest that he was actually involved in any kind of terrorist activity, as soon as the Americans found out about his history they rendered him to Egypt. For six months, he was “suspended from hooks on the walls while his feet rested on a rotating metal drum that delivered electric shocks,” “kicked, punched, beaten with a stick and rammed with what can only be described as an electric cattle prod,” and handcuffed and left in a room that gradually filled with water until it was just beneath his chin. “Broken” by the Egyptians, he made a number of false confessions — in particular, that he “trained several of the September 11 hijackers in martial arts and had planned to hijack a plane himself” — which were then used against him after he was transferred to Guantánamo, via Afghanistan, in June 2002.

In Guantánamo, he continued to be treated brutally, and several prisoners reported his suffering. The British prisoners Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed (see “WikiLeaks and the Guantánamo Prisoners Released from 2002 to 2004 (Part Two of Ten)“) said that he was “in catastrophic shape, mental and physical,” and that, as a result of his torture, “he used to bleed from his nose, mouth and ears when he was asleep.” Habib also made allegations about his treatment in Guantánamo — in particular that he was “smeared with the menstrual blood of a prostitute” during an interrogation — and complained vociferously about being kept in solitary confinement in Camp Echo: “They use every possible [way] to make me crazy. They put me in isolation all the time. I never see the sun. I never have shower like a human being. I never have soap. I never have cup to drink. I never treated like a human being.”

Habib was also one of the many prisoners for whom it was made clear that medical treatment was dependent on cooperation, as he was told by medics that he would only be given treatment for the internal bleeding he suffered in Egypt if he cooperated with his interrogators.

Given this catalogue of abuse, and the allegations against him, it came as a surprise to everyone — including the Australian authorities — when he was released from Guantánamo in January 2005, and returned to Australia as a free man, but for those watching closely, it was engineered by the Bush administration in the hope that his story would then disappear, as it had been acutely embarrassing when details of Habib’s rendition and torture were included in a US court filing and exposed in the Washington Post on January 6, 2005, just three weeks before his release.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Habib was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” dated August 6, 2004, in which Habib, described as being born in June 1955, was diagnosed as having “a history of depression and behavioral disorders, benign prostatic hypertrophy, hungerstriking, and had a knee surgery performed.” It was also noted that he “carries the Hepatitis B virus.”

In telling Habib’s story, the Task Force described how he had served in the Egyptian army from 1975 to 1978, and then moved to Australia in 1980, where he initially lived with his sister. Other key events mentioned were his visit to New York in December 1992, to visit another two of his sisters, a brief visit to Afghanistan in 1999, and the last fateful journey in 2001, which allegedly involved him attending “a military training base,” where he stayed for “only 3 to 4 days,” before returning to Kandahar, where “he was told to leave because the US had began [sic] its bombing campaign.”

It was then noted that, when Pakistani forces seized him on a bus from Quetta to Karachi in October 2001, it was reportedly “with two Germans who were suspected Al-Qaida members from Hamburg, Germany” (about whom, to the best of my knowledge, nothing further has been heard, although they were identified as “Tier III personalities in the Hamburg 9/11 cell”). He was then “held at a Pakistan military base in Quetta, PK, and was subsequently transferred to Egyptian control” — a careful reference to his rendition to torture, which was followed up with the breezy-sounding statement that he “spent six months with Egyptian interrogators” before being transferred back to US custody.

He was sent to Guantánamo on May 5, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was because he “may be able to provide specific information on the students, staff, and curriculum of the Al-Qaida intelligence and operations course,” because “he may also be able to provide general information on key Al-Qaida support network figures with whom he had personal contact,” and because he “may be able to provide specific information on the support network of Lashkar-e-Tayiba in Kashmir.”

In seeking to justify his detention, the Task Force drew also on the details of his US visit in 192 and the lies about him training the 9/11 hijackers that were extracted under torture, claiming that he had been “linked to the 11 Sept 2001 hijackers, Al-Qaida, Lashkar-e-Tayiba of Pakistan, Al Gamma Al Islamia [Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya] of Australia, German 9/11 cell and conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,” and noting that he was “suspected of being a money courier and a terrorist operations facilitator, due to his extensive international travels.”

Analyzing Habib’s purported connection with terrorists in the US, the Task Force claimed that, as well as visiting in 1992, when he “allegedly befriended” Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, who was later convicted for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he had made a previous visit (or perhaps more than one). It was claimed, for example, that he attended the trial of the Egyptian-born US citizen El-Sayyid Nosair, for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane, but this took place in 1991.

El-Gabrowny was Nosair’s cousin, and the Task Force claimed that, in discussions with Habib, he told him “he desired to move away from the US,” and Habib suggested that he  move to Australia “because it was a quiet place to live for Muslims.” An analyst also noted that “Immigration records and external investigations show that [Habib] was also in New York during 1988/89.”

These alleged connections may not prove anything more than that Habib moved in circles where he met Egyptian-born US citizens while in America, as might be expected, but the US authorities were desperate to tie him to terrorism, claiming that, because he had a cleaning business involving the Australian military, which collapsed, leaving him in debt after a court case, that was a reason for him to have possibly been a courier or “financial operator” for Al-Qaida.

The most shocking information in Habib’s file, however, concerns the false statements that he made while being tortured in Egypt. As the Task Force explained, coyly:

While in the custody of the Egyptian Government, under extreme duress, [he] alleged that he made the following admissions of guilt, which he now denies:

• He trained six of the 9/11 hijackers in the use of martial arts
• He also taught them how to use a knife disguised as a cigarette lighter He was en route to hijack a Qantas flight with his friend Jamal (LNU)
• His friend Rakim (LNU) was going to conduct a simultaneous operation from Thailand
• He had information on his home computer to be used to poison an unidentified river in the United States
• He fought in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan

Habib “retracted all the above statements during an interrogation in Jan 2003. He claimed he lied to Egyptian authorities when he admitted to the above statements.”

Despite this, the US authorities (obviously drawing heavily on the co-operation of the Australian government) followed up on the fact that a member of a mosque in the town where Habib lived in Australia was arrested in connection with a terrorist plot (and another was “implicated’ in it), to throw further innuendo his way, claiming that these two men were connected to the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Tayiba, and that Habib was too. This was designed to appear significant, even though it was conceded that Habib had “a hostile relationship” with the mosque.

Another dubious claim came from one of Habib’s fellow prisoners at Guantánamo, Mohamedou Ould Slahi (ISN 760), who stated that he “ha[d] ‘strong knowledge’ of the Egyptian Islamic extremist group, Al-Gamma Al-Islamia [Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiyya] in Australia,” and an analyst noted, “Al-Gamma Al-Islamia has a strong following in Germany. This may explain why the detainee was captured with the two Germans, who also may be members of Al-Gamma Al-Islamia.” This was tenuous, to say the least, partly because it has not been established that Habib was with the two Germans whose whereabouts are unknown, other than being on the same bus as them, but also because Slahi is one of the most well-known torture victims at Guantánamo, whose testimony is therefore untrustworthy, and there is no evidence that he ever met Habib.

In conclusion, the Task Force described Habib as being “of high intelligence value,” and “a high risk,” and Brig. Gen. Hood recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.” However, in a recap of reasons he was regarded as threat, in which it was noted that there were “serious intelligence gaps” regarding his activities, the most telling phrase concerned the results of his interrogation and torture in Egypt, which prompted the Task Force to ask, “Was any of the information that he provided to the Egyptians valid?”

Since his release, Habib has campaigned against both the US and Australian governments for their roles in his detention, rendition and torture. He has undertaken numerous interviews, and also, with Julia Collingwood, wrote a book, My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, which was published in November 2008, and in February 2011, as the Mubarak regime fell in Egypt, and, briefly, it looked as if Omar Suleiman would take over, Habib told the Australian (as I reported here) that this would be unforgivable because, after he was rendered to Egypt, “Mr. Suleiman helped torture him.”

The Australian also explained that, in his book, Habib “wrote that Mr. Suleiman had often been present during his interrogations,” and also noted:

“I was sitting in a chair, hooded, with my hands handcuffed behind my back. He came up to me. His voice was deep and rough. He spoke to me in Egyptian and English,” Mr. Habib writes. “He said, ‘Listen, you don’t know who I am, but I am the one who has your life in his hands’.”

Mr. Habib writes that Mr. Suleiman had told him that he wanted him to die a slow death: “No, I don’t want you to die now. I want you to die slowly. I can’t stay with you; my time is too valuable to stay here. You only have me to save you. I’m your saviour. You have to tell me everything if you want to be saved. What do you say?”

When Mr. Habib said he had nothing to tell him, he says Mr. Suleiman had said: “You think I can’t destroy you just like that?”

They had taken Mr. Habib to another room and then Mr. Suleiman had said: “Now you are going to tell me that you planned a terrorist attack. I give you my word you will be a rich man if you tell me you have been planning attacks. Don’t you trust me?” Mr. Habib had replied that he did not trust anyone. “Immediately he slapped me hard across the face and knocked off the blindfold; I clearly saw his face,” Mr. Habib writes.

Mr. Habib alleges Mr. Suleiman said: “That’s it. That’s it. I don’t want to see this man again until he co-operates and tells me he’s been planning a terrorist attack.”

Mohammed Anwarkurd (ISN 676, Iran) Released August 2005

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (11) – The Last of the Afghans (Part One) and Six “Ghost Prisoners”,” I explained how Mohammed Anwarkurd, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, said in Guantánamo (where he was identified as Mohamed Anwar Kurd) that he went to Afghanistan on a shopping expedition. He said that he had gone to buy electronic equipment for his brother, because it was cheaper than in Iran and could be sold for a profit, but was seized by the Taliban, who stole his money and conscripted him. He added that he “did not want to tell them that he was from Iran as he had heard that they killed Iranian diplomats.” Presumably captured by anti-Taliban forces at a later date, he was accused of traveling to Afghanistan to buy a pistol to kill three people who had destroyed his mosque, or, alternately, of planning to assassinate two key Shia leaders in Zahedan, his home city.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated April 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Mohammed Anwar Kurd, born in 1979, it was also stated that, as well as having latent tuberculosis, in common with many of the prisoners, he had also been diagnosed with h. pylori (the bacteria responsible for most ulcers and many cases of stomach inflammation) and “adjustment disorder,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Joint Task Force drew on his own accounts of his activities, essentially covering the same ground that was later covered his tribunal: that he had traveled to Afghanistan, via Pakistan, to “purchase electronic devices for his brother’s electrical store in Zahedan, Iran,” ending up in Spin Boldak, where he traveled to “inspect some heavy machinery,” and that, as he tried to return, he was stopped by Taliban soldiers, who “asked for his identification card.” He said he “did not possess an identification card and claimed that he was from Nimroz, Afghanistan, because of an incident that occurred with ten Iranian diplomats who were accused of espionage and were summarily executed.”

The Taliban, he said, then conscripted him into service, “because they believed him to be an Afghan citizen.” As training, he reported that he “observed one Kalishnakov [sic] assault rifle and approximately six RPGs.” He was then taken, via a Taliban base in Kandahar, to Talogan, in Takhar province, where, he said, “the majority of the conscripts were taken to the frontlines to fight against Massoud’s forces” (the forces of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, assassinated on September 9, 2001), although Anwarkurd “convinced the Taliban leaders at the guesthouse that he was unfit for the frontlines.” He added that he “spent approximately two months at the guesthouse before the Taliban fled to Kunduz to regroup when Mazar-e-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance,” when he “and the other inhabitants of the guesthouse traveled to a military base in Kunduz,” and, soon after, surrendered to General Dostum, a prominent Northern Alliance commander. As a result, he was probably part of “the convoy of death,” when many prisoners (probably numbering in the thousands) died en route to Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan while being transported in containers, although this was not mentioned by the Task Force.

He was sent to Guantánamo on June 12, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of Taliban safe houses in Kabul and Takhar, 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 [676] 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. Geoffrey Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government.”

Hammad Gadallah (ISN 712, Sudan) Released July 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Hammad Gadallah is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files” (describing the 14 files missing from the documents released by WikiLeaks in April), Hammad Gadallah (whose full name is Hammad Ali Amno Gadallah and who was was 32 years old at the time of his capture) was one of five prisoners working for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), a Kuwait-based NGO, with branches around the world, who were seized in 2002 after the Pakistani and Afghan branches of RHS were blacklisted by the US government.

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how he told the most complete story of the organization’s activities, and obviously managed to impress upon the Americans that not everyone who worked for the charity was siphoning off money for al-Qaeda. Arrested at his home on May 27, 2002, by two Americans and representatives of Pakistani intelligence and the police, he explained that he had been working for the Central Bank in Sudan, when his brother, who worked for a bank in Bangladesh, told him that the RIHS in Peshawar had a vacancy for an accountant. He took leave from his job to investigate the organization in January 2001, and, after seeing that they were “all good people, with high standards, [who] love their work, and … perform their work faithfully,” and that there were “no problems with the accountancy programme,” he handed in his notice at the bank and began working for the RIHS in March.

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

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

Ibrahim Fauzee (ISN 730, Maldives) Released March 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Ibrahim Fauzee is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In a footnote to Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Ibrahim Fauzee, who was 23 years old at the time of his capture, was one of a number of prisoners seized in Pakistan, mostly in April and May 2002, and largely because they were working for Gulf-based charities that had come under suspicion for alleged links with terrorist funding, like Hammad Gadallah, above. Fauzee was a student of Islam, according to an account published by Cageprisoners, which explained more than the ludicrously thin set of allegations for Fauzee’s tribunal, in which it was mainly alleged that his telephone number was discovered in another suspect’s pocket, and was associated with “a Sudanese teacher who assisted Arabs traveling to training camps in Afghanistan.” According to the Cageprisoners account, Fauzee was living in a house in which one of the other occupants was reportedly the father of an Al-Qaida suspect. A witness reported that on May 19, 2002, US agents came to the house in Karachi, and arrested Fauzee and the other man, whose whereabouts are unknown.

In the documents released by WikiLeaks in April, the file relating to Ibrahim Fauzee was a “Reassessment of Recommendation to Retain in DoD Control,” dated November 11, 2003, in which he was identified as Ibrahim Fouwzy, born in November 1978, and it was stated that he had been diagnosed with asthma (and had been “given an albuterol inhaler”) and had also been “treated for strep throat,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

In telling his story, the Task Force partly reiterated the Cageprisoners account, but failed to reach the conclusion of Fauzee’s tribunal, which recognized that he was not an “enemy combatant.” The Task Force noted that Fauzee had stated that he had first traveled to Pakistan to studying 1995 (in Karachi), and that, in March 2000 he had “traveled to Maldives to wed his fiancee, and then returned with her to Karachi.” However, it is not clear from this account if it is meant to indicate that he had been living in Pakistan from 1995 to 2000.

Prior to his capture, however, the Task Force stated that he “lived in several apartments, and last resided in a home owned by Mohammed Afzal,” where, he said, he lived “for approximately 11 days before being arrested by the Pakistani police,” who “told him that he was arrested because of his knowledge and association with his landlord (Afzal).” He was then “taken to a police station and questioned,” and was “later taken to a military facility, and then returned to jail.” Soon after, he was transferred to US custody, even though he “stated he never learned why Afzal was arrested but opined that it may have had something to do with his work.”

It is not known what happened to Mohammed Afzal, as he was never transferred to Guantánamo, but Fauzee was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002. No reason was given for his transfer, but it was clear that his connection with Mohammed Afzal was the only significant thing about him, and it is therefore worth asking what happened to Afzal, and whether he was ever held in US custody. In providing reasons for Fauzee’s detention, the Task Force stated that he was “arrested by Pakistani authorities under suspicion of being an Al-Qaida member after a raid on his residence, that just missed a group of Al-Qaida members who had gathered at the home for a meeting.”

Without further information about Mohammed Afzai it is impossible to know whether there was any truth in this, or, indeed, if there was any truth in the additional claims that he was “a known Al-Qaida facilitator,” and was also “the person who sponsored the detainee at the madrassa [where he was studying, presumably] and whom [sic] was allowing the detainee to live in an apartment attached to his home.”

Ramping up his purported significance, the Task Force added that Fauzee had “traveled extensively in spite of his limited income and ha[d] failed to explain adequately the source(s) of the funds he used for travel.” The Task Force also claimed that the madrassa was “fundamentalist” and that it was “administered” by Mohammed Afzai, but this serves only to make me think that Afzai’s role may have been overplayed, and that Fauzee might have been nothing more than a student paying board and lodging in the apartment next to Afzai’s house, which he rented out.

Nevertheless, the Task Force noted that he was “suspected of being an Al-Qaida recruit and courier, however the complete extent of his association within the organization is not completely known because of his refusals to be forthright.” As a result, he was assessed as posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests, and its allies,” and it was noted that he “require[d] further exploitation … before being submitted for further transfer consideration.” Maj. Gen. Miller therefore recommended that he be “retained under DoD control,” although the Criminal Investigative Task Force disagreed, as it was noted that, “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 [Fauzee] pose[d] a medium threat.” However, it took another 16 months for a military tribunal to agree with CITF that he was not a threat, and for Fauzee to finally be freed.

In the classified US diplomatic cables secured by WikILeaks (and in the full version recently made available), Maldivian Permanent Secretary Ahmed Shaheed first asked the US to “share any intelligence it had gained from Fauzee” on November 5, 2002, as Minivan News reported. “Shaheed specifically asked for any information on ties Fauzee may have with other Maldivian nationals,” the cable read. “In this regard, Shaheed also requested that the Maldivian government be permitted to conduct its own intelligence interview of Fauzee.”

On November 23, 2002, Shaheed wrote to US officials requesting Fauzee’s release, but he was not, of course, freed for another 28 months. In August 2003, Maldivian government officials were allowed to visit Fauzee, although they found him to be “an unlikely threat,” and after “further investigation,” requested his release again, on November 5, 2003.

Another request was made on May 11, 2004, and in a cable dated July 20, 2004, as Haveeru Online stated, Maldivian Deputy Foreign Minister Hussein Shihab assured the then US Ambassador Jeffrey Lunstead that “a travel ban would be imposed on Ibrahim Fauzy” (as he was identified), because “the Maldives understood the need to clear up the detainee’s story.”

It was also stated that “Shihab told Lunstead, who ‘had concerns about some aspects of the detainee’s history,’ that the Maldives government would place Fauzy under close surveillance and would put him on a watch list to ensure that he could not leave the country. Shihab was quoted in the diplomatic memo … as saying that the measures would be ‘effective in preventing him [Fauzy] from traveling’ unless ‘he is very good at rowing.’”

By the end of 2004, the US government finally “agreed to return Fauzee to the Maldives under certain conditions,” as Minivan News explained. A cable dated December 13, 2004 “showed the Maldivian Foreign Ministry was interested in cooperating with these conditions, which included humane treatment upon release.”

Qalandar Shah (ISN 812, Afghanistan) Released April 2005

Of the 13 prisoners profiled in this article, Qalandar Shah is one of eight included in the 38 prisoners officially declared to be “no longer enemy combatants” after their Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how, between April and December 2002, at least 50 Afghans were sent to Guantánamo from Bagram, and how, in his book The Interrogators, Chris Mackey (the pseudonym of a former senior interrogator in Afghanistan) reported that the screening for Afghan prisoners was made more flexible in June 2002, when, instead of sending every single prisoner in their custody to Guantánamo (as stipulated by those directing operations from Camp Doha in Kuwait), the prison’s commanders finally worked out how to release “worthless prisoners back to their farms and families.” The process involved creating a new category of prisoner — “persons under US control” — who could be held for 14 days without being assigned a number that entered the system overseen by the overall commanders in Kuwait and the Pentagon, because once a prisoner was officially assigned a number, it was almost impossible for the interrogators to let them go.

One of the 50, whose story only demonstrates that, even with these changes, many Afghans were still pointlessly sent to Guantánamo, was Qalander Shah, who was 28 years old at the time of his capture, when he was seized in a house raid in Bermel, in Paktika province, along with his uncle and a cousin. Accused of having a weapons cache and a false Pakistani ID card, he explained that the weapons were for protection and that he had the false ID because “the Taliban were running the government and we were in conflict with them.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated August 30, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Khan Shah Qalandar, born in 1973, the Task Force provided a more detailed explanation of his story, in which the key elements remained the same. Shah, described as a veterinarian for the Dutch Committee for Afghanistan from 1993 to 1996, and a self-employed teacher from 1996 to 2000, teaching Pashtu, English, math and painting, stated that he also supported his family “through construction, tailoring, and farming his land.”

Speaking about the circumstances of his capture, he “stated that he was asleep when Americans raided the compound where he and his family lived.” He was seized with his uncle, Pacha Gul, and his cousin, Abdul Adin. Providing further information, he “stated that he was awoken by gunfire and he later learned that as the Americans approached they were shot at by unknown persons and those people fled the compound.” He added that “he had nothing to fear from the Americans so when he was told to surrender, he did so.” It was also noted that he admitted that the area he lived in was “known to have been an egress route for Taliban and Al-Qaida fighters fleeing into Pakistan,” but obviously had nothing to do with either the Taliban or Al-Qaida, and, although weapons were found in the compound, he said he knew nothing about them. He was sent to Guantánamo on October 28, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his suspected involvement with subversive elements.”

In conclusion, the Joint Task Force assessed him “as being neither affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee is of low intelligence value to the United States. Based on the above, detainee poses a low threat to the US, however because of his subversive activities and affiliations in Afghanistan, he is assessed to pose a medium threat to the Afghan government.” As a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.” 20 months later, he was finally freed.

Richard Belmar (ISN 817, UK) Released January 2005

In Chapter 12 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained, drawing on information from Guantánamo, and in an article published after his release (“Beatings, sex abuse and torture: how MI5 left me to rot in US jail,” by David Rose, in the Observer), how Richard Belmar, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, was born and brought up in Marylebone, in central London. After training as a mechanic, he worked for the Post Office, and converted to Islam in 1999. In July 2001, after spending some time in Pakistan, he traveled to Afghanistan to study at a religious school in Kandahar.

Trapped in the city after the US-led invasion began, he made several unsuccessful attempts to leave the country — on one occasion wearing a burka, but still failing to escape because the driver of his car thought that it was too dangerous — before managing to cross the border in December 2001 by walking across the mountains. “I didn’t want to be part of any war,” he said. “I wanted to get out. I was seeing people who’d been bombed, pieces of them everywhere.” In Karachi, he stayed in a hotel for a while, but was running out of money and had lost his passport, and was afraid of contacting the British consulate because he knew that “anyone who had been in Afghanistan was at risk of arrest.” He then met an Arab who “promised to sort me out,” and arranged for him to stay in “a large house,” where he was captured.

He was then taken to the ISI headquarters in Karachi (the HQ of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s largest intelligence service), along with the other prisoners, where he was interviewed by American intelligence operatives, whose superiors, finding his story credible, recommended his repatriation to the UK and asked MI5 to send some agents to see if they wanted to recruit him. Turned down by MI5, for reasons that were never explained, he was sent to Bagram instead.

In Chapter 14, I explained how Belmar said that on the plane to Bagram he received a huge blow to the back of his head from a rifle butt, which gave him headaches “for a long, long time,” and how, in Bagram, where he spent more than six months and was interrogated repeatedly, he was sexually taunted by a woman interrogator, who fondled his genitals. “I told her she was ugly, cheap and I spat in her face,” he said. “There were two guys in the room and I was shackled. They got me on the floor and started kicking me up, in the back, in the stomach, they gave me a real beating.”

In another interrogation, a pistol was forced into his mouth: “It tasted cold, bitter. I thought, ‘Yeah, this is getting serious, there’s a good chance they will pull the trigger.’” Eventually, he said, he gave the interrogators the confession they wanted, even though it was all lies. He told them he had listened to Osama bin Laden making a speech, but pointed out after his release, “How could I have done that? I didn’t know a word of Arabic,” and added that the interrogators “tried to make me confess to being at a training camp in 1998 — when I never left Britain, and wasn’t even a Muslim.”

In the documents released by WikiLeaks, the file relating to Belmar was a “Recommendation to Retain Under DoD Control,” dated November 15, 2003, in which his full name was given as Richard Dean Belmar, and it was noted that he was born in October 1979. The Joint Task Force claimed that Belmar and a friend had been arrested at Heathrow in June 2001 for “assaulting two individuals,” and then decided to go to Afghanistan rather than appear in court. A contact, Abu Mohammed, then apparently raised money for them to travel, and to attend the Al-Farouq training camp, where Belmar allegedly received basic training.

What happened to Belmar’s friend was not related, but after the 9/11 attacks, Belmar reportedly “traveled with Taliban forces throughout Afghanistan” and then, in November 2001, “fled Afghanistan after bribing a guard,” and traveling to Karachi, where he was seized three months later. He was sent to Guantánamo on October 28, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his knowledge of the Al-Farouq training camp, Al-Qaida safehouses in Kandahar, AF, Kabul, AF and Karachi, PK, of Al-Qaida recruiter Abu Mohammed, Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh and other Al-Qaida members.”

In seeking to justify Belmar’s detention, the Task Force claimed that he had sworn bayat (a pledge of loyalty) to Osama bin Laden, which seems highly unlikely, and that, for some reason, he had “unexploited information” about Ghassan al-Sharbi (ISN 682), a Saudi and a self-confessed al-Qaida member who was seized in Faisalabad, Pakistan, two months after Belmar was seized in Karachi. It was also claimed that he had “knowledge of Jaish-e-Mohammed [a Pakistani militant group] and how they aided Arabs in Afghanistan,” and, in a particularly weak claim, it was alleged that an alias attributed to him, Abdul Rahim (an exceedingly common name), had been “referenced by several detainees possibly indicating that [Belmar] played a more important role in Al-Qaida while traveling around Afghanistan.”

Belmar was “assessed as being a member of Al-Qaida,” and it was also stated that he was “of intelligence value to the United States,” and posed “a high risk to the US, its interests, or its allies.” In addition, it was noted that he had been identified as a candidate for a trial by Military Commission, and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained under DoD control.” However, 14 months later, and without being put forward for trial, he was freed, flown back to the UK, and released without charge.

Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Five 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, 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.

Guantánamo has become largely forgotten by those who should be alarmed at what its continued existence reveals about America’s humanity and sense of justice, but who, in all too many cases, are misled by their media and by the senior Bush administration officials who are still allowed to continue defending their dreadful policies and criminal activities in public, even though they should be held accountable for their part in implementing torture.

For Esquire this month, Tyler Cabot, an editor at the magazine, has profiled Noor Uthman Muhammed, otherwise known as Prisoner 707, a Sudanese prisoner who was subjected to a trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo in February this year, as I explained in my article, “Hiding Horrific Tales of Torture: Why The US Government Reached A Plea Deal with Guantánamo Prisoner Noor Uthman Muhammed.” The military jury in Muhammed’s case gave him a 14-year sentence, although he is only supposed to serve 34 months as the result of a plea deal, but such is the injustice at Guantánamo that it is by no means certain that he will actually be released.

Cabot’s connection to the case is through his father, Howard Cabot, a corporate lawyer who, to his son’s immense surprise, ended up working on Muhammed’s case. With the assistance of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, an organization that supports journalism on underreported topics, Cabot wrote “Stories My Father Told Me,” a feature on his father, and his involvement in Noor Uthman Muhammed’s case, for the June 2009 edition of Esquire, and he also reported on Muhammed’s trial in February this year, in two blog posts for Esquire (here and here).

I recommend all of the above, but with his latest article, “The Prisoners of Guantánamo,” Tyler Cabot has issued an accomplished, important and timely reminder about the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo through a thorough analysis of Muhammed’s story and of the terrible and unjustifiable position that America has found itself in ten years after the 9/11 attacks, and nearly ten years after Guantánamo opened.

Cabot not only tells, with some sensitivity, Muhammed’s own back story, but also the story of the Khalden training camp, where he was a trainer and then a quartermaster under Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi [described as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi], later a notorious CIA “ghost prisoner,” how the camp was closed when al-Libi refused to bow to pressure from Osama bin Laden to bring all the camps in Afghanistan under al-Qaeda control, and Muhammed’s capture in Faisalabad in March 2002 with Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee,” who was in fact Khalden’s mentally damaged gatekeeper.

Cabot does an excellent job of creating sympathy for Muhammed, explaining how, at Khalden, where he disliked being a trainer and preferred instead to look after the supplies, and to cook, he was nothing but a minor player in a camp that was primarily associated with defensive jihad — or, as he stated at Guantánamo during is Combatant Status review tribunal in 2004, Khalden was “a place to get training” that had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “People come over to that camp, train for about a month to a month and a half, then they go back to their hometown,” he said, adding that what the people did with the training they received was their own business.

Moreover, at the end of the account of Muhammed’s journey from Sudan to a trial by Military Commission, Cabot sums up the baleful legacy of Guantánamo in a handful of powerful passages, which I include below, and which I hope will reverberate powerfully with any Esquire reader who is not knowledgeable about Guantánamo:

There was a time, early in the “war on terror,” when word came from the highest levels in Washington that Guantánamo was to be the preserve of the “worst of the worst.” This was obviously never true, but it’s not until now that we know it. And not before surrendering to fear and abandoning the rules of evidence and the value of due process and eroding the foundation of the rule of law itself. The truth is that most of the 779 men who wound up at Guantánamo were like Noor — low-level, rather inconsequential, possessed of nothing useful to the United States nor posing any particular danger. In fact, people close to the team that prosecuted Noor quietly even voiced sympathy for him, describing him as “one of life’s losers.”

It is a strange population, the 171 men still left at Guantánamo. There is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another two dozen hardened militants, who will never be released. This class of prisoner represents a small minority of the population. Then there are the others — about a hundred men, mostly Yemeni, who have been cleared to leave but have no place to go, as no country will take them. And there are another thirty-five or so like Noor. They are nameless, low-level operatives, or hapless men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are the detritus of a decade-long war. They can’t simply be released. That would be admitting that they aren’t as bad as the government once said they were. And most can’t be tried, either, because much of the evidence against them — if there is any — is too fraught, as it was gotten by torture, and would never have even been considered to be evidence in any American judicial proceeding before September 11, 2001.

The Prisoners of Guantánamo
By Tyler Cabot, Esquire, September 2011

After a decade, it’s hard to tell who the captives are — us or them. Here, we follow Prisoner 707 to find out how the unlucky men got to the island prison, and whether it’ll ever be possible for us all to leave.

A man is born in the 1960s, but in the wrong place. His life is untouched by modernity, and in fact the people who live where he lives — mostly nomads or goatherds or subsistence farmers — carry on as they have for a thousand years. Compared even with the people in this arid Sudanese borderland west of the Red Sea he is poor. He is illiterate, can’t even tell you when he was born, and after his parents die when he is a child, he doesn’t think to ask why. It’s simple: People don’t live long, and then they die. The movements of his life are dictated by elemental concerns — what to eat, where to sleep. He collects what he finds and trades what he can — sticks, cardboard, tattered robes, tires. And when your abiding interests are so basic, you likely don’t have time for something so luxurious as a personal history or self-regard. He makes no claims for himself, possesses nothing resembling the Western notion of ambition. He has no conception of the outside world — knows little of Europe, has barely heard of America, doesn’t have the frame of reference even to conceive of a signal bouncing off a star and sending a picture or someone’s voice around the world. By the standards of the late twentieth century, or of any century, really, he is one of the unlucky men. Maybe God will provide something a little better in heaven, inshallah.

And then something most unexpected happens. Improbably, the unlucky man encounters the United States of America and becomes subject to the full might of the mightiest, most consequential power the world has ever known. His life will be changed forever, to be sure. But what one could never have imagined is that the man — not much more than a peasant in rags, after all — would become the very essence of what our mighty country fears the most. What one could never have imagined is that the peasant in rags would change the United States as much as the United States changed him.

*****

Today, nine years after he arrived on the island, Noor Uthman Muhammed is a whiff of a man. His orange prison jumpsuit hangs on his slight body. His cell is new. Until recently, he had been charged with no crime, and he’d lived for the past few years communally. He had a cell where he was locked up at night, but by day he could wander through the block, talk with the other brothers, watch one of the large TVs bolted to the wall, wash his white robe himself, and hang it on the railing to dry. Today, as a convicted war criminal, he lives on a cell block with three other men. They are the men whose cases have gone before military commissions at Guantánamo. Enter his cell and to the right there are a stainless-steel toilet and sink bolted to the wall. The toilet has no seat, the sink no knobs. Across the tiny concrete room, almost close enough to touch from the toilet, is a platform that extends up from the floor and out from the wall. It is topped by a thin blue foam mattress where at night he closes his eyes and dreams.

After his parents died, Noor didn’t have a place to sleep. He was passed from aunt to brother to uncle, hut to hut to hut. He slept where he could, ate what he could find or trade for. This didn’t change when, after one drought or famine too many, the family moved far from the town where he was born, Kassala, eventually landing in the city of Port Sudan. From above, the port looks like the lucky half of a broken wishbone, narrow and straight where the Red Sea first breaches land, then curving up and around the asphalt roads, tan government buildings, and colonial settlements of Main Town, built by the British in 1909. Yet as the channel curves farther west toward the Nile and the desert beyond, signs of civilization ebb. Roads turn to dirt, electricity lines vanish, running water is replaced by mule-drawn water tanks. Here in Deim al-Nur and the slums of Tata and Al Qadsiya, the low jerry-rigged dwellings are similar to the huts Noor lived in as a young boy, except instead of branches and twigs, some are made of empty food-aid sacks, tin, salvaged cloth, plastic bags. Many of the residents are former shepherds and nomads. Now they are dockworkers, carpenters, junk collectors, prostitutes.

Noor had no skills and no education, so he did what he could do best. He scavenged. Wood, old sandals, broken wheels, anything he could find that might be of some value to somebody he brought to the market to trade. There were dozens of corrugated-metal-and-plastic booths selling bags of spices and piles of bananas, meat, and fish. At night he looked for a corner of a hut or lay down in the dirt outside. He had a small cupboard, his one solid possession, where he kept his clothes and Koran. He was alone. Even around family, he didn’t talk or socialize. He had a mind full of fears and ideas he wouldn’t share.

It’s the same in Guantánamo. He doesn’t like talking about his past, refuses even to look at the recent pictures from his brother or write letters to his family. There was one letter conveyed by the Red Cross, and that was all. Noor had been engaged to marry his cousin, and he wanted to release her to marry someone else, as he wasn’t sure he’d ever be going home. For a boy from Kassala, Noor traveled a long way, and then he just vanished from the face of the earth. Now at least they know where he is, but he doesn’t want to worry them, doesn’t want to raise their hopes, and for years didn’t want to burden them with a singular hell — the prospect of being imprisoned for life but charged with no crime. “Please pray for me,” he wrote in his only letter home. “I am being held by the Americans.”

Also, he wants to remember all of them as he knew them when he was a boy, before he knew anything about America, before his name was spoken at the White House. When people ask about his childhood, whether it be interrogators, lawyers, or investigators, his face goes dark. He sits way back in his white plastic chair under the fluorescent lights, so far that he looks as though he’ll fall over, his lips tightened and wide, his eyes dead.

*****

In 1992, Noor was about twenty-five. He had never been very religious, but he started talking to some of the men in the market about Islam. Port Sudan is almost directly across the Red Sea from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, so most African Muslim pilgrims pass through here on their way to Mecca. Because Noor couldn’t read, the men gave him audiotapes of sermons, and later they showed him films. There were murdered Muslim women and children in the films, bloody and broken. They need help, Noor was told. The men told him about the mujahideen, the heroic brothers who were protecting these Muslims. They were doing Allah’s work. They were fulfilling their obligation to wage defensive jihad. And they told him that he, too — even Noor — could be a hero and make something of his life.

Decisions and choices and circumstances can push and pull a life in unexpected directions. You can wake up in a cell and not quite understand how the door got locked behind you.

Noor wanted a way out of the bleakness of his life. Having a larger purpose sounded good to him. Having a job sounded better. He took a $700 loan from a local cattle trader and left.

*****

Three black office chairs behind three microphones in a double-wide trailer. The chair in the middle is taller, wider, made of padded leather. This is where the tribunal president sits. Behind him there is a two-way mirror, about four by six feet. Behind that? Impossible to know. A translator? An intelligence analyst? Guards wearing desert camouflage? There is a small American flag hung flat above the mirror, an AC unit poking through the wall on the right.

Perpendicular to where the tribunal sits is a small off-white table with two cheap vinyl chairs that look like they belong around a kitchen table. This is where the recorder sits. Directly across, against the back wall, is another chair. It is made of white molded plastic. No cushion, nothing detachable, no materials that could be used for other means. This is where the detainee sits. Detainee, the word itself, it must be noted, is one of the great Orwellian inventions of the past decade. A word that would have had great meaning to Solzhenitsyn, meant to describe a prisoner for whom, for a variety of good and terrible reasons, a suitable judicial system cannot be found. A “prisoner” knows his fate. A “detainee” just lingers.

And so the detainees pass through like ghosts, their stories flickering for minutes, before they are shuttled back to the cells. The Algerian accused of planning an explosives attack against the U. S.: “I just want to defend my case. It is a false accusation against me and I just want to clarify it.” The Brit who demands rights under international law: “So the government evidence has been classified?” The Tunisian who offers his hands as literal proof that he is innocent: “How could I have trained? If you look at my hands, I am injured. My hand is only 35 percent functional.”

It is July 2004 and there are roughly six hundred men at Guantánamo but no legal system for distinguishing between the relative few true militants and the misbegotten. The government is still gathering evidence, all questions of justice and due process put on hold by the imperatives of war. The purpose of these primitive tribunals is not adjudication but rather compliance with the Supreme Court’s order that the detainees have at least some means of challenging their imprisonment.

Noor is led up the trailer stairs and through the door. He slowly lowers himself into the white plastic chair. He is weak and moves far more slowly and with more caution than a man his age should. He arrived two years earlier, in August 2002. His body has begun to slip away, weakening, aching.

“Do you understand why we are here?” asks the tribunal president, an Air Force colonel. He is pleasant and very concerned with procedure.

“Yes, I understand why we are here.” Noor’s answer is translated from Arabic into English, then played back to the military officers in the room. They wear no name badges, their identities concealed to protect them from the shackled man before them.

“Do you understand that you do not have to provide us any statement, but you may if you wish?”

Yes, Noor understands. Directly in front of his chair a steel eyelet and lock protrude from the green-gray office carpeting. Across the room, on the back wall, is a red panic button.

The unclassified evidence is read for the record. If Noor wants to go home to Sudan, his chance is now. He must convince the people before him that he is not who they think he is. He is not dangerous, he is just a man who was lost for a while but does not want any trouble. There are no lawyers present — as no lawyer has yet been assigned to the case or allowed to meet him. Noor must make the case himself.

The detainee delivered an electronic communication machine, possibly a facsimile machine, to Osama bin Laden.

“I did not see bin Laden, nor did I meet him,” Noor says. “As far as the facsimile, I wanted to buy that facsimile for myself.”

The detainee corresponded with a senior Al Qaeda lieutenant concerning the potential closing of Khalden camp.

“What happened was this,” he begins. He is trying to explain that he didn’t know anything. The camp was run by the sheik’s son and Abu Zubaydah, he says. “The rest of the trainers … we just simply follow what they have to say.”

The detainee was the “70th Taliban Commander.”

“Again, I don’t know anything about the Taliban,” he says. “I never carried arms with them. I don’t know anything about the Taliban. I am not even convinced of the Taliban, so how do you associate me with the Taliban?”

How do you reason with captors who don’t understand where you’ve been, what you’ve seen? How do you tell a captor you’re innocent when everything in your file says that you’re a terrorist?

The detainee worked as a weapons instructor on the use of the AK-47, PK, and RPG at the Khalden camp.

“All I trained on was the Kalashnikov, the light weapons. I trained for a period of three months only … That’s all I did.”

The detainee provided logistics support at the Khalden training camp.

“I want to tell you something,” says Noor. Here it is. The point that will finally make them understand, his chance to finally get through.

“I used to bring the rice, and all the required food, vegetables,” he says. “That’s all I was doing. Sugar and other things, I would get for cost, take it to the camp or somewhere else.”

The faces stare back at him, his words met with silence.

One tribunal member leans toward his mic: “Just had one clarifying question. At one point you said you don’t know anything about the Taliban, and you’re not even convinced of the Taliban. What do you mean by that?”

It is not a complicated question. “I am not convinced with their cause or with the Taliban,” answers Noor.

The tribunal member is incredulous. “You’re not convinced they even exist, or what?”

Noor stares back. “Everything that you want to do in life, you want to be convinced of what you’re doing. When it comes to the Taliban, even scientists go against each other. Everybody sees it a different way.”

The guards close their fingers over his frail wrists and help him down the trailer stairs and back through the tropical humidity to his cell. Noor doesn’t understand much from the proceedings, but he understands enough to know that he will never leave Guantánamo.

*****

He didn’t tell his brother or sister or uncle what he intended to do. He simply told them he was going to Khartoum to study. Once there he boarded a Kenya Airways jet — likely the first plane he’d ever seen up close, let alone flown in — and hopscotched southeast to Nairobi, then on to New Delhi. In that swarming city of foreign faces, he switched to the train, 250 miles to Lahore, Pakistan, then another 250 miles to Peshawar. The journey took him two years. What Noor did in those two years — did he travel by train or truck, foot or mule? Did he stop to work or study, to rest and pray? — is hard to know. But as the Soviets had been routed from Afghanistan just a few years before, the CIA still thought of the mujahideen fondly, and global jihad was as yet only notional — nothing he did would have put him in conflict with the United States.

On an unremarkable day in 1994, in a border town in Pakistan, Noor arrives at a safe house. There is a clear system for entering a jihadi training camp. Noor offers the proprietor of the safe house a letter of introduction, likely from one of the men in the market in Sudan. The proprietor asks Noor a series of questions. Who do you know in Port Sudan? Why did you come here? How did you travel? Nervous and scared, Noor answers all the questions. He passes the test; his future ticks forward further. He enters the house and another exchange takes place. He is given a traditional salwar kameez, the dress worn by both women and men, and a letter. In return he offers his Sudanese passport and his name. From here forward he will be known as Farouk and Akrima and Zamir. A new kunya every few years, but never Noor. Noor is the past. The past is gone.

A guide takes Noor to the Afghan border. Early in the morning the guide walks him through, past the Pakistanis standing guard — straight, don’t stop or ask questions — and into the mountains of Khost. They rise tall and black, then settle into brown hills, then eventually into beautiful green valleys. In just such a valley sits the camp. It is called Khalden and has been here since at least 1988, when Arab mujahideen built it to train for their fight against the Soviet empire. The Soviets eventually left Afghanistan, but Khalden and the mujahideen stayed. They still had weapons, they still had American tactical manuals, and they still had Muslims to protect — from the communist Najibullah in Afghanistan, from madmen in Bosnia, and from the Russians again, this time in Chechnya.

Khalden is the size of one and a half football fields. There is a brick mosque with a metal roof and a small shack made of stones and topped with leaves and plastic sheeting, where food is cooked. The barracks have earthen floors. On the far side is a classroom with a blackboard, the surrounding mountain walls used for target practice, the caves used for storing munitions and baking bread. There is one water source, the river. Candles, gas lamps, and fire the only means of light and warmth. Noor is given a filthy sleeping bag that previously was used for transporting the bodies of brothers killed in battle. But he is filled with great pride. He has made it, he is now a brother.

His first day begins with formation. There are many men here. Yemenis and Algerians and Chechens and Saudis. At any time there can be anywhere from fifty to seventy men. They come for different reasons. Some to return home to fight, others hoping to move up to another camp where they can learn more advanced skills, and still others like Noor who are just looking for something to do. They come not to fight but to escape. (Every so often a group of rich Saudis roll through for a week or two, not to train but rather so they can tell everyone back home they shot guns at a mujahideen camp.) In the morning these men stand together united as brothers as the camp’s emir, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, leads formation. Then they divide into groups, the Chechens with other Chechens, the Jordanians with other Jordanians, and so forth.

The men train physically, they run for hours through the mountains, they learn how to crawl and surveil and bury their secrets. Their muscles grow and their heels and palms become callused. In the classroom they are quizzed on tactics, how to spot a target, how to evade an attack. There is small-arms training, handguns, assault rifles, machine guns. They shoot at the mountainside, learning how to peer through a scope, how to exhale as they squeeze the trigger. The more advanced students are broken down into smaller groups and given explosives training — how to lay dynamite, how to install a trigger in a ball of C-4, how to plant a bomb. At night there is Islamic study. Someone might give a sermon or teach a lesson or urge the brothers to help push the Israelis out of Palestine.

There are many different philosophies on jihad. The men who run this camp subscribe to defensive jihad, the idea that all Muslims have an obligation to protect themselves and other Muslims from attacks. Their camp is not a Taliban camp or an Al Qaeda camp. It is independent. The men come here to learn basic skills. What they decide to do with them when they leave is their concern.

Most of the men stay for weeks, three to four months at most, then they head back to their home countries with the vague notion of protecting themselves or their families, or they head off to fight the Russians in Chechnya. Those who are more fervent are sent to more advanced camps, Derunta if they want to learn explosives. A Palestinian named Abu Zubaydah is responsible for transferring them. He’s emir of the main guesthouse into Khalden. When recruits arrive in Pakistan, he takes their passports and funnels them to Khalden, and when their training is over, he funnels them back out.

Noor is not funneled anywhere. He never graduates to another camp or goes home. He stays at Khalden, where he feels he belongs.

At first he works as a small-arms instructor. He teaches the recruits to treat their weapons as if they were their own limbs. He shows them how to take them apart and clean the barrels, wiping the dirt away, oiling them, then reassembling them. And he teaches them to shoot. There are hand pistols and single-shot rifles and Kalashnikovs, passed down from fighter to fighter. For a few months, Noor’s job is to teach the trainees how to use these weapons. But he does not enjoy the work. Eventually he works up the courage to ask Ibn Sheikh for a transfer. In Noor, Ibn Sheikh sees a man he can trust. He offers him a new job, one better suited to his skills and disposition. Noor becomes the camp’s quartermaster, responsible for making sure there is enough rice and beans and water and wood. He collects what the camp needs, and at the end of the day he goes to sleep in his corner.

There is a profound sense of isolation, of remoteness, to Khalden. And for six years the men come and go, hundreds, perhaps thousands as the years pass. The barracks stay the same, the biting cold comes each winter, and each winter Noor knows what the camp needs to make it through — how much firewood to gather for warmth, how much food. He has a job and a purpose. He doesn’t ask questions. In 1995, Osama bin Laden moves his operations to Afghanistan and begins setting up his own camps. Noor gets up and does his job. In 1998, fatwas are heard over the radios, men blow up the U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Noor helps out when Ibn Sheikh is out of town, leads formation. Cruise missiles rain down on Al Qaeda training camps, and still Noor checks the food supply. Until one day in late 1999, the outside finally pushes through.

First comes word that Khalden must be moved. Ammunition, weapons, food stores, everything loaded up and caravanned ninety miles over dirt roads to Kabul. Soon after, a meeting is called. The men meet in Wazir Akbar Khan, an upscale district of Kabul lined by embassies and government buildings. Ibn Sheikh is there. Abu Zubaydah comes from the safe house in Pakistan. Noor and the other trainers, most of whom are part of the camp’s advisory council, attend. The problem is laid out. Bin Laden is consolidating power in Afghanistan. He does not like the idea of independent camps. He wants all the camps to be Al Qaeda camps, and he wants to be the emir of them all. They can allow bin Laden to run the camp as an Al Qaeda facility and train the men for offensive jihad, or they can shut it down.

The men in the room voice their opinions. And at last Ibn Sheikh makes a decision. Khalden will close. The trainees go to other camps. The trainers look for other jobs. Noor begins wandering again, this time toward home.

He doesn’t know what is coming — the hijackers and airplanes and falling bodies and crumbling towers. He doesn’t know that he will soon collide with the greatest power in the history of the world. For a few months more, he is simply a peasant without a passport.

*****

He sleeps on a mat cramped on the floor with a dozen others. They come from different places: Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia. Some have traveled here in small groups, wearing hijabs over their beards, long salwar kameez to their toes. Others rose from their caves in Tora Bora after bin Laden escaped and the Americans left. They journeyed by white pickup truck and donkey and on foot from Kandahar up to Khost and across the border. They were alerted where to cross the border by contacts on the Pakistani side, then they began moving from safe house to safe house until they came to this floor in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Most were driven by fear, others like Noor simply followed. Noor has never led in his life. It is hard to believe that he would lead now.

The home is two stories of stucco topped by rectangular balconies that double as a watchtower. The only color is a blue gate that keeps cars out and the people in. Some of the men have been here for two or three weeks. Others for just a few days. In the kitchen there are vegetables, some chicken and rice, wildly mismatched silverware and plates. There’s a chore list taped to one wall, and little furniture. The men eat on the floor. It is also where they pray. Where they wait. One of the men, Ghassan al Sharbi, a Saudi who attended an aeronautics college in Arizona and knows English, teaches some of the others. Noor works on his English vocabulary and assumes a role similar to the one he had at Khalden — he gets the food, cooks, makes sure the safe house has the supplies it needs. It is boring here. They are safe, there is food and a place to sleep, but little more to do than pray and wait.

It is extremely hard to get a good fake passport in Faisalabad. Sometimes you can get documents in Afghanistan, but only pictures in Pakistan. Once you have both, you need an expert who can seamlessly bind them together. They must be near perfect, or else they are useless. A former jihadi might make it home, but then what? He can never leave again. Getting married, having children is not an option, because the man cannot travel with his family. Inside the house there are dozens of passport photos. The same man is in many of them, in front of the same red background that is often used in passports in the Middle East. In each he looks slightly different. Here he has a beard, there a mustache. Here a suit, there a robe. There are also multiple blank passports with no pictures or names. This is downstairs where the men waiting for documents are staying. There is also an upstairs. But Noor is not allowed upstairs. To get upstairs you need to go through the steel door at the top of the stairway. To go through the steel door you need a battering ram.

On March 28, 2002, at two in the morning, the battering ram comes.

The Pakistanis go in first, over the blue gate and through the front door. This is one of a dozen simultaneous raids tonight — a dozen houses, each handpicked by the CIA after weeks of surveillance, in search of Abu Zubaydah. He’s the man Noor first met two years earlier when Khalden was closed, the one whose responsibility was getting passports and paperwork for the men leaving the camp and moving onward to other training or perhaps home. Since 9/11 he’d become one of the most wanted men in the world, third after bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The commandos lead with 9mm handguns, the same handguns stenciled on their black Punjab Elite Police uniforms. Most of their equipment for the raid — a battering ram from Galls police supply in Kentucky, night-vision goggles, body armor — was shipped in by the CIA on a charter plane just days earlier. The commandos are well trained and brutally efficient. The safe-house front door bursts open, pistols punch into the darkness, and the men on the thin mats awaken from the last good sleep they will have for years. There is no resistance. Hands up, Noor and the rest simply surrender.

They cannot see what is happening elsewhere in the house, but they can hear. Shouting on the stairwell, huge bangs as the metal of the battering ram pounds the reinforced upper door. Then the sound of hinges breaking, metal giving, and the sounds of a man gasping as a knife is thrust into his neck. Now commotion, shouts in Punjabi as the commandos storm through the door and up to the roof. Then the sound of 9mm’s firing. Gravity takes over from there. Two thumps on the ground, boots surrounding the bodies, one dead, the other — Zubaydah — wounded with shots to the leg, groin, and stomach, but still breathing. A voice in accented English: “He killed my man, he stabbed him in the neck, he killed my man! We will fuck him!” Now another voice, this one the CIA officer in charge: “We’re fucked if he dies. Let’s get him to a hospital.”

By now, Noor and the other men from the first floor are sitting outside the blue gate, hands cuffed behind their backs, faces staring forward. Around them, the Pakistani commandos laugh and smoke. Upstairs the CIA and FBI begin collecting evidence. There is a magnifying glass and a couple card-sized screwdriver kits, dirty and smudged. A toothbrush, its head blackened by grease, red wire strippers, a yellow-and-blue box-cutting knife. Then the switches, dozens of bags of them, little matchbook-sized boxes in individual plastic bags, and the batteries, Duracell AAs. There are no beds and few personal items upstairs, but there is a folding table. On it lies a black timing device, two wires sticking out, a blue soldering iron, its metal tip still warm. Nearby is a map showing the British school in Lahore.

A paddy wagon arrives. Then the moving begins — the imagination starts a game that won’t end for years: Where are they taking me? What will happen? Noor is taken by the arm, pushed into the wagon. Then into a holding pen at a jail in Faisalabad. The next day a jail in Lahore, filthy cells, squalor. The not knowing, the inability to gain any mental traction, is worse than the conditions. Time slows, measured in breaths. Some of the men cry, others fervently shout and pray, others stay silent.

Another day, moved once again. This time to a house in Lahore bought by the CIA. Up out of the paddy wagon, Noor and the others are situated on the kitchen floor. On the ground they sit, hands cuffed behind their backs. Silence enforced by the gun. September 11 is still an open investigation, so the FBI is in charge here. The bedrooms are interrogation rooms. They are led to the interrogation rooms, one by one. The questions drilled at them in Arabic. Name? Birth date? Nationality? How did you get here? What were you doing in Afghanistan? Where were you on September 11? Have you ever met bin Laden? Where did you meet bin Laden? What did he say to you?

The men all have the same story. They are in Pakistan to study Arabic, that is the only reason. “There are no Arabic schools in Faisalabad,” the interrogators tell them. At this, the men pretend to grow tired, exhausted, some nodding off in their chairs, sliding forward off their seats. Others claim nausea, extreme distress. In America the politicians are already bragging. Abu Zubaydah is the biggest capture so far. In 2002 they don’t yet know that he actually knows very little, that he had nothing to do with the embassy bombings or 9/11, that any useful information Zubaydah may have given the Americans is hopelessly compromised by the fact that he was repeatedly tortured to get it.

No matter, in Lahore the prisoners are moved to the dining room for processing. Fingerprints, cataloging of items found with the men, mug shots. In one a man stands stone-faced and dirty. He has not slept or showered in days. He has the look of a man lost in a current he can’t control or understand, his eyes wide in shock. He holds a handwritten sign across his chest with his name. The flash pops, and he is led back through the kitchen, out of the house, and into the unknown.

*****

In the cage in Lahore where he and the others live and sleep for two months, he’s interrogated for days at a time without being fed. When not being questioned, Noor and the others beg the Pakistani guards to pull weeds or brown grass from the ground outside so that they might have something to eat. The hunger is crippling and all consuming. But there are other worries, other dark fantasies. Growing up in Sudan, Noor had heard about the security forces in Egypt and about how they would take people from the streets and make them disappear. In his cage in Lahore, Noor thinks about what it would be like to disappear and never be heard from again.

At Bagram Air Base, where the prisoners are transferred, Noor has a bag placed over his head, his arms suspended from the ceiling by chains, or else the opposite, feet and hands bolted to the floor, knees bent, a man stuck to the earth. At times the air-conditioning is turned to freezing, his clothes stripped away. These are the good days, because as uncomfortable as he is, he knows what is happening. He has begun conditioning himself to routine. The worst is when the guards rush in at night and push him against the wall and tell him that his time has come — he’s going off to Egypt with the others. He will disappear.

The flight to Guantánamo is more than twenty hours. He is hooded and handcuffed to the other men, unable to move, unable to urinate. When he arrives, he is taken to Camp 5. Here he is locked up in solitary and interrogated daily. He has no idea what will happen to him, what his future could be, whether anyone even knows he’s here. He only knows what to fear — the interrogation room, where the music is so loud he feels like his head is being beaten. And Romeo, an even smaller room, with no mattress or blanket or clothes. You could be left in Romeo for days, forgotten.

Noor is moved to Camp 6. He is still kept in solitary, but some of the worst treatment ends, the routine becomes more routine, and the days pile up. The mind adjusts. But he has begun changing physically. There are nightmares. He replays the raid, the worst hours of interrogation. But other things, too. He feels achy all the time. Also he has become bloated and nauseous, his digestive system never quite right, always on the verge.

The body has ways of coping with stress. A mugger pulls a pistol or your car is sideswiped and adrenaline and cortisol immediately flood your system. Your heart rate rises and your breath quickens so oxygen can reach your muscles faster. Glucose is released into your bloodstream, a boost of energy to aid in escape. And your brain’s levels of the memory-stamping hormones called glucocorticoids and catecholamines increase so that you remember the situation and avoid it in the future.

Allostasis is the process by which the body constantly adjusts its hormone levels to remain stable. Allostatic load occurs when the stress switch that controls the flow of cortisol and adrenaline gets stuck in the on position. Doctors who have spent time treating Guantánamo detainees call this “Guantánamo syndrome.”

In May 2008, six years after he arrived, Noor is at last charged with conspiracy and supporting terrorism. The penalty is life imprisonment. He does not trust his lawyers; he does not trust anyone. But by now he is in Camp 4. Here the brothers live communally, up to ten men to a room. Life gets considerably better. Noor takes classes, reads and studies. There is open sky and a yard and a soccer field. And yet one thing doesn’t change — the not knowing. He is trapped in a legal system that seems to change by the day. There is no end to his confinement in sight. Five months later, in October, the charges are abruptly dropped after a lead prosecutor resigns, citing a crisis of conscience, claiming that the military has been withholding exculpatory evidence in the case against a child soldier from Afghanistan. Two months later, a month before President Obama will take office, the charges against Noor are reinstated.

At Noor’s military-commission trial in February 2011, many observers will comment how odd it is that he doesn’t stand when his lawyers stand. What they don’t know is that he is not able.

*****

Thursday night is the night of enlightenment. And on Thursday, the brothers are together and Noor is laughing and smiling and at ease. He is usually quiet, spends his time alone reading and memorizing the Koran. But on Thursday nights he joins his brothers in singing nasheeds. They come together out of their cells and sway slightly. Noor sings loud, his dark face turned to the sky, facing his home, his voice rising into the Caribbean night.

Between nasheeds the brothers recite poems or tell jokes. Noor has a favorite. It is about Adarob, the local name for his extended tribe in Sudan. The Adarob are known for their smarts, and extreme patience. They can wait and wait and wait; their forbearance is bottomless. The joke is about an Adarob thief who tries to mug a schoolteacher.

Adarob says, “Give me what’s in your pocket!”

The teacher says, “I don’t have anything in my pocket.”

“Then give me your watch!”

“I am not wearing a watch.”

“Then give me a cigarette!”

“I don’t smoke.”

“What do you do for work?”

“I am a schoolteacher.”

Adarob then sits on the ground and says, “Give me a lesson! I swear I will get something out of you!”

Noor breaks out in laughter, his face beaming. It is the one evening a week he allows himself the pleasure of small things.

“You must be patient,” he tells the brothers. “Being here is divine destiny. God tests humans in their lives to know their faith and patience.” The brothers hear this and they see how he perseveres with calm and patience, and they are inspired. He is serving the time for all of them.

They come to him for counseling on other matters, too. He is an elder the other men depend upon, his advice always honest but never disrespectful. When some of the brothers go on a food strike, he tells them that he does not believe not eating will solve their problems. But he also skips some meals himself out of solidarity and respect. “I cannot eat if they are going on a food strike,” he says. Some of the brothers spit on the guards as they walk by; they throw urine and feces on them. He tells the brothers, “Even if I hated a guard, I am not convinced that this is a good thing to do.” He tells them, “I respect your convictions, but it’s not something I want to do.”

Some days after morning recitation Noor spends an hour with his Sudanese brothers on a prayer rug in the yard, the high barbed-wire fences stretching to the sky, the smell of the ocean strong. They talk about home and soccer, Noor recounting games he played as a young boy and trips to the social club, watching his favorite team, Al-Hilal. They reminisce about Flamingo and Kilo 8, where the teenage kids would gather and camp, and evening Ramadan meals of assida, millet pudding, and hulu-mur, the spicy drink that is on every table in Sudan.

“You should not be in jail,” he tells brother Adel, from Port Sudan [Adel Hassan Hamad, released in December 2007]. “You did not do anything, you are a respected person, like an older brother. It saddens me that someone your age would be here.” To brother Mustafa from Khartoum [Mustafa al-Hassan, released in September 2008], he makes a request: “If you ever get out and meet my niece and nephew, remind them to be of good morals.”

He does not like to waste his time on television. He is often silent. He reads and studies and thinks and prays to Allah. Because this he knows: Whether he will get out of here or not is Allah’s will.

*****

The courtroom looks like a prefabricated barn, a light-yellow box made of metal siding surrounded on every side by barbed wire. Around it sit other metal boxes, trailers for the defense and prosecution teams, five trailers for five defendants. The courthouse was specially built to try the 9/11 plotters concurrently and broadcast the proceedings to the world. Inside, it is outfitted with a media box and large-screen monitors and a sound system that can be delayed so that sensors can muffle classified information before it reaches the journalists who sit behind triple-paned, soundproof hurricane glass.

Noor sits in the front row with his defense team. His robe is white, as is his cap. He has a blue jacket that he wears when he gets cold. In his mid-forties, he is old and weak. He speaks the most the first day, but says only one thing. Na’am. Yes. Yes. Yes he understands the charges, yes he pleads guilty, yes he knows what that means, yes he has seen the translation, yes he has made the decision to plead guilty on his own, yes, yes, yes, yes. Over and over again he is prompted to tell the judge that he is guilty, that nobody has made him plead guilty. Yes, yes, I did it. And then he sits, his gaze often to the left, away from his own trial and the judge and his legal team, a phantom in a custom-built $12 million courtroom. It is not that he’s uninterested in his fate. It is that his fate has already been decided. Everyone knows this. Despite what has been agreed upon and signed behind closed doors, he must still stand trial, he must still be publicly sentenced. He must be patient, let the lawyers and government do what they need to do.

Virtually overnight the prosecution team has doubled, tripled in size. Whereas two young JAG lawyers spent months shepherding the case, the big brass has shown up for court, seven men huddled around the prosecution tables. Nobody wants to miss the trial, nobody wants to be left out of history and the photo ops after.

Arthur Gaston steps before the jury. He is tall, brown hair, small head, wire-rimmed glasses, a southern Navy commander, a second-generation Eagle Scout. He walks with the swagger and confidence of a man used to being right. His grin shows that he knows it.

“Terrorists are not born, they are made,” he tells the jury. “And Noor has made hundreds of them.” Noor does not move, does not flinch, he simply sits and waits.

Over three days, the government makes its case: Khalden is where terrorists are made. By working there, Noor was cultivating terrorists. There are photos of bomb switches projected onto the large screens and pictures of cards rigged to explode when opened, all items found in the safe house. The stories of three terrorists are explained in detail over hours during each day: Mohamed al-Owhali, who helped blow up the U. S. embassy in Nairobi; Ahmed Ressam, who plotted to bring down LAX during the millennium celebration; Zacarias Moussaoui, who the government at one point posited was the twentieth 9/11 hijacker. Noor did not know what would become of these men, but he did cook rice for them.

The defense counters. Noor has owned up to working at Khalden but shouldn’t be charged for the crimes of others. He should not be forced to be made culpable for 9/11. Noor’s posture does not change; the figure in perfect white robes simply sits. Whether the arguments are for or against him does not matter. Noor knew nothing of the terror plots carried out by men years after they left Khalden, the defense continues. He should not be held responsible for them, nor for the actions of Abu Zubaydah in the safe house. Of the 1,050 fingerprints taken from the second story, where the bombs were being made, not one belongs to Noor. He was not there to build bombs and has never been accused of such. He needed a passport. He wanted to go home.

Still. Noor wants to go home, which is why he says nothing. Let the lawyers argue, let the government preen and justify his incarceration, let 9/11 survivors and military families take solace in his guilty plea, let the journalists and human-rights observers denounce the commission system. It does not matter to him. The politics of this bizarre ritual are not his concern.

After three days, the jury comes back with its sentence. Noor rises, puts his blue jacket on. “Fourteen years.” He is emotionless. The jury is led from the room, and his plea deal is unsealed, the real sentence read. Thirty-four months. In exchange for pleading guilty and agreeing to be interviewed by the FBI under oath, Noor will be released in less than three years.

He is led out of the courtroom and into a transport van. Outside, in competing press conferences, the government celebrates its victory and extols the virtues of the commission system while the human-rights observers denounce the outcome as a sham. They would have had Noor fight the charges, even if it meant another six, seven, or eight years waiting for a trial.

Meanwhile, back at his cell in Camp 6, Noor thinks about none of this. He is carefully packing his belongings, his Koran, his prayer items. For the first time in nearly ten years, there is a sentence and an end point. He knows how much longer he must be patient. One thousand and twenty days. Twenty-four thousand four hundred eighty hours.

He is happy.

*****

His family waits in the same two-room home that Noor left nearly twenty years ago. The yard he slept in remains, as does the dirt alley where he would play soccer. His older brother Osman supports the family now, and he waits. Any time Noor’s nephew Mus’ab, who was born around the time Noor was captured, sees something on the television about Guantánamo, he shouts and tells the family to come watch. “They’re talking about Noor!” he says. He dreams of Noor coming home, wishes he could be transformed into a superhero for one day so he could rescue him. His sister Muna waits, too. But she has the most trouble. Ask her a simple question and she cries, goes sick. The memories hurt. But they all also have faith. This is all God’s predestined plan. If Allah wants Noor to be released, Noor will be released. “When he comes back, we will find him a wife, celebrate his return, build him a home, inshallah,” says Osman. “We will greet him with a parade like that of the president of the republic. After that we will do anything he wants,” says his cousin Sa’id.

To the family, he is a lost son they want back. In Guantánamo he is prisoner 707. And throughout, he has become what we needed him to be. When he was captured, he was what we most feared — an Arabic-speaking man found in a house with bombs. Then, because we feared fair trials in courts of law, he became a judicial problem, a man to be processed and moved. Nine years later, the government has now made him proof that our commission system works.

There was a time, early in the “war on terror,” when word came from the highest levels in Washington that Guantánamo was to be the preserve of the “worst of the worst.” This was obviously never true, but it’s not until now that we know it. And not before surrendering to fear and abandoning the rules of evidence and the value of due process and eroding the foundation of the rule of law itself. The truth is that most of the 779 men who wound up at Guantánamo were like Noor — low-level, rather inconsequential, possessed of nothing useful to the United States nor posing any particular danger. In fact, people close to the team that prosecuted Noor quietly even voiced sympathy for him, describing him as “one of life’s losers.”

It is a strange population, the 171 men still left at Guantánamo. There is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another two dozen hardened militants, who will never be released. This class of prisoner represents a small minority of the population. Then there are the others — about a hundred men, mostly Yemeni, who have been cleared to leave but have no place to go, as no country will take them. And there are another thirty-five or so like Noor. They are nameless, low-level operatives, or hapless men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are the detritus of a decade-long war. They can’t simply be released. That would be admitting that they aren’t as bad as the government once said they were. And most can’t be tried, either, because much of the evidence against them — if there is any — is too fraught, as it was gotten by torture, and would never have even been considered to be evidence in any American judicial proceeding before September 11, 2001. And no serious person would have ever argued for it as such.

This condition — this stateless and inconsequential group of ghost detainees — might well be described as another form of Guantánamo syndrome. Except this syndrome is a debilitation of the American legal system, whereby it becomes possible for a prisoner to be held forever, without charge. With a court system, the envy of the world, simply too afraid to present evidence and hold trials. As one lawyer for a high-profile detainee put it, the best thing that happened to Noor is that he was at last charged with a crime. It forced the government to act and make a deal. They could no longer simply let him linger indefinitely. His charges were his way out. A military lawyer puts it another way: “One of the running jokes of Guantánamo is that you have to lose to win.”

Noor wouldn’t speak to me for this story, nor would my father, who is a member of his legal team (See “Stories My Father Told Me,” July 2009), nor would anyone else involved in Noor’s defense. They are all extremely cautious, because even still, there are no guarantees that Noor will actually leave when his sentence is up. The convening authority could decide in the end that he is too dangerous to release. Or he could be the victim of fractious American politics. In February 2011, the day after his sentencing, the House passed a bill stipulating that no Guantánamo detainees can be transferred to countries that are state sponsors of terror. Sudan, whose president is wanted for war crimes committed in Darfur, is on that list. It does not matter that nine other detainees have returned to Sudan and none have returned to militancy. It does not matter that the Sudanese government tracks their every move. If Sudan is on that list in 2013 when Noor’s sentence is up and the House bill becomes law, the secretary of defense would have to make an explicit exception.

Noor can’t worry about these things. It is all up to Allah, he tells his lawyers. “I put this in God’s hands. If He wants me to leave from here, I will go.”

Recently, Noor has begun to allow himself to think of the future. The camp doctors told him that his cholesterol is high, so he has begun eating better. He doesn’t touch the cheese or the carbs. Every week his lawyers send a packet of news articles to read. Lately he has asked for stories on omega-3′s. During recreation time he uses the elliptical machine or treadmill, and the pain in his joints and in his back is giving way to muscle. The belly beneath his robe is flat again. In his forties, he is already an old man. But with exercise now, he will be able to carry the child he’ll have when at last he makes it home.

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.

As a follow-up, Jeff recently wrote another article for Truthout, providing further examples of the use of water as a torture technique, not only in Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to mark my return to work after two weeks away in Greece, I’m cross-posting his latest article as my own follow-up, because I cross-posted his earlier article just before my departure for Athens and Agistri, and I hope that making both articles available here will ensure that they reach new readers who have not yet come across Jeff’s work.

More Evidence of Water Torture “Depravity” in Rumsfeld’s Military
By Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, August 18, 2011

There have been a number of cases of detainees held by the Department of Defense (DoD) who have been subjected to water torture, including some that come very close to waterboarding, according to an investigation by Truthout. The prisoners have been held in a number of settings, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantánamo Bay.

In a number of settings, DoD spokespeople in the past — most notably former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld — have denied the use of waterboarding by DoD personnel. But as examples of DoD water torture have multiplied, it appears government denials about “waterboarding” were overly legalistic, and that behind them, DoD personnel were hiding torture involving similar methods of choking, suffocation or near-drowning by water.

Reports of water-related torture by the military include having water forced into the nose or mouth by a hose, repeated dunking in water, pouring water over the head in such a way that it is difficult to breathe or over a piece of cloth or hood, dousing with high-pressure hoses, dousing or partial drowning in combination with the application of a chemical agent, and in a few instances, actually being thrown into a large body of water, such as a river.

An article in Truthout earlier this month [cross-posted here] documented a half-dozen cases of DoD prisoners subjected to waterboarding-style torture. The article also detailed discussions among high-ranking military and intelligence officials around the use of waterboarding, and the fact that interrupted or simulated drowning at a military site in Kandahar, called “water treatment” in this instance, was revealed at a Congressional hearing in May 2008.

Human rights and civil liberties groups have expressed concern over news of DoD water torture and have asked for further investigation.

Asked to respond on behalf of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the reports of such water torture, spokesperson Kathleen Long said the committee had “no comment.”

One web site, Lawfare, co-founded by former Department of Justice official Jack Goldsmith, who was involved in internal decisions surrounding torture inside the Bush administration, seemed confused by the Truthout report, complaining that “reports of waterboarding-like tortures at Guantánamo” lacked “any examples of the military’s using waterboarding, but refers to the repeated use of water in interrogations instead.”

Truthout continues to investigate further instances of DoD waterboarding-style torture at US military sites in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.

“Waterboarding-style” torture refers to the use of water to provoke choking or suffocation by water, and, in some cases, the triggering of the sensation of drowning, if not actual drowning itself, but without actually following the CIA’s description of the waterboard procedure. It is has also been called “water treatment,” “water torture” and “drown-proofing.”

“The Interrogators Asked Me to Confess to Being a Part of 9/11″

In an affidavit filed on April 21, 2009, in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Muhammad al-Ansi, a Yemeni accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, described his torture in a tent at Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan in the early weeks of 2001. According to al-Ansi, it began after a female interrogator became angry he would not “confess”:

Four American soldiers came and took me into another room. It was not a tent. They put me on a slab (the size and shape of a bed) made of bricks. I was made to lay on my stomach with my head hanging over the edge. They brought in a big water container and placed it under my head. They would [force] my head and shoulders [under] the water until I almost drowned and lift my head out at the last minute. They did this over and over. During this time, the interrogators asked me to confess to being a part of 9/11, confess I am part of al Qaeda, confess that I swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, confess I have explosive weapons training, and confess to knowing several names that I had never heard of. This continued for one to two hours. I said nothing other than: “Have mercy on me.”

In another instance of torture in Afghanistan, in June 2008, Tom Lasseter reported for McClatchy that Ghalib Hassan, “a district chief in Nangarhar province for the Afghan Interior Ministry,” was detained “in a basement at an airstrip in Jalalabad during March 2003″ by Special Forces troops.

According to Hassan, “At night they would strap me down on a cot, and put a bucket of water on the floor, in front of my head. And then they would tip the cot forward and dunk my head in the bucket … They would leave my head underwater and then jerk it out by my hair. I sometimes lost consciousness.”

Once again, the military personnel involved demanded that the prisoner confess, in this instance to supporting a former Taliban official. In fact, the Taliban had expelled Hassan in 1996, and he had fought with US-backed forces at Tora Bora against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Another case from Afghanistan concerned Saudi national Ahmed al-Darbi. Arrested by authorities in Azerbaijan in 2002 and later turned over to the Americans, he is the brother-in-law of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar. Al-Mihdhar is also famous for being one of two al-Qaeda suspects who US intelligence knew was attending a meeting with other suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. As it turned out, this meeting likely involved the planning of the 9/11 and USS Cole terrorist attacks.

In a recently aired video interview with filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism “czar” who resigned during the Bush administration, charged former CIA director George Tenet and top CIA officials Cofer Black and Richard Blee with suppressing information about al-Mihdhar’s intent to enter the United States after the Malaysia meeting. The CIA deliberately had withheld cables to the FBI about al-Mihdhar entering the United States and failed to notify the State Department to put him and his traveling companion on the State Department watch list.

Al-Mihdhar’s brother-in-law, al-Darbi, was renditioned from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan in 2002 and was later sent to Guantánamo, where he remains to this day. In a declaration dated July 1, 2009, al-Darbi cited a number of instances of abuse and torture at both the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and later at Guantánamo.

At Bagram, al-Darbi stated, at times, “a sand bag or hood was placed over my head and tightened around my neck, and then they would grab my head and shake it violently while swearing at me and they would also pour water over my head while my head was covered.” The covering over the head while water is poured sounds very much like waterboarding. Al-Darbi also indicated that a powder, perhaps pepper spray, was applied to him and then water sprayed on him, so that the “water absorbed the powder and it burned my skin and made my nose run.”

More Water Torture at Guantánamo

In an August 2 Truthout article, six cases of water torture were described at the Cuban naval base prison. Two of these cases, including “near asphyxiation from water,” were described in an article published in an online medical journal earlier this year, but the identities of the detainees were kept anonymous.

Further investigation has found three more reports of such torture at Guantánamo and two cases of unique water torture, something between water dousing and waterboarding-style interrupted drowning.

One of the cases, of British citizen Tarek Dergoul, who was released from Guantánamo in 2004, involved treatment very similar to that reported by Omar Deghayes and Djamel Ameziane in the earlier Truthout article. According to an interview given to UK Guardian reporter David Rose, when Dergoul refused to have his cell searched for a third time on one day, an Extreme Reaction Force (ERF) squad was called.

“They pepper-sprayed me in the face and I started vomiting,” Dergoul reported. “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 continued to beat him and finally shaved off his hair, beard and eyebrows.

In another interview, Guantánamo detainee Salim Mahmoud Adem, a Sudanese national released in 2007, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that he had witnessed another prisoner having his head shoved repeatedly into a toilet. Interestingly, the story came up after Goodman asked about waterboarding.

AG: Salim, did — Salim, did you witness anyone waterboarded?

SMA: I did not see waterboarding, but my neighbor, they insulted the Qu’ran, so we refused to listen to the guards. So they would come with the riot police and enter into the cells, one by one. So they went into the cell of a Yemeni brother, whose name is Othman [phonetic]. After they tied him, his hands to his back, they put his head to the toilet and turned on the flush many times. And all of us could see it. This was a horrible sight.

The torture of Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman held at Guantánamo for seven years and finally released in 2008, presents a unique instance of torture involving forced application of water. Al-Haj was a hunger striker who, along with a number of other hunger strikers, was put on a forced feeding schedule. Civil rights attorney Candace Gorman, who has also represented some of the Guantánamo detainees, described the procedure in a May 2007 article for In These Times.

According to Gorman, al-Haj described his experience of forced feeding to his attorney. Al-Haj said he was strapped into a chair and had a tube painfully inserted through his nose twice each day. The attendants would blow air into the tube in order to ascertain its placement. Al-Haj would suffer in silence, “until tears stream down his cheeks.”

But sometimes things went even worse:

Three times they have inserted the tube the wrong way, so it went into his lungs. When they think that has happened they check by putting water into the tube, which makes him choke. Al-Haj says that never once have the hospital personnel apologized when the tube entered his lung.

Extreme “Water Dousing”

In a few reports, detainees have described a form of “water dousing” that went far beyond the description of the procedure given by the CIA. According to the 2004 CIA Inspector General (IG) report on “counterterrorism detention and interrogation activities,” which looked at the implementation of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques of the Bush administration, “water dousing” involved “laying a detainee down on a plastic sheet and pouring water over him for 10 to 15 minutes.” The room was to be maintained at room temperature.

In a 2008 Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) report, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and its Impact,” PHR quoted testimony by a detainee, Haydar (not his real name), who recalled having been sprayed with pepper spray and then hosed with high-pressure water. “This one female soldier subjected me to pepper gas and then sprayed me with water with extreme force — and I was writhing on the ground in pain,” Haydar said.

Another Guantánamo detainee, British citizen Jamal al-Harith, noted in a 2004 statement to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly that he knew of “three or four occasions guards using an industrial strength hose to shoot strong jets of water at detainees. This was done to me on one occasion. A guard walked along the gangway by the cages sending the hose into each alternate cage. When it happened to me I was hosed down continuously for about one minute. The pressure of the water was so strong it forced me to the back of the cage. It soaked the cage including my bedding and my Koran.”

Such cases of “water dousing” by Guantánamo guards, including the use of high-pressure hoses, went far beyond what was even contemplated by such a technique even under CIA torture procedures.

Drownings in Iraq

A review of news reports from Iraq reveal two separate instances of actual drowning of Iraqi detainees by US and British forces. In one case, soldiers were court-martialed and received light sentences. In the other case, the men were acquitted.

In January 2005, Army Sgt. First Class Tracy Perkins was convicted for ordering men under his command one year earlier to throw Iraqi detainees into the Tigris River. One of the Iraqis, 19-year-old Zaidoun Hassoun, drowned. Perkins was sentenced to six months in military prison and his rank was reduced to staff sergeant.

Perkins claimed he was ordered to throw the men in the river by his platoon leader, Army First Lt. Jack Saville. According to an account by the UK Guardian, Saville “pleaded guilty to assault and dereliction of duty,” and was sentenced to 45 days in military prison and ordered to pay a $12,000 fine. The light sentence was reportedly because “Lt. Saville agreed to testify against his captain, who had given him a hit list of five Iraqis who were to be executed on the spot if they were captured in a raid.”

But there was more. According to a July 2004 Associated Press article, the actions by Saville, Perkins, and two other soldiers, Sgt. Reggie Martinez and Spec. Terry Bowman, were initially covered up by their commanding officers. At an Article 32 hearing, and under grants of immunity, Capt. Matthew Cunningham, Maj. Robert Gwinner and battalion commander Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman said they told Saville and his men to “to clam up because they feared higher-ups in the chain of command would use the incident against them.”

In another case, British soldiers, operating as part of the US-led alliance that invaded Iraq, arrested and beat an Iraqi teenager, who was then ordered to swim across the Shatt al-Basra canal. According to an account in the Guardian, 17-year-old (some reports say 15-year-old) Ahmed Jabbar Kareem was too weakened by his injuries and drowned. All four soldiers involved were acquitted of manslaughter in the case. One of the soldiers, Irish guardsman Joseph McCleary, told the press, “We were told to put the looters in the canal. I was the lowest rank, and we were always told we weren’t paid to think. We just followed orders.”

The acquittal of the British soldiers and the light sentences for US soldiers involved in the drowning of captives represent an attitude towards prisoners in general — including the use of water torture and drowning — that carried minimal consequences in the Iraq war theater.

Indeed, in a US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) investigatory report dated May 27, 2004 (pg. 70), the special agent in charge reported that a team leader for 5th Special Forces group (Airborne), based in Al Asad, Iraq, gave “special instructions for the guarding and handling of EPWs” [enemy prisoners of war], including “maintaining a sandbag over their heads, playing loud music and pouring water over their heads.”

The torture of the Iraqi EPWs is very similar to the description Ahmed al-Darbi gave of his treatment at Bagram.

Reactions to New Revelations

The examples of water torture described in this and the earlier Truthout article are certainly not the only occurrences of water torture. For instance, one further example exists of a Guantánamo detainee who suffered water being poured over his head while it was covered, but further details could not be given due to legal restrictions covering his case.

It is also assumed that some instances of such torture have not yet been revealed. The press and human rights groups have not interviewed most prisoners released from US custody. Furthermore, detainees released from Guantánamo must sign an agreement that twice notes they can be “immediately” re-imprisoned if the United States finds any condition of the agreement, which includes prohibitions against conspiracy or vague “preparation of” “combatant activities,” violated. Fear of re-imprisonment and psychological traumatization from their experience have led many former detainees to maintain a silence about their experiences.

Not all observers or participants in DoD activities have indicated they witnessed or heard of water torture at DoD sites.

Morris Davis, who was chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, told Truthout that his office “focused on about 75 of the detainees we were assessing for potential prosecution.” He added he “did not have the time or the manpower to examine the many others that were not likely candidates for prosecution.”

Even so, Davis told Truthout, “I never saw any evidence that any detainee was waterboarded or subjected to any similar technique at Gitmo,” though “others things [were] done to some of them that I believe constitute torture.”

In addition, some guards, even if critical of abuses at Guantánamo, have said they did not witness waterboarding or water torture at the Cuban prison camp. In an interview with The Talking Dog blog in March 2009, former guard Terry Holdbrooks Jr. said, “In my time in Camp Delta, I didn’t see or hear of any waterboarding.”

But testimony and evidence offered in this investigation strongly suggest that water torture similar to waterboarding or of other extreme nature was inflicted on some prisoners under US military control, and also by allied forces.

Some sources have been adamant that waterboarding did in fact occur, for instance, at Guantánamo.

In an April 2007 statement to the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, Guantánamo detainee attorney Brent Mickum said that a guard who had worked at the prison camp told him “prisoners at Guantánamo were routinely waterboarded.” Mickum reiterated this point in an interview with the blog The Talking Dog later that year.

Mickum said the guard “confirmed that waterboarding, which he called ‘drown-proofing’ took place. This individual knew extensive details of the camp layout and the names of military personnel. Eventually, the full story will be released and people will be shocked at the extent of the depravity.”

Mickum has also said he heard from a civilian contractor that he heard interrogators talking about waterboarding at Guantánamo in 2003.

In a telephone interview, Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, responding to the accumulated evidence compiled on DoD water torture, told Truthout, “The suggestion that the use of water to torture is more widespread than previously thought is extremely troubling, and reaffirms the need for greater transparency and a broader investigation into the abuse committed under the Bush administration.”

In an emailed statement, Vince Warren, executive director for Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorneys have represented a number of Guantánamo detainees, said, “It’s clear even from the accounts of men who were released from Guantánamo that many more people were subjected to different forms of water torture or simulated drowning than the three victims of waterboarding the government has admitted to. Our attorneys can’t talk about what happened to our all of clients because they are under a protective order, but public documents show the widespread extent of this barbarity. It’s simply shameful.”

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.

Please support my work!

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 14 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 ninth 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 Eight and Part Ten of this series.

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

Din Mohammed Farhad (ISN 699, Afghanistan) Released September 2004

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (9) – Seized in Pakistan (Part One),” I mentioned how Din Mohammed Farhad, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture, “fitted into [a] category of blank slates to be filled with whatever allegations the authorities thought they could get away with.” He had run a grocery shop in Kabul before the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, and, while in US detention in Afghanistan, told the British prisoner Moazzam Begg that he had been sold to the Americans as an al-Qaeda sympathizer after he fled to Pakistan. He added that he thought that he had aroused suspicion because many of his customers — like Begg, who had visited his shop on a regular basis while living in Kabul — had been foreigners.

During a visit to Pakistan in September 2010, Moazzam Begg met Farhad (whom he described as Farhad Mohammed) at the house of Dr. Ghairat Baheer, the son-in-law of the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and a former CIA “ghost prisoner.” Begg wrote, “The last time I saw him was in Bagram. He’d suffered terrible beatings at the hands of the Pakistanis who’d then handed him over to the Americans. The reason: Farhad was a shop-keeper who ran a store on the famous Chicken Street in Kabul where Arabs used to do their shopping. I remember my disbelief at seeing him in Bagram as I used to shop there too. Farhad returned home after four years in Guantánamo to his mud house in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated April 26, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Din Mohammed, born in 1975, it was stated that he had been working at a supermarket owned by an Arab, Abu Isa, and that when he decided to leave the job, Abu Isa “gave him a cell phone and told him to call a man named Abu Mahaz who might offer him a job.” Abu Mahaz duly gave him a job as a courier, “delivering packages to and from Lahore and Sargodha” in Pakistan.

On one occasion, he and a man named Abu Kassam were supposed to deliver a package to a man named Akhram, but were unable to contact him. However, they were “stopped at a police checkpoint where Kassam attempted to evade arrest by running away,” and he then “discovered that the package contained red, green and brown passports.” Kassam was then captured, and when both men were in custody Mohammed “asked Kassam why he ran away,” and “Kassam told [him] that he had been transporting illegal documents for the Arabs.”

Mohammed stated that the “Pakistani authorities told [him] that if he paid a fee, he could be released. [He] stated that all he had was 5,000 Pakistani rupees. The Pakistani authorities stated that amount was not enough, so [he] remained incarcerated until he was turned over to US forces.” For some reason, however, “Kassam was never turned over to US forces.” Mohammed, however, was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, allegedly “because of his knowledge of Arab safe houses in Kabul, AF, Karachi and Sargodha, PK, his placement and access to movement of passports by Arabs through Pakistan, possible knowledge of Arab facilitators of movement out of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and corruption of Pakistani authorities.”

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 [699] 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 transfer to the control of another government.”

Mohammed Al Ghazali Babikir (ISN 700, Sudan) Released March 2004

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Babikir was one of five workers for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, a Kuwait-based NGO, with branches around the world, who were seized in house raids in Peshawar, Pakistan in May 2002 but subsequently released (along with other charity workers and teachers seized at the time) because there was no evidence whatsoever that they had been involved in any kind of wrongdoing. The stated aim of the RIHS was “to improve the condition of the Muslim community and develop an awareness and understanding of Islam amongst the non-Muslim communities, by concentrating on youth and education,” but in January 2002, the Pakistani and Afghan offices were blacklisted by the US Treasury, ostensibly because they had some sort of connection to terrorism.

Prior to the release of the Detainee Assessment Briefs by WikiLeaks, all that was known of Babikir was that he was an accountant for the RIHS, and that he was 28 years old at the time he was seized.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated June 21, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Muhammed al-Ghazali Babaker Mahjoub, born in 1973, it was noted that he worked for the Saudi Red Crescent from 1992 to 1997, first as an Arabic teacher, then as the Manager of Orphan Schools, and then as the Education Department Duty Manager. He began working for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society in August 1997, working as an Arabic teacher until June 1999, when he was promoted to the role of Indoctrination Division Chief, with duties including “overseeing the teaching staff and book printing.” In September 2000 he took the position of Orphanage Division Chair, where his duties included “providing shelter, clothing, rations and supplies for the orphans,” and where he was “responsible for orphanages in Pakistan and six additional orphanages in Afghanistan.”

After setting the scene, the Task Force jumped to the circumstances of his arrest without providing any explanation, noting that he was working as Orphanage Division Chair on May 26, 2002, when “several members of the Pakistan police entered [his] home,” and “[h]e was arrested and his home was searched.” The Pakistani officials “confiscated his diplomas, identification papers and passport. He was asked if he wanted these items returned to his wife because he would be taken in for two to three months of interrogation. [He] requested that all of his documents be returned to his wife except his passport, which he opted to keep with him.”

He was then taken to Bagram for approximately two months, and was sent to Guantánamo on June 4, 2002, on the basis that it was “because of his knowledge of the composition and organisational structure of the RIHS and Red Crescent NGOs which are currently operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan; because of his knowledge of personalities associated to [sic] the RIHS and Red Crescent NGOs who may have connection to the Al-Qaida financial network; and his knowledge of population characteristics of displaced persons in and around Pakistan and Afghanistan.” This was not as spurious as many of the other reasons given for transferring prisoners to Guantánamo, as it was clearly why he and other NGO workers were seized, although it is depressing to realize how nakedly he and others were sent to Guantánamo just in case they may have had any information about the charities’ suspected connections with al-Qaeda.

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 [700] 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 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 for continued detention.”

Hassan Hamid (ISN 711, Jordan) Released November 2003

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Hamid, another of the five workers for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society seized in house raids in Peshawar, Pakistan in May 2002, was one of two Jordanian prisoners released in November 2003 — along with Ayman al-Amrani (ISN 169) — who were approached in 2005 by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve. Stafford Smith was on a fact-finding mission in Jordan, but he reported, in an article entitled, “Abandoned to their fate in Guantánamo,” published by Index on Censorship in 2005, that neither man consented to meet him and noted, “they were afraid that speaking out would only make their lives more difficult.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated June 21, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Hassan Khalil Muhammed Abdul Hamid, born in 1961, it was stated that, like many of the prisoners, he had been “diagnosed with latent tuberculosis,” although “treatment was successful,” and it was noted that he “may possibly have asthma,” although he was “otherwise in good health.”

It was also stated that, after being unable to find a job in Jordan from 1988 to 1992, he “expanded his search to include other locations,” ending up working for as a geography teacher in Peshawar, Pakistan through the support of the Islamic International Relief Organization. In June 1995, he found a new job with the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society as “a supervisor of an orphan college preparatory school” near Peshawar, where “[h]is duties included acting as the teacher, counsellor, and social worker” and he “was in charge of such logistics duties as providing rations, clothing, and shelter for the children enrolled.”

In June 1999, he was “promoted to Director of the Mosque Department,” and moved to the RIHS Peshawar office “where five separate departments of RIHS were housed: Oversight, Mosques, Education, Orphanages, and Financial,” and where he “received contracts for the main office in Kuwait” and gave permission “to build new mosques and find suitable sites for them.”

As with Mohammed al-Ghazali Babikir, the Task Force then jumped to the circumstances of his arrest without providing any explanation, noting that, “After a typical day at the office, [he] was relaxing at home with his wife and four children using their computer’s television function in May 2002, in Peshawar, Pakistan,” when “[a]pproximately six Pakistani intelligence officers and two US officers entered his home by force and arrested [him].” The police then searched his house, and Hamid “saw his personal computer the next day in Bagram, so he [knew] that [his] equipment was confiscated.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, allegedly “because of his knowledge of the efforts of foreign-based NGOs to exert influence within Pakistan and of the activities of the Islamic Heritage Revival Society [sic] within Pakistan.” As with Babikir, it was clear that he and others were sent to Guantánamo just in case they may have had any information about the charities’ suspected connections with al-Qaeda.

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 [711] 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 or its 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 he had asked to be returned to Jordan, and had stated that, although he realized the unemployment rates were high, he “might try and open a candy store called 7/11 if he couldn’t find a teaching position.”

Rashid Ahmad (ISN 714, Sudan) Released March 2004

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained (via a Cageprisoners article) how Ahmad was another of the five workers for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society seized in house raids in Peshawar, Pakistan in May 2002. 36 years old at the time of his capture, and married with four sons, he did not speak publicly about his experiences after his release, but his wife described the circumstances of his arrest. She said that Pakistani soldiers, accompanied by Americans, “attacked the house in a terrifying manner, scaring the two children … A female Pakistani soldier that was with them attacked her in an attempt to remove her hijab, in order to ascertain her identity. She refused to uncover her face in front of the men. All of this happened in front of her children’s eyes. He [Ahmad] had never been in Kabul or Kandahar, yet he was not safe from suspicion or capture.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated June 21, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was identified as Al Rachid Hasan Ahmad Abdul Raheem, born in 1965, it was noted that, in  common with many of the prisoners, he had been “diagnosed with latent tuberculosis, although current chest x-rays read clear,” and he was “otherwise in good health.”

It was also noted that, in 1997, he worked first for the Islamic International Relief Organization as the sports director at a school, and then as a teacher at the Sudanese School in Peshawar, and then, until 2000, worked as “the education supervisor, teacher and counsellor for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society at its school for orphans in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, but “left the RIHS in 2000 when the Taliban closed the office,” which was an interesting insight into an organization that, according to the US, was connected to al-Qaeda. He then transferred to the RIHS office in Peshawar, where he worked as the director of a primary school for orphans.

As with Mohammed al-Ghazali Babikir and Hassan Hamid, the Task Force then jumped to the circumstances of his arrest without providing any explanation, noting that, “On May 26, 2002, [he] was at home with his family preparing for bed when the doorbell rang. When [he] opened the door, approximately 25 Pakistanis (some wearing civilian clothes, others in police gear) had their weapons trained on him. He was then taken to the house of another man, Muhammed Hussein Abdalla (ISN 704, a 57-year old Somali teacher, and a father of eleven children, who was not released until November 2008), whom he knew as Abu Abd Al Tawab. The two were then held in a Pakistani military intelligence holding facility for ten days, then handed over to US forces and held in Bagram for two months.

He was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, allegedly “because of his knowledge of the Islamic International Relief Organization and Revival of Islamic Heritage (RIHS), a non-governmental organisation in Peshawar, Pakistan.” As with Babikir and Hamid, however, it was clear that he and others were sent to Guantánamo just in case they may have had any information about the charities’ suspected connections with al-Qaeda.

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 [714] 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 poses a low threat to the US or its 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 noted that he had asked to be returned to Sudan, “where his family [had] now relocated back to,” and had stated that he “plan[ned to find a teaching position," and, "if not, he hope[d] to open a small store or to return to the Agricultural College.”

Hussain Mustafa (ISN 715, Jordan) Released March 2004

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Mustafa, a 48-year old Jordanian, who was born in Palestine, was another innocent victim of house raids based on dubious intelligence. Interviewed by Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, for his article entitled, “Abandoned to their fate in Guantánamo,” published by Index on Censorship in 2005 (and available here in an edited form), he explained that he had taken a Masters degree in Islamic Law in Saudi Arabia, and had taught at the University of Galilee until 1984, when he moved to Pakistan, where he lived with his family near the Afghan border, teaching refugees.

He told Stafford Smith that on the evening of May 25, 2002, after returning home with his son Mohammed, the doorbell rang. “I asked Ibrahim, my youngest son to answer the door,” he said. “He came back scared, calling, ‘Police, Police!’ He was crying. As soon as he came in the room, the Pakistani police followed, armed and with their guns pointing at us … I asked the officer what he wanted and he said he needed Hussain. I said, ‘I am Hussain.’” He added that he had a refugee card from the UN, but that, although the police looked at it, they took him and his son away.

Mustafa also told Stafford Smith that, in the US prison at Bagram airbase, where he was taken before his transfer to Guantánamo, he was repeatedly threatened that his wife would be brought to the prison. “I felt a true anger,” he said. “I was torn on the inside because of what they said. This was a terrible threat.” He also said that prisoners were repeatedly threatened “with ghastly and immoral acts like rape,” and explained that he thought that the worst moment in his life took place in Bagram, when, blindfolded and handcuffed, and with his ears plugged and his mouth covered, he was forced to bend down, while a soldier “forcibly rammed a stick up my rectum.”

Mustafa told Stafford Smith that these events had “affected him deeply,” explaining:

I simply cannot understand why it happened to me. It is a smear that will always cloud my life. It is something that I am ashamed to think about, let alone talk about, but it is something that, inevitably, I cannot press out of my mind. What they did to me was disgusting, and it is difficult for me to talk about this. Naturally, I do not want this known in public, yet my fear for my own privacy is overridden by my desire to make sure that the truth is known, so that others are not made to suffer in this way in the future.

Stafford Smith also explained that Mustafa’s family “did not all survive to welcome him home. His oldest son Abdullah died of a heart condition in February 2004.” Further explaining the painful changes in his life, Mustafa told him, “I have had the experience of doing nothing wrong or illegal, and yet being held for over two years of my life. I will never be the same person. Now I spend a lot of my time alone, sitting in the Mosque, as I have become an introvert. I only go out where it is really necessary.”

In the memos released by WikiLeaks, the document relating to him was a  “Recommendation [for] Release or Transfer to the Control of Another Country,” dated February 27, 2004, in which he was identified as Abdul Qadir Yousef Hussein, born in March 1953, and it was stated that he and his family moved to Pakistan in 1992, where “he was hired as a teacher of history, culture and Islamic studies at a university,” and then moved to Afghanistan, teaching from 1995-96 at a university that was sponsored by the International Islamic Relief Organization. At the time of his capture, on May 25, 2002, at his home on Peshawar, he was working for a university run by the Saudi Red Crescent, and was seized, according to the Task Force, because the police “were looking for a man named Abu Sufian.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, allegedly because it was thought that he might be able to “provide general or specific information on IIRO and SRC leadership and activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” and because of “[h]is possible connections to Abu Sufian and the IIRO.” As with Mohammed al-Ghazali Babikir, Hassan Hamid and Rashid Ahmad, however, it was clear that he and others were sent to Guantánamo just in case they may have had any information about the charities’ suspected connections with al-Qaeda, and this was spelled out clearly in a section of the memo headed, “Reasons for Transfer from JTF GTMO,” in which it was noted that, “Although the IIRO has been connected to Islamic extremism in the past,” Mustafa’s connection with it consisted of one year as a teacher, six years before his capture, and “appears to have been administrative in nature,” so that “[h]is knowledge of the IIRO is limited to administrative information, relating to daily school operations,” and “is very dated.”

Similarly, with the SRC, which had “not been directly linked with Islamic extremism at this time,” it was noted that his connection was “more recent, but also limited,” because his “connections and information appear[ed] to be administrative and related to running the school.” In addition, his connection to Abu Sufian “appear[ed] to be one of acquaintances. [He] said an Abu Sufia [sic] had an apartment on the floor above his for about 3-4 months in 2000, but then moved to another part of the city.” Bluntly, the Task Force conceded, “There does not appear to be any direct links between them.”

Despite having seized Mustafa on the basis of very poor intelligence, and having found no reason to detain him, he was assessed as being “of low intelligence value,” rather than no intelligence value at all, although it was also noted that he posed “a low risk, as he [was] unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies,” and, as a result, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “released or transferred to the control of another country as appropriate,” although he conceded that the Criminal Investigative Task Force had “not completed an assessment” and was “unable to supply a threat [sic] at this time.”

Menhal Al Henali (ISN 726, Syria) Released March 2004

In Chapter 13 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how, before the release of the Detainee Assessment Briefs by WikiLeaks, all that was known of al-Henali was that the Syrian, who was 38 years old at the time of his capture, was one of three teachers, working in a school run by the Saudi Red Crescent, who were seized in house raids in Peshawar, Pakistan on May 27, 2002, the others being Fethi Boucetta, a 38-year old Algerian seized after the Pakistani police came to his house looking for someone else, and Mohammed Abdallah, a 57-year old Somali. At Guantánamo, Boucetta described how all three men used to travel to work together in a bus that was provided for the teachers.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated May 3, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that he was born in 1963, and that he had been “diagnozed with latent tuberculosis,” in common with many of the prisoners, and was “a chronic Hepatitis B carrier,” but was “otherwise in good health.” It was also stated that he left Syria when he was 19, to avoid military service, and his mother then “advised him never [to] return to Syria because his father and brother were subsequently incarcerated following his flight out of the country.”

In assessing his case, the Task Force noted that he fled to Pakistan, where he was living with his wife and six children until his capture in May 2002. He was employed by the Saudi Red Crescent to work as an Arabic instructor and director of a school in Islamabad, where he stayed until 1991, when he left for two years to finish his Master’s degree in Lahore. He then began working as a language instructor at a school in Peshawar, which is where he was for nine years until he was seized by the Pakistani police, presumably with US guidance.

Detained first in Pakistan, and then in US custody at Bagram, he was sent to Guantánamo on August 5, 2002, allegedly “because of his knowledge of the activities of the Saudi Red Crescent organisation in Pakistan.” As with Mohammed al-Ghazali Babikir, Hassan Hamid, Rashid Ahmad and Hussain Mustafa, however, it was clear that he and others were sent to Guantánamo just in case they may have had any information about the charities’ suspected connections with al-Qaeda.

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 [726] 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 to the control of another government.”

It was also noted that he had “expressed concerns over being released to the Pakistani government because he believe[d] the reason he was arrested was that he could [perhaps in the sense of "was no longer allowed to"] pay bribes to government officials. He [felt] that if he return[ed] to Pakistan he [would] receive harsh punishment, and therefore would like to return to PK only to retrieve his family, then move to another country in the Gulf States region.” Despite this, he was returned to Syria, and, in light of the fact that his father and brother were imprisoned because he left the country in the first place, it is troubling that no news has emerged from Syria regarding his treatment since his release.

Muhibullo Umarov (ISN 729, Tajikistan) Released March 2004

Umarov, who was 21 years old when he was seized, was one of three unfortunate Tajiks — along with 22-year old Mazharuddin (ISN 731) and 27-year old Abdughaffor Shirinov (ISN 732, see below) — who were seized from an improvised dormitory in the library of Karachi University. In 2006, the journalist McKenzie Funk met Umarov by chance while reporting from Tajikistan for Mother Jones, when a farmer in the remote Obihingou valley told him, “There’s a man in the valley who has been to America. Really. He was in a prison. They made a mistake.”

After tracking Umarov down to his tiny, mud-walled home, Funk heard how, during the civil war, when he was 14 years old, his father took him and his two younger brothers to Pakistan and installed them in madrassas for the duration of the war. Six years later, he returned to his home village, diploma in hand, and began helping the family with their harvest of apples, potatoes and walnuts, “but then America bombed Afghanistan and the whole world went crazy.” Sent back to Pakistan to raise money to bring his brothers home, he found odd jobs in the bazaar in Peshawar and on May 13, 2002, in search of a better job, set off for Karachi, where his friend Abdughaffor Shirinov, who was working at the library, had a place for him to stay. Mazharuddin was also staying there, and at night the three men hung their T-shirts on the bookcases and slept on thin carpets on the floor.

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

Describing Bagram, Umarov told McKenzie Funk about the “hangar, vast and bright with artificial lights,” where, he said, “Our cages were in a two-story building inside the bigger building. They had high fences and were surrounded by sharp wires.” He added, “The whole place was blocked from daylight and man’s sight.”

Funk continued (and the whole section is worth reproducing in detail, I believe):

Each cell held as many as 15 men; each man was issued blue prison dungarees, a wooden platform to serve as a bed, and two blankets. Umarov used one of the blankets as a mattress, the other to cover himself — though it wasn’t enough. The nights were cold, and the guards would not let him put his head under the covers. Inmates wore shackles on their wrists as well as their ankles, even when sleeping, and each was assigned a number. Umarov’s was 75. “Seventy-five,” he whispers in halting English. “Seventy-five, come here.”

Powerful lights flooded the cages 24 hours a day, and the guards made loud noises to keep the prisoners awake. They hit their billy clubs against the metal fences. They pounded on barrels. They threw cans and empty water bottles. “We lost count of days, let alone dawn and dusk,” he says. “We never saw daylight. We were never outside.” […]

If the prisoners talked to each other, the soldiers forced them to stand and hold their shackles above their heads until the pain made them not want to talk again. If they talked again, Umarov says, the soldiers would take them upstairs and beat them. He was never beaten. But once he dared to talk to Abdughaffor and Mazharuddin, and the soldiers forced him to stand for hours, holding his shackles up while his arms shook. He did not talk again.

Umarov knew the other men in his cage as faces. He grew bored of looking at them. They were Arabs and Afghans and Pakistanis and men who spoke French and English. These, he assumed, must be the terrorists — the ones to be blamed for the world going crazy, the ones who should be punished. Sometimes, when a cellmate was taken upstairs, screams would ring out across the prison. “This did not happen every day,” he says, “but it happened.”

I ask for details, and he’s reluctant to say more. “I did not see anything with my own eyes,” he says, “and my friends and I did not experience this torture.” He pauses. There were stories he later heard in Cuba, he says — stories that he believed — about “beatings with the wooden stick” and electrocutions. “American soldiers used electrical cables to shock them in their eyes, hands, and feet. Three men told me this. And some, mostly Arabs, were forced to remove their clothes in front of women. There were other things, too.” He will not go on. […]

In two months at Bagram, Umarov says, he had only one interrogation — with an American woman who questioned him in Farsi and seemed confused as to why he was there. “We were alone in the room,” he says. “She checked my documents and listened to my answers, then told me I wasn’t guilty.” Life became a haze. He would stand and sit and try to sleep in his cage, and every fifth day a soldier loosened his handcuffs and let him walk around the prison grounds. Every seventh day, he was brought to the showers, which often had female guards and shut off after two minutes, even if he was still covered in soap.

After his transfer to Guantánamo, he said, “I did not understand where I was. When my consciousness appeared, I found myself in the sandy desert. And I thought I would be executed there, in the desert.” Instead, he was initially interrogated every week. “There were new investigators every time,” he said. “There was a new room every time. But the questions were always the same” — what Funk described as “an endless repetition of the conversation about Pakistan and Tajikistan and his life in both.” “Occasionally,” Funk explained, “he became so angry that he wouldn’t answer their questions, preferring to sit in silence. Other times, he challenged his interrogators: ‘Why was I taken here if I have not committed any crimes?’” Funk also explained:

They told him they were suspicious because he had traveled many places, many times, by many routes. He had been to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. “I answered that they could find many people like me,” he says. “Why was it that it had to be me?” They said that the routes he’d taken were famous, and used mostly by terrorists; he might have seen the terrorists on the roads.

After a while, Umarov said, they stopped interrogating him, although not everyone was so fortunate. As Funk explained:

“Some men were moved constantly,” he says. “They would wake them up, put them in chains, and take them to a new cell or to an interrogation room.” Prisoners were left shackled in a standing position until the investigators arrived. “They sometimes had to stand for 24 hours, moving only when they were brought to the toilet,” he says. “How could anyone be normal after that?” Yet Umarov never heard Bagram-like yells at Guantánamo, and few of his neighbors told him they had been tortured. What they talked about was injustice. “We did not know why we were there or when we would leave,” he says. “At Guantánamo, the torture wasn’t physical — it was psychological.”

Some prisoners went insane. Abdughaffor was one of them. He would throw himself against the door and scream. He tried to hang himself. He wouldn’t eat. He became somebody Umarov did not know. Others took off their clothes and sat naked in their cells. “These people became like children,” he says. “They did not understand their reality.”

Although he watched as his fellow prisoners tried to commit suicide, after the Koran was abused by US personnel, and although he also, briefly, took part in three of the hunger strikes, the injustice he felt most keenly was personal, when he asked an interrogator about his status, and was then punished by the guard force “for his insolence,” by being held in isolation for 10 days:

“I was taken to the dark room,” he says. “The soldiers took all my clothes and left me there.” The room was made of iron; it measured three feet by five feet. At night, frigid air was pumped through a hole in its ceiling, and its small window was covered by Plexiglas so the air couldn’t leave. Two electric coils provided dim light, and during the day, they were turned up to heat the cell to a very high temperature. But night was worse. “Some prisoners wouldn’t last the night and had to be taken to the doctor,” he says. “They kept me there for 10 days — and for no reason.”

He later spent another 15 days in isolation, but for that, he says, there was a reason. I ask him what it was. “I was standing in the cell block, leading a prayer for 48 people, and a female soldier came up and stood right next to me. I asked her to move, but she would not. She was doing psychological pressure. So I spit on her.”

When Funk pushed him for further information on some of the horrors of Guantánamo, the following took place, which should really provide Umarov’s final words on his lost two years in US custody:

“What I’ve already said should be enough for those who want to know about this prison,” he says softly. “It was like being in a zoo, with people coming to stare and laugh at you.” I keep pressing. His voice rises. “There is no point in telling more of these stories. Such a prison has never existed in the history of mankind. No one has ever written about such a prison. Why did they keep a man for two years with no reason? Why? They caught me and kept me as a prisoner of war. What war, may I ask? When was I involved? I was sleeping when they came and dragged me out of my bed. People who understand the laws will have already made up their minds about who is who.”

In the files leaked to WikiLeaks and released in April, Umarov’s file, dated January 31, 2004, was an “Annual Enemy Combatant Review.” This type of document was evidently used to assess the status of all the prisoners as “enemy combatants,” although the only one I had seen previously was the review for the Iranian Bakhtiar Bameri (ISN 623, see Part Seven).

In the memo relating to Umarov, in which he was described as Mukhibullo Abdukarimovith Umarov (he was also identified as Moyuballah Homaro), it was noted that he was transferred to Guantánamo from Afghanistan on August 5, 2002. It was also noted, crucially, that, “Although he was assessed as an enemy combatant at the time of his transfer to GTMO, on-going assessment and determination of his status as an EC is required by the Implementing Guidance for Release or Transfer of Detainees under US Department of Defense Control to Foreign government Control, dated 11 December 2002 and approved by the Secretary of Defense on 26 December 2002.” The reference to this document in Bakhtiar Bameri’s file was the first time I had seeing mentioned, although a version of it, relating to Bagram and issued on December 10, 2002, is available here. In it, as Bameri and Umarov’s memos explained:

Enemy combatant is defined by the above guidance as “any person that US or allied forces could properly detain under laws and customs of war.” For purposes of this conflict, an enemy combatant includes, but is not necessarily limited to, a member or agent of al-Qaida, the Taliban, or another international terrorist organisation against which the United States is engaged in armed conflict.

In describing how he ended up in US custody, the Task Force admitted that he was “living and working in Pakistan,” that he was arrested by Pakistani police “at a small library in Karachi on 19 May 02,” that he was “held for a month in a Karachi jail and then sent to the US Forces in Afghanistan.” Most significantly, the Task Force noted that it was “undetermined as to why [he] was transferred to GTMO.”

The Task Force added, “Since his arrival at GTMO it has been determined that [he] is not an al-Qaida or Taliban member. Furthermore, no information has developed to support his determination as an EC under any other aspect of the EC definition above. Therefore, after reviewing all relevant and reasonably available information, it is GTMO’s assessment that [he] is not an enemy combatant.” The memo concluded by noting that his case was being “processed by the Department of Defense Detainee Assessment Team for release.” This is notable for two reasons: firstly, because it is only the second mention I have seen (the first was in Bakhtiar Bameri’s file) of the existence of a Department of Defense Detainee Assessment Team responsible for processing the prisoners for release; and secondly, because it is almost unprecedented for a prisoner to be designated as “not an enemy combatant.” The terminology, when the Combatant Status Review Tribunals began in the summer of 2004, was that those whose release was recommended (38 out of 558 prisoners whose cases were reviewed) were not judged as “not an enemy combatant,” but as being “no longer an enemy combatant.”

Not being an “enemy combatant” should have been useful to Umarov, but as McKenzie Funk explained, it was not useful on the ground in Tajikistan. At one point, Umarov showed him a document provided on his release, which stated, “This individual has been determined to pose no threat to the United States Armed Forces or its interests in Afghanistan. There are no charges from the United States pending [sic] this individual at this time. The United States government intends that this person be fully rejoined with his family.” As Funk explained, however, “These papers are now the only form of identification Umarov has,” and they are “a red flag that causes shakedowns at Tajik checkpoints and occasional arrests. The US, which offered no compensation upon his release, never returned his passport either.”

Mazharuddin (ISN 731, Tajikistan) Released March 2004

As with Abdughaffor Shirinov (ISN 732, see below), little was known about Mazharuddin (also identified as Mazharudin) before the release of the Detainee Assessment Briefs by WikiLeaks, although it was clear, from the story of Muhibullo Umarov (ISN 729, above) that all three had been seized from the library of Karachi University, where Umarov worked, and where they were all staying, either on the basis of extremely dubious intelligence, or because they could be easily sold to US forces as terrorist suspects.

As with Muhibulllo Umarov (above), Mazharuddin’s file, dated January 31, 2004, was an “Annual Enemy Combatant Review.” This type of document was evidently used to assess the status of all the prisoners as “enemy combatants,” although the only one I had seen before Umarov’s was the review for the Iranian Bakhtiar Bameri (ISN 623, see Part Seven).

In the memo relating to Mazharuddin, dated January 31, 2004, in which he was described as Nuzar Udeen, it was noted that, like Umarov, he was transferred to Guantánamo from Afghanistan on August 5, 2002. As with Umarov, it was also noted, crucially, that, “Although he was assessed as an enemy combatant at the time of his transfer to GTMO, on-going assessment and determination of his status as an EC is required by the Implementing Guidance for Release or Transfer of Detainees under US Department of Defense Control to Foreign government Control, dated 11 December 2002 and approved by the Secretary of Defense on 26 December 2002.” In it, as Bameri and Umarov’s memos explained:

Enemy combatant is defined by the above guidance as “any person that US or allied forces could properly detain under laws and customs of war.” For purposes of this conflict, an enemy combatant includes, but is not necessarily limited to, a member or agent of al-Qaida, the Taliban, or another international terrorist organisation against which the United States is engaged in armed conflict.

In describing how Mazharuddin ended up in US custody, the Task Force repeated exactly the same information contained in Umarov’s file, admitting that he was “living and working in Pakistan,” that he was arrested by Pakistani police “at a small library in Karachi on 19 May 02,” that he was “held for a month in a Karachi jail and then sent to the US Forces in Afghanistan.” Most significantly, the Task Force noted that it was “undetermined as to why [he] was transferred to GTMO.”

As with Umarov, the Task Force added, “Since his arrival at GTMO it has been determined that [he] is not an al-Qaida or Taliban member. Furthermore, no information has developed to support his determination as an EC under any other aspect of the EC definition above. Therefore, after reviewing all relevant and reasonably available information, it is GTMO’s assessment that [he] is not an enemy combatant.” The memo concluded by noting that his case was being “processed by the Department of Defense Detainee Assessment Team for release.” As I noted in the reviews of Bameri and Umarov’s memos, this was notable because it mentioned the existence of a Department of Defense Detainee Assessment Team responsible for processing the prisoners for release, and because it is almost unprecedented for a prisoner to be designated as “not an enemy combatant.” As I explained in Umarov’s case, the terminology, when the Combatant Status Review Tribunals began in the summer of 2004, was that those whose release was recommended (38 out of 558 prisoners whose cases were reviewed) were not judged as “not an enemy combatant,” but as being “no longer an enemy combatant.”

Abdughaffor Shirinov (ISN 732, Tajikistan) Released March 2004

In the Detainee Assessment Briefs released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, Shirinov’s was one of 14 missing files, as I noted in my article, “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files,” although it was clear, from the story of Muhibullo Umarov (ISN 729, above) that he was Umarov’s friend, that he worked in the library of Karachi University, that he had allowed Umarov and Mazharuddin (ISN 731) to stay, and that all three had been seized either on the basis of extremely dubious intelligence, or because they could be easily sold to US forces as terrorist suspects.

Given that the files for Umarov and Mazharuddin contain exactly the same information and assessments, it is certain that Shirinov’s was the same, with the same damning conclusions — that it was “undetermined as to why [he] was transferred to GTMO,” and that he was “not an enemy combatant.”

In response to Umarov’s comments about his friend, however, it is not known how he has fared since being released from Guantánamo. As McKenzie Funk wrote, based on Umarov’s words, “Some prisoners went insane. Abdughaffor was one of them. He would throw himself against the door and scream. He tried to hang himself. He wouldn’t eat. He became somebody Umarov did not know.”

Haji Osman Khan (ISN 818, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Haji Osman Khan, who was 50 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 27-year old Abdul Salaam (ISN 826), and 19-year old Noor Aslam (ISN 822, see below), who was his cousin, and the family ran a hawala (a money exchange/forwarding business) with branches in Pakistan and the UAE. Khan did not speak publicly about his experiences following his release, but Salaam (who was not released until February 2006), 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 his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 6, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” Khan, described as Osman Khan, born in 1950, was subjected to serious doubts about his innocence, given that, by May 2005, the Task Force conceded, in the case of Abdul Salaam, “It was first assessed [he] was involved in money laundering operations, however, after reviewing all the available documentation, nothing has been found to support this claim. It is highly probable [his] statements that he and his family are honest business people, have no connections to the Taliban and Al-Qaida, and have never transferred any money on behalf of the Taliban or Al-Qaida are truthful.” It was also significant that Mohammed Haji Yousef (ISN 820), released in November 2003, whose story was told for the first time in my article in June, “WikiLeaks: The Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo (Part Five of Five),” was evidently Khan’s brother, and was assessed, in August 2003, “as not being affiliated with Al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader,” of being “of low intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “a low threat to the US, its interests or its allies.”

Khan told his interrogators that he was at home in Bermel “with his brother, friends and his children, when Afghan soldiers and Americans came into his home and arrested everyone.” He stated that “the information used against him was ‘false’ and he [had] no affiliations with any members of the Taliban,” and that he was “a local businessman,” who, with his brother, ran “several small shops, including a call office.”

To the Task Force, however, “when questioned closely about his business dealings with known Taliban and Al-Qaida members,” he “feigned any knowledge of these individuals [sic] and remained evasive.” He was “assessed to have had a great deal of involvement with the movement of money for the local hawalas, which were used by the Taliban to provide funds to their members,” but no explanation was provided as to why this assessment demonstrated that, as a result, Khan knew about the provision of money to the Taliban through the hawala system rather than being nothing more than a suspect with no actual evidence against him.

It was apparently regarded as suspicious that he “continue[d] to deny any knowledge of Al-Qaida” and “professed his innocence in this whole matter,” because, according to the Task Force, he had been “generally cooperative but never forthright,” had “consistently been evasive in his answers” and had “outwardly refused to identify individuals whom he had a known affiliation with.” The Task Force added that Khan, “along with his brother and other family members,  was heavily involved in the movement of monies (for a fee) for known Al-Qaida and  local Taliban members and [Khan had] refused to reveal the nature of these transactions,” even though he was “assessed to have extensive (though dated) knowledge concerning the financing of local extremists and the personalities involved in cross-border trade, financing and telecommunications (via local call office run by his brother)” — although how that was known, especially in light of the later revelations about Abdul Salaam, was, again, not explained, and, moreover, the allegations about his brother contradicted the findings of the Task Force in his assessment a month earlier.

Refusing to let up, however, the Task Force stated that Khan had been “assessed as being an opportunist and an extremist criminal, protecting his business dealings by not revealing his connections to extremist elements operating in the region,” who was, therefore, “assessed as possibly posing a threat to the Afghan government.” As a result of all the above, he was “assessed as possibly being a member of the Taliban, however that has not been determined with any certainty” — which, of course, is doubly vague. He was also assessed as being “of minimal intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and as a result, Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III of the US Army, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Noor Aslam (ISN 822, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, I explained how Aslam, who was 19 years old at the time of his capture, was part of a family of businessmen who ran a hawala (a money exchange/forwarding business), and who were seized in a sweep of Bermel, in Paktika province, by US forces. He was seized with 50-year old Haji Osman Khan (ISN 818, see above) and his cousin, 27-year old Abdul Salaam (ISN 826), but his own story was not known until the release of the Detainee Assessment Briefs by WikiLeaks.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 6, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” Aslam was identified as Noor Aslaam, born in 1983, and was also identified as having been “improperly listed as Afghani however he was born in Pakistan and holds Pakistani citizenship.”   No mention was made of his purported family relationship with Osman Khan, Abdul Salaam and Mohammed Haji Yousef, so it is uncertain if he was actually related to any of these men, but what was clear was that he “worked with six other men on the security force” in Bermel (and that “some of those men are detainees in Guantánamo with him”), and that “he was conducting early morning security checks of buildings and businesses within the Bermel town bazaar,” when “he was arrested by US forces, who were conducting a sweep of the bazaar, looking for weapons.”

After he was seized, US forces “found a grenade in a box, in the building that he and the others shared as living quarters, along with other small arms and ammo.” This was unsurprising, given that the security force of which he was a part had been put together after the Taliban fled, and no one should really have been surprised if they were armed. Nevertheless, Aslam was obliged to find explanations for the presence of the weapons, to explain that “he knew about the grenade but that it was not his,” to explain that he owned several of the other weapons found, which he had “‘acquired’ through deals with friends,” and to explain that “everyone in the village owns a Kalashnikov, and because of the violence many of the shopkeepers band[ed] together to protect their businesses.”

He was sent to Guantánamo on October 27, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his possession of the grenade that was found in the box,” which was a particularly feeble reason for transporting him halfway round the world.

In assessing him, the Task Force stated that, “although cooperative and non-aggressive,” he was “assessed as not being completely forthright.” It was noted that his explanation of “his association with the local businessmen [was] viewed as plausible, however he [had] failed to completely explain the dynamics of his involvement with these men,” which was regarded as important because several of these men had “known affiliations with former Taliban” (which had not actually been established) “and he was working as a personal security guard for these persons.”

The Task Force also regarded it as suspicious that he was a Pakistani working for Afghans, suggesting that this indicated that his employers had “a stronger affiliation with former Taliban than [he] would like us to believe,” and noted that he had “failed also to convincingly explain how he came into the possession of all the weapons he had,” and, as a result, although he was assessed as “not being a member of Al-Qaida or a Taliban leader” and of being “of low intelligence value to the United States,” he was also assessed as being “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and Brig. Gen. James E. Payne III of the US Army, who signed the memo, recommended that he be “considered for transfer to the control of another government for continued detention.”

Parkhudin (ISN 896, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

In Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, and also in my article, “When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan,” I discussed the murder by US soldiers of detainees in the prison at Bagram airbase in 2002, including the killing, in December 2002, of Dilawar, a taxi driver who was brought into the prison the day after another prisoner, Mullah Habibullah, had been killed. Dilawar was brought in with the three passengers in his taxi — Parkhudin, a 25-year old farmer, Abdul Rahim, a 27-year old baker, and Zakkim Shah, a 19-year old farmer.

According to Dilawar’s elder brother, Dilawar was “a shy man, a very simple man,” who lived a quiet life with his wife, his young daughter and the rest of his family. On the day of his capture, after he had picked up the three passengers, he was passing Camp Salerno, a US base, when he was stopped at a checkpoint by soldiers serving under Jan Baz Khan, the nephew of the warlord Pacha Khan Zadran, who were looking for the men who had launched a rocket attack on the base earlier that day. Finding a broken walkie-talkie on one of the passengers and an electric stabilizer for a generator in the boot of the car, they delivered the four men to the Americans at Bagram as suspects.

They were among the last men to be implicated by Jan Baz Khan, and Dilawar’s passengers were certainly the last three to be sent to Guantánamo on Khan’s advice, because the Americans finally realized that their supposed ally was actually using them for his own ends, and imprisoned him in Bagram in February 2004, although as mentioned elsewhere in these articles, and in The Guantánamo Files, Pacha Khan, who also fell out of favor, was responsible for sending several other prisoners to Guantánamo.

Before the release of the Detainee Assessment Briefs, all that was known of Parkhudin and Dilawar’s other passengers came from reports dealing with Dilawar’s murder, which was first exposed by Carlotta Gall of the New York Times in March 2003. In that ground-breaking article, Gall identified two of the three men seized with Dilawar as Parkhudin and Zakhim, and explained that Dilawar’s father and brother and local government officials told her the men had been seized “when [Dilawar's] taxi was stopped by Afghan soldiers guarding the perimeter of the United States army base Salerno, on the outskirts of Khost, in eastern Afghanistan,” and that they “were innocent and arrested because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That morning two rockets had been fired at the base, and Mr. Dilawar passed by at noon.” On searching the car, the soldiers “found a stabilizer, a machine used to regulate electricity, in the trunk of his car,” and Parkhudin, described as being 30 years old and “a local policeman from the village of Turiuba,” was identified as the passenger who “had a broken walkie-talkie with him.”

In September 2004, Gall and David Rohde provided an important update, and included further testimony from Parkhudin, described as a 26-year-old farmer and former soldier. He said that, in Bagram, “his hands were chained to the ceiling for 8 of his 10 days in isolation and that he was hooded for hours at a time,” as the article described it. “They were putting a mask over our heads, they were beating us in Bagram,” he said. “I think Dilawar died because he couldn’t breathe. For me, it was very difficult to breathe.” He also “said he was forced to lie on his stomach and that a soldier then jumped on his back,” adding that “he believed that the Afghan in an adjoining isolation cell was Mr. Dilawar because the prisoner cried out for his mother and father.”

In a detailed report about the murderous regime in Bagram, published in the New York Times in May 2005, Tim Golden explained how Dilawar  and his passengers spent their first night in Bagram “handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep,” and reiterated how Dilawar’s passengers said that the most difficult thing for Dilawar “seemed to be the black cloth hood that was pulled over his head.” “He could not breathe,” Parkhudin said.

Golden also noted that, in interviews after their release, the three survivors “described their treatment at Bagram as far worse than at Guantánamo. While all of them said they had been beaten, they complained most bitterly of being stripped naked in front of female soldiers for showers and medical examinations, which they said included the first of several painful and humiliating rectal exams.”

Golden also explained that, when the three men were finally sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, they had “letters saying they posed ‘no threat’ to American forces.” He also noted:

They were later visited by Mr. Dilawar’s parents, who begged them to explain what had happened to their son. But the men said they could not bring themselves to recount the details. “I told them he had a bed,” said Mr. Parkhudin. “I said the Americans were very nice because he had a heart problem.”

In the classified military documents released by WikiLeaks in April, in which he was identified as Bar Far Huddine, born in 1975, the document relating to him, dated February 26, 2004, was an “Update Recommendation [for] a Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention,” in which — rather depressingly, given the circumstances of Dilawar’s death — it was noted that, on November 11, 2003, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained for continued detention,” based on an assessment that he was “a Taliban member, who was possibly involved in a rocket attack on US Fire Base Salerno.”

According to new information, however, Parkhudin was “no longer assessed as being a Taliban member,” because “[a] review of information about the radio [he] was captured with revealed that it was non-functional at the time of capture and not used to communicate with the Taliban, as previously reported,” and because “further investigation revealed no links between [him] and the rocket attack on US Fire Base Salerno, which he was suspected of being involved in,” and that “[t]he other people arrested out of the same taxi have also been assessed as having no links to the rocket attacks.”

As a result, he was “assessed as having a low intelligence value,” and as “a low risk as he [was] unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies” (not “no risk at all,” as he should have been) and Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer or release to the control of another government.” It was also noted that, on November 10, 2003, the Criminal Investigative Task Force had been “unable to give a threat assessment, citing the need for additional information,” but that, “[i]n the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between CITF and JTF-GTMO Commanders, CITF will defer to the JTF-GTMO assessment that [he] was a low risk.”

Abdul Rahim (ISN 897, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

As with the story of Parkhudin (ISN 896, above), I explained, in Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, and also in my article, “When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan,” how Parkhudin, Abdul Rahim and Zakkim Shah (ISN 898, see below) were passengers in a taxi driven by another Afghan, Dilawar, who was killed by US soldiers in the prison at Bagram airbase after the four men were seized by Afghan soldiers following a rocket attack on a US military base in December 2002. The three survivors were then sent to Guantánamo, where they were held for 15 months.

Abdul Rahim was apparently a 27-year old baker, although not much else was known about him until the Detainee Assessment Briefs were released by WikiLeaks. In a New York Times report in September 2004 about the murderous regime in Bagram, Carlotta Gall and David Rohde described him as Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old baker, and noted that he told them that “he was hooded and that his hands were chained to the ceiling for ‘seven or eight days’ and turned black.” He also said that “American interrogators forced him to crouch and hold his hands out in front of him for long periods, causing intense pain in his shoulders. When he tried to sit up, he said, they were coming and hitting me and saying ‘Don’t move!’” In another article in the New York Times in May 2005, Tim Golden noted that, speaking of his time in Bagram, Abdul Rahim said, “They did lots and lots of bad things to me. I was shouting and crying, and no one was listening. When I was shouting, the soldiers were slamming my head against the desk.”

In the classified military documents released by WikiLeaks in April, in which it was noted that he was born in 1975, the document relating to him, dated February 26, 2004, was an “Update Recommendation [for] a Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention,” in which — rather depressingly, given the circumstances of Dilawar’s death — it was noted that, on November 11, 2003, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained for continued detention,” based on an assessment that he was “a member of Hezb-e-Islami [Gulbuddin] (HIG),” who was possibly “involved in a rocket attack on US Fire Base Salerno.”

According to new information, Abdul Rahim “joined HIG for a brief 4-month period in the mid-1990s, after which he broke off his association,” and “spent most of the 1990s involved with various Northern Alliance combat units, fighting the Taliban.” However, he was “assessed as having no current ties to HIG,” and, as with Parkhudin, it was also noted that “further investigation revealed no links between [him] and the rocket attack on US Fire Base Salerno, which he was suspected of being involved in,” and that “[t]he other people arrested out of the same taxi have also been assessed as having no links to the rocket attacks.”

As a result, he was “assessed as having a minimal intelligence value,” and as “a low risk as he [was] unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” because he was “no longer assessed as being an HIG member,” and Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer or release to the control of another government.”

Zakkim Shah (ISN 898, Afghanistan) Released March 2004

As with the story of Parkhudin and Abdul Rahim (ISN 896 and 897, above), I explained, in Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files, and also in my article, “When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan,” how Parkhudin, Abdul Rahim and Zakkim Shah were passengers in a taxi driven by another Afghan, Dilawar, who was killed by US soldiers in the prison at Bagram airbase after the four men were seized by Afghan soldiers following a rocket attack on a US military base in December 2002. The three survivors were then sent to Guantánamo, where they were held for 15 months.

Zakkim Shah was apparently a 19-year old farmer, although not much else was known about him until the Detainee Assessment Briefs were released by WikiLeaks. In Carlotta Gall’s original New York Times report about Dilawar’s death, Shah was described simply as Zakhim, from the same village as Parkhudin, and was also described as being 25 years old. In a follow-up article in September 2004, he was identified as Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer, and it was noted that he “said he was kept awake by soldiers blaring music and shouting at him.” He also said “he grew so exhausted at one point that he vomited.”

In the classified military documents released by WikiLeaks in April, in which he was identified as Zakhim Shah, born in 1983, the document relating to him, dated February 26, 2004, was an “Update Recommendation [for] a Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention,” in which — rather depressingly, given the circumstances of Dilawar’s death — it was noted that, on November 11, 2003, Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “retained for continued detention,” based on an assessment that he was “a Taliban fighter,” who was “committed to Jihad.”

According to new information, however, he was “no longer assessed as being a Taliban fighter or committed to Jihad,” and, as with Parkhudin and Abdul Salim, it was also noted that “further investigation revealed no links between [him] and the rocket attack on US Fire Base Salerno, which he was suspected of being involved in,” and that “[t]he other people arrested out of the same taxi have also been assessed as having no links to the rocket attacks.”

As a result, he was “assessed as having a minimal intelligence value,” and as “a low risk as he [was] unlikely to pose a threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and Maj. Gen. Miller recommended that he be “considered for transfer or release to the control of another government.”

Also see Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight 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.

Two suspicious omissions: Abdullah Tabarak and Abdurahman Khadr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The US “enemy combatant”: Yasser Hamdi

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

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

The late arrivals — in 2007 and 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eight others, released between 2003 and 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As published exclusively on WikiLeaks.

In her latest article, Carol has focused on the conditions of isolation in which the four men who have lost their trials by Military Commission are held, and for once I’m going to cross-post the entire article, as it oozes a thinly-disguised disdain for some of the exaggerations, lies and unfairnesses of the regime at Guantánamo — her description of the four men as “a cook, a kid, a small-arms trainer and a videographer,” for example, or her description of how “TV time is spent alone, each man shackled by an ankle to the floor of an interrogation room, always under the watch of a special guard force implementing a Pentagon policy for ‘punitive post-conviction confinement.’” Get that: punitive post-conviction confinement. Another Guantánamo speciality for the lucky few who aren’t merrily detained forever without charge or trial, or cleared for release by an administration that, it turns out, has no intention of releasing them at all.

I also like, with reference to former child prisoner Omar Khadr, the understatement with which she notes that, “once back in Canada, Khadr’s parole is all-but certain because he was captured as a juvenile, 15 at the time of the crime” — something the US, to its shame, thoroughly ignored — and again, towards the end, when she lays out the possibilites facing one of the men, Ibrahim al-Qosi, whose sentence ends next July, when he “may leave Guantánamo — if the Obama administration chooses to negotiate [his] release,” and “congressional restrictions” don’t get in the way.

After nine years, as Carol knows, any kind of monstrously unjust nonsense — such as not releasing someone after they have served a sentence negotiated by the Pentagon — remains a distinct possibility.

Inside the convicts cellblock where war criminals stay at Guantánamo Bay
By Carol Rosenberg, Miami Herald, February 28, 2011

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — One Sudanese prisoner is filing his hours until release reading Decision Points, George W. Bush’s memoir on why he quit alcohol, ran for president and approved waterboarding war on terror captives.

Another is being home-schooled every other week inside a cell, learning the astronomy, math, grammar, Shakespeare, even elocution, he never got as a child of al-Qaeda.

These are the war criminals of Guantánamo Bay. They are four convicts — captured as a cook, a kid, a small-arms trainer and a videographer — kept out of sight of visitors in a segregated cellblock of a SuperMax-style 100-cell $17 million penitentiary.

Because each man was sentenced for war crimes by a U.S. military jury, three after guilty pleas in exchange for short sentences, theirs is what the Pentagon calls “punitive confinement.” They are “prisoners” set apart from the other 168 captives at what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld calls “one of the finest prison systems in the world.”

Yet, military defense lawyers say the convict cellblock at Camp 5 is especially austere and that their clients are doing hard time reminiscent of Guantánamo’s early years when interrogators isolated captives of interest.

Each man spends 12 or more hours a day locked behind a steel door inside a 12-by-8-foot cell equipped with a bed, a sink and a toilet.

They get up to eight hours off the cellblock in an open-air recreation yard, a huge cage surrounded by chain-linked fencing. If recreation time coincides with one of Islam’s five times daily calls to prayer, the convicts can pray together. If it coincides with meal time, they can eat together.

Once locked in their cells, they can shout to each other through the slots in their steel prison doors troops uses to deliver meals and library books.

TV time is spent alone, each man shackled by an ankle to the floor of an interrogation room, always under the watch of a special guard force implementing a Pentagon policy for “punitive post-conviction confinement.” That policy is still in flux, says a spokeswoman, Army Lt. Col. Tanya Bradsher, so the Defense Department won’t let the public see it.

At 50, Ibrahim [al-]Qosi of Sudan is the eldest. Early in his captivity here, Bush era prosecutors portrayed him as al-Qaeda’s payroll master. By the time he pleaded guilty to supporting terror last summer, his crime was working as a cook for bachelor irregulars in Afghanistan and occasionally driving for Osama bin Laden and others in al-Qaeda.

Now up for release from the cellblock in July 2012, he’s passing time with a copy of Bush’s recently released best-selling memoir. His Navy defender couldn’t find an Arabic translation. So Qosi’s learning about the man who waged the global war on terror with the help of an Arabic-English dictionary.

In a failed bid for clemency, Qosi’s attorney, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier wrote in January that, after years in communal custody, living in a POW-style setting, his post-sentencing conditions are “grueling” and “reminiscent for him of the eight difficult months he spent in complete isolation when first arriving at Guantánamo.”

But a senior guard who works at the prison said it’s far from isolation. “They do get to commune together,” said Army Command Sgt. Major Daniel Borrero, whose 525 Battalion pulled guards from the blocks interning U.S. criminal soldiers at Fort Leavenworth to work at Guantánamo.

“It’s a prison, ma’am,” said Borrero. “I make the assumption they don’t want to be here.”

The cellblock’s youngest is confessed teen terrorist Omar Khadr, 24, and he’s on the fast-track to freedom.

He pleaded guilty to war crimes last year in exchange for a promise to repatriate him before his 26th birthday. A military jury sentenced him to 40 more years in prison for hurling a grenade that killed an American commando in a July 2002 gun battle in war-time Afghanistan. But once back in Canada, Khadr’s parole is all-but certain because he was captured as a juvenile, 15 at the time of the crime.

At his sentencing hearing, a government paid psychiatrist said Khadr spent his years here “marinating in a radical Islamic community’’ — memorizing verses of the Quran in the company of captives who got to eat, pray, watch satellite TV and shoot hoops in groups as a reward for good behavior.

Now Khadr’s cut off from that group, as a war criminal segregated in circumstances his Army lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, calls “horrific and stupid and don’t make any sense.”

Khadr’s father, a since slain al-Qaeda insider, moved the family from Toronto to Afghanistan when the boy was in elementary school. So to prepare him for life back in Canada, Khadr’s Pentagon defense team is shuttling twice a month to the remote base for attorney-client visits in a compound, Camp Echo.

There, for four days out of five military lawyers and paralegals are drilling Khadr on a home-school styled curriculum designed by a Canadian college professor — history, astronomy, math, grammar, elocution.

English is the emphasis, said Jackson, to help him achieve “mature student” status in Canada, a gateway to college admission.

Not so long ago, the al-Qaeda convict played Romeo to the Army officer’s Juliet.

“He’s very serious about his education,” said Jackson. “His attitude is positive. There’s been a real change in him now that he has the legal matters behind him.”

Also on the cellblock are Guantánamo’s lone lifer, al-Qaeda filmmaker Ali Hamza al-Bahlul and former weapons instructor, Noor Uthman Mohammed. Bahlul keeps to himself, according to military sources, and Noor is just settling in. On Feb. 2, he traded 34 months imprisonment on the cellblock for testimony at future trials about terrorists he knew in Afghanistan.

Theirs is a prison within the sprawling prison system, cut off from the other captives regardless of how good their behavior.

Elsewhere on the base, the military has built a secret lockup for men interrogated by the CIA and suspected in some of the most heinous attacks against America — the Sept. 11th terror attack, the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen, beheading Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl.

There are five Uighurs, ethnic Muslims fearing religious persecution in their native China, likewise segregated from the other captives because a federal judge found them unjustly imprisoned.

But Bahlul and Qosi, Khadr and Noor are segregated because they are “serving punitive sentences,” says Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese, a Guantánamo spokeswoman.

Under the 1949 Third Geneva Conventions, she said, the other captives are “detained under the Law of War only as a security measure” and “should not be subjected to a penal environment or comingled with prisoners punitively incarcerated as a consequence of a criminal conviction.”

Once their sentences are over, under Pentagon doctrine, they become ordinary detainees again — put back with the others in a penitentiary away called Camp 6, the closest thing at Guantánamo today to POW-style barracks housing.

Or they may leave Guantánamo — if the Obama administration chooses to negotiate their release, and congressional restrictions don’t hamstring future releases, for example to Sudan, a State Sponsor of Terror nation.

That test could come next year. The Sudanese man reading the Bush memoirs finishes his sentence on July 7, 2012.

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

As a result, al-Qosi, a peripheral figure in al-Qaeda, who “worked as a cook in a portion of an al-Qaeda compound that housed single men in Kandahar, Afghanistan” (as the Miami Herald put it), and also allegedly served on occasion as a bodyguard for bin Laden, should be freed from Guantánamo and returned home in July 2012. As Reuters explained, “Qosi’s lawyers said last year that once he returned to Sudan, he would enter a program run by the Sudanese intelligence service and designed to rehabilitate those with radical views. He would then return to live with his family but would be monitored to ensure he had no contact with radicals.”

The US still claims it has the right to continue holding al-Qosi after his two-year sentence expires, but that kind of injustice would, I hope, be a step too far even for the current administration and Congress, who have abandoned any attempt to close Guantánamo or deal fairly with the men still held, descending into callousness and scaremongering on the part of Congress, and cowardice and capitulation on the part of the administration.

Nevertheless, last Monday, responding to a specific request from the Miami Herald, Army Lt. Col. Tanya Bradsher stated, “Decisions regarding Mr. al-Qosi’s status after he serves his punitive confinement will be made by the detention authorities at that time.” The Herald added that she “called the sentence due to expire July 7, 2012 ‘being punished for past acts,’” explaining that al-Qosi could still be subject to “detention under the law of war” as “a belligerent during an armed conflict.”

This provoked a fierce and entirely justified response from al-Qosi’s military defense attorney, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, who said, “Indefinitely detaining a 53-year-old man who will have served his sentence and been in custody more than 11 years for being a cook serves neither our national security or foreign policy interests.” Instead, she added, “It bludgeons ‘the interests of justice.’”

However, as the Miami Herald also pointed out, another problem for al-Qosi is that Sudan, his home country, is on the State Sponsors of Terror list, and “Congressional limits on Guantánamo detainee transfers [introduced in a military spending bill before Christmas] forbid the Obama administration from sending even cleared captives to states on the list” — although it should be noted that Congress did not insist on interfering with prisoners cleared for release by US courts.

What no one wants to discuss, of course, is how, logically, a two-year sentence for a man who actually met Osama bin Laden and was demonstrably involved, even in the most minor way, with al-Qaeda, means that the majority of the other men in Guantánamo, who never met bin Laden or worked with al-Qaeda, should also be freed by July 2012.

Logic, however, is in short supply when it comes to discussing Guantánamo in the corridors of power in the United States, where, apparently, justice, fairness and respect for international law may never again be of concern to US lawmakers or the administration. Increasingly cast adrift from opinions in the rest of the world, America blithely continues to assert that everyone still in Guantánamo can be held indefinitely without charge or trial, with the exception of al-Qosi, and three other men subjected to trials by Military Commission.

Those already tried are:

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni, and a self-confessed member of al-Qaeda who produced a propaganda video for the organization, and is serving a life sentence after a one-sided trial in October 2008, in which he refused to mount a defense;

Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, and a former child prisoner who accepted a plea deal last October, and will be repatriated to Canada next October to serve the last seven years of an eight-year sentence in his homeland; and

Noor Uthman Muhammed, from Sudan, a trainer at the Khaldan military camp in Afghanistan, who accepted a plea deal on February 15. On February 18, after a brief sentencing phase, in which prosecutors attempted to persuade a military jury to hand down a punitive sentence to Muhammed, he was given a 14-year sentence, reduced to 34 months as part of his plea deal, in which he has apparently agreed to be a witness in the trials of other men still held.

The absurdity of this is all too obvious to anyone who cares to examine it. Unlike Ibrahim al-Qosi, Omar Khadr and Noor Uthman Muhammed, 89 of the remaining 172 men in Guantánamo have actually been cleared for release for at least a year — and in some cases for nearly two years — after all the cases inherited by the Obama administration were examined by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, consisting of 60 career officials and lawyers in government departments and the intelligence agencies. Some of these men had also been cleared even earlier — in 2006 and 2007, for example — by military review boards under the Bush administration, but had not been freed by the time Bush left office.

Despite this, it’s possible that all of them — or nearly all of them — will still be held when al-Qosi is scheduled for release (and probably when Noor Uthman Muhammed’s date for release comes round in 2014), because 58 are Yemenis, and the release of Yemenis — even those cleared for release by President Obama’s own Task Force — was suspended by the President last January, after a backlash provoked by the discovery that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas Day plane bomber in 2009, had been recruited in Yemen.

The future is barely less bleak for the 31 other cleared prisoners who are still held because they face the risk of torture if sent back to their home countries (which include China, Libya and Syria), and are waiting for third countries to offer them new homes instead. Although 15 countries have taken in 36 prisoners in this category (between May 2009 and August 2010), it’s possible that other countries’ well of good will has run dry, and that the men will therefore remain at Guantánamo indefinitely, as Congress, lawmakers and the administration itself have all made sure that no cleared prisoner will ever set foot on the US mainland.

As for the other men still held, the Task Force recommended that 33 should be put on trial. As a result, some may be tried by Military Commission before 2012 (the option for federal court trials having been cut off by Congress), and may, like al-Qosi, Omar Khadr and Noor Uthman Muhammed, be offered plea deals. In part this is because the administration is fearful of losing if it proceeds with actual trials, and, in Muhammed’s case, it is because officials were obviously fearful that a trial would expose details of the case of Abu Zubaydah (with whom he was seized in Pakistan in March 2002), allowing room for lawyers to point out that this supposed “high-value detainee” and “al-Qaeda No. 3,” for whom the CIA’s torture program was specifically developed, was no such thing, and was instead a mentally damaged training camp facilitator. A trial in Muhammed’s case might also have allowed exposure for the story of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of the camp, who was flown to Egypt by the CIA, tortured until he confessed to non-existent links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, which were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and later returned to Libya, where he died in mysterious circumstances in May 2009.

For 47 others, however, even the option of trial is out of the question, as the Task Force concluded that they were too dangerous to release, but that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial — in other words, that the supposed evidence is not evidence at all, but unverifiable statements and hearsay, often produced in dubious circumstances.

Even ignoring the valid presumption that some of these 47 men are almost certainly regarded as less significant than al-Qosi (and yet are to be held indefinitely), the mind reels at the revelation that the surest way out of Guantánamo is to be regarded as so significant that you are put forward for a trial by Military Commission and secure a favorable plea deal.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After all, when Dick Cheney first revived the Military Commissions in November 2001, they were intended to provide a means to swiftly try and execute alleged terrorists after rigged trials in which evidence derived from torture was admissible. The Supreme Court brought this phase to an end in June 2006, ruling it illegal, but when the Commissions were revived by Congress later that year in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, they were still regarded as a poor substitute for federal court trials by legal experts, who were particularly alarmed that they involved prosecutions for war crimes that were invented by Congress. Significantly, the same problems remained when Obama and Congress revived the Commissions again in the summer of 2009.

Ironically, it may be this fundamental weakness, as much as the fear of losing trials, that is driving the Obama administration to seek plea deals rather than proceeding with trials, and which, in turn, is providing the majority of those charged with a better chance of leaving Guantánamo than their fellow prisoners.

Another irony is that we have been here before, but under George W. Bush. In August 2008, when Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who had taken a job as part of bin Laden’s car pool, was tried by Military Commission, a military jury gave him a five and a half year sentence, which translated to just five more months in Guantánamo when the judge in his case, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, took account of time served since Hamdan had first been charged.

As with al-Qosi, the administration claimed that it had the right to continue holding him even after his sentence was served, but in the end could not countenance what would, presumably, have been an international uproar. In al-Qosi’s case, it is to be hoped that similar concerns will prevail next July, but it is a sign of how monstrously and unjustly politicized Guantánamo has become in the US that it is by no means certain that the administration will recognize that certain principles — such as freeing prisoners after they have served their sentence — have to be honored if notions of justice are to mean anything at all.

By December 2008, Hamdan was a free man, back home in Yemen, and as I explained at the time of his sentence, and of his release, this should have shattered the supposed justification for holding every other prisoner regarded as less significant than him, although this did not happen then, just as it is not happening now, in the case of Ibrahim al-Qosi.

History repeating itself this way should, of course, be a humiliation for the Obama administration, but I suppose that no one in a position of authority really cares that they are presiding over a prison in which Kafka meets Alice in Wonderland, as, crucially, the American people don’t care in sufficient numbers, and all that matters now is sending out the right messages to try and win the 2012 Presidential Election.

Note: The courtroom sketch above is by Janet Hamlin, and is reproduced courtesy of Janet Hamlin Illustration.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Military Commissions and the Case of Bin Laden’s Cook.”

As legal experts have repeatedly pointed out, the charges in the Military Commissions (since their revival by Congress in 2006, after the US Supreme Court ruled that Cheney’s version was illegal) consist of spurious war crimes specifically invented by Congress (“Murder in Violation of the Law of War,” for example, which, as in the case of Omar Khadr — who was obliged to accept that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent” in his plea deal last October — attempts, absurdly and shockingly, to claim that any attempt to fight Americans or coalition forces is a war crime) or of crimes traditionally triable in federal court (conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism), which, very probably, would not stand up on appeal, as senior Obama administration officials conceded when reviving the Commissions in 2009.

In Muhammed’s case, an additional complication is that the authorities were trying to convict him for war crimes that took place before the US was at war with al-Qaeda. Last September, Raha Wala, a Georgetown Fellow in Law and Security, who attended a pre-trial hearing on behalf of Human Rights First, specifically touched on these problems, noting, “Most of the criminal acts Noor allegedly committed took place from the mid-1990’s to 2000, purportedly before the United States was at war with anyone. Yet the military commissions were originally created in response to the September 11th terrorist attacks to try individuals for war crimes, raising questions about whether the military commission even has jurisdiction to hear Noor’s case.”

Another fundamental problem, however, and one which casts a dark shadow over the entire proceedings, concerns Muhammed’s role at the Khaldan training camp, which is central to the allegations against him, and the possibility, or probability that an actual trial — rather than a plea deal followed by a brief sentencing phase — would have focused attention on the stories of two other men involved in Khaldan — Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi — which the authorities would rather not air too publicly, and on the role of Khaldan itself.

Muhammed was seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, on March 28, 2002, which also led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, who was touted as a significant figure in al-Qaeda, and flown to Thailand, to the first of a series of secret prisons in other countries that were used by the CIA to torture “high-value detainees.” On August 1, 2002, before he was moved to another secret prison in Poland, he became the first “War on Terror” prisoner to be subjected to a specific torture program for “high-value detainees,” when John Yoo, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (which is supposed to provide impartial legal advice to the executive branch) wrote two memos — the “torture memos,” signed by OLC head Jay S. Bybee — in which he cynically attempted to redefine torture, and endorsed an interrogation plan for Abu Zubaydah using torture techniques including waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning.

Despite this, however, the US authorities have been unable to prevent the emergence of damning evidence — not least from FBI interrogators — demonstrating that Zubaydah was actually mentally ill, and was little more than a glorified travel agent for the Khaldan camp. In a court submission in October 2009, the government abandoned its claims that he was a member of al-Qaeda, or had any inside information about the 9/11 attacks or other terrorist attacks, proposing instead that he was the head of a militia that “was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” and that he “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

This narrative — and other, uncorrected claims that Abu Zubaydah was a “terrorist leader” and was “the person in charge” of Khaldan — have, distressingly, been accepted by judges in the District Court in Washington D.C., where they have been ruling on Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, and also in the D.C. Circuit Court, which hears appeals following the District Court rulings, as I explained in my articles, In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies and Algerian in Guantánamo Loses Habeas Petition for Being in a Guest House with Abu Zubaydah. The courts’ inability, or unwillingness to investigate the evidence about Abu Zubaydah has been disastrous for Sufyian Barhoumi and Abdul Razak Ali, who have lost in court, as discussed in the articles above, and can, therefore, continue to be held indefinitely, although it is certain that Noor Uthman Muhammed’s defense team was better briefed, and, had their client’s trial by Military Commission proceeded, might have been able to raise some awkward questions.

Also central to the government’s allegations that Muhammed sometimes served as the deputy emir of Khaldan is the role played by the camp’s emir, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, although al-Libi cannot provide any information himself, as he died in mysterious circumstances in a Libyan prison in May 2009. His death conveniently prevents the US from having to account for what happened to him between December 2001, when he was seized following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, and 2006, when he was returned to Libya. This is convenient because, towards the beginning of what appears to have been a horrific tour of secret prisons operated by the CIA or on the CIA’s behalf, lasting several years, al-Libi was sent to Egypt, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that two al-Qaeda agents had been discussing the use of chemical and biological weapons with Saddam Hussein. This confession was used to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, even though al-Libi retracted it before Colin Powell presented it as “evidence” at a crucial UN security council meeting a month before the invasion.

In addition, the role of Khaldan as an “al-Qaeda camp” has also been dispelled over the years, as it has become clear that it was founded during the US-backed mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, that it was only marginally connected to al-Qaeda’s activities, and that, in fact, the Taliban closed it in 2000 after al-Libi refused to allow it to come under the control of Osama bin Laden. This does not necessarily mean that the camp did not play a role in the training of men who later became involved in terrorist activities, despite Abu Zubaydah’s claim that it was “committed to a defensive, not offensive, jihad” (as it appears that the mentally damaged would-be terrorists Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui both trained there, as, reportedly, did three of the 9/11 hijackers), but it certainly adds weight to Muhammed’s explanation, at his tribunal in Guantánamo in 2004, that Khaldan was “a place to get training” that had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “People come over to that camp, train for about a month to a month and a half, then they go back to their hometown,” he said, adding that what the people did with the training they received was their own business.

A military jury will shortly begin deliberations about what sentence Muhammed should receive — a largely symbolic gesture, as it will be irrelevant if, as expected, it exceeds the term agreed in the plea deal. This is under seal, but the Miami Herald reported that “Military sources said the deal could send Noor home by January 2015,” and the Associated Press stated, “Arabic broadcaster Al-Arabiya, citing an anonymous source, reported that Noor … will serve no more than three years at Guantánamo and has agreed to testify against other prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah.”

It remains to be seen whether the Obama administration will actually press ahead with a trial by Military Commission for Abu Zubaydah, as suggested by Al-Arabiya. It certainly seems unlikely, given his central role in the Bush administration’s torture program, but in the meantime, the jury in Muhammed’s case will probably deliver a punitive symbolic sentence, which will be used by the administration to justify the Commissions, and to show Republicans how tough the government is on “terrorists.”

This will no doubt play well to the many cheerleaders for the Military Commissions in the Republican party — and to those Democrats who, like Obama himself, approved their revival despite never seeming to be entirely convinced — although the truth was pointed out to the Miami Herald by Mary Cheh, a law professor at George Washington University, who “said the strategy of trading short prison sentences for guilty pleas lets the government ‘gloss over fundamental legal issues’ still bedeviling” the Commissions, leaving defense lawyers “to resolve a tension between ‘what’s in the best interest of the client and whether to challenge a system that is fundamentally flawed.’”

As ever, “justice” and “Guantánamo” are not words that fit well together.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

This year the President’s bitter surprise for the prisoners (which has encouraged a widespread peaceful protest at the prison, as reported here) was two-fold. The first was his failure to veto a military spending bill passed by Congress, which contained cynical and unconstitutional provisions preventing the transfer of any prisoner to the US mainland, in which lawmakers also demanded the power to prevent the release of prisoners to countries regarded as dangerous.

While these were evidently unacceptable assaults on Presidential authority, dashing the administration’s hopes of holding federal court trials for any of the remaining 173 prisoners and confirming the intent of Congress to enshrine the Yemeni moratorium in legislation, and also to prevent any prisoners from being released to other countries including Afghanistan, Obama refused to veto the bill, feebly claiming that he would try to negotiate with Congress, but thereby conceding that there was no way that the prison would close in the foreseeable future — or, very probably, in the rest of his term in office.

The Return of the Military Commissions

The second bitter surprise for the prisoners was the announcement last week, first mentioned by the New York Times, that, although federal court trials have effectively been suspended, specifically derailing the administration’s stated intention to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks in federal court, the administration is preparing to push ahead instead with trials by Military Commission for at least some of the 33 men recommended for trials by Obama’s Task Force.

This decision is particularly disappointing because it hands victory to the most ideologically misguided Republicans, who like the idea of Military Commissions because they reinforce their false notion of terrorist suspects as “warriors” in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” while enraging many of Obama’s own supporters, who are opposed to trials by Military Commission because they represent a second-tier system of justice, inferior to federal court trials, and, in particular, because they contain “war crimes” specifically invented by Congress.

As Lt. Col. David Frakt, a law professor and the military defense attorney for two prisoners at Guantánamo, explained in Congressional testimony in summer 2009:

If one were to review the charges brought against all of the approximately 25 defendants charged [under President Bush] in the military commissions, as I have, one would conclude that 99% of them do not involve traditionally recognized war crimes. Rather, virtually all the defendants are charged with non-war crimes, primarily criminal conspiracy, terrorism and material support to terrorism, all of which are properly crimes under federal criminal law, but not the laws of war.

The decision to revive the Commissions is also disappointing because, as ProPublica reported in a follow-up to the Times‘ story, last August, when “President Obama’s national security advisers, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, met in the White House situation room to decide whether and how to go forward with trials for some Guantánamo prisoners,” they reportedly “left the White House that August day committed to moving forward simultaneously with prosecutions in federal court and military commissions.” As ProPublica stated explicitly, “No military trials would be held anywhere unless trials in federal courtrooms were held at the same time.”

The only glimmer of hope, as ProPublica also reported, is that:

[S]ome experts have suggested that the restrictions [on moving prisoners to the US mainland] affect only the Pentagon. Justice Department funds could still be used to move prisoners to the United States. If that is the White House view, it will be known only when a prisoner is moved to the United States for trial. And only then will it be clear whether the White House policy to move simultaneously on prosecutions in federal court and military commissions still holds.

However, given Obama’s history of bowing to Republican pressure on almost everything to do with Guantánamo, it strikes me as highly unlikely that he would willingly invite an avalanche of criticism to descend on him by stealthily moving prisoners to face trial to the US using Justice Department funds.

If that were the case, he would already have robustly defended federal court trials, whereas the sad truth is that, when tested, he withdrew from the fray. That test came in October and November, during the trial and conviction of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the only man to be moved by the Obama administration from Guantánamo to the US mainland to face a federal court trial (a move that took place in May 2009, before Congress decided to do all it could to usurp the President’s powers). When the jury in Ghailani’s case convicted him on one count of conspiracy, in connection with the bombing of the US embassy in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania in August 1998, and cleared him of 284 other charges, Obama refused to speak up to defend the court system, allowing his distorted critics to behave as though Ghailani had somehow beaten the system, even though he faced a minimum prison sentence of 20 years, and, when his sentence was delivered today, received a life sentence without parole.

The sad history of the Military Commissions

With the Commissions back in play, therefore, the only hope for those who believe, correctly, that federal courts are the only legitimate venue for trying offenses related to terrorism, is that the system first dragged from the grave by Dick Cheney in November 2001, and revived by Congress in the fall of 2006, and again in 2009 (under Obama), after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2006 that Cheney’s version violated both the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, will be as much of a failure as it has on all its other previous outings — the three convictions under Bush, and the two under Obama:

• David Hicks, an Australian, who, in March 2007, accepted a plea deal and was a free man nine months later;
• Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, and one of several drivers for Osama bin Laden, who was cleared of conspiracy charges by his military jury, and was a free man five months after being convicted and sentenced for providing material support to terrorism in August 2008;
• Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni who made a promotional video for al-Qaeda, and received a life sentence in November 2008 after a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defense;
• Ibrahim al-Qosi, from Sudan, a sometime chef for al-Qaeda members in a compound used by Osama bin Laden, who accepted a plea deal in July last year, and is expected to be freed in July 2012; and
• Omar Khadr, a Canadian, and a former child prisoner, who was put forward for a trial by Obama despite his former status as a child (which should have guaranteed that he was rehabilitated rather than prosecuted), and who agreed to a plea deal in October, which involves him serving one more year in Guantánamo, and then being repatriated to serve seven more years in Canada.

Of these, the trial of Omar Khadr ought to have been the biggest humiliation for the Obama administration, and a sure sign of troubles to come, as his guilty plea involved the spurious war crimes invented by Congress, and it was both depressing and shameful to watch as Obama presided over a system in which Khadr was obliged to accept that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” whose participation in — or presence at — the firefight in July 2002 that led to his capture was illegal.

The men scheduled to face trials by Military Commission

As the New York Times explained last week, the men scheduled to face trials include three of the five men mentioned by Attorney General Eric Holder on November 13, 2009, on the same day that he announced the federal court trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged 9/11 co-conspirators. With al-Qosi and Khadr dealt with, the remaining three are Noor Uthman Mohammed, Ahmed Mohammed al-Darbi and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. A fourth man is Obaidaullah, an Afghan. All of these men (like al-Qosi and Khadr) are hold-overs from the Bush-era Commissions, when 29 men in total were charged, but only three trials took place, as mentioned above.

Noor Uthman Muhammed

In the case of Noor Uthman Muhammed, accused of being the deputy emir of a training camp in Afghanistan, the main problems were summarized in a report from his most recent hearing at Guantánamo in September last year, by Raha Wala, a Georgetown Fellow in Law and Security, who attended the hearing on behalf of Human Rights First, and elaborated on some of the failures of the Commissions that I mentioned above. Wala wrote:

One reason Noor’s case is a bad fit for a war crimes prosecution is that it’s unclear whether a military commission can even exert jurisdiction over Noor for crimes that the government says he committed. Most of the criminal acts Noor allegedly committed took place from the mid-1990′s to 2000, purportedly before the United States was at war with anyone. Yet the military commissions were originally created in response to the September 11th terrorist attacks to try individuals for war crimes, raising questions about whether the military commission even has jurisdiction to hear Noor’s case. The crimes Noor allegedly committed — material support of terrorism and conspiracy — are not traditional law of war violations typically tried in military commissions. Moreover, attempts by Congress to codify material support and conspiracy as war crimes may very well be seen as imposing ex post facto punishment, with military commissions serving as a venue for trying individuals like Noor for “war crimes” that simply didn’t exist at the time these alleged unlawful acts took place.

Similarly, Noor must be considered an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” for the military commission to assert jurisdiction over him. This means that the prosecution needs to show that Noor was unlawfully taking part in hostilities during an armed conflict. Yet, as was mentioned above, the United States was not at war in the 90′s during Noor’s alleged crimes. And Noor denies that he was affiliated with any armed forces, although the US government claims he was providing support for a Taliban training camp [actually the Khaldan camp, which was independent of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda]. Even if the US government’s accusations are accurate, it’s not clear that the Taliban was involved in any armed conflict during the time of Noor’s alleged unlawful acts either.

Other problems for the government are that Muhammed’s case relates to two others that the administration ought be extremely wary of publicizing: that of Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee” for whom the CIA torture program was first developed, who, it turned out, was not a significant figure in al-Qaeda at all, and that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of Khaldan, who was flown to Egypt by the CIA, tortured until he confessed to non-existent links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, which were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and later returned to Libya, where he died in mysterious circumstances in May 2009. Despite this, in September, prosecutors in Muhammed’s case declared their intention to use Abu Zubaydah’s diaries as evidence when his case comes to trial.

Ahmed Mohammed al-Darbi

In the case of Ahmed Mohammed al-Darbi, a Saudi seized in Azerbaijan in June 2002 and rendered to US custody in Bagram, Afghanistan, before being sent to Guantánamo, the main problem for the government is that his case is tainted with torture. He is accused of plotting to attack a ship in the Strait Of Hormuz, meeting Osama bin Laden and attending a training camp in Afghanistan, but at a hearing in September 2009, his civilian lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, urged that all of the 119 statements that al-Darbi made to interrogators should be ruled out, because they were obtained through the use of torture and abuse, including beatings, threats of rape, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation, both at Bagram, where al-Darbi was held for eight months, and at Guantánamo (a full statement by al-Darbi is available here).

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri

The most troubling case is that of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, after being held in secret CIA prisons for nearly four years. I have written about the problems with al-Nashiri’s case since he was originally charged in June 2008, and these were summarized last week, when the New York Times noted that:

[His case] would attract global attention because he was previously held in secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons and is one of three detainees known to have been subjected to the drowning technique known as waterboarding.

Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Reyes of the Navy, a military lawyer assigned to defend Mr. Nashiri, declined to comment on any movement in the case. But he noted that two of Mr. Nashiri’s alleged co-conspirators were indicted in federal civilian court in 2003, and he made clear that the defense would highlight Mr. Nashiri’s treatment in CIA custody.

“Nashiri is being prosecuted at the commissions because of the torture issue,” Mr. Reyes said. “Otherwise he would be indicted in New York along with his alleged co-conspirators.”

The Times might also have mentioned that, shortly after al-Nashiri’s capture, he was threatened with a gun and a power drill in a secret CIA prison in Thailand, and was then moved to Poland, where, in September last year, he was granted “victim” status in an ongoing investigation into Polish complicity in the establishment of a secret CIA prison at Stare Kiejkuty, near Szymany.

Obaidullah

For the last of the men, Obaidullah (also spelled Obaydullah), the decision to proceed with a trial by Military Commission demonstrates how, as under President Bush, the Commissions’ ill-conceived dragnet not only includes alleged terrorists, but also minor figures in the Afghan insurgency, whose connection to terrorism is only justifiable under the absurd terms of the “War on Terror,” which treats terrorists and soldiers equally, and attempts to criminalize soldiers, while denying criminal trials for terrorists.

A year ago, when Eric Holder announced that Obaidaullah had been charged, I revisited an article I wrote when he was first charged under President Bush in September 2008, noting not only that he had plausible compliants that he was tortured by US forces in Bagram, but also that he was

charged with “conspiracy” and “providing material support to terrorism,” based on the thinnest set of allegations to date: essentially, a single claim that, “[o]n or about 22 July 2002,” he “stored and concealed anti-tank mines, other explosive devices, and related equipment”; that he “concealed on his person a notebook describing how to wire and detonate explosive devices”; and that he “knew or intended” that his “material support and resources were to be used in preparation for and in carrying out a terrorist attack.”

As I also explained:

It doesn’t take much reflection on these charges to realize that it is a depressingly clear example of the US administration’s disturbing, post-9/11 redefinition of “war crimes,” which apparently allows the US authorities to claim that they can equate minor acts of insurgency committed by a citizen of an occupied nation with terrorism.

In conclusion, while the charges against Obaidullah remain incomprehensible, there is no reason to suppose that the invented war crimes misapplied to the other men will ensure that their trials by Military Commission — also dogged by evidence of torture — will secure credible convictions, or be regarded as legitimate outside the United States.

January really is the cruelest month, at least for those still languishing in the Pentagon’s prison at Guantánamo.

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

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

This sixth article tells the stories of 14 prisoners seized in two house raids in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, which led to the capture of the supposed “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah.

Of the hundred or so prisoners seized in Pakistan — mostly in house raids, but also in random raids on mosques, on buses and in the street — all but these 27 (and 13 more profiled in Part Seven) have been released. The cases of those released reveal, in general, how US intelligence was often horrendously inaccurate, and how opportunism often played a part in the actions of the Pakistani authorities, who were being rewarded financially. As President Musharraf admitted in his 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”

Moreover, of the 14 men whose stories are described in this chapter, many appear to be victims of the same failures of intelligence or opportunism as those already released. This is particularly true of nine men seized not with Abu Zubaydah (although there are, of course, serious doubts about his significance, as described below) but in a guest house close to a university, as five others seized in that raid have been released, two of whom won their habeas petitions in rulings that were notable for the level of criticism leveled at the government by the judges in question. In addition, one of the remaining nine also won his habeas petition (although the government is appealing that decision), and another has been cleared for release and, recently, came close to being offered a new home in Germany.

The following five men were seized in the house raid in Faisalabad that led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-value detainee” for whom the CIA’s torture program was initially developed. Zubaydah’s case reveals the true horror at the heart of the “War on Terror,” because, despite being waterboarded 83 times and held in secret CIA prisons for four and a half years, he was not a senior al-Qaeda operative at all, and was, instead, the mentally troubled gatekeeper of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan. Even so, the five men seized with him have, for the most part, been accused of having connections to al-Qaeda, although one other, an Algerian named Labed Ahmed, was released in November 2008, and all appear to be more fortunate than three others seized in the same raid — two young men named Omar Ghramesh and Noor al-Deen, and an unidentified teenager — who were rendered to Syria as part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, and who have never resurfaced in any form.

ISN 682 Al Sharbi, Ghassan (Saudi Arabia)
Al-Sharbi, who speaks fluent English and graduated in electrical engineering from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, is one of very few Guantánamo prisoners to have publicly declared membership of al-Qaeda. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he accepted all the allegations against him, which included claims that he received specialized training in the manufacture and use of remote-controlled explosive devices to detonate bombs against Afghan and US forces, that he “was observed chatting and laughing like pals with Osama bin Laden,” and that he was known in Guantánamo as the “electronic builder” and “Abu Zubaydah’s right-hand man.” Charged in the first incarnation of the Military Commissions, he appeared at a pre-trial hearing on April 27, 2006, and was equally open about his activities, telling the judge, “I came here to tell you I did what I did and I’m willing to pay the price,” “Even if I spend hundreds of years in jail, that would be a matter of honor to me,” and “I fought the United States, I’m going to make it short and easy for you guys: I’m proud of what I did.” Perhaps surprisingly, al-Sharbi, who was a member of the short-lived Prisoners’ Council in the summer of 2005, along with Shaker Aamer (ISN 239) and four others who have been released, was befriended by Guantánamo’s warden, Col. Mike Bumgarner, despite his avowed allegiance to al-Qaeda, and despite the fact that he later became one of Guantánamo’s most persistent hunger strikers. In June 2008, he was again put forward for a trial by Military Commission, along with Sufyian Barhoumi, Jabran al-Qahtani and Noor Uthman Muhammed (see below), but the charges were dropped by the Pentagon in October 2008, after their prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned, stating that the trial system was designed to prevent the disclosure of evidence essential to the defense. New charges against all four men were filed in January 2009, in the dying days of the Bush administration, but with the exception of Noor Uthman Muhammed, have not been revived under President Obama, perhaps because, as in the majority of cases involving Abu Zubaydah, the government has stepped back from its discredited claims about his significance.

ISN 685 Ali, Abdelrazak (Algeria)
The story of Abdelrazak Ali is so confusing that I have no idea what to believe, and can only hope that the truth will emerge when the supposed evidence is examined by a District Court judge in his habeas corpus petition. In the Summary of Evidence for his Combatant Status Review Tribunal in 2004, he was identified as Abdelrazak Ali Abdelrahman, a Libyan, but by the time of his second Administrative Review Board in 2006, he was identified as Abdullah Azak, and in the third round of the ARBs, in 2007, he was identified as Said Bin Brahim Bin Umran Bakush, an Algerian. This led to the US authorities accusing him of having “lied for a period of two years eight months prior to revealing his real name and actual place of birth,” and using this as part of the evidence against him, even though, as I have stated, this “may not have been advisable, but was understandable.” According to the US authorities, he was accused, by an unidentified “source,” of staying in various guest houses in Afghanistan from July to October 2001, and of attending the Khaldan training camp “circa 1996/1997,” and by an unidentified “al-Qaeda operative” of being “a member of his Martyrs’ Brigade.’” In response, he has stated that he traveled to Pakistan “to go to school to learn how to read and write,” and has also claimed, like Labed Ahmed (released in November 2008), that he was taken to Abu Zubaydah’s house by other people, and did not know the inhabitants. Given that the allegations against him are such clear examples of unverifiable hearsay, it may well be that this is the case.

ISN 694 Barhoumi, Sufyian (Algeria)
Barhoumi, who lost his habeas corpus petition in September 2009, was accused of being a trainer for the bomb-making group in the house rented by Abu Zubaydah, but has strenuously denied the allegations against him. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he admitted traveling to Afghanistan for military training in 1999, but pointed out that this was long before 9/11, and insisted that, having been shown a video of atrocities in Chechnya at a mosque in the UK, where he lived for two years, his intention was to train to fight in Chechnya. He explained that, after leaving Afghanistan, he traveled “from house to house,” ending up at the safe house in Faisalabad where he was seized with Abu Zubaydah. He added, however, that he was only there for ten days before the raid, and claimed that the allegations were the result of “hearsay” and of “people testifying against me.” He claimed that his interrogators told him, “people are talking about you a lot,” and suggested that, because he was arrested with Abu Zubaydah, “they dumped everything on me and said I was al-Qaeda also.” In 2006, at a pre-trial hearing after he had been put forward for a trial by Military Commission, he, like Ghassan al-Sharbi, refused legal representation, but was primarily concerned with showing the courtroom his hand, which was severely damaged after a land mine accident in Afghanistan, and complaining about the conditions of his imprisonment. Although he was charged for a second time in June 2008, and the charges were dropped in October 2008 and refiled in January 2009, he has not been charged under President Obama, and the fact that his habeas petition proceeded to a ruling may indicate that he is one of the 48 men that the Guantánamo Review Task Force recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial. Noticeably, when his habeas appeal was denied by the D.C. Circuit Court in June this year, and the reasons for the denial of his habeas petition were first publicly revealed, it became apparent that, although the judge in his case (Judge Rosemary Collyer) noted that Barhoumi “said that he is not now and has never been a member of al-Qaeda,” and added, “I have no reason not to believe that,” she nevertheless concluded that “he was with an associated force that was engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners and therefore was properly detained.” That “associated force,” it transpired, was an alleged militia associated with Abu Zubaydah, whose existence was apparently revealed in the diary of another of Zubaydah’s associates, Abu Kamil al-Suri, (someone previously unheard of, and whose current whereabouts are unknown). It also became apparent that, in the absence of any other evidence, the government was using this not only as a new way of justifying Abu Zubaydah’s detention, but also to implicate others like Barhoumi.

ISN 696 Al Qahtani, Jabran (Saudi Arabia)
As I explained in June 2008, when al-Qahtani, a graduate in electrical engineering from King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, was put forward for a trial by Military Commission with Ghassan al-Sharbi, Sufyian Barhoumi and Noor Uthman Muhammed, he has had little to say about the allegations against him: that he traveled to Afghanistan after 9/11 “with the intent to fight the Northern Alliance and the American forces, whom he expected would soon be fighting in Afghanistan,” and that he was part of a group at Abu Zubaydah’s house who were provided with money to buy the components to make remote-controlled explosive devices. He refused to take part in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, and spoke very little in April 2006, during the pre-trial hearing for his first, aborted Military Commission, when he was concerned only to refuse the services of his military lawyer. As with the other three men, the charges against him were dropped in October 2008, and new charges were filed in January 2009, although he has not been charged under President Obama.

ISN 707 Muhammed, Noor Uthman (Sudan)
Muhammed was put forward for a trial by Military Commission on May 23, 2008, accused of serving as the deputy emir and a weapons instructor at the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2000, when the camp was closed. Noticeably, these charges do not relate to the 9/11 attacks, and in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, Muhammed insisted that Khaldan was “a place to get training” that had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “People come over to that camp, train for about a month to a month and a half, then they go back to their hometown,” he said, adding that what the people did with the training they received was their own business. Muhammed’s case ought to raise troubling questions about Khaldan — and, specifically, about how his claims about the camp’s lack of affiliation with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban echo the US authorities’ belated conclusions about Abu Zubaydah, and how his alleged role as the camp’s deputy emir ought to raise troubling questions about the camp’s emir, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoner,” al-Libi died in a Libyan prison in May 2009 after being rendered back to the country, having served his purpose when, in 2002, under torture in Egypt (where he had been flown by the CIA), he falsely confessed to connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. However, despite these problems, Muhammed is one of five prisoners put forward for a trial by Military Commission under the Obama administration, and although there are serious doubts about whether the court is empowered to try him for his alleged involvement with terrorism before the 9/11 attacks, prosecutors made a point, in a pre-trial hearing on September 21 this year, of stating that, “for a number of years,” Muhammed “was the principal trainer and in charge of all training at the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan that provided numerous individuals who went on to serve for al-Qaeda.” His trial is scheduled to begin in February 2011.

The following nine men were seized in a separate house raid in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002, at the Crescent Mill guest house, also known as the “Issa house,” after its Pakistani owner (who was not seized) or the “Yemeni house,” because most of its inhabitants were Yemenis. Although the house was purported to have a connection to Abu Zubaydah, the majority of the 15 prisoners known to have been seized in the raid have always maintained that they were students at the nearby Salafia University, or that they had traveled to Pakistan for cheap medical treatment, and that the house was a student guest house. One of the prisoners, Salah Ahmed al-Salami, died in mysterious circumstances in Guantánamo on June 9, 2006 (on the night that two other men died in what was described as a triple suicide), and five others have been released. In May 2009, Judge Gladys Kessler, ruling on the habeas corpus petition of one of the five, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, who described himself as a student, savaged the government for drawing on the testimony of witnesses whose unreliability was acknowledged by the authorities, and for attempting to create a “mosaic” of intelligence that was thoroughly unconvincing, and she also made a point of stating, “It is likely, based on evidence in the record, that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university.” Ali Ahmed was finally released last September, and in the meantime another student in the house, Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, a Saudi who stated that he had traveled to Pakistan to receive cheap medical treatment for a back problem, was released last June, following the deliberations of President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force. In addition, two other Yemeni students, Mohammed Tahir and Fayad Yahya Ahmed, were released last December. Since then, one other man has also won his habeas petition (although the government is appealing that decision), and another has been cleared by the Task Force, and is seeking a third country to offer him a new home.

ISN 680 Hassan, Emad (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Hassan has repeatedly stated that he never set foot in Afghanistan (until the US took him there after his capture), and that he was near the end of a seven-month trip to the university to study the Koran when he was seized. He has also explained that, while in Pakistani custody, “the person who was in charge came and told us we didn’t have anything to worry about,” and that “our sheet was clean.” Nevertheless, he has been subjected to numerous allegations made by unidentified individuals, who have claimed that he trained at al-Farouq, where he was one of 50 men chosen to be Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards, that he swore bayat to Osama bin Laden, and that he was present in Tora Bora, at the showdown between al-Qaeda and US forces in December 2001. These dubious sounding allegations have not been tested in court, of course, and it may be that Hassan has simply aroused the wrath of the authorities in Guantánamo because of his refusal to accept the conditions in which he and the other prisoners are held. In 2006, one of his lawyers, Douglas Cox, explained how he was “regarded as a leader by other detainees,” and how he “went on a hunger strike. A few months into it, military doctors started force-feeding him by inserting a tube through his nose. The process was so painful that Hassan felt he couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t want to quit, though, because he thought he would be letting down the other detainees.” Weight records released by the Pentagon show that, although Hassan only weighted 113 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, his weight dropped at one point in December 2005 to a skeletal 85 pounds (PDF).

ISN 684 Tahamuttan, Mohammed (Palestine)
Tahamuttan, who was 22 years old when seized, had been a member, since the age of 14, of Jamaat-al-Tablighi, the vast missionary organization, with millions of members worldwide, which, in Guantánamo, was routinely described as a front for terrorism (a description that is akin to describing the Catholic Church as a front for the IRA). According to his own account, he had traveled to Pakistan in October 2001, and had been part of two missions from the Tablighi headquarters in Raiwand, but in Guantánamo he was subjected to claims that he had traveled to Afghanistan for military training, even though a more plausible explanation of his activities was also provided by the government, in passages in his Unclassified Summary of Evidence in which it was stated that “he met two Afghani men during a lecture at the Jamaat-al-Tablighi headquarters in Raiwand, Pakistan, who pressured him into traveling to Afghanistan … even though the Jamaat-al-Tablighi expressly forbade travel to Afghanistan as too dangerous.” However, although “he traveled with the two Afghan men to Quetta, Pakistan, where he was taken to a compound containing Afghan refugees and Arab men who looked like fighters,” he “was advised not to travel to Afghanistan, and his travel was arranged to Lahore, Pakistan.” Cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, he was recently considered for rehousing in Germany, but at the last minute the German government decided to accept only two of the three prisoners offered. However, on September 27, 2010, the Foreign Minister of the Maldives, Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, said the government “was going to invite the sole remaining Palestinian detainee in Guantánamo Bay to live a ‘peaceful, free’ life in the Maldives,” and “expressed hope that the parliament would endorse the decision as a gesture of affection to the Palestinian brothers and as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people.”

ISN 686 Hakim, Abdel (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, although Hakim stated in Guantánamo that he had studied the Koran for five months in Lahore, and had then been directed by a religious figure to the guest house near Salafia University, the US authorities alleged that he had trained at al-Farouq. When a tribunal member asked him, “If you were a student studying the Koran, how did you end up here?” he replied, “This is the question I always ask myself … why was I captured there, and why did they bring me here?”

ISN 688 Ahmed, Fahmi (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Fahmi Ahmed (also identified as Fahmi al-Tawlaqi) “said that he went to Pakistan to buy fabrics, taking $3,500 that he had borrowed from his mother, but explained that he actually spent most of his time in Pakistan ‘like a wild man,’ drinking and smoking hashish. After staying for a year and a half, during which time his visa expired, he was eventually advised to go to Faisalabad, where there was a big Arabic community, and where he was told he would be able to locate people who could tell him how to bribe the government to renew his visa. He said he ended up staying for two months with a Pakistani family, but just as he was planning to call his family to arrange to return home, because the house he was staying in was too small, he met Ali Abdullah Ahmed al-Salami [aka Salah Ahmed al-Salami, one of the three prisoners who died in June 2006], who invited him to stay at a larger house, where he was also staying, and where ‘they were all university students.’” In contrast, the US authorities allege that he trained in Afghanistan, fought with the Taliban, and was a member of al-Qaeda, but this seems unlikely, because, as his lawyers explained in 2006, “Although he says he endured his share of abuse at Gitmo –once, soldiers shaved his head in the shape of a cross — he has also made an amazing discovery: rap music. Al-Tawlaqi adopted the rap name King Daniel, which he drew on his prison jumpsuit. He filled two notebooks with rap lyrics, in English, organized by subject. The lawyers can’t say what the songs are about because Justice Department officials wouldn’t declassify the lyrics, though they assured me they are ‘very lewd,’” and he “asked his lawyers if they could persuade Eminem to perform his songs.”

ISN 689 Salam, Mohammed (Yemen)
Salam, who was reportedly seen by “a senior al-Qaeda member” at al-Farouq, has actually presented a far more coherent narrative, which involved traveling to Pakistan to get treatment on his nose, and then meeting up with a missionary under whose guidance he traveled to Faisalabad to study the Koran, where he stayed for eight months until he was seized in the house raid. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, after explaining that a “generous person” paid for his trip, the following exchange took place, which demonstrated how wide the cultural gap was between the Americans and Muslims from the Gulf:

Tribunal Member: I don’t know your culture very well, but … in our culture people just don’t step up and say, “I’ll pay for the trip for you.”
Detainee: In our culture, in Islam, there is such a thing … Indeed, it is an obligation for any Muslim who is rich to pay for someone who is poor.

ISN 690 Qader, Ahmed Abdul (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Qader, who was just 18 years old when he was seized, said in Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan “to help the needy and the poor,” and tried unsuccessfully to establish a charity organization. He admitted that he visited the “back line,” encouraged by friends connected to the Taliban, but insisted that he “never participated in any kind of military activities.” After leaving Afghanistan before the US-led invasion began, he said that he ended up in the house in Faisalabad, where he became friends with Fahmi Ahmed (ISN 688, above). “We shared the same vision and he has the same opinions,” Ahmed said of him, adding, “He used to use hashish with me,” whereas the other students in the house “were trying to inspire me to do the religious things, like look at my religion, because most of the students were studying the Koran and all things related to religious studies.”

ISN 691 Al Zarnuki, Mohammed (Yemen)
Although it was alleged, by unidentified sources, including “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” that al-Zarnuki was seen in various training camps and guest houses in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2001 (and even that, after the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, he attended a meeting in Kandahar with Osama bin Laden to plan further operations), he has stated that he took a break from farming to preach with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, and has claimed that he spent four months preaching and then spent a month and a half at the guest house where he was seized, where he became ill.

ISN 702 Mingazov, Ravil (Russia)
A former ballet dancer and Russian army officer, Mingazov, who won his habeas corpus petition in May 2010, has always claimed that he traveled to Afghanistan in search of a new home for himself and his family, after he converted to Islam and faced dangerous discrimination from the Russian military. Following the US-led invasion, he said that he fled with other refugees to a center in Lahore, in Pakistan, run by the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi, where he stayed from January to March 2002. Anxious to be reunited with his wife and child, but aware that foreigners in Pakistan were prey for bounty hunters, he then accepted an offer of safe passage to a house in Faisalabad with two other refugees, Labed Ahmed (an Algerian, released in November 2008) and Jamil Nassir (a Yemeni, see below), where, they were told, it would be easier for them to leave the country. After being accidentally delivered to Shabaz Cottage, where Abu Zubaydah was living (and where Ahmed insisted on staying), Mingazov and Nasser were then moved to the Crescent Mill guest house, where they were seized after about ten days. Any doubts about Mingazov’s innocence should have been removed not just by the ruling but also because, during a military review board at Guantánamo, Labed Ahmed had stated that, because he, Mingazov and Nassir “did not have a connection or relationship with Abu Zubaydah,” they “should have been placed in the Yemeni house.” As I have explained previously, “This indicates that, although Abu Zubaydah had some sort of contact with the [Crescent Mill guest] house, it was not a place that had any connection with terrorism, and was, at best, a place where a few foreigners fleeing from Afghanistan could be concealed alongside a group of students.” Despite this, however, the Obama administration recently announced that it would appeal Mingazov’s successful habeas petition.

ISN 728 Nassir, Jamil (Yemen)
The outline of Nassir’s journey to Faisalabad, and the reasons that he should not be regarded as an associate of Abu Zubaydah, can be found in the story of Ravil Mingazov, above. As for what Nassir had been doing prior to his capture, the US authorities initially struggled to find evidence of any anti-US activities. In 2004, at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, the only information they had about him, beyond the spurious connection with Zubaydah and the house, was a claim that he had stayed in “the Afghani house” in Kandahar, after traveling from Yemen to Pakistan in late July 2001. By 2007, the US authorities had established a much more exciting narrative, but its reliability is, of course, unknown. According to this version of events, Nassir had traveled to Afghanistan with his wife, had rented a house next door to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, and was linked by unknown sources to “the purchase of equipment used to assist al-Qaeda operatives in the production of biological weapons.” According to this allegation, Nassir was working with al-Wafa, a Saudi charity that, for many years, the US authorities believed was working with al-Qaeda on chemical and biological weapons, although these claims appear to have evaporated in every case except Nassir’s, as the director of al-Wafa, Abdul Aziz al-Matrafi, and two other prisoners once accused of similar crimes — Ayman Batarfi and Jamal Mar’i — have all been released. Nassir has refuted the al-Wafa allegations, and, in light of his own claim that he traveled from Pakistan to Afghanistan to study and teach the Koran, it may be that the most reliable unidentified source is the one who stated that he was “not a guard nor affiliated with al-Qaeda,” but a civilian who had “moved to Afghanistan with his wife and children.”

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Pacific Free Press, The Public Record and Uruknet.