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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 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.

This seventh article tells the stories of 13 prisoners seized in Pakistan between February and September 2002, which, as I explained in Parts Five and Six (which told the stories of another 27 men seized in Pakistan), was part of a process of capturing prisoners that was, if anything, even more alarmingly random, opportunistic, or reliant on dubious intelligence than the well-chronicled seizure of Arabs in Afghanistan or crossing the border into Pakistan that I chronicled in Parts One to Four of this series.

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 40 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 13 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. It is unknown what conclusions President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force reached about these men, but only two were cleared for release under the Bush administration. One of these men subsequently lost his habeas corpus petition, and two others have also lost their habeas petitions, and it is a fair presumption that many of these men were recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Task Force.

ISN 695 Abu Bakr, Omar (Omar Mohammed Khalifh) (Libya)
Khalifh, a Libyan amputee, lost his habeas corpus petition in April this year, despite doubts about where he was captured, and what he had been doing in Afghanistan, as well as disturbing revelations about his treatment in Guantánamo. According to the US authorities, he had worked for a trucking company owned by Osama bin Laden in Sudan, had worked as an explosives trainer at various training camps in Afghanistan from 1996-98, had been “identified” as a trainer and the leader of a Libyan training camp near Kabul, visited by bin Laden, where he was “identified as someone whom others would approach to receive explosives training if they wanted to commit a terrorist attack,” and had also been “identified” as “a military leader in charge of many Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other Gulf States while on the front line” in 2001, who “would meet with other Taliban leaders to plan military operations.” The US authorities also allege that he was seized in the house raids in Karachi on February 7, 2002, which I described in Part Five of this series, but his lawyer, Edmund Burke, explained that he had worked for the Taliban as a mine cleaner until 1998, when his right leg was severely damaged by a land mine, and had then spent years moving from hospital to hospital in Afghanistan to receive treatment for his leg, which was eventually amputated. Burke added that he moved to Pakistan in 2001, and was living in a school for boys when it was raided by Pakistani police. The most disturbing revelations about Khalifh came from former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who told me that that Khalifh’s status had been exaggerated by the authorities in Guantánamo. “They call him ‘The General,’” Deghayes told me, “not because of anything he has done, but because he decided that life would be easier for him in Guantánamo if he said yes to every allegation laid against him.” Even so, as Deghayes also explained, this cooperation has been futile, as Khalifh has been subjected to appalling ill-treatment, held in a notorious psychiatric block where the use of torture was routine, and denied access to adequate medical attention for the many problems that afflict him, beyond the loss of his leg. As Deghayes described it, “He has lost his sight in one eye, has heart problems and high blood pressure, and his remaining leg is mostly made of metal, from an old accident in Libya a long time ago when a wall fell on him. He describes himself as being nothing more than ‘the spare parts of a car.’” Despite these contradictory claims, Judge James Robertson denied his habeas petition, finding the government’s version of events generally convincing (although it was not reassuring that, in his unclassified opinion, he muddied the waters still further by incorrectly stating that Khalifh was seized in Jalalabad in March 2002).

ISN 708 Al Bakush, Ismael (Libya)
Apparently a former mujahid in the dying days of Afghanistan’s Communist regime, al-Bakush reportedly stated that he returned to Afghanistan “to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance,” and the US authorities allege that he “and his group would fight sporadically whenever there was a fight between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.” However, al-Bakush also provided a detailed explanation for doing so, stating that “the reason he decided to help fight with the Taliban was because he lived in Afghanistan both prior to Taliban control and after Taliban control. Prior to Taliban control there were robberies, thefts, and fights between groups. After the Taliban took over the area became safe.” Beyond these claims, there was nothing to indicate that he took up arms against the United States, or had any desire to do so. He stated that he “had never met bin Laden,” said that “at no time did he conduct any operations against the American Forces,” and, moreover, “said he had no feelings towards the United States and considered the United States like any other country.” “His main concern,” he explained, “is Libya and the overthrow of [Colonel] Gaddafi.” Much of the evidence against Bakush consisted of allegations about his involvement with Libyan groups opposed to the Gaddafi regime, and the question of Bakush’s continued detention, therefore, seems, as with other Libyans held in Guantánamo, to hinge on whether it is acceptable to hold dissidents opposed to a regime that, until the “War on Terror” began, was regarded as a terrorist dictatorship by the very government that has been holding Bakush for the last eight and a half years.

ISN 713 Al Zahrani, Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
Apparently seized in a house raid in Lahore (around the same time as the house raids in Faisalabad, described in Part Six), al-Zahrani (also identified as Mohammed Muti Zahran) is one of several amputees held at Guantánamo, having apparently lost a leg in Afghanistan. According to the US authorities, he “admitted to being proud that he was a low-level Taliban fighter,” and “stated he was proud that he came to Afghanistan to be a Mujahedin [sic], and stated that if he had not lost his leg, he still would have fought.” These admissions — plus a detailed list of statements, attributed to al-Zahrani, relating to his training at al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs in the years before the 9/11 attacks) and at an Algerian guest house in Afghanistan — suggest that he was indeed a foot soldier, and that he had undertaken advanced military training, but, as in other cases, they may not be reliable. Noticeably, however, the US authorities have also come up with other allegations indicating that he was a member of al-Qaeda. These include allegations that he was friends with one of the 9/11 hijackers, that he swore bayat to Osama bin Laden, that he “met [Ayman] al-Zawahiri [al-Qaeda’s second-in-command] three or four times and they had a very good relationship,” that he “met with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [the future leader of “al-Qaeda in Iraq”] several times about logistics and personnel issues for the fight against the Northern Alliance,” and that he was involved in planning the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, who was murdered on September 9, 2001. Again, it is impossible to know how much truth there is to these allegations. They may be as they appear, or they may have been produced through the dubious interrogations of other prisoners connected with al-Qaeda. What is certain is that there are holes in al-Zahrani’s jihadist CV: in another statement attributed to him, for example, he “stated that he doubted the viewpoints of al-Qaeda because some of their operations contradict Islamic principles and go against Islamic laws.”

ISN 717 Bin Hadiddi, Abdulhadi (Hedi Hammamy) (Tunisia)
Like many Tunisians, Hammamy, who was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board under the Bush administration, had traveled to Italy from Tunisia in search of a new life. After arriving in 1987, he settled in Bologna where he worked as a hotel porter, and later in a restaurant. In 2000, he moved to Pakistan, where he married the daughter of another Tunisian he met while applying for asylum, and had a daughter, Marwa. He then worked alongside his father-in-law, but one evening, in April 2002, as he went with a Pakistani friend to look at a house to rent, he was seized by the Pakistani police, presumably for the lucrative bounty payments available for vulnerable Arabs in Pakistan. Despite being cleared for release, his habeas corpus petition reached the US District Court in April 2009, when Judge Richard Leon denied his petition, choosing to believe an allegation submitted by the Italian authorities — that he was “a member of an Italy-based terrorist cell that provided support to various Islamic terrorist groups” — as the basis for presuming that he had therefore arrived in Pakistan in connection with terrorism, even though the charges leveled against him in Italy — of “supporting terrorism, in part, by furnishing false documents and currency” — had not been tested in a court of law. Judge Leon was partly persuaded to regard the unsubstantiated Italian allegations as trustworthy, because he concluded that they tied in with another claim put forward by the government, regarding Hammamy’s identity papers, which were apparently “found after the Battle of Tora Bora in the al-Qaeda cave complex.” As with the Italian allegation, which he has persistently refuted, Hammamy has always denied being in Tora Bora, and has claimed that his papers were in fact stolen from him, and that the government has evidence that this is the case. The result of this ruling was that, for the first time, a prisoner cleared under President Bush had his detention justified by a judge, and as one of his lawyers, Cori Crider of Reprieve, explained, “While this doesn’t change the military’s opinion that Hedi Hammamy is transferable, it certainly isn’t going to help him in the political context. Being found subject to military detention is not remotely the same thing as a criminal conviction, but that won’t stop right-wing elements in potential resettlement states from conflating the two issues.”

ISN 722 Diyab, Jihad (Syria)
The story of Jihad Diyab (or Deyab) is spotted with unsubstantiated allegations. A former driver for the Syrian Air Force, he has stated that he left Syria with his family in May 2000 and traveled to Kabul, via Iran and Pakistan, “to start a business selling honey,” and has maintained this story throughout his imprisonment. When he arrived at Bagram in June 2002, the following comments were made by the interrogators who first spoke to him (these were reproduced by Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of one of the interrogators in the US prisons in Afghanistan, in his book The Interrogators, in which he also noted that Diyab and the other prisoners who arrived with him had already been interrogated in Pakistani prisons with the assistance of the CIA): “31 years old; Lebanese; speaks Arabic well, English. Was in the Syrian Air Force. Severe kidney problems. Think he is lying. Says he was a honey trader. Captured in Lahore. Doctor says good to go. Watch him.” With seven and a half years to come up with another story, the US authorities have certainly managed to do that, but it is impossible to know how accurate the allegations are, and very little information has come from Diyab himself, who, as the authorities noted under the sub-heading “Intent,” “would not talk; he spent the entire interrogation looking at the floor.” The allegations accrued from the interrogations of other prisoners include a claim that he was “identified as having fled to Afghanistan where he joined al-Qaeda’s military training camps,” a claim that he “allowed a senior al-Qaeda operative to stay in his house,” and other allegations made by two unidentified “senior al-Qaeda operatives”: one claimed to have met Diyab in the 1990s, when he noted that he was an expert in passport and document forgery, and added that he had met him again in Kabul in 2000 or 2001, and in Lahore in 2002, and another claimed that he had “showed up in Afghanistan in 2000 expecting to be able to attend Khaldan training camp because he had known another individual from their time together in Syria.” This source apparently “disapproved” of him, because he “expected to be accepted into the camps without prior vetting.”

ISN 757 Abdul Aziz, Ahmed Ould (Mauritania)
A Mauritanian seized in a house raid on June 25, 2002, Abdul Aziz is accused of being a member of al-Qaeda, even though the US government has failed to come up with a single piece of evidence to support the claim. Evidently an educated and articulate man (his first lawyers at Guantánamo noted hat he studied literature and philosophy, and speaks French and English, in addition to Arabic), Abdul Aziz, according to the government’s account, traveled to Afghanistan in September 1999 to support the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, and undertook training in 2000. At the time of his capture, however, he was working as an Arabic language teacher at an institute in Pakistan, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, and there is no evidence that he ever took up arms against anyone, and certainly no evidence that he was ever involved in any activities against the United States. Instead, he is quoted in the government’s documents as saying that he “believed his direct supervisor was more affiliated with the Taliban than with al-Qaeda,” that he “visited [the] supervisor’s house but never discussed things such as al-Qaeda,” and that, although “a man he worked for told him that al-Qaeda needed a good administrator and approached him on al-Qaeda’s behalf,” he turned down the offer. Set against this are an array of unsubstantiated al-Qaeda allegations, which are in marked contrast to Abdul Aziz’s own account, in which he admitted that he “spoke with Osama bin Laden about the Institute … for approximately five minutes in October 2000.” The claim that he was a member of al-Qaeda came from an unidentified “source,” who also claimed that he had sworn bayat (an oath of loyalty) to Osama bin Laden. It was also claimed that he had been recruited to join al-Qaeda by “a personal adviser of Osama bin Laden, who leads the Mauritanian al-Qaeda cell,” and had attended the wedding of one of bin Laden’s sons in 1999 or 2000.

ISN 894 Abdul Rahman, Mohammed (Lotfi Bin Ali) (Tunisia)
Abdul Rahman (also identified as Lotfi bin Ali), who was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review under the Bush administration, had been living in Italy before traveling to Pakistan, and was essentially an economic migrant. In Guantánamo, he explained that he went to Pakistan for medical treatment and to find a wife. “I have told my story five hundred times,” he said. “I went to Pakistan for drugs. I was sick and I wanted to heal myself, so I went to Pakistan.” He also traveled, he said, “to get married and relax and to get out of what I was in.” Although the US authorities compiled an array of allegations that purported to undermine his story, including claims that he was involved in various North African terrorist groups, and a claim by “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant” that he attended the Khaldan training camp in 1998 or 1999, he refuted all the allegations, and insisted that, although he had traveled to Afghanistan from Pakistan, he had only done so because the Pakistani government had started a campaign against Arabs. In his last review before he was cleared for release, he also retracted a confession, “admitted some time ago,” that he associated with “various amounts” of terrorists while in Jalalabad, saying, “I do not pose a threat. I am against terrorism … I am against the killing of innocent people … I live a normal life. I do not like problems. That’s it.” Like the majority of Tunisians in Guantánamo, bin Ali received a prison sentence in Tunisia in absentia (on dubious charges of belonging to a terrorist organization), with the result that, in 2007, when the US authorities were planning to repatriate him against his will, Judge Gladys Kessler of the US District Court in Washington D.C. intervened to prevent his repatriation. Judge Kessler was particularly concerned because two Tunisians repatriated in June 2007 — Abdullah bin Omar and Lotfi Lagha — received prison sentences on their return, after trials denounced by observers as show trials, and in her ruling, in October 2007, Judge Kessler ruled that he “cannot be sent to Tunisia because he could suffer ‘irreparable harm’ that the US courts would be powerless to reverse.” Since Judge Kessler’s ruling, Lotfi bin Ali has been stuck in Guantánamo, while the State Department has tried to find a third country prepared to accept him.

The following six men were seized in house raids in Karachi on or around September 11, 2002, around the same time that the “high-value detainee” Ramzi bin al-Shibh was seized in a separate house raid. Also seized with bin al-Shibh, who was immediately rendered to the CIA’s network of secret prisons, was Hassan bin Attash, the 17-year old brother of Waleed bin Attash (another “high-value detainee” seized six months later), and the children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Bin Attash was held for a week in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” near Kabul (a medieval torture dungeon with the addition of 24-hour music and noise), and his torture was then outsourced to Jordan, where he was held for 16 months before his return to Afghanistan in January 2004 and his transfer to Guantanamo in September 2004, and KSM’s children were held for a unspecified amount of time, although it is believed that, at the time of writing, they are no longer in US or Pakistani custody (see Part Nine for more on these stories). Although the six men below were not captured with bin al-Shibh, the US authorities have been content to allow observers to infer that they were somehow connected to bin al-Shibh, even though, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, they seem, at most, to have been “nothing more than recent Taliban recruits who ended up in Karachi as part of an extended safe house system that was sheltering all Arabs from arrest, and not just those who were committed to al-Qaeda.”

ISN 836 Saleh, Ayoub Murshid Ali (Yemen)
All six of the men described here were probably rendered, after their capture, to the “Dark Prison,” but only two — Musa’ab al-Madhwani and Hail al-Maythali (see below) — have spoken about their experiences. Saleh, who is accused of traveling to Afghanistan “to join the jihad” in 2000, and of training at al-Farouq, appears, like all the men, to have been an extremely peripheral figure in the Afghan conflict. He has stated that he learned first aid as well as receiving weapons training at al-Farouq, and that his training was cut short because he contracted malaria, and, like Shawki Balzuhair and Musa’ab al-Madhwani, he was only seized in Karachi because a plan to return home via Iran was thwarted by the Iranian authorities, obliging him to return to Pakistan.

ISN 837 Al Marwalah, Bashir (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, al-Marwalah, who had studied nursing in Yemen, admitted traveling to Afghanistan in September 2000 and training at al-Farouq and another camp, but he added that he then returned to Yemen to see his family, and especially his father, who was ill. He said that he then returned to Afghanistan in August 2001 and attended al-Farouq for a second time, but refuted an allegation that he had participated in military operations against the US-led coalition, and said that he had fled to Pakistan after the US-led invasion began. When the tribunal asked him why he had gone to Afghanistan, he said that he wanted to train to fight in Chechnya, and when he was asked, “Are you a member of al-Qaeda?” he said, “I don’t know. I know I am an Arab fighter” (although he also noted that he had not engaged in any actual combat). In the government’s most recent publicly available allegations, it was noted that, unlike other men who had traveled to Tora Bora, al-Marwalah “and about 400 others” were evacuated to Khost, after “approximately four weeks moving back and forth between two guest houses, one in Kabul, and the other in Bagram,” and that, after traveling through Pakistan, he “stayed in a safe houses” [sic] in Karachi “from July to September 2002.”

ISN 838 Balzuhair, Shawki Awad (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Balzuhair was accused of traveling to Afghanistan in April or May 2001, attending al-Farouq, and serving on the Taliban front lines near Bagram. In the most recent publicly available documents, it was noted that he “decided to go to Afghanistan after viewing a video about Chechnya, and became concerned about the Palestinian struggle for independence.” Balzuhair’s route out of Afghanistan apparently involved staying, in a variety of house with “about 20 others” from September to December 2001, and then living “wth a group of about 60 Arabs in the mountains of Afghanistan near Zormat.” From there, he ended up in Karachi, where, after an ill-fated diversion in Iran (as with Ayoub Saleh and Musa’ab al-Madhwani), he was seized after also staying in a house in Quetta for a month and “another house near a rail road track for another month.” As with the other five men, there were no allegations that he had engaged in combat at any point in his travels.

ISN 839 Al Mudwani, Musab (Musa’ab Al Madhwani) (Yemen)
Al-Madhwani is the only one of the six whose habeas corpus petition has been ruled on by a District Court judge, and the outcome was not entirely satisfactory. In December 2009, when Judge Thomas F. Hogan denied his petition, he said that, although the government had “met its burden” in establishing, by a preponderance of the evidence, that al-Madhwani was connected to al-Qaeda, he “did not think Madhwani was dangerous.” Noting that he had been a “model prisoner” since his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002, he explained, “There is nothing in the record now that he poses any greater threat than those detainees who have already been released.” Moreover, Judge Hogan refused to rely on any statements that al-Madhwani had made to interrogators at Guantánamo, ruling that they were “tainted by abusive interrogation techniques,” to which he was subjected in the weeks after his capture in the “Dark Prison,” although he did accept statements that al-Madhwani made during his Administrative Review Board at Guantánamo in 2005, which, he said, were not tainted because they were made years after the abuse took place. Al-Madhwani’s lawyers had argued that these statements should also have been excluded, because they were “contaminated because he was still worried about upsetting his captors,” but the judge refused to accept this argument, even though one of his attorneys, Darold W. Killmer, explained, “He was threatened that if he changed his story, he would be sent back to a place worse than at the ‘Dark Prison.’” According to al-Madhwani’s own account, he arrived in Afghanistan in August 2001, and trained briefly at al-Farouq, until it closed immediately after the attacks. After spending a few months in guest houses in Afghanistan, he made his way to Pakistan via Khost, traveling with other Arabs, Pakistanis and Afghans, and then, after trying unsuccessfully to return home via Iran, where, he said, he was “beaten and questioned” before being refused entry, spent ten months being moved around various houses in Lahore, Quetta and Karachi, waiting for an opportunity to return home that never came. Moreover, when he explained the situation in Karachi at the time of his arrest, an even less militant picture emerged. “The group I was arrested with were staying in two apartments,” he said. “One person from each apartment refused to surrender and fought the Pakistani forces sent to arrest us. I was in the group that chose to surrender.” He added that the Pakistanis were “thankful for our cooperation and surrendering without fighting.” He then explained that there were seven men in his apartment, including one who was killed, who had only been there for about five days, and that two other men shared the other apartment with a family. In his Review Board, he spoke only briefly about the “Dark Prison,” but it was easy to understand why Judge Hogan, who also spoke to him by video-link from Guantánamo, concluded that his “allegations about abusive interrogations were credible,” and, noticeably, added that they “were not challenged by government lawyers.” In 2005, when a Board Member asked him, “Are you holding anything back from the interrogators?” he replied, “That is impossible, because before I came to the prison in Guantánamo Bay I was in another prison in Afghanistan, under the ground [and] it was very dark, total dark, under torturing and without sleep. It was impossible that I could get out of there alive. I was really beaten and tortured.”

ISN 840 Al Maythali, Hail Aziz Ahmed (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, al-Maythali stated that he went to Afghanistan in November 2000 to “fight in the jihad,” and admitted ferrying supplies on the back lines near Kabul, but he added that he was only on the front lines for a week because he had no military experience. He denied allegations that he trained at al-Farouq, and explained that these allegations had only arisen because of his torture in the “Dark Prison,” where, he said, “there was very bad torture conducted on people,” including himself, which was “so bad that he knew by making up and agreeing to the training it would stop the torture.” He added that “his testicles were disfigured to the point where they cannot be repaired.” Like Ayoub Saleh, Shawki Balzuhair and Musa’ab al-Madhwani, he was only captured after returning to Pakistan following an abortive attempt to return home via Iran.

ISN 841 Nashir, Said Salih Said (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Nashir was accused of attending al-Farouq from July to September 2001, when the camp closed. He then apparently served as a guard at Kandahar airport until November 2001, when he traveled to a valley between Zormat and Khost, Afghanistan, where he stayed in caves for approximately ten days, before moving on to Pakistan. In “factors favor[ing] release or transfer,” it was noted that he “stated he would never kill innocent women or children in the United States because it was against his religion.”

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 The Public Record.

From the beginning, there had been doubts about President Obama’s commitment to justice for the prisoners at Guantánamo. Instead of respecting the habeas corpus litigation initiated by the Supreme Court in June 2004, and revived, after unconstitutional interference from Congress, in June 2008, the President established an interagency Task Force to review all the Guantánamo cases, which, essentially, was a secretive, executive-led alternative to court review.

Even worse, however, was the hands-off approach that the President, and his Attorney General Eric Holder, brought to the ongoing habeas litigation. When Obama came to power, 23 Guantánamo prisoners had won their habeas corpus petitions, and just three had lost. This should have been a resounding indication that all was not right with the government’s cases, but instead of ordering a shake-up of the department responsible for sending lawyers to the District Court to be humiliated again and again in cases like those of the Uighurs (innocent Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) or Mohammed El-Gharani, a former child prisoner held on the basis of information provided by witnesses that the government itself regarded as unreliable, Obama and Holder did absolutely nothing.

The same people who had worked on the cases for George W. Bush were allowed to keep manufacturing whatever argument they thought might win, leading to further humiliations, as in the case of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, one of 15 men seized in a guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan in March 2002. In May, accepting Ali Ahmed’s contention that he was a student, Judge Gladys Kessler, as I explained at the time, “demolished the government’s case against him, painting a disturbing picture of unreliable allegations made by other prisoners who were tortured, coerced, bribed or suffering from mental health issues, and a ‘mosaic’ of intelligence, purporting to rise to the level of evidence, which actually relied, to an intolerable degree, on second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions.”

However, it was in June, when Judge Richard Leon (an appointee of George W. Bush) came to consider the case of Abdul Rahim al-Janko, that new depths were plumbed in the Obama administration’s inability — or unwillingness — to conduct even the vaguest objective analysis of the cases it inherited.

I explained al-Janko’s story in a detailed article at the time, which I recommend for those who want the full sordid tale, but to recap, he had traveled to Afghanistan at the age of 23 after falling out with his father, had stayed in an al-Qaeda-affiliated guest house for five days, and had then (perhaps unwillingly) attended an al-Qaeda-affiliated training camp for 18 days, after which he was tortured as a spy for three months, until he confessed that he had been spying for the US and Israel. He was then held in a Taliban prison in Kandahar for 18 months, which was where he and four other men imprisoned by the Taliban were found in January 2002.

Although all five men — a British citizen, a Tatar and two Saudis, as well as al-Janko — had been imprisoned by the Taliban, they were sent to Guantánamo instead of being freed, and al-Janko was particularly unfortunate, as a search of the house belonging to Mohammed Atef, the military chief of al-Qaeda, who had directed his torture and who was killed in a US bombing raid in November 2001, unearthed a videotape containing his tortured confession, which was wrongly interpreted as a declaration of jihad by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The five men seized in the Taliban prison in Kandahar were eventually released, but al-Janko was the only one freed under President Obama, and the only one whose unjust detention had to be exposed in a US court before his release was secured.

In ruling last June on al-Janko’s habeas petition, Judge Leon was so appalled that the case had come before him at all that he openly mocked the government for “taking a position that defies common sense” by asking the court to address whether a relationship with al-Qaeda or the Taliban “can be sufficiently vitiated by the passage of time, intervening events, or both.” Concluding that “The answer, of course, is yes,” he then dismantled the government’s case point by point, stating, “To say the least, five days at a guest house in Kabul combined with eighteen days at a training camp does not add up to a longstanding bond of brotherhood,” and adding that al-Janko’s torture “evinces a total evisceration of whatever relationship might have existed!”

Judge Leon also stated that his abandonment in the Taliban prison “is even more definitive proof that any preexisting relationship had been utterly destroyed,” and concluded that an analysis of all these factors “overwhelmingly leads this Court to conclude that the relationship that existed in 2000 — such as it was — no longer existed whatsoever in 2002 when al-Janko was taken into custody.”

Last week, al-Janko, who was freed from Guantánamo and given a new home in a third country last October, sued 26 current and former senior US military officials for damages. Alleging violations of his rights under the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, his lawyers stated that he was “the victim of a decade-long Kafkaesque nightmare from which he is just awakening,” adding, “Whether a country provides redress for the people it has wronged in violation of international and US law is a true test of the character of a nation.”

As the Washington Post described it, al-Janko “says that he was urinated on by his American captors, slapped, threatened with loss of fingernails and exposed to sleep deprivation, extreme cold and stress positions.” He also “says that US authorities broke his knee, used police dogs against him and caused kidney damage by failing to treat him for kidney stones.”

Al-Janko undoubtedly has a case, but his chances of securing a meaningful response from the Obama administration — let alone an apology or compensation — must be close to zero, given that the administration’s response to any challenge involving Bush-era crimes, or its own novel developments, such as the proposed extrajudicial executions of US citizens, is to invoke the “state secrets” doctrine, or, in the case of a damning internal report into the “torture memos” of John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, to secure the services of a compliant Justice Department official (David Margolis), who is skilled in the dark arts of an official whitewash. As Glenn Greenwald explained:

[T]he Obama DOJ — which fought unsuccessfully to keep Janko imprisoned at Guantánamo — has been so consistent in its standards that one need not wait to hear from them to know how they will respond. It’s the same way they’ve responded in similar cases: whatever was done to this person is a State Secret that no court can review; those who are responsible for the abuse do and should enjoy full legal immunity; and, besides, we should all be Looking Forward, Not Backward at “unnecessary battles” like this one.

If that sounds bleak, it’s because it is. With hindsight, shielding the Bush administration’s torturers from accountability for their crimes has always been an important part of Barack Obama’s supposedly pragmatic Presidency, but in recent months, as Obama’s own crimes have been highlighted in his relentless use of drone assassinations in Pakistan (PDF), and his defense of plans to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, shielding administration officials, past and present, from accountability for wrongdoing has openly become a key policy of the government.

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

Cross-posted on The Public Record, The Smirking Chimp, Uruknet and Common Dreams.

This is the fourth part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven.

This fourth article tells the stories of 19 prisoners seized in Pakistan after crossing from Afghanistan in December 2001, shortly after the prisoners described in Part One, and during a week-long period when around a quarter of the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo (779 in total) were seized. Although these 185 or so men were routinely regarded as al-Qaeda members who had fled from the showdown between al-Qaeda and the US (via its Afghan allies) in the Tora Bora mountains, the truth is that almost every significant al-Qaeda member escaped from Tora Bora, that many of these men were nothing more than insignificant foot soldiers, and that many others were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers or economic migrants, caught fleeing the death and destruction in Afghanistan.  Nevertheless, all were presented as al-Qaeda operatives by their Pakistani captors, who then handed them over — or sold them — to their US allies.

Around 140 of these men have been released, and the remaining prisoners are not only described in this article, but also in Part Three, where I told 22 more stories. Disturbingly, seven of these men have won their habeas petitions, but are still held, and at least five have been cleared for release (or “approved for transfer,” to use the language that the Obama administration learned so carefully from its predecessor).

ISN 249 Al Hamiri, Mohammed (Yemen)
Al-Hamiri, who was 19 when he was seized, claimed that he “left Yemen for medical treatment and was tricked by a British resident into going into Afghanistan where he did nothing for six months.” An unidentified source — or sources — claimed that he had trained at al-Farouq (the main camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) and had spoken to bin Laden at a guest house in Kabul, but al-Hamiri denied the allegations, and only conceded that, in Kabul, he had stayed in the home of someone he “felt may have been associated with the Taliban.” His most critical comments were delivered in a statement that was read out in his absence during his tribunal. All the charges, he said, “were made up in order to keep him and other Muslims at the camp,” because he “never had a weapon, never carried one and never even killed a chicken.” According to weight records released by the Pentagon in 2007, he weighed 122 pounds on arrival at Guantánamo, but his weight dropped to just 102 pounds in February 2003, probably during one of the many hunger strikes that have punctuated Guantánamo’s history (PDF).

ISN 251 Bin Salem, Mohammed (Yemen)
In a particularly thin set of allegations, the US authorities claim that bin Salem, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan in July 2001, and received training at al-Farouq. Noticeably, he is not accused of having taken part in combat against the Taliban (let alone US forces), as it is only alleged that he “supported al-Qaeda and Taliban forces by serving as a cook at a rest and relaxation facility for front line troops at Bagram,” and that he was captured by Pakistani forces after retreating directly from Bagram to Pakistan.

ISN 254 Khenaina, Muhammad (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Khenaina has stated that he went to Afghanistan in August 2001 “to teach the Koran in Arabic,” although he admitted that he “did not actually teach the Koran.” After staying in a guest house in Kabul, he said that he heard of the 9/11 attacks and was “concerned about retaliation by the Americans and wanted to get out.” He explained that the owner of the house arranged for him to travel to Logar and then Khost, where he stayed with an Afghan, and then traveled through the mountains to Pakistan with five other Arabs and an Afghan guide. After joining up with another group of 19 men who were also fleeing Afghanistan, he reached the border, where he was detained by the authorities. Throughout this story, the only claim of militancy against Khenaina was an allegation that the manager of the guest house “arranged transportation for guests to a Taliban training area 35 minutes north of Kabul,” but Khenaina insisted that “he was not in Afghanistan to participate in jihad,” and that he “did not have a weapon while in Afghanistan.” He also condemned the 9/11 attacks, and explained that, if released, “he would return to Yemen and marry a cousin who has been betrothed to him and never leave again.”

ISN 255 Hatim, Saeed (Yemen)
In December 2009, Hatim won his habeas corpus petition, but it did not lead to his release. In fact, the Obama administration has appealed the ruling, even though the judge in Hatim’s case, Judge Ricardo Urbina, clearly established that the government’s allegations — that he trained at al-Farouq, stayed in al-Qaeda and Taliban guesthouses, “operated under the command of al-Qaeda and the Taliban at the battlefront against the Northern Alliance,” and fought at the battle of Tora Bora — “rest[ed] almost entirely upon admissions made by the petitioner himself,” which he made “only because he had previously been tortured while in US custody” in Kandahar. In addition, Judge Urbina discredited the Tora Bora allegation, because it was made by a fellow prisoner who had made false allegations against dozens of other prisoners (first exposed publicly in 2006), and “whose grasp on reality,” as Judge Urbina explained, “appears to have been tenuous at best.” Distressingly, the Obama administration’s appeal has been filed despite knowledge that Hatim has suffered from what Judge Urbina described as “severe psychological problems” in Guantánamo, and has tried to commit suicide on several occasions. Indeed, in May 2002, an interrogator stated, “I do not recommend [Hatim] for further exploitation due in part to mental and emotional problems [and] limited knowledgeability.”

ISN 259 Hintif, Fadil (Yemen)
Prior to traveling to Afghanistan, Hintif, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he had spent many years working as a farmer on his family’s land, and had then moved to Sana’a to look for work. There he met a man at a mosque who asked him about “going to Afghanistan to help poor Afghans,” and he “felt this would be a chance to do something good in memory of his deceased father, so he thought it was a good idea.” He then apparently sold his car to raise funds for his trip, received some money from his brother and set off for Afghanistan. In Kabul, he “began living with an individual who previously taught the Koran in Afghanistan,” and when he asked him how he could help the Afghans, was told that “he could either work with the Afghani Red Crescent or he could help distribute food supplies.” Having decided to work for the Red Crescent, he said that he traveled with the instructor to Logar province, south of Kabul, but stopped his work after the US-led invasion began, when he was escorted to the Pakistani border. There, he said, he surrendered to the Pakistani police, who took him to a prison in Peshawar. He was then transferred to a larger prison in Kohat, and was eventually turned over to the Americans. Throughout his whole story, Hintif maintained that he “did not receive any training in Afghanistan” and “did not fight in Afghanistan because he was not convinced of the causes that were being fought for.” He explained that he “felt that the groups there were fighting for power, and that there was no reason to fight a jihad.” Disturbingly, apart from vague allegations about the guest houses in which he stayed, the only allegations that the US authorities have been able to come up with are that his name was on a document “recovered from a safe house raid associated with al-Qaeda in Karachi, Pakistan” (which is not necessarily reliable, as it may not have been his name, but a kunya or alias that does not necessarily refer to him) and a much-derided claim that his Casio watch was the same model as one used in improvised explosive devices “in bombings linked to al-Qaeda and radical Islamic terrorist groups.”

ISN 263 Sultan, Ashraf (Libya)
Sultan, who is accused of being a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (opposed to the regime of Colonel Gaddafi), training at various camps in Afghanistan, and fighting at Tora Bora, has denied the allegations, stating that he left Libya because of religious persecution, and lived with other Libyan refugees in Jalalabad. He has also stated that he was not a member of the LIFG (or of al-Qaeda), and was not at Tora Bora, and has declared that he traveled to the Pakistani border, where he was seized on December 18, 2001, with an Afghan guide, and not with a group of soldiers. His disdain for the betrayal of justice at Guantánamo was revealed in his appearance at his tribunal in 2004, when he stated, “I know my fate is already predetermined and the judgment has been pronounced already. So this Tribunal is just for show and it is not real. Everybody is reading from papers that are already printed and everything is already predetermined. I know for sure my destiny is already predetermined. The judgment against me is already made up. My presence, me defending myself or not defending myself, will have no importance whatsoever.”

ISN 275 Abbas, Yusef (Abdusabar) (China)
Abbas is one of 22 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who had fled persecution in their homeland, and had ended up in Afghanistan, either because they had been thwarted in their attempts to reach Turkey or Europe, or because they nursed futile hopes of rising up against the Chinese government. He is one of 17 of the men who were living in a rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains when the US-led invasion began in October 2001, and who, after the settlement was destroyed in a bombing raid, made their way to the Pakistani border, where they were seized and later sold to US forces. 21 years old at the time of his capture, Abbas was a farmer, who, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “learned about the oppression of his people as he was growing up, and was determined to leave to find a better life, but could find little information about other countries, except through broadcasts that were made by a covert US radio station. Having finally obtained a passport, he decided to try to get to America. Taking $600 with him, he went first to Kyrgyzstan, where he was warned that the police planted false evidence on Uighurs and handed them over to the Chinese authorities, but where they took $300 from him instead, and laughed at him when he told them that he wanted to go to America. He then went to Pakistan, where a Uighur businessman, who befriended him at the airport, encouraged him to go to an Uzbek house in Jalalabad, where another Uighur took him to the camp in the Tora Bora mountains.” Five of the Uighurs were released in Albania in May 2006, and the remaining 17 — including Abbas — won their habeas corpus petitions in October 2008. However, although 12 of these men have been resettled in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, Yusef Abbas and four others remain in Guantánamo. Having turned down offers of a new home because of fears about the suitability or security of the countries offered, they are back in legal limbo, as the US courts have ruled that they have no right to be accepted in the US, and no other offer to rehouse them has yet been made.

ISN 280 Khalik, Saidullah (Khalid) (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantanamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), little is known of Khalik’s story, as he refused to engage with the tribunal process at Guantánamo. In his absence he was accused of being in Afghanistan during the US bombing campaign, and, in a sign of how information was twisted in a ridiculous manner to come up with anything that officials might find a way of using, of receiving “wounds to his face and arm as well as other flesh wounds” during the bombing. Like the other four remaining Uighurs, he is currently in legal limbo, as he awaits an offer of a new home.

ISN 282 Abdulghupur, Hajiakbar (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantánamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), Abdulghupur told his tribunal at Guantánamo, when asked about the “training camp” in the Afghan mountains, where he and 16 others had lived before the bombing raid that destroyed the settlement, “They called this place a camp but that’s way too much of a name for that place we stayed. They did not have enough bathrooms to use or housing or anything. That is way too big of a name for the place where we stayed.” He added, “the conditions were really bad and stressful and there was lots of hard work, [but] I decided to stay there because our goal was to be against the Chinese government and I wouldn’t give up my goal even in the bad conditions to live.” After the bombing raid that completely destroyed the settlement, so that, as Abdulghupur explained, “it looked like no one ever even stayed in that place,” the men’s journey to Pakistan (and their betrayal by Pakistani villagers) was also described by Abdulghupur. “After that there was no stopping,” he said. “There was constantly bombing all the time. In the mountain we stayed in a cave because we didn’t know where to go … We were waiting for our leaders to come and tell us to go to the city or somewhere else but no one showed up and we decided to go to Pakistan. When we got to Pakistan, the local people came to us with tea, bread and meat, really good stuff. In the middle of the night they came to take us to the mosque. We went to the mosque and then they turned us over to the Pakistani authorities … They put us in cars and took us to jail. After that they turned us over to the US.” Like the other four remaining Uighurs, Abdulghupur is currently in legal limbo, as he awaits an offer of a new home.

ISN 288 Saib, Motai (Algeria)
One of five Algerian prisoners facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, Saib (also identified as Mutaj Sayab), had been living in Jalalabad prior to his capture (like many of the Algerians held at Guantánamo), and had traveled to Afghanistan via France and London. Throughout nearly nine years of detention, he has only been accused of “receiving small arms training” near Jalalabad. In relation to plans for his release from Guantánamo, his lawyers explained, in a court filing in July 2008, that in February 2008 the Department of Defense notified them that he had been “approved to leave Guantánamo,” but stated obliquely that “such a decision does not equate [to] a determination that your client is not an enemy combatant, nor does is it a determination that he does not pose a threat to the United States or its allies. I cannot provide you any information regarding when your client may be leaving Guantánamo as his departure is subject to ongoing discussions.” As his lawyers noted, “Saib has serious concerns that this ambiguous and damaging language will prevent his safe release from Guantánamo” to a third country, and these fears have only heightened after the involuntary repatriation of another Algerian, Abdul Aziz Naji, in July this year.

ISN 290 Belbacha, Ahmed (Algeria-UK)
Another of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, Belbacha was cleared for release in March 2007, and has repeatedly appealed to the US courts to prevent his return to Algeria — although in September 2009, the notoriously Conservative D.C. Circuit Court ruled that the lower courts were no longer able to grant injunctions preventing their forcible repatriation. A former footballer in Algeria, Belbacha then worked as an accountant for a government-owned oil company, but after receiving death threats from Islamist militants, fled to the UK in 1999, where he sought asylum and secured work in Bournemouth. During the Labour Party conference in 1999, he received a thank-you letter and a tip from Deputy Prime Minster John Prescott, whose room he was responsible for cleaning. In June 2001, he decided to take a holiday in Pakistan with a friend, and then traveled to Afghanistan to see the country, staying for several months in a guest house in Jalalabad, and then fleeing to Pakistan after the US-led invasion, where he was seized by opportunistic villagers and sold to US forces. Despite being cleared for release in 2007, the British government has persistently refused to accept Belbacha, so that his lawyers at Reprieve, and other organizations, including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Cageprisoners, have sought help from the governments of Ireland and Luxembourg as well, although to date all these efforts have been unsuccessful. He has also been offered a home in Amherst, Massachusetts, although a law passed by Congress, banning any Guantánamo prisoners from being brought to the US mainland except to face a trial, has prevented him from taking up this offer. In case any doubt remains about the legitimacy of Belbacha’s fears of repatriation, it should be noted that, in November 2009, he was tried in absentia and sentenced to 20 years in prison, for what his lawyers can only conclude was the crime of speaking out about his fears of being repatriated. As Reprieve explained, “In a disgraceful show trial, the court sentenced Ahmed to 20 years in prison for belonging to an ‘overseas terrorist group.’ Despite repeated requests and extensive investigation, Reprieve’s lawyers have been unable to discover what exactly Ahmed is supposed to have done. No evidence has been produced to support his ‘conviction,’ which appears to be retaliation against Ahmed for speaking out about human rights abuses in Algeria.”

ISN 309 Abd Al Sattar, Muieen (UAE)
One of Guantánamo’s least-known prisoners, al-Satter is ostensibly from the United Arab Emirates, although the UAE claims not to know who he is, and his Unclassified Summary of Evidence also states that he “has a Pakistani passport and originally went to Pakistan on vacation in September 2001.” All that is known of this man — listed by the US authorities as Muieen A Deen Jamal A Deen Abd Al Fusal Abd Al Sattar — is contained in this slim document, released in September 2007, but it makes clear that al-Sattar taught at the Private Holy Koran School in Mecca, that he paid for his own travel, that he was “convinced by a friend to go to Afghanistan and teach the Five Pillars of Islam,” and that he “thought if he traveled to Afghanistan that he would get credit from God and that, since the trip was only going to be for a week, there would be no harm in going.” This seems fairly straightforward, and is certainly more comprehensible than other claims from unattributed sources: that he “was identified as a trainer at the al-Farouq training camp in Afghanistan” (which would have been impossible if he arrived in Pakistan in September 2001, as al-Farouq closed after the 9/11 attacks), and that he was “a fighter in Tora Bora who moved around encouraging people to fight and be religious.” Perhaps what actually happened, as was indicated in other passages in the Unclassified Summary, was that the “friend” who convinced him to travel to Afghanistan — a Syrian whom he had met in Karachi — tricked him into traveling to Tora Bora. According to the allegations, al-Sattar “advised that if he saw al-Moaz again, he would be very upset with him and would want to do him physical harm for getting him into so much trouble.”

ISN 310 Ameziane, Djamel (Algeria)
Ameziane, another of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, had also been living in Jalalabad. A Berber, he left Algeria in 1992 “in order to escape persecution and make a better life for himself,” and unsuccessfully sought asylum in Austria, where he worked legally for three years, becoming the top chef at an Italian restaurant in Vienna, until a new government clamped down on immigrants, and his work permit was denied without explanation. From there, he moved to Canada, where he obtained a temporary work permit and worked for an office supply company and for various restaurants in Montreal. In 2000, after five years in Canada, his asylum claim was denied, and, as his lawyers explained, “Fearful of being forcibly returned to Algeria, and with few options, [he] went to Afghanistan, where he could live freely without discrimination as a Muslim man, and where he would not fear deportation to Algeria.” Apart from an allegation that he stayed in a guest house in Kabul that was associated with the Taliban, before traveling to Jalalabad, the US authorities failed to come up with a shred of evidence against him, with the exception of an evidently unreliable claim, by an unidentified “source,” who said that he “met the detainee” at al-Farouq. In relation to plans for his release from Guantánamo, Ameziane fears returning to Algeria because of the stigma of Guantánamo and the instability in his hometown of Kabylie, where, as his lawyers have explained, practicing Muslims are “targeted for arrests and detention by the government based solely on their religious practices” and “The stigma of having spent time at Guantánamo would alone be enough to put him at risk of being imprisoned if he is returned.”

ISN 311 Bin Mohammed, Farhi Saeed (Algeria)
Bin Mohammed, who is 50 years old, is one of the five Algerians facing involuntary repatriation, after being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and also by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force. In his case, uniquely, he was also cleared for release by a US judge after winning his habeas corpus petition in November 2009.  A former conscript in the Algerian army, bin Mohammed had traveled around Europe for many years, working as a laborer in the UK, France and Italy, before traveling to Afghanistan in 2001, apparently in search of a wife. Although the US authorities alleged that he had undertaken military training in Afghanistan, the judge in his case, Judge Gladys Kessler, ruled that the government’s evidence was unreliable because it came from statements made by Binyam Mohamed, the British resident and torture victim, who had been subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul from April 2002 to May 2004. In an attempt to prevent his enforced repatriation, and to uphold the United States’ obligation, under the UN Convention Against Torture, not to “expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” Judge Kessler issued a temporary order barring bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria in June this year, following up on his lawyers’ request for her “to order the government to carry out his release, but to bar his transfer to Algeria, where he fears persecution or even death from either the Algerian government or from armed terrorist groups there.” After protracted wrangling with the notoriously Conservative judges of the D.C. Circuit Court, Judge Kessler’s temporary order was overturned, and the Circuit Court’s decision — which drew on previous rulings preventing the lower courts from interfering in the Executive branch’s right to decide how and where to dispose of prisoners — was upheld in July this year, when the US Supreme Court sided with the Circuit Court, just a few hours before the Supreme Court also approved the repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji, who was immediately sent home. As SCOTUSblog noted, the ruling was “the first indication that the Supreme Court will not allow federal judges to interfere with government controls on who leaves or stays at Guantánamo Bay.” Despite the ruling, bin Mohammed remains at Guantánamo, still desperately hoping that a third country will offer him a new home, although he could, of course, be sent back to Algeria any time the Obama administration feels like doing so.

ISN 324 Al Sabri, Mashur (Yemen)
According to the US authorities, al-Sabri traveled to Afghanistan in summer 2000, lived in Jalalabad for a year, and traveled on occasion to the Taliban lines at Bagram and Kabul. Quite what else he did is difficult to ascertain — not because there are no allegations, but because their trustworthiness is hard to gauge. According to various unidentified sources, in May 2001 he was working as a facilitator for new arrivals at two guest houses in Kabul, and was “well known and well respected as an administrator in the guest houses.” It was also noted that he “was said to facilitate the transfer of weapons and other supplies to the front lines,” and, most worryingly (or most outrageously, depending on your point of view), was accused of working for Osama bin Laden. According to the unidentified allegations, he was “believed to have sworn bayat to Osama bin Laden,” because he and others around him knew bin Laden’s travel dates and routes, and another “source” identified him as “a member of al-Qaeda,” because he was “following Osama bin Laden’s orders to keep the guest house up and running.”

ISN 326 Ahjam, Ahmed (Syria)
Ahjam is one of four Syrians who had been living in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border. As one of these men, Maasoum Mouhammed (also known as Bilal Abdah Mohammed), was released in Bulgaria in May this year, despite having been accused of running “a safe house,” which was used for “money and document forging operations” for al-Qaeda, it seems likely that Ahmed Ahjam and the other two men, Ali Husein Shaaban (ISN 327) and Abu Omar al-Hamawe (ISN 329) have also been approved for release. Certainly, there is nothing in the men’s story to indicate that they were connected in any way with al-Qaeda. At Guantánamo, Mouhammed described it as “a normal house, a place to eat, drink and sleep,” and, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files, “The four men certainly matched the profiles of economic migrants, drifting from country to country in search of employment, and drawn to Afghanistan by its Arab-influenced reputation for welcoming Muslims from all around the world. They said that only seven people lived at the house (themselves, the owner, and two other Syrians), and that they all put money in to keep the place running.” According to his account in Guantánamo, Ahjam worked for al-Wafa, a Saudi humanitarian aid charity, which the Bush administration regarded as being tied to al-Qaeda, although no proof of this was ever forthcoming, and, with a few exceptions (including Ahmed Ahjam), the many dozens of prisoners who worked for the charity, including its Saudi director, have all been released.

ISN 327 Shaaban, Ali Husein (Syria)
One of four Syrians who had been living in a house in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border (see the story of Ahmed Ahjam, above), Shaaban, who was just 19 years old when he was seized, came from a poor family in Syria and had been an ironsmith in his father’s store. He told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he went to Afghanistan because he wanted to move there to seek a new life.

ISN 328 Mohamed, Ahmed (China)
One of 22 Uighurs held in Guantanamo (see the entry for Yusef Abbas, ISN 275), and also identified as Hammad Mohammed, he is one of an unknown number of prisoners subjected to “do-over” tribunals at Guantánamo, after the military panels responsible for reviewing their cases in 2004 and 2005 concluded that they were not “enemy combatants” and should be released. These “do-over” tribunals were convened in secret in Washington D.C. — often on more than one occasion — until the military officers delivered the desired verdict, and in Mohammed’s case he was not finally vindicated until a subsequent military review board cleared him for release in 2006. In his initial tribunal, he explained why his desire for military training was aimed at China and not America. “The Chinese people have tortured and pressured the Uighur people really bad,” he said. “The Uighur people are trying to go all over the world now. One sixth of the world’s population is in China. They are a threat to the whole world. If I have such a large enemy, why would I go and fight with another enemy?” Throughout his tribunal, the only explanation for the administration’s determination to continue holding him was an allegation that he was a weapons instructor from May to October 2001. In response, he called one of his compatriots as a witness, who explained, “I saw that he was sick during that time. He has a stomach problem and he was helping with the kitchen work and helping the cook. He was also studying the language.” The allegation was then dropped, but in the meantime ludicrous new allegations were added to his Unclassified Summary of Evidence, in which it was claimed that he “was identified as Abdul Jabar, an al-Qaeda member with the Islamic Movement of Turkistan,” and was also “identified as a visitor to known al-Qaeda guest houses.”

ISN 329 Al Hamawe, Abu Omar (Syria)
One of four Syrians who had been living in a house in Kabul before the US-led invasion, and who were subsequently seized on the Pakistani border (see the story of Ahmed Ahjam, above), al-Hamawe, who was just 20 years old when he was seized, told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he had been working at a store in Kabul, but that he planned to move on to Pakistan when a friend sent him money from Syria, as I explained in The Guantánamo Files. He also stated that the house in Kabul was close to the Pakistani embassy and that their neighbors, who worked for the Red Cross, “knew that all of us were not fighters or Taliban, just refugees.”

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 The Public Record, Uruknet and New Left Project.

The identity of the second — Mahmoud Salim al-Ali, a Syrian — was then revealed by Der Spiegel, which stated that he had arrived in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in central-western Germany. In fact, the identities of both men should not have come as a surprise, as Der Spiegel devoted a major article to their stories back in July, after the German government had confirmed that it would take two prisoners from Guantánamo.

The release is good news not only for Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali, but also for the many campaigners and commentators — myself included — who have been trying to keep Guantánamo on the mainstream media’s radar. Although President Obama briefly discussed Guantánamo on September 9, in his first press conference since May, apologizing for failing to meet his self-imposed deadline of January 2010 for the prison’s closure, progress towards belatedly fulfilling his promise has been horribly slow this year. Although the President’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force recommended that over half of the remaining prisoners should be released, just 21 of the 111 prisoners cleared for release at the start of the year have been freed in the last nine months, and 90 cleared men still remain.

Dozens of these men — like Mahmoud al-Ali — cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture in their home countries, and must wait for third countries to rehouse them (a difficult task, given that the Obama administration, Congress and the judiciary have all made sure that the United States will not take any of them), and one, like Ayman al-Shurafa, is a stateless Palestinian. However, 58 others are Yemenis, who could be sent home tomorrow were it not for an indefensible moratorium on releasing any Yemenis that was issued by President Obama in January, following hysterical overreaction to the news that the failed Christmas day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen.

Clearly, the President has no chance of fulfilling his promise to close Guantánamo until this moratorium is lifted, and those who wish to see the prison closed must do more to challenge this cynical knee-jerk ban which effectively tars all Yemenis as terrorist sympathizers. For now, however, the German government must be congratulated for offering new homes to Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali, and for bringing their long and unjust imprisonment to an end.

Ayman al-Shurafa, a stateless Palestinian

Ayman al-Shurafa, who is now 34 years old, was cleared for release by a military review board in 2007, but remained at Guantánamo because of the particular problems facing the handful of Palestinians held in the prison, who are — or were — literally stateless. In al-Shurafa’s case, although his family is from Gaza, his parents settled in Saudi Arabia with their four children when he was a young child. He spent most of his life in Saudi Arabia, where his family still lives, but because he does not have a Saudi passport, the Saudi government refused to press the US authorities for his repatriation. Instead, he holds documents issued by the Jordanian government (as part of his family’s long search for refuge), which are suitable only for travel purposes, and until Germany agreed to accept him, he was, therefore, literally a man without a home.

Around ten years ago, al-Shurafa traveled to Gaza to enroll in a Palestinian university to finish a business degree that he had started in Saudi Arabia. However, after the intifada broke out, he feared for his life and decided that he had to leave. He returned to Saudi Arabia, but, as with all Saudi residents, discovered that his educational opportunities were more limited than those available to Saudi citizens. It was then that, like many other young men, he found himself taking poor advice from a Saudi sheikh who stated that he needed to be “prepared” to defend Muslims from those oppressing them — a religious duty known as e’dad, which is conceptually distinct from jihad or any participation in combat.

As a result, he traveled to Afghanistan in summer 2001, but, like many young men recruited by religious figures, he was unaware that the Taliban’s enemies were other Muslims. Throughout his detention, he maintained that, although he was in Afghanistan, he never took up arms against the Northern Alliance — or against the United States after the US-led invasion of October 2001. In meetings at Guantánamo with his lawyers, he explained that “he hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was getting himself into; he knew nothing about the Taliban’s long inter-Muslim struggle with the Northern Alliance, and had no knowledge whatsoever of al-Qaeda.”

In 2007, a military review board agreed with this assessment, but although al-Shurafa was cleared for release, and was compliant throughout his detention, he still ended up held in isolation in a cell in Camp 6 for 22 to 23 hours a day. Throughout his life, he has suffered from vitiligo, a painful skin complaint, and his permanent isolation from sunlight made his skin condition flare up horribly, causing maddening discomfort, as well as permanent skin damage. According to his lawyers, although he was well regarded by both the guards and by his fellow prisoners, leading prayers in his cell block, he was deeply concerned that he would never see his elderly mother again, and also showed signs of depression, asking the authorities for medication to “let the days go by without feeling anything.”

Mahmoud Salim al-Ali, a Syrian seized by an Afghan warlord

As Der Spiegel explained in July, Mahmoud Salim al-Ali, who is 36 years old, had been living in Kuwait before he made an ill-fated trip to Afghanistan in October 2001. His last job had been in a fruit and vegetable market, but he also had “experience working in the service sector and in industry, as a salesperson in the Sultan Shopping Center and with the Al-Fahad Aluminum & Glass Works.”

However, in late September 2001, he traveled to Afghanistan, via Syria and Iran, apparently because, as the US authorities alleged at Guantánamo, he “had a desire to join the jihad after viewing videos depicting the situation in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya.” Nevertheless, as Der Spiegel also explained:

[H]e never received any military training or saw any combat. After a few days in Kabul, al-Ali contracted a serious case of diarrhea, for which he was treated in a hospital. He then spent the night in the house of a doctor. By the next day, as he was fleeing from the Northern Alliance, which was fighting the Taliban, his big adventure was over. Al-Ali and his companions were captured by an Afghan warlord and robbed. The bandits took his money, his wedding ring and his watch, and he was later turned over to the Americans.

New life in Germany

For both these men, life in Germany promises to present them with an excellent opportunity to rebuild their lives. As Der Spiegel explained in July, Mahmoud al-Ali “has a wife and a 10-year-old daughter living in Syria who apparently want to come to Germany to live with him, to which the state politicians dealing with the case have no objections,” and Ayman al-Shurafa, whose immediate physical and psychological needs appear to be more acute, is already receiving attention in a medical clinic, where, as Der Spiegel reported on Thursday, “he will be given an extensive check-up over the next few days.” Hamburg government officials stated that “the goal was to help reintegrate the former prisoner into society, with the hope that he will ultimately become self-sufficient.”

Accepting these two men has not been without problems for the German authorities. There was fierce opposition from conservative ministers, for example, and, in response, plans for the state of Brandenburg to take a third prisoner, Mohammed Tahamuttan, the last Palestinian in Guantánamo, were quietly dropped. In July, Rainer Speer, the state’s interior minister, told Der Spiegel, “We were up to the task,” and the newspaper also noted that “the Interior Ministry task force charged with the issue had apparently concluded that accepting all three candidates was fundamentally justifiable.” However, Der Spiegel speculated that the rejection of Tahamuttan was “probably intended primarily to send a political message at home in Germany, where de Maizière felt that he had to show the many members of his party who had opposed reaching an agreement with the United States on Guantánamo that he was not blindly obeying the Americans.”

Noticeably, the government in Berlin also refused to proceed with the resettlement of Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali without written guarantees from the Obama administration. As Der Spiegel noted, Germany was “probably the only ally to have done so.” According to a joint declaration signed by the two countries, “The United States will not release any inmates if this could jeopardize the security of the United States or our friends and allies.” Der Spiegel added that “the Germans also have it in writing that the US government would not permit any individuals deemed a threat to the national security of the United States to ‘enter the country,’” explaining that what this means is that the men being released and sent to Germany “are not dangerous and could even enter the United States as tourists.”

As Der Spiegel also explained, this was “a delayed victory for Wolfgang Schäuble who, as interior minister in Berlin’s former grand coalition government, refused to accept Guantánamo inmates because, as he noted, they would not even be given a tourist visa for the United States.”

Will other countries now help?

While this will send shockwaves though the more paranoid parts of the US establishment (and should, if there is any justice, lead to calls to revoke the various bans on bringing cleared prisoners to live in the US), the impact of Germany’s acceptance of two prisoners should be most marked in Europe, where hopes for rehousing other cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated are most sharply focused.

Although ten other countries in Europe (Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland) have taken in 23 prisoners over the last 16 months, who had no prior connection to their new homes (and 15 others have been settled in Bermuda, Cape Verde, Georgia, Latvia and Palau), other countries have failed to be swayed by the entreaties of Daniel Fried, President Obama’s Special Envoy to Guantánamo.

Ambassador Fried’s thankless task has been to persuade other countries to overlook US hypocrisy regarding the resettlement of prisoners, and to help President Obama close Guantánamo by taking in men like Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali. However, despite his success to date, certain prominent countries in western Europe — Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK — have so far refused to help, even though, in some cases, persuasive arguments can be made that they should be involved as part of a tacit acknowledgment of their involvement in the crimes committed in the “War on Terror.”

In Norway’s case, this arose because of the involvement of AkerKvaerner, the country’s largest commercial company, which, as filmmaker and journalist Erling Borgen has noted, “had 700 people working on the Guantánamo base,” providing logistical support that included “fueling the rendition flights.” In Sweden’s case, the complicity centers on the government’s involvement, in December 2001, in the CIA-directed kidnap and rendition to torture in Egypt of two Egyptian asylum seekers, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed Alzery. In Britain’s case, the true scale of the complicity of the Bush administration’s closest ally has not yet been revealed, but enough has been exposed to indicate that providing new homes for a handful of cleared Guantánamo prisoners who cannot be repatriated is the least that the government should do.

The British government’s complicity includes former foreign secretary Jack Straw’s recently-revealed support for Guantánamo and former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s interference in plans to provide consular access to a British citizen seized in Zambia (Martin Mubanga). It also includes involvement in the kidnap and rendition of two British residents in the Gambia (Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna), its knowledge of the torture by US agents in Pakistan of British resident Binyam Mohamed, who was later sent to be tortured in Morocco (also with British knowledge), and the repeated visits made by British agents to British nationals and residents while they were held in Pakistan, and in US custody in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, even though it was apparent that the conditions in which they were being held did not meet internationally recognized standards of humane treatment.

Although Prime Minister David Cameron has announced an inquiry into British complicity in torture abroad, one way in which the government could atone for its deep involvement in the “War on Terror” would be to step back from the outrageous position taken by the previous government — that, in securing the return of nine British nationals and five British residents, the UK had “done its bit,” as foreign secretary David Miliband claimed in January 2009 — and accept that this was, in fact, nothing more than what was required.

The new coalition government already faces questions about why it cannot secure the return of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was cleared for release in 2007 but is still held, and is also under pressure to explain why it will not accept Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who lived and worked in the UK between 1999 and 2001, who was also cleared for release in 2007, but is terrified of returning to Algeria. Perhaps it might now be worth asking if the British government will take up where Germany left off, and also offer a new home to Mohammed Tahamuttan, the Palestinian who is still waiting for someone to free him from 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, 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 the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Two Freed Prisoners in Germany.” Cross-posted on The Public Record, Cageprisoners and New Left Project.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 64 prisoners released from February 2009 to July 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); July 2010 — 1 Algerian, 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain.

With Abdul Aziz Naji now apparently home with his family (also see this interview here), valid concerns still remain about whether he is safe from extremists, about whether the Algerian government can be trusted, and about whether the Obama administration has been sufficiently stung by international criticism to call off its planned repatriation of other Algerians in Guantánamo who fear returning home. These are questions that I discussed in a recent article, and I’d like now to run through the stories of the other men released last week, which, yet again, demonstrate that those who insist on flagging up all the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo as terrorists are either cynical opportunists, preying on the message of permanent fear that was promoted by the Bush administration, or blinkered ideologues, incapable of separating fact from fiction.

Abdul Nasser Khantumani: A 50-year old economic migrant from Syria, resettled in Cape Verde

Abdul Nasser Khantumani (identified on his release as Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani, and also known in Guantánamo as Abdul Nasir al-Tumani), a 50-year old Syrian, was released at the same time as Abdul Aziz Naji, but, given undisputed fears about what would await him if he was repatriated to Syria, he was, instead, given a new home on the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, an archipelago of islands off the west coast of Africa.

Well respected as a stable democracy, Cape Verde has a population of 500,000, but only a very small Muslim population, so it will be difficult for him to adjust to his new life, especially as he is alone, with no members of his family or fellow ex-prisoners to provide any support. What is unusual about this arrangement is that his son, Muhammed, who was seized with him in Pakistan in December 2001, was given a new home in Portugal last August, and it would, therefore, have made sense for him to have been rehoused in Portugal as well.

As economic migrants to Afghanistan, the Khantumanis never posed a threat to anyone, and it is distressing that it took so long for both men to be released. In my book The Guantánamo Files, I discussed their story, based on accounts that they gave in their military review boards at Guantánamo (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals) in 2004-05:

The father had traveled to Afghanistan in 1999 in search of work, finding a job in a restaurant in Kabul and bringing ten members of his family over in June 2001, including Muhammed, his grandmother and an eight-month old baby. Another six family members — [Muhammed]’s uncle’s family — arrived a week before 9/11, but after hearing about the attack on America the family fled to Jalalabad, where they stayed for a month, and then made their way on foot to Pakistan. On the way, their guide advised [Abdul Nasser] to let the women and children travel by car, to make them less of a target for highway robbers, but when he and his son arrived in Pakistan the local villagers handed them over to the Pakistani army.

In his tribunal, Abdul Nasser also spoke about his reasons for traveling to Afghanistan, stating, “I was always looking for an alternative country that I could immigrate to and live with my family. I thought about going to the free world, which is the Western world, especially after I heard a lot about freedom, stability and justice in these countries, but all the doors were closed.”

Unfortunately, both father and son experienced brutal treatment after their capture, both in Pakistani and US custody. Muhammed explained that, while in Pakistani custody, in three separate prisons, he and his father were “subjected to beatings and harsh torture,” and his nose was broken. He added that throughout this ordeal “there were Americans present,” and this account was echoed by his father, who said that the Pakistanis “were torturing us really hard,” and the Americans “were looking and standing right there. The Americans were present. I am sure about that because they were the ones who interrogated us.”

In addition, Muhammed explained that, in the US prison at Kandahar airport (where the prisoners were processed for Guantánamo), his father’s forehead was fractured “and the Red Cross saw this and wrote a report,” and he added that he received a fracture to his left hand, as well as suffering “many diseases” and “other methods of psychological torture,” including sleep deprivation.

He also explained that, during interrogation at Camp X-Ray (the rudimentary first prison at Guantánamo), “one of the interrogators brought two wires connected to electricity and said that if you do not say that you and your father are from al-Qaeda or Taliban, I will place these in your neck,’” and that the abuse continued in Camp Delta (Camp X-Ray’s more permanent replacement), where he said that he was “threatened with violence,” and that “an interrogator threatened to send him to torture in a foreign country.”

Muhammed’s story is also notable for a number of false allegations made by one of his fellow prisoners, which were exposed by his Personal Representative (a military officer assigned to him in place of a lawyer) during his tribunal. As I explained in an article in 2007, based on a series of ground-breaking stories by Corine Hegland for the National Journal:

In his tribunal, [Muhammed Khantumani] denied an allegation that he had attended the al-Farouq training camp [the main training camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11] with such vigor that his Personal Representative decided to investigate the matter further. When he looked at the classified evidence, however, he found that only one man … claimed to have seen him at al-Farouq, and had identified him as being there three months before he arrived in Afghanistan. As Corine Hegland described it, “The curious US officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.”

Even so, the Personal Representative’s protestations were in vain, because, as I explained on Muhammed Khantumani’s release, he was “judged to be an ‘enemy combatant,’ and had to wait for nearly five years before President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force finally conducted a comprehensive review of his case, and … established that the evidence against him was unreliable.”

The same conclusion, it should be noted, was also reached by the Task Force in Abdul Nasser’s case. As the Center for Constitutional Rights explained to me, although his habeas corpus petition had not been heard by the time of his release, he was “cleared to leave Guantánamo on the basis of a unanimous determination” by the Task Force, which suggests that the lurid allegations against him that can be found in publicly available documents — including claims that he “was identified by a senior al-Qaeda operative as reportedly being part of a terrorist group,” and that he was “commonly known as an explosives expert” — were conjured up either by the same prisoner who caused his son such problems, or by other patently unreliable witnesses whose lies have been regularly exposed by judges in the District Court in Washington D.C., in their rulings on the prisoners’ habeas petitions.

With Abdul Nasser’s release, the long years of torture, lies and brutality are now behind him, but as CCR also noted, “father and son’s profound hope now is for the day when they may finally be reunited as a family.”

An Uzbek resettled in Latvia

Last Thursday, following the release of Abdul Aziz Naji and Abdul Nasser Khantumani, the Pentagon announced that two more prisoners had been released, in Latvia and Spain, bringing the prison’s population to 176. Neither was publicly identified, but in February this year RFE/RL reported that Latvia had “agreed to accept an Uzbek citizen currently held at the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay.” The report added, “The name of the Uzbek citizen was not disclosed, although it was reported that he speaks fluent Russian, is single, has relatives in Uzbekistan, and is prepared to learn the Latvian language.” In addition, Latvian Foreign Minister Maris Riekstins told journalists at the time that the government “will provide the man with refugee status, a monthly allowance, and an apartment.” It was also reported that the Latvian security service would “monitor” the ex-prisoner.

Given that, at the start of the year, just two Uzbeks remained at Guantánamo, and that one of these men, Ali Sher Hamidullah, was reportedly the Uzbek rehoused in Switzerland on January 26, it seems likely that the man given a new home in Latvia is Kamalludin Kasimbekov, who was cleared for release in 2006 by a military review board under the Bush administration, but who continued to be held because of well-founded fears that he would be tortured if returned to his homeland.

24 years old at the time of his capture, Kasimbekov told his tribunal at Guantánamo that he and a friend had fled Uzbekistan after his friend accidentally killed a policeman while driving his car, and had ended up in a training camp run by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a militant group aligned with the Taliban, where, he said, those in charge of the camp took away his military ID, which he needed to go home, and flew him and five or six others to Kabul, where he worked in an auto shop.

He went on to explain that in 2001 he requested to go home, and asked for money and his military ID, but that when he received no response he decided to run away, only to be captured while traveling from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif in a minivan taxi, imprisoned by the IMU for six months and then released on September 16, 2001 “with agreement that I will help in a battle.” Sent to the front lines in Kunduz, the last Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan, he explained that he was “helping with all kinds of household work for about a month or so,” but that, after the aerial bombardment of Kunduz by US forces, when there were “lots of dead bodies” and a surrender was negotiated between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, he refused to retreat with the IMU and instead went to Abdul Mumin, a Northern Alliance commander, and handed himself in with his gun. He added, “There were no bullets shot from my weapon.”

An Afghan resettled in Spain

For now, the remaining mystery regarding the prisoners released last week concerns the man released in Spain. In February this year, the Spanish government agreed to accept five men from Guantánamo. On the basis that none of them must have criminal record, the government pledged to give them a residence permit and the right to work, and also pledged that they would have freedom of movement within Spain, but would not be allowed to leave the country.

The first of these men, Walid Hijazi, a Palestinian, arrived in February, the second, Yasim Basardah, a Yemeni, arrived in May, and the third, who arrived last week, has, to date, only been identified as an Afghan. With no clues as to his identity, it is difficult to speculate as to why he was not released in Afghanistan, but as a website, The Americas Post, explained this week, confirming his arrival at the military base of Torrejón de Ardoz, the Spanish government’s arrangement with the US “has not been easy for the hosting country, because most of the former prisoners have deep psychological problems and their insertion into society is difficult,” and, perhaps as a result, “no more arrivals are expected at least until after the summer.”

Updating the story of Walid Hijazi, which I reported in May, the blog explained that he arrived with “serious psychological” problems as a result of his detention, “and lived [for] several months in a room [in] a small family hotel in a city in northern Spain. He was offered a transfer to a flat, but the NGO in charge [was] unable to reach an agreement with him. Finally, the city government moved him and brought him to live in a residence of the same NGO.” The blog added that Hijazi is having problems learning Spanish, a “fundamental issue that can truly integrate him in Spain and get a job.”

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 The Public Record, Eurasia Review, and New Left Project.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 60 prisoners released from February 2009 to mid-July 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini).

I’ll discuss the stories of Abd al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani and Abdul Aziz Naji in a separate article, but for now the focus must be on the legal maneuvering that led to the repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji, because, for the first time in Guantánamo’s history, a prisoner has been sent home against his will, even though Doris Tennant, one of his lawyers, told the Washington Post two weeks ago that he was “adamantly opposed to going back.” At the weekend, another of his lawyers, Ellen Lubell, told the Miami Herald that Naji “fears extremists will try to recruit him — associating him with Guantánamo — and will torture or kill him if he resists.” She added, “He has nothing against the Algerian government, but he fears that the government will be unable to protect him from Algerian extremists.” In a press release, the Center for Constitutional Rights explained that Naji “fled various forms of persecution in Algeria many years ago, including having been attacked by an extremist.” CCR also sounded a note of caution about how the Algerian government will receive Naji, stating, “we are deeply concerned that he will disappear into secret detention.”

These are valid concerns, as Algeria has a poor human rights record. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations (PDF, pp. 108-9) regularly express concerns about the use of torture in Algeria, and in its 2009 report on human rights in Algeria, the US State Department noted, “Local human rights lawyers maintained that torture continued to occur in detention facilities, most often against those arrested on ‘security grounds.’”

In contrast, an Obama administration official, speaking anonymously, told the Washington Post two weeks ago, “We take some care in evaluating countries for repatriation. In the case of Algeria, there is an established track record and we have given that a lot of weight. The Algerians have handled this pretty well: You don’t have recidivism and you don’t have torture.” This was a bold statement to make, in light of the allegations made by NGOs and the UN, and concerns about torture or other ill-treatment were not diminished by a response to the news of Naji’s repatriation in Monday’s Washington Post, in which it was noted that “The government said that Algeria has provided diplomatic assurances that Naji would not be mistreated, assurances that administration officials say are credible because 10 other detainees have been returned to Algeria without incident.”

The problems with this statement concern the “diplomatic assurances,” and the claim that 10 men have been repatriated “without incident.” On the “diplomatic assurances,” Human Rights Watch explained in a press release that its own research “has shown that diplomatic assurances provided by receiving countries, which are legally unenforceable, do not provide an effective safeguard against torture and ill-treatment,” and, on the status of the 10 men returned, although there have been no allegations of torture, there has been very little information at all about the conditions in which they have been held, and what has emerged publicly is not reassuring, as it reveals both prolonged pre-trial detention, and calls for punitive sentences from the prosecutors. As I explained in January this year:

[F]rustratingly little is known about the eight Algerians repatriated from Guantánamo between July 2008 and January 2009, although one indication of how the Algerian justice system deals with returned Guantánamo prisoners was provided in November 2009, when the BBC reported that, 15 months after two of these men were repatriated, they had been acquitted after a trial in which the prosecutor had called for prison sentences of 20 years.

Alarmingly, despite Abdul Aziz Naji’s fear of being repatriated — and the fears of five other Algerians, as revealed by the Washington Post two weeks ago — his release was not only supported by the Obama administration, but also by the Supreme Court.

Judge Gladys Kessler takes on the D.C. Circuit Court – and the Supreme Court

The spur for a legal battle that has largely been taking place without the mainstream media paying much attention — and with an alarming reliance on secrecy — was a principled stand taken by Judge Gladys Kessler, of the District Court in Washington D.C., who, single-handedly, has been attempting to uphold the United States’ obligation, under the UN Convention Against Torture, not to “expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

In November, Judge Kessler granted the habeas corpus petition of Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, a 49-year old Algerian, after concluding that the government’s supposed evidence relied almost entirely on unreliable confessions produced by Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul from April 2002 to May 2004.

Six months after Judge Kessler delivered her ruling, with bin Mohammed still not released, his lawyers asked her “to order the government to carry out his release, but to bar his transfer to Algeria, where he fears persecution or even death from either the Algerian government or from armed terrorist groups there,” as SCOTUSblog described it. As a result of two depressing rulings in the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. Circuit Court (the District Court), judges are not actually able to order the release of prisoners who have won their habeas petitions, and are not even supposed to interfere with the disposition of prisoners, whose fate, according to the Circuit Court, is entirely dependent on the whims of the Executive branch. Judge Kessler, however, was undeterred.

On June 3, she issued a temporary order barring bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria, and on June 10 mounted a stout defense of his right not to be forcibly repatriated, noting (PDF):

Petitioner has voiced great fear about being transferred to Algeria. He has not lived in Algeria for more than 20 years, and has no ties to that country. Because he has been designated an “enemy combatant,” he greatly fears retribution by the Algerian authorities and that he will be formally charged under the Algerian Penal Code, tortured, convicted, and very possibly executed by the Algerian Government. He has claimed that he will be caught between the Algerian Government, which will brand him as an international terrorist, and armed domestic terrorists, who oppose the existing government, often pressure individuals to join their ranks, and retaliate violently when such individuals refuse. Petitioner has made clear that he would rather suffer continued confinement in Guantánamo Bay than be placed in the control of the Algerian Government.

In response to a brief filed by the government, Judge Kessler complained that two declarations submitted, which purported to guarantee bin Mohammed’s humane treatment if returned to Algeria, “appear to be boilerplate statements which have been filed in a number of the Government’s Oppositions to Motions,” and that a third, written by Daniel Fried, President Obama’s Special Envoy on Guantánamo, “was submitted ex parte so that [bin Mohammed] has not had an opportunity to read it.” After noting that bin Mohammed’s fears “are of great concern,” and that it is “essential” that assurances received from the Algerian government, purporting to guarantee that bin Mohammed will receive “humane treatment,” are “tested,” Judge Kessler ordered Fried to appear in person in her court, explaining, “Given the centrality of those representations and assurances to the future of [bin Mohammed] and possibly to his very life, this Court has an obligation to ensure that there is real substance behind the conclusory phrases contained in Special Envoy Fried’s declarations.”

Fried never turned up, of course, because the Justice Department immediately filed an appeal with the Circuit Court, which then ordered Judge Kessler to “resolve all outstanding motions” in the case with reference to Munaf v. Geren and Kiyemba v. Obama (aka Kiyemba II), the cases that the Circuit Court had drawn on (Munaf) and issued (Kiyemba II) to demonstrate that only the Executive branch was entitled to make decisions about where to send Guantánamo prisoners. As SCOTUSblog noted, “While the order did not say that Kessler could not hold a hearing on Mohammed’s plea not to be sent to Algeria, it specified that the judge was to rule on that issue ‘without requiring testimony from Special Envoy Fried or any other United States government official,’” which, of course, “completely undercut the purpose that Kessler had” for calling the hearing in the first place.

The Circuit Court then issued an amended ruling, instructing Judge Kessler to decide the Mohammed plea “in an order from which a party can take an immediate appeal,” and as SCOTUSblog noted in response to this instruction:

The Circuit Court thus had taken over, in a significant way, the further proceedings in Kessler’s Court, and has sent her the strongest hint that she risked being overturned if she barred his transfer anew. Since it noted the binding nature of the precedents she was to observe, the Circuit Court clearly was signaling that, if it accepted the government’s view that Mohammed’s case was no different, Kessler would be found to be without authority to prevent his transfer to Algeria.

After this, the struggle between Judge Kessler and the Circuit Court was swamped in secrecy. At a hearing convened by Kessler on June 28, all the documentation was sealed, but SCOTUSblog was able to deduce, from a subsequent appeal filed by the government, that she had once more barred bin Mohammed’s transfer to Algeria. On July 8, however, in another secret hearing, the Circuit Court “summarily overturned” Judge Kessler’s ban, prompting SCOTUSblog to note that the court’s order “continues a seldom-interrupted string of rulings by the Circuit Court against detainees challenging their confinement or transfer,” which “contrasts with a majority of rulings by District Court judges upholding detainees’ challenges under federal habeas law.”

The final blow for bin Mohammed — and for those who, like Judge Kessler, had quaintly presumed that the “non-refoulement” requirement of the UN Convention Against Torture might actually mean something to the judiciary and the Executive branch — came last Friday, when, by 5 votes to 3, the Supreme Court sided with the Circuit Court. As SCOTUSblog noted, the ruling was “the first indication that the Supreme Court will not allow federal judges to interfere with government controls on who leaves or stays at Guantánamo Bay.”

Although three of the justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor — dissented, noting that they “would grant the stay to afford the Court time to consider, in the ordinary course, important questions raised in this case and not resolved in Munaf v. Geren,” just a few hours later the Supreme Court unanimously approved the forced repatriation of Abdul Aziz Naji.

This was a bleak day for US justice, not only because it involved the Supreme Court blithely disregarding the UN Convention Against Torture’s “non-refoulement” obligation, joining in an unholy trinity with the D.C. Circuit Court and the Obama administration, but also because it brings to an abrupt, cruel, and — I believe — illegal conclusion a struggle to release prisoners without violating the UN Convention Against Torture, which, for the most part, was actually respected by the Bush administration.

The Bush administration’s record on not returning prisoners to torture

The long history of the authorities grappling with the “non-refoulement” obligation at Guantánamo began with the Uighurs, 22 Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who were mostly seized in Pakistan in December 2001 after crossing from Afghanistan, where they had been living in a run-down settlement in the Tora Bora mountains, thwarted in their attempts to travel to Turkey or Europe in search of work, or nursing futile hopes of rising up against their only enemy, the Chinese government.

With the Uighurs, the Bush administration recognized its “non-refoulement” obligation, refusing to return them to China, and finding new homes for five of the men in Albania in 2006. When the Obama administration inherited the problem of the remaining 17 men, who had, in the meantime, won their habeas corpus petitions, it found new homes for 12 of them in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, although five still remain at Guantánamo, and, last spring, the administration turned down a plan by White House Counsel Greg Craig to bring some of the men to live in the US, which would have done more in the long run to defuse scaremongering about Guantánamo than any other gesture.

Despite the Bush administration locating some principles when it came to the Uighurs, in other cases prisoners had to fight in the courts to prevent their forcible repatriation to countries where they faced the risk of torture. In 2007, a Libyan, Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, sought the intervention of the courts to prevent his return to Libya, and after two Tunisians were repatriated in June 2007 — and were subsequently mistreated and given jail sentences (of three and seven years) after show trials — a judge intervened to prevent the repatriation of a third, Mohammed Abdul Rahman (also known as Lotfi bin Ali), and, by extension, other Tunisians in Guantánamo.

In other cases, like that of Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who had lived in the UK, lawyers successfully sought injunctions preventing their return, and by the time Obama came to power, it was generally understood that prisoners were not be involuntarily returned to China, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia or Uzbekistan. As a result, in the last year, the Obama administration has resettled prisoners from Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan in Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Georgia, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland. Algeria was more problematical, as was demonstrated by the cases of the men who had returned voluntarily, even though there was, to be honest, no guarantee that they would be treated humanely, and my constant analogy was that return to Algeria was like Russian Roulette.

How the Circuit Court defended expansive executive power

However, all this came to an end with the Circuit Court’s intervention in the Uighurs’ case — firstly, in February 2009 (in Kiyemba v. Obama, aka Kiyemba I), when a panel of judges ruled that the courts could not order the resettlement in the US of prisoners who had won their habeas petitions but could not be repatriated, because only the Executive branch could decide matters relating to immigration. As I explained in a review of the ruling:

The judges were seemingly unmoved that this would leave the Uighurs (and, very possibly, others in Guantánamo) with no means of leaving the prison, and that it stripped the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2008, granting the prisoners habeas corpus rights, of all practical meaning, if it was not possible for judges to order their release. In the judges’ words, however, “the political branches have the exclusive power … to decide which aliens may, and which aliens may not, enter the United States, and on what terms.”

The second blow came last September (in another Kiyemba v. Obama case, identified as Kiyemba II), after the Uighurs’ lawyers asked the Court of Appeals to reconsider its opinion en banc (in other words, with all the judges ruling, instead of just a panel of three), and also sought assurances that the courts would be able to act if the government proposed sending their clients to countries where they faced the risk of torture. However, as I explained at the time:

[N]ot only did the court refuse to reconsider its ruling, but the judges also refused the Uighurs’ request for the court’s assistance “to prevent their transfer to a country where they are likely to be subjected to further detention or to torture,”, drawing on Munaf v. Geren, a case from 2008 in which “two American citizens held in the custody of the United States military in Iraq petitioned for writs of habeas corpus, seeking to enjoin the Government from transferring them to Iraqi custody for criminal prosecution in the Iraqi courts.” In Munaf, although “The Court held the district court had jurisdiction over the petitions,” it also ruled that “it could not enjoin the Government from transferring the petitioners to Iraqi custody,” because “that concern is to be addressed by the political branches, not the judiciary.”

It is this narrow reading of Munaf that has particularly enraged those opposed to the Circuit Court’s resolute endorsement of executive power — and which at least caused some consternation last Friday to Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor. Essentially, though, the Circuit Court’s ruling in Kiyemba II dictates what happens to prisoners like Abdul Aziz Naji — and, presumably, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed — when the administration tires of trying to find new homes for them, and decides to subject them involuntarily to the Russian Roulette repatriation package that Abdul Aziz Naji received this week.

Although government officials told the Washington Post on Monday that they “will nonetheless continue to examine each case individually before any repatriation,” noting that some officials “have expressed some concern about returning one of the Algerians [Ahmed Belbacha] who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in absentia” last year, for what his lawyers think was the crime of speaking out about his fears of repatriation, there now appears to be no obstacle to prevent the Obama administration from sending the other four Algerians home whenever it feels like it.

To discover that such shameless disregard for the UN Convention Against Torture has come not only from the Supreme Court, but also from the man who promised to close Guantánamo (but then failed to do so), and who also promised to uphold the absolute ban on torture (while refusing to prosecute anyone who authorized its use in the previous eight years), is depressing news indeed.

Note: With these releases, 178 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. One of these men, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, after a one-sided trial by Military Commission in October 2008, in which he refused to mount a defense. Another prisoner, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, is in prison in New York, awaiting a federal court trial that was recently approved. 594 prisoners have been released (or, in some cases, transferred to the custody of their home governments, or of other governments), and six men died, five in mysterious circumstances.

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 The Smirking Chimp, The Public Record and New Left Project.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 60 prisoners released from February 2009 to mid-July 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini).

Soon after his arrival, RTT News explained, “Neither [Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan] Tsvetanov nor the Pentagon disclosed his identity, but local media reported that the man was a 38-year-old Syria-born Kurd named Masum Abda Mohammed.” The news report added that Tsvetanov has stated that Mohammed was “accompanied by his relatives,” which, if confirmed, will demonstrate a certain generosity of spirit on the part of the Bulgarian government, and will augur well for his psychological adjustment to life after Guantánamo in a new and unknown country.

While the release of prisoners in Western Europe — or even the suggestion of it — has generally provoked ferocious media attention, reporting in Eastern Europe has been noticeably more muted — as with the release of a prisoner in Hungary in November, and three prisoners in Slovakia in January this year, where the anonymity of the men appears to have been thoroughly preserved (although whether this is a good thing or not is difficult to ascertain, as, without outside scrutiny, there appears to be no way of knowing whether their resettlement is proceeding smoothly or not).

However, with the identity of the man released in Bulgaria exposed, I thought it would be useful to explain what is known of his story, to dispel any doubts that might linger, in Bulgaria or elsewhere, regarding whether or not he poses any threat. As I have learned though conversations with journalists in Georgia, Slovakia and Switzerland, it is easy for people in host nations to be influenced by the Bush administration’s enduring propaganda regarding the prisoners — that they were “the worst of the worst” — and not to appreciate that the majority of the men were sold to the US military by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, often very far from any battlefield, and that, moreover, the Obama administration would not release prisoners that officials regard as a threat to the US or to anyone else.

Part of the problem is that documents detailing the US authorities’ supposed evidence against the prisoners are readily available, without any editorial comment, even though they should be stamped with a warning, to indicate that much of the information is not necessarily accurate. This is because much of it — as judges have been discovering while examining prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions — is untrustworthy information, masquerading as evidence, which was extracted through the coercive interrogations of the prisoners themselves, or of their fellow prisoners.

In this, the case of Masum Abda Mohammed (who was identified in Guantánamo as Maasoum Abdah Mouhammad, but who stated that his name was Bilal) is typical. What is certain is that he and three other Syrians, who had been sharing a house in Kabul at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001, were seized while crossing the Pakistani border in December 2001, and subsequently transferred to US custody.

After that, the US authorities began interrogating them — for “actionable intelligence,” as they did with all the prisoners — and, along the way, began collecting information, in a shockingly haphazard manner, which, essentially as a by-product of the interrogations’ main purpose, established narratives that purported to justify their detention. Discovering how much of this information is true is a puzzle that I have been deciphering for years, that judges have been grappling with in US courts for the last year and a half, and that the Obama administration’s interagency Task Force dealt with last year in Mouhammad’s case, when, while reviewing all the prisoners’ cases, they concluded that there was no reason for him to be held.

Whether the Task Force reached a similar conclusion about the other three men seized with him — 24-year old Ahmed Ahjam, 19-year old Ali Shaaban, and 20-year old Abu Omar al-Hamawe — is unknown, but it is possible, as three of the seven remaining Syrians in Guantánamo had been cleared by the Task Force last October, and several dozen more prisoners were cleared after that date, although to the best of my knowledge the other men are still held. Certainly, the impression given by Mouhammad, and by the other three men, is that they were essentially economic migrants, who had left Syria for the opportunities — spurious or otherwise — that were advertised in Afghanistan, and were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As Mouhammad explained at Guantánamo, and as I described it in my book The Guantánamo Files:

[He and the others] had been living together in a house in the Wazar Akbar Khan area of Kabul. This was one of the more upmarket areas of the capital, where most of the embassies and other grand houses had been taken over by senior figures in the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but although the Americans described their house as “a safe house where five to 20 personnel armed with AK-47 rifles could be found at any time,” which was used for “money and document forging operations” for al-Qaeda, Mouhammed described it as “a normal house, a place to eat, drink and sleep.” Al-Hamawe added that it was close to the Pakistani embassy and that their neighbors, who worked for the Red Cross, “knew that all of us were not fighters or Taliban, just refugees.”

As I also explained:

The four men certainly matched the profiles of economic migrants, drifting from country to country in search of employment, and drawn to Afghanistan by its Arab-influenced reputation for welcoming Muslims from all around the world. They said that only seven people lived at the house (themselves, the owner, and two other Syrians), and that they all put money in to keep the place running. Al-Hamawe worked at a store in Kabul, but planned to move to Pakistan when a friend sent him money from Syria, Mouhammed, who had been a policeman and a grocer in Syria, had saved some money while working, and planned to move on to Jordan, Shaaban had been an ironsmith in his father’s store and went to Afghanistan because he wanted to move there, and, according to US intelligence, Ahjam worked for al-Wafa [a Saudi humanitarian aid charity, which the Bush administration regarded as being tied to al-Qaeda, although no proof of this was ever forthcoming, and almost all of those who worked for the charity, including its Saudi director, were subsequently released].

In disputing Mouhammad’s story, the authorities not only alleged that the house was a safe house, which he “operated,” but also, over the years, built up a picture involving claims that he “trained in al-Qaeda camps” and “was a fighter in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan” (where a showdown between al-Qaeda and the US military took place around the time of his capture). These are typical allegations leveled against those seized crossing the Pakistani border, but in the courts — the only objective forum in which allegations like these have been tested — judges have often dissected them and found them to be unpersuasive.

In Mouhammad’s case, he was never given an opportunity to clear his name in a courtroom, because he was released before any ruling was delivered regarding his habeas petition. As a result, he remains, officially, tagged as an “enemy combatant,” but it is to be hoped that, in Bulgaria, if his story ever surfaces, those who try to construct a narrative from the collection of uncorroborated statements and allegations in his file realize that the best indicator of the reliability of the Bush administration’s supposed evidence is that Obama’s Task Force authorized his release, having concluded, presumably, that his own account was more reliable than the one concocted by the authorities in Guantánamo after years of pointless interrogations.

The Bulgarians are, moreover, to be congratulated for offering Maasoum Mouhammad a new home, and for recognizing that a Kurdish Syrian refugee, deprived of eight years of his life in Guantánamo, could only expect far worse treatment had he ended up back in Syria, whose prisons — full of the most ill-defined dissidents — are amongst the most feared, and least accountable in the world.

POSTSCRIPT: Today (May 17), Saba, the Yemen News Agency, reported that the Yemeni released in Spain is named Yasin, and that he was released after he “was found cooperative with the authorities.” This suggests that he may be Yasim Basardah (aka Yasin Basardh), who won his habeas case last March.

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

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

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 57 prisoners released from February 2009 to March 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 3 prisoners of undisclosed nationality to Slovakia, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland.

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NOTE: This list has now been superseded by a dedicated page, “Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List,” which will be used to monitor the ongoing habeas rulings.

As part of my series, “Guantánamo Habeas Week” (introduced here, and expanded, on April 23, to become “Guantánamo Habeas Fortnight”), it’s my pleasure to present a list of the 47 habeas corpus rulings made to date, with links to the articles I have written over the last 19 months analyzing the judges’ rulings.

As I explained in the introduction to this series, I remain impressed that the judges involved have ruled in the prisoners’ favor in 34 of the 47 cases, particularly because they have revealed the alarming flimsiness of most of the material presented by the government as evidence — primarily, confessions extracted through the torture or coercion of the prisoners themselves, or through the torture, coercion or bribery of other prisoners, either in Guantánamo, the CIA’s secret prisons, or proxy prisons run on behalf of the CIA in other countries.

However, as I also explained, I remain deeply troubled about the justification for continuing to hold the majority of the prisoners who lost their habeas petitions, because the basis for doing so — the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and maintained as a justification by President Obama — was, and is a deeply flawed document, which fails to distinguish between a small group of genuine terrorists (al-Qaeda) and a considerably larger group of men (and boys) associated with the Taliban. The result is that men continue to be consigned to indefinite detention, on an apparently sound legal basis, even though they were only peripherally involved with the military conflict in Afghanistan to secure the fall of the Taliban, and should, all along, have been held (if at all) as prisoners of war, and protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Please note that, although 23 of the prisoners who won their habeas petitions have been released, eleven are still held. With the exception of the Uighurs, the government has appealed the rulings (or appears intent on appealing). In the cases of prisoners who lost their habeas petitions, a number of appeals have also been filed. See the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Habeas Scorecard for further information on the status of the various appeals.

The 47 Guantánamo Habeas Corpus Results

October 2008

1 WON: Abdul Helil Mamut (aka Abdul Khalil Manut, Abdul Nasser, Abdulnassir) (Uighur, ISN 278)
Released in Bermuda, June 2009.
2 WON: Abdullah Abdulquadirakhun (aka Abdulla Abdulqadir, Jalal Jalaladin) (Uighur, ISN 285)
Released in Bermuda, June 2009.
3 WON: Emam Abdulahat (aka Salahidin Abdulahad, Abdul Semet) (Uighur, ISN 295)
Released in Bermuda, June 2009.
4 WON: Huzaifa Parhat (aka Hozaifa Parhat, Ablikim Turahun) (Uighur, ISN 320)
Released in Bermuda, June 2009.
5 WON: Nag Mohammed (aka Edham Mamet) (Uighur, ISN 102)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
6 WON: Ahmad Tourson (Uighur, ISN 201)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
7 WON: Anwar Hassan (aka Hassan Anvar) (Uighur, ISN 250)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
8 WON: Abdulghappar Abdul Rahman (Uighur, ISN 281)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
9 WON: Dawut Abdurehim (Uighur, ISN 289)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
10 WON: Adel Noori (Uighur, ISN 584)
Released in Palau, October 2009.
11 WON: Arkin Mahmud (Uighur, ISN 103)
Released in Switzerland, March 2010.
12 WON: Bahtiyar Mahnut (Uighur, ISN 277)
Released in Switzerland, March 2010.
13 WON: Abdul Razak (Uighur, ISN 219)
Still held.
14 WON: Yusef Abbas (Uighur, ISN 275)
Still held.
15 WON: Saidullah Khalik (Uighur, ISN 280)
Still held.
16 WON: Hajiakbar Abdulghupur (Uighur, ISN 282)
Still held.
17 WON: Ahmed Mohamed (Uighur, ISN 328)
Still held.

For my analysis of the ruling, see: From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs.
For Judge Ricardo Urbina’s unclassified opinion, see here. And see here for a transcript of the hearing.
For the releases in Bermuda, see: Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda?
For the releases in Palau, see: Who Are The Six Uighurs Released From Guantánamo To Palau?
For the releases in Switzerland, see: More Dark Truths from Guantánamo, as Five Innocent Men Released.
For the Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the case of the last five Uighurs held, see: Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo.

November 2008

18 WON: Mohammed Nechle (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10003)
Released in Bosnia, December 2008.
19 WON: Mustafa Ait Idr (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10004)
Released in Bosnia, December 2008.
20 WON: Boudella al-Haj (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10006)
Released in Bosnia, December 2008.
21 WON: Lakhdar Boumediene (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10005)
Released in France, May 2009.
22 WON: Sabir Lahmar (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10002)
Released in France, November 2009.
1 LOST: Belkacem Bensayah (Bosnian Algerian, ISN 10001)
Still held.

For my analysis of the ruling, see: After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims.
For Judge Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For the releases in Bosnia, see: Freed Bosnian Calls Guantánamo the “worst place in the world”.
For the release of Boumediene in France, see: Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government.
For the release of Lahmar in France, see: Four Men Leave Guantánamo; Two Face Ill-Defined Trials In Italy.
For Bensayah’s appeal, see: First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling. And also see this New York Times article examining conflict within the Obama administration on prisoner cases, including that of Bensayah.

December 2008

2 LOST: Hisham Sliti (Tunisia, ISN 174)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo.
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.

January 2009

3 LOST: Muaz al-Alawi (aka Moath al-Alwi) (Yemen, ISN 28)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo.
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.

23 WON: Mohammed El-Gharani (Chad, ISN 269)
Released June 2009.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child.
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For El-Gharani’s release, see: Guantánamo’s Youngest Prisoner Released To Chad.

4 LOST: Ghaleb al-Bihani (Yemen, ISN 128)
Still held.
Al-Bihani appealed, and lost his appeal in January 2010.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo.
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For my analysis of the verdict in the appeal, see: Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights.
For the Circuit Court’s unclassified opinion, see here.

March 2009

24 WON: Yasim Basardah (aka Yasin Basardh) (Yemen, ISN 252)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame.
For Judge Ellen Huvelle’s unclassified opinion, see here.

April 2009

5 LOST: Hedi Hammamy (aka Abdulhadi bin Haddidi) (Tunisia, ISN 717)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied.
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.

May 2009

25 WON: Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed (Yemen, ISN 692)
Released September 2009.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses.
Also see: Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies.
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For Ali Ahmed’s release, see: Three Prisoners Released From Guantánamo: Two To Ireland, One To Yemen.

June 2009

26 WON: Abdul Rahim al-Ginco (aka Abdul Rahim Janko) (Syria, ISN 489)
Released.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Why Did It Take So Long To Order The Release From Guantánamo Of An Al-Qaeda Torture Victim?
Also see: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now!
For Judge Richard Leon’s unclassified opinion, see here.

July 2009

27 WON: Khalid al-Mutairi (Kuwait, ISN 213)
Released October 2009.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker.
Also see: Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame.
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For al-Mutairi’s release, see: Two More Guantánamo Prisoners Released: To Kuwait And Belgium.

28 WON: Mohamed Jawad (Afghanistan, ISN 900)
Released August 2009.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat.
Also see: How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case.
For Judge Ellen Huvelle’s unclassified opinion, see here. And see here for a transcript of the hearing.
For Jawad’s release, see: Reflections On Mohamed Jawad’s Release From Guantánamo.

August 2009

6 LOST: Adham Ali Awad (Yemen, ISN 88)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings.
For Judge James Robertson’s unclassified opinion, see here.

29 WON: Mohammed al-Adahi (Yemen, ISN 33)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings.
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For my analysis of the government’s subsequent appeal, and Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s response to it, see: What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo?

7 LOST: Fawzi al-Odah (Kuwait, ISN 232)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings.
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s unclassified opinion, see here.

September 2009

8 LOST: Sufyian Barhoumi (Algeria, ISN 694)
Still held.
For information about Barhoumi, see:
Guantánamo trials: critical judge sacked, British torture victim charged.
For the 2-page ruling by Judge Rosemary Collyer, see here. The unclassified opinion has not been released.

30 WON: Fouad al-Rabiah (Kuwait, ISN 551)
Released December 2009.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions.
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For al-Rabiah’s release, see: Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait.

November 2009

31 WON: Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed (Algeria, ISN 311)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere).
For Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For an analysis of the significance of Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling with reference to statements made by torture victim Binyam Mohamed, see: Binyam Mohamed: Evidence of Torture by US Agents Revealed in UK.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Kessler’s unclassified opinion, see: How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court.

December 2009

9 LOST: Musa’ab al-Madhwani (Yemen, ISN 839)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition.
For Judge Thomas Hogan’s unclassified opinion, see here. And see here for a transcript of the hearing.

32 WON: Saeed Hatim (Yemen, ISN 255)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit.
For Judge Ricardo Urbina’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Urbina’s unclassified opinion, see: Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo.

February 2010

10 LOST: Suleiman al-Nahdi (Yemen, ISN 511)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: The Black Hole of Guantánamo.
For Judge Gladys Kessler’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Kessler’s unclassified opinion, see: Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion.

11 LOST: Fahmi al-Assani (Yemen, ISN 554)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: The Black Hole of Guantánamo.
For Judge Gladys Kessler’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Kessler’s unclassified opinion, see: Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion.

33 WON: Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman (Yemen, ISN 27)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: The Black Hole of Guantánamo.
For Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr.’s unclassified opinion (March 2010), see here.
For Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr.’s revised unclassified opinion (April 2010), see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Kennedy’s unclassified opinion, see: Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture.

March 2010

34 WON: Mohamedou Ould Slahi (aka Salahi) (Mauritania, ISN 760)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit.
For Judge James Robertson’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Robertson’s unclassified opinion, see: Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims.

12 LOST: Mukhtar al-Warafi (Yemen, ISN 117)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit.
For Judge Royce C. Lamberth’s unclassified opinion, see here.
For a more detailed article, based on an analysis of Judge Lamberth’s unclassified opinion, see: With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic.

April 2010

13 LOST: Yasin Qasem Muhammad Ismail (Yemen, ISN 522)
Still held.
For my analysis of the ruling, see: An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition.
Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr.’s unclassified opinion is not yet available.

(‘’)

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

The introduction to “Guantánamo Habeas Week” was discussed in detail by Jeff Kaye on Firedoglake and Invictus, by Kelly Vlahos at Antiwar.com, which also posted a link on its front page, and by Jeff Farias, and was cross-posted on The Public Record, Eurasia Review, The World Can’t Wait, War Criminals Watch, Campaign for Liberty, Global Research, The Lift: Legal Issues in the Fight against Terrorism, Uruknet, Cageprisoners, New Left Project, Political Theatrics, Countercurrents, Zinmag Chronicle and The Ruthless Truth. It was also mentioned in a round-up of news on Foreign Policy’s website, by Reprieve, and on Democratic Underground. In addition, the full list was cross-posted on The Public Record, The World Can’t Wait, New Left Project and War Criminals Watch, and was linked to in a banner headline on Cageprisoners’ front page.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009), 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantánamo Lawyer (November 2009), Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere) (November 2009), Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait (December 2009), What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo? (December 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit (December 2009), Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois (December 2009), Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit (April 2010).

Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009), Bagram Isn’t The New Guantánamo, It’s The Old Guantánamo (August 2009), Obama Brings Guantánamo And Rendition To Bagram (And Not The Geneva Conventions) and Is Bagram Obama’s New Secret Prison? (both September 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions (February 2010).

The list is based on the deliberations of an interagency Task Force, established by President Obama on his second day in office, to determine who should be released, and who should continue to be held, and in my article I looked at the cases of 31 of the prisoners (26 Yemenis, three Saudis and two Kuwaitis, one of whom has since been released), pointing out that, in theory, there was no reason for them not be released immediately.

However, I also pointed out that members of Obama’s own administration had told the New York Times that the government was afraid of releasing the Yemenis (even though they had been cleared for release), because Guantánamo itself might have radicalized [them], exposing [them] to militants and embittering [them] against the United States,” and I should also have added, as former military defense attorney Maj. David Frakt pointed out to me in an email, that the men’s release is also dependent on the whims of Congress, where lawmakers “passed a law this summer that requires the administration to give Congress 15 days notice before releasing anyone from Guantánamo.”

Nevertheless, although Congressional obstruction may well be an additional complication (which I discussed in another article last week, “Lawyer Blasts ‘Congressional Depravity’ On Guantánamo”), it remains apparent that the route out of Guantánamo for these 30 men ought to be easier than it is for the other 44 prisoners cleared for release, as these are men who cannot be repatriated either because of fears that they will face torture or other ill-treatment (including arbitrary detention and show trials) on their return, or because (in the cases of two Palestinians) they are, effectively, stateless refugees.

Who are the 44 prisoners?

Of these 44 prisoners, 15 had their release ordered by judges in US District Courts, as a result of the habeas corpus petitions that were authorized by the Supreme Court in an extraordinarily important ruling in June 2008. 13 of these men are Uighurs — Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, whose release was ordered by Judge Ricardo Urbina a year ago, and whose plight I have written about extensively (particularly here and here) — and the others are an Algerian, Sabir Lahmar, whose release was ordered last November, and Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, a young Syrian, tortured and imprisoned by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, whose release was ordered in June this year.

The other 29 are as follows: nine Tunisians, six more Algerians, three more Syrians, two Egyptians, two Uzbeks, two Palestinians, an Azerbaijani and a Tajik. Although their names have not been provided, the identities of the majority of these men can be deduced by a process of elimination (there are, for example, only two Egyptians, two Uzbeks, and one Azerbaijani in Guantánamo), and, in addition, the decision to release the Tajik prisoner, Umar Abdulayev, is known about because it was announced in July.

As I explained at the time, this decision was distressing to Abdulayev and his lawyers for two reasons: firstly, because when government lawyers announced that they would “no longer defend his detention,” they also announced that they “want[ed] US diplomats to arrange to repatriate him,” even though Abdulayev is terrified of returning to Tajikistan, because he was threatened by Tajik agents who visited him in Guantánamo; and secondly, because the Task Force’s decision also led the Justice Department to ask a judge to drop Abdulayev’s habeas petition, prompting his lawyers to point out that the Task Force’s decision was “not a determination that [Abdulayev’s] detention was or was not lawful,” and that it therefore “does nothing towards removing the stigma of being held in Guantánamo or being accused of being a terrorist by the United States.”

This is actually a widespread problem for those cleared for release who fear repatriation, not only because recent rulings by the Court of Appeals have removed a number of judicial safety nets established by judges to prevent the enforced repatriation of a number of prisoners in Guantánamo (for whom the “stigma” of “being accused of being a terrorist by the United States” is of grave importance), but also because, in a wider sense, the Obama administration is unwilling to state openly that any prisoner was seized by mistake (as one of the prisoners’ lawyers recently explained to me, no lawyer would advise admitting responsibility, as it would open the floodgate to compensation claims). As a result, the administration is doing nothing to facilitate the work of Daniel Fried, the senior diplomat employed in March 2009 as the Special Envoy to Guantánamo, whose unenviable task it is to persuade other countries to accept released prisoners from Guantánamo.

Even putting aside for a moment the difficulties caused by the refusal of the Court of Appeals and Congress to accept cleared prisoners into the United States (which fuels a reluctance to help in European countries, as Fried acknowledged in a recent interview with the BBC), there are disturbing signs that this reticence on the part of the administration to state openly and categorically that colossal mistakes were made by the Bush administration is also undermining the very decisions made by Obama’s own Task Force.

Recently, for example, when Swiss officials visited Guantánamo to investigate the cases of four men cleared for release, in an attempt to work out if they would be prepared to accept any of these men, they returned, not with an honest appraisal, but with weighted conclusions that could only have been presented to them by the US military, who had, in effect, opened up their files and shown them material which purported to be evidence, but which, in other prisoners’ habeas petitions, has been demonstrated, time and again, to be nothing more than false allegations made by other prisoners (under duress or as a result of bribery) or by the prisoners themselves, multiple levels of unacceptable hearsay, and “mosaics” of intelligence that do not stand up to independent scrutiny.

According to reports in the Swiss media, the government representatives concluded that, of the four men they investigated, two Uighurs were “low-risk,” even though they are no risk at all, having persuaded the Bush administration to drop its claims that they were “enemy combatants,” and having been cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, by a US District Court, and by the Obama administration’s Task Force, and two other men, an Uzbek and a Palestinian — also cleared by Bush-era military review boards and by Obama’s Task Force — were considered “medium-risk” and “high-risk.”

What has the Task Force been doing for eight months?

Beyond these absurd discrepancies, which do nothing to help Obama’s cause, the other conclusion I draw from an analysis of the Task Force’s figures is that, after eight months of reviewing the prisoners’ cases, it has made very little progress, despite detailed consultations with lawyers and other experts, despite detailed searches for information relating to the men, which was scattered throughout numerous departments and agencies in a disturbingly incoherent manner, and despite the establishment of a database bringing all the available information together in one place.

Although exact numbers are impossible to work out, it is clear that, of the 29 men cleared by the Task Force, all but nine (at most) were actually approved for transfer, between 2006 and 2008, by Administrative Review Boards at Guantánamo. When Obama came to power, eight Tunisians, five Algerians, four Uzbeks, three Palestinians, an Egyptian, a Libyan, and Umar Abdulayev, the Tajik, had all been approved for transfer. Some tweaking has taken place — a Palestinian has been removed from the list, and the Azerbaijani, Poolad Tsiradzho, has been added, plus an Algerian, an Egyptian, two Libyans and three Syrians — and, in addition, it is possible that the Task Force has shifted position on a few of those approved for transfer under Bush.

However, when added to the 14 or so Yemenis discussed in the last article, this figure of 25 or so prisoners is hardly a triumph for the Task Force, and indicates, yet again, that when it comes to Guantánamo, the President’s bold start in January, when he issued his executive order regarding the closure of the prison, has been steadily eroded by confusion, extreme caution and indecision.

If this damned icon of the dark years of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their close advisors is ever to close, it is time for Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Robert Gates to regroup and to accept that confusion plays only into the hands of those haunted by the ghost of Dick Cheney, and that clarity is required. Moreover, despite lawyers’ fears of new waves of litigation, this clarity has to involve the nation’s leaders acknowledging why the District Courts have ruled, in 79 percent of the habeas petitions before them, that the men in question are neither terrorists nor soldiers and should be released.

The truth is out there — and I am only one of many writers who have been explaining it for the last four years — but I will spell it out again: the majority of the prisoners were seized for bounty payments by US allies, were never screened according to the Geneva Conventions to determine whether or not they were combatants of any kind, and are held not because of anything resembling evidence, but through a shamefully poor attempt to build up a case against them in the isolation of Guantánamo, through a combination of torture, coercion and bribery, and the use of raw intelligence masquerading as facts.

Everyone in Guantánamo deserves better than this: both the few dozen men who are genuinely accused of involvement with al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks and other acts of international terrorism, who should face trials for their alleged crimes, and the majority of the prison’s population, whose release is still being prevented, or made horrendously complicated, by both the Executive and the lawmakers in Congress — some innocent men, and others who were soldiers in a now almost forgotten civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, whose ongoing detention is based not on any notions of justice, but on the lingering legacy of the Bush administration’s mistaken decision to equate al-Qaeda with the Taliban.

Note: For more information on the prisoners cleared for release, see my article, “Guantánamo’s refugees,” and also see the following profiles on the Reprieve website: Ahmed Belbacha (Algeria), Nabil Hadjarab (Algeria), Said Farhi (Algeria), Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar (Egypt), Sherif El-Mashad (Egypt), Ayman al-Shurafa (Palestine), Adel Hakeemy (Tunisia), Hedi Hammamy (Tunisia) and Saleh Sassi (Tunisia).

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on The Public Record.