At the time, seven Tunisians had left Guantánamo, to face a variety of fates. Two had been repatriated in 2007, although both had then been imprisoned following show trials, two others were in Italy, where they had been delivered from Guantánamo to face trials in November 2009, and three others had been resettled in early 2010 in three other countries — namely, Slovakia, Albania and Georgia.

Soon after the fall of Ben Ali, the interim Tunisian government announced an amnesty for all political prisoners, paving the way for the return of exiled members of the Islamist party Ennahdha, and also the release of 55-year old Abdallah Hajji (also identified as Abdullah bin Amor), the former Guantánamo prisoner who was still imprisoned after a show trial. It also transpired that the other returned and imprisoned ex-Guantánamo prisoner, Lotfi Lagha, had actually been freed under President Ben Ali in June 2010.

Around the same time, one of the Tunisians sent to Italy, Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri, was convicted of criminal association with the aim of terrorism and sentenced to six years in prison, which seems harsh, especially as, just days later, on February 7, another judge delivered a completely different ruling in the case of Adel Ben Mabrouk (also identified as Adel Ben Mabrouk Bin Hamida Boughanmi), the other Tunisian sent to Italy from Guantánamo in November 2009. Although he too was convicted of criminal association with the aim of terrorism, the judge gave him a two-year suspended sentence and ordered his immediate release from jail, after taking into account “the eight years Mabrouk spent in Guantánamo in ‘inhumane conditions,’ plus a year and a half in Italian prison,” as his lawyer described it, even though he did not, at that point, have a passport or any kind of travel or identity papers.

On April 20, he returned to Tunisia, and after his return an Italian journalist traveled to Tunis to interview him, as I reported here.

On the third anniversary of President Obama’s failed promise to close Guantánamo, and the first anniversary of the fall of President Ben Ali, another Tunisian who returned home — Rafiq al-Hami, also identified as Rafik Hammi and Rafik al-Hammi — who had been released in Slovakia in January 2010, and had returned to his home country last March, appeared in a report on Guantánamo’s Tunisians on Al-Jazeera, and also in a longer video on the Guardian‘s website, both of which are posted below.

Al-Hami had spoken at a press conference in October last year, called by the interim government to campaign for the release of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners, when he said, “The years I spent in detention were unimaginable. I never knew if I would be able to return to my family and my homeland, and I was never informed of why I was being held, or given a chance to defend myself at trial. Since my return to Tunisia, I have finally been reunited with my family and have been able to experience normal life again. I have very high hopes for my future here.”

However, I had never seen what he looked like until these films were released. A quiet, bookish man with an almost secret smile that his long years of torture could not erase, he was clearly never a threat to anyone, and it is salutary to recall that he was actually brutalized not only in Guantánamo, but also in three “black sites” run by the CIA, where, as he explained in a lawsuit 2009, “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers,” and, at various times, he was “stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful stress positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold.”

Many years before, he had told his tribunal in Guantánamo that he was tortured for three months in the “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan, where, he said, “I was threatened. I was left out all night in the cold … I spent two months with no water, no shoes, in darkness and in the cold. There was darkness and loud music for two months. I was not allowed to pray … These things are documented. You have them.”

In the two and a half minute feature on Al-Jazeera, al-Hami spoke briefly about his experiences, and the report also noted the story of Adel Hakeemy, still held in Guantánamo, who was “accused of training al-Qaeda members, but all charges against him were dropped last year,” as Al-Jazeera explained. His brother Imad also spoke, as did Polly Rossdale of Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent most of the Tunisians at Guantánamo.

In the seven minute video for the Guardian, in which Rafiq al-Hami spoke about his abuse, Adel Hakeemy’s brother appeared again, as did his mother. Most poignantly, his brother showed a photo of the daughter he has never met. Also included were the sister and mother of Hisham Sliti, also still held, and Cortney Busch of Reprieve was on hand to provide a good explanation of the circumstances surrounding the men’s ongoing detention, and the need for pressure to secure their release.

Ten years after Guantánamo opened, it is sad to see these stories of men still held, even though they were cleared for release by military review boards under President Bush, and even though the reason they fled Tunisia in the first place — because of their opposition to, and persecution by President Ben Ali — has come to an end, and they could be safely repatriated without any problems.

POSTSCRIPT: Below, via Tunisia Live, which reported on a press conference in Tunis on January 11 to call for the return of the prisoners, is another interview with Rafiq al-Hami, in which he described the forms of torture used by the US authorities, and also explained that he spent five years in solitary confinement:

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

The conference was convened to “examine how this support can be turned into action,” and Kamel Eddine Ben Hassan, representing the Tunisian Ministry of Justice, announced that the government was “ready to set up a legal framework” with the US authorities “to study the situation of five Tunisian citizens” still held at Guantánamo, as the website Tunisia-live.net explained. “The state is now taking up the cause of its nationals in Guantánamo,” he told the conference, according to the Associated Press, which explained that he had stated that “Tunisia will soon send a mission to the United States to plead for the repatriation of its five remaining citizens held at the Guantánamo Bay detention center.”

According to Reprieve (as the AP described it), “one of the barriers to the repatriation of the remaining Tunisians” was Ben Ali’s “reputation for torture and human rights abuses,” but Cori Crider, the NGO’s legal director, said “Tunisia’s willingness now to accept the detainees should pave the way for their release.”

This position was also supported by Mokhtar Trifi, previously the president of Tunisia’s League for the Defense of Human Rights, who said his organization “now supports” the repatriation of the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo. “Before,” he said, “we were against their return, and we sought a safe place to go. Now that place is Tunisia.”

Mehrezia Ben Shaaban, the 70-year old mother of Hisham Sliti, one of the remaining Tunisians in Guantánamo, “cried as she said she just wanted to see” her son back at home. “His father and I are praying for Hisham to return after such a long absence and live at home with his family,” she said.

In January, after the overthrow of Tunisia’s long-term dictator, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, I wrote an article, “What Does Tunisia’s Revolution Mean for Political Prisoners, Including Guantánamo Detainees?,” in which I looked in detail at the stories of the twelve prisoners held at Guantánamo throughout its history. At that time, three had been freed in other countries, fearing what would happen if they were repatriated, two had been sent to Italy, where they were imprisoned pending trials on allegations that they were involved with terrorism, two had been returned to Tunisia, where they had been imprisoned after show trials, and five were still held in Guantánamo.

After Ben Ali’s flight to Saudi Arabia, Abdallah Hajj (aka Abdullah bin Amor), the one Tunisian returned from Guantánamo in 2007 who was still imprisoned, was freed “as part of a promise by the interim government to free all political prisoners.” or, as Tunisia-live.net explained after Wednesday’s conference, as a result of an amnesty declared by the interim government, which “put an end to all lawsuits based on the 2003 anti-terrorist law.” All twelve prisoners had been convicted in absentia in Tunisia on trumped-up charges, or charges derived through the torture of other prisoners, in show trials, but the website noted that no case had been established that any of the Tunisians at Guantánamo were a threat to their home country.

As a result, after Abdallah Hajji was released, and one of the Tunisians held in Italy had the case against him dismissed by the presiding judge in his case, he too returned  to Tunisia, where he was interviewed in May, and at Wednesday’s conference another former prisoner, Rafiq al-Hami, who had been freed in Slovakia in January 2010, but who recently returned to his newly liberated homeland, spoke about his experiences.

“The years I spent in detention were unimaginable,” he said. “I never knew if I would be able to return to my family and my homeland, and I was never informed of why I was being held, or given a chance to defend myself at trial. Since my return to Tunisia, I have finally been reunited with my family and have been able to experience normal life again. I have very high hopes for my future here.”

Polly Rossdale, who heads Reprieve’s “Life After Guantánamo” project, told me on Thursday that she was reassured that the conference had raised the profile of the prisoners in Tunisia, and was hopeful that this would indeed lead to pressure being exerted on the Obama administration.

As Reprieve noted in its press release about the conference, “171 prisoners remain detained at Guantánamo Bay. The Obama administration has publicly stated that 89 of these men have been cleared for release and pose no threat whatsoever to the United States or any other nation. Despite this fact, over the past year only a small handful of men have actually been released. With the upcoming elections in October, there is an opportunity for Tunisia to correct the wrongs of the past and open negotiations with the American government for the release of its citizens.”

With no one released from Guantánamo since January, and, as Reprieve noted, 89 cleared prisoners still held, it is to be hoped that President Obama will rise to the opportunity presented by the Tunisian government, to overcome the inevitable barriers raised by Republican lawmakers, who have cynically decided to oppose the release of prisoners from Guantánamo under any circumstances, and to free the last five Tunisian prisoners, following the example of the amnesty declared after Ben Ali’s fall, and providing Tunisia’s interim government, and its new political parties, with a clear example of support and understanding after so many years of demonizing political prisoners as terrorists.

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

This was, I believe, a harsh sentence, as Nasseri will have spent 16 years in prison by the time his sentence comes to an end, and on February 7, just days after the Nasseri verdict, another judge delivered a completely different ruling in the case of Adel Ben Mabrouk, the other Tunisian sent to Italy from Guantánamo in November 2009 (also identified as Adel Ben Mabrouk Bin Hamida Boughanmi). Although he too was “convicted of criminal association with the aim of terrorism,” as the Associated Press described it, the judge gave him a two-year suspended sentence and ordered his immediate release from jail, “citing time served at Guantánamo,” even though he did not, at that point, have a passport or any kind of travel or identity papers.

As the AP explained, Ben Mabrouk’s defense lawyer Giuseppina Regina “said she and prosecutors made a joint appeal to the judge to take into consideration the eight years Mabrouk spent in Guantánamo in ‘inhumane conditions,’ plus a year and a half in Italian prison.” She stated, “Both the defense and the prosecution asked the judge to take into account his illegal and inhumane detention at Guantánamo,” and this was indeed the case. Prosecutor Armando Spataro said that he “appealed for a lighter sentence,” because Ben Mabrouk’s detention at Guantánamo was illegal under Italian law, and because “the crimes of which he was accused occurred more than a decade ago.”

On April 20, Adel Ben Mabrouk was deported to Tunisia, after the Interior Ministry reached an agreement with Tunisian diplomats in Rome, and a few days ago the website Worldcrunch, which translates articles from around the world into English, published a fascinating article based on an interview with Ben Mabrouk, back home in Tunisia, that was originally published in La Stampa. Lazy readers, or those in search of a shock, might pick up on Ben Mabrouk’s respect for Osama bin Laden, whose death was reported while the journalist, Domenico Quirico, was with him, but what is more interesting is how Ben Mabrouk realistically defended his travel to Afghanistan in February 2001 as having nothing to do with militancy or terrorism, and also how Guantánamo, in his own words, was a place that contained both good and evil.

Watching bin Laden’s End (from Tunisia) with a Guantánamo Survivor
By Domenico Quirico, La Stampa (translated for Worldcrunch), May 5, 2011

TUNIS — Adel Ben Mabrouk has seen the inside of Italian prison cells from Milan in the north to Benevento in the south. He also spent eight years behind the barbed wire of a certain US military prison on the island of Cuba.

Last February, a Milan Judge convicted this 40-year-old Tunisian of criminal association with terrorist intent, but then freed him from jail, citing the time he’d spent incarcerated at Guantánamo as “not democratic” and the conditions “inhumane”. Mabrouk is a survivor of Afghanistan, where he was arrested at the end of 2001 for his alleged associations with Al-Qaeda.

I met him at his house in Tunisia. By chance, it was this past Monday, soon after Osama Bin Laden’s death had been announced. On the television screen in his living room, France 24’s Arabic channel was broadcasting the images of the collapsing Twin Towers, Bin Laden, and the stories of some of his many victims.

Looking at the screen, with a strange smile on his face, Mabrouk says: “The Americans … they are smart and bastards at the same time.” He then picks up the remote control, and starts looking for the Italian Rai TV channel, in vain. “I love watching Italian soccer. How did Inter Milan do yesterday? What a team.”

I ask him what Bin Laden meant for him: Martyr? Madman? Killer?

“He was a respectable man. Even his enemies should recognize that he deserved respect,” Mabrouk responds. “He was a man of honor.”

After eight years in Guantánamo, American authorities handed Mabrouk over to Italy. In 2005, Italian authorities had issued an arrest warrant accusing him of international terrorism, falsification of documents, aiding illegal immigration, theft and drug trafficking.

Following Milan judge Armando Spataro’s decision to free him, Mabrouk was expelled from Italy. He now lives in the notorious Zahrouni neighborhood of Tunis, an area that is too dangerous to frequent at night.

Mabrouk spends his new life between the local mosque and the garage he runs with his brother. People who pass in front of the garage stop to say hello. They show a sort of respect and admiration for him. Mabrouk’s brother, who convinced him to accept this interview, had also been arrested in Afghanistan, accused of terrorism and jailed for seven years in Tunisia.

Prior to his release, Mabrouk spent a total of 10 years in jails. He has been incarcerated in the Italian prisons of Pesaro Asti, Fossombrone, Macomer, Benevento, and Milan, as well in the United States-run Guantánamo and Kandahar military prisons in Afghanistan.

His tales are related to life in jail. He speaks about the fetters used in Pakistan. “It’s like in the times of Christ. They put rings around your ankles which are connected by a bar and another bar across the legs. You have to raise the bar in order to walk,” he explains.

Does his body have the signs of all this tortures? “Maybe, but I don’t realize it. Perhaps Guantánamo inmates like me are all crazy without knowing it,” he says with a dry laugh. “It’s only when we are out surrounded by people, and we see them looking at us, that we realize.”

Every now and again, Mabrouk falls into impenetrable silences. He had said after the second question, “Look, it’s better if I just speak. I don’t like to answer questions, because I feel like if I am back there. I was interrogated 200 times in Guantánamo, by the CIA, the Italian special forces and those bastards of our Tunisian secret services — Ben Ali’s men. I knew all the questions. They were always the same. There were three questions to which I would never reply: what do you think about kamikazes? How did you become a radical Islamist? Have you ever fired a gun?”

On the question of his faith, he denies that radical imams he met during a stint in an Italian jail for drug-dealing had an impact on him. “This is bullshit. I just had many things to confess, that’s all. It was like to be born again. We Muslims have God inside, our faith comes from our souls … I stopped taking drugs, started working as a barber, then as a driver for a company in Cernusco. I had even applied for a regular visa, but there was that old conviction for drug trafficking. Always the same …”

He finally opens up about Afghanistan and why he went there in February 2001: “It was a place where good Muslims felt at home. I was scared that the Italian authorities would hand me over me to Ben Alì, accusing me of being a radical Islamist. [In Afghanistan] I lived in a shelter for foreigners. The Taliban took us in, they gave us a home.”

After 9/11, when the Taliban regime fell apart, Mabrouk crossed the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, under the US bombing. There, Pakistani authorities arrested him and 150 other people. “They sold me to the Americans for $5,000 just because Bush needed people to fill up the jails as part of the war on terrorism.”

He was jailed in Guantánamo. “Look, in Guantánamo there was a lot of good, not just evil. I would like to write a book about it. The title would be Guantánamo, Between Good and Evil. Yes, there we understood who the Americans really are, and we also understood our faith better. We were from 50 countries, and 80 percent of us learned the Koran by heart. That is not a prison. It is a war camp where psychologists and psychiatrists are in charge. If you do not have faith, you cannot survive in those conditions. I could tell about some amazing gestures, even from the guards. In Guantánamo I understood one thing: the human being is good, even there.”

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

On February 27, Mohamed Ghannouchi, who was the Prime Minister in the transitional government that took over from Ben Ali, responded to the largest protests since the dictator’s fall — a weekend of violent protests that left five people dead — by tendering his resignation. Ghannouchi, who had been the Prime Minister under Ben Ali for ten years,  had struggled — and failed — to convince a significant number of the Tunisian people that he represented a break with the old regime — hence the protests that led to his resignation.

His successor, Béji Caïd Essebsi, 84, is a lawyer, with a reputation for being “a political liberal,” as AsiaOne explained, noting that he “was a close aide of Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first president after independence,” and served in several ministerial posts. After Ben Ali came to power in 1987, he was elected a member of parliament (in 1989), and was president of the House of Deputies until 1991, when he resumed his profession as a lawyer.

Untainted by close association with Ben Ali, Essebsi immediately spoke of the elections planned for July 24, saying, “We will see to it that this election will be the first one in Tunisia’s history to take place in total credibility and transparency, which is an important step on the path of democracy,” and moved swiftly to distance himself still further from the Ben Ali years by asserting that “all persons proved guilty under the old regime will be brought to justice, starting with the deposed Head of State who committed the crime of ‘high treason,’ not to mention all those key figures of the ousted system,” as AllAfrica.com explained. He also announced a new government that “includes no new members from the old regime,” as the Guardian pointed out, although the Ministers of Defence, the Interior, Justice and Foreign Affairs kept their posts. The Guardian added that “All the newcomers are technocrats rather than career politicians,” and that they will help to facilitate the election of “a constituent assembly in late July to rewrite the Constitution.”

On March 3, the July 24 elections were offcially announced by interim President Fouad Mebazza, to choose a constituent assembly that will rewrite the Constitution and chart the country’s transition to democracy. A source close to the President’s office told Reuters that, “once elected, the constituent council could either appoint a new government or ask the caretaker executive to carry on until presidential and parliamentary elections were held.”

On March 7, Béji Caïd Essebsi also fulfilled one of the key demands of the popular revolution that overthrew Ben Ali by announcing the abolition of the hated secret police. In an official communiqué, the interim government stated that abolishing the secret police was done “in harmony with the values of the revolution.”

A brutal fixture of Ben Ali’s repressive regime, the secret police — the state security agency — had a fearsome reputation as human rights abusers. As the Guardian explained, the agency “functioned largely as a domestic spy agency and had wide powers to act against people deemed disloyal by the regime. Its officers, [who] monitored opposition politicians and journalists, could arrest people randomly” and regularly tortured those in its custody.

Ben Ali had remorselessly targeted political dissidents, including Ennahdha, a moderate Islamist party opposed to his dictatorship. In 1989, after Ennahda came second to the ruling party in elections, “officially winning about 17% of the ballot in a count widely suspected to favour the ruling party,” as the BBC put it, the party was banned. Its leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, fled the country during a crackdown soon after, as did many members of the party, some of whom ending up living in Afghanistan or Pakistan, where a handful were unlucky enough to be picked up after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and sent to Guantánamo as terrorists. This was a label that suited Ben Ali, who had sentenced them all in absentia on charges related to terrorism that were widely regarded as being based on confessions derived from their co-defendants through the use of torture.

On March 1, Ennahdha was given legal status as a political party, paving the way for its participation in the forthcoming elections under the leadership of Rachid Ghannouchi, who returned from exile after Ben Ali’s fall. Speaking of the announced dissolution of the secret police, Ali Larayedh, a member of Ennahdha, who spent 14 years in prison for political reasons, told Reuters, “It is a dream come true for everyone. People have suffered because of them. They wrecked politics, the media and the judiciary in this country.”

Although Egypt generally seems to have been mirroring events in Tunisia, overthrowing its own dictator, Hosni Mubarak, on Febuary 11, and then forcing the resignation, on March 3, of Mubarak’s tainted Prime Minister, Ahmed Shafiq, it is not known if events in Egypt, on the weekend immediately before the Tunisian interim government’s announcement of the dissolution of the state security agency, had influenced its neighbor’s decision. In Egypt, protestors had stormed the headquarters of the state security agency in Cairo, and several offices in other locations, including Alexandria, rescuing files, videos and torture instruments after hearing that agents had been shredding and burning documents. The events may be related, or it may simply be that, as the Guardian described it, Tunisia “has gone further than neighbouring Egypt in seeking to rid itself of an apparatus associated with decades of repression.”

Nor was this the end of the changes. Two days after this momentous announcement, on March 9, a Tunisian court dissolved Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali’s party, the Rally for Constitutional Democracy (RCD), announcing that it had decided “to liquidate its assets and funds.” The RCD, which has said it will appeal, was suspended from official activities in February by the Interior Ministry, after Ben Ali fled the country. As Al-Jazeera reported, “The party, which claimed a membership of two million people out of a population of around 10.4 million, was accused of violating the constitution to set up a one-party ‘totalitarian regime’ under Ben Ali.” The Interior Ministry noted that, “Since it was created in 1988, the party had never been audited and had never filed annual accounts.”

Confirmation of the extent of the changes enacted in Tunisia since Ben Ali was deposed came from a friend of mine in the UK, Ann Alexander, who told me:

On a happy note, I had a call today from Fathi Messaoudi, a Tunisian friend in London. A charismatic blind man, he had successfully sought political aslyum here, having been given a 75-year prison sentence by the Ben Ali regime.

He asked, “Guess where I’ve been?”

“Tunisia,” I said. And I was right.

He had been home for the first time in nearly 20 years and was reunited with his family and friends. He said that although he is back in London, he still feels that he’s dreaming. He told me that all the police stations were burned down. I reminded him that he told me less than a year ago that his only hope for Tunisia would be after the death of Ben Ali and we agreed that miracles happen.

He also was happy to report that all political prisoners had been released including Sayfullah Ben Hassine, his friend, who was sentenced by a military court a few years ago to 60 years imprisonment. He was on his way back to the airport when he got a call from Sayfullah to say he was released so he didn’t get the chance to meet him but they have spoken a lot on the phone since.

I have been told, although not by Fathi, that the Tunisian embassy in London contacted dissident Tunisians and offered them Tunisian passports so I think he had plenty of company on the plane.

I was delighted to hear about Fathi’s story, especially as I had the pleasure to meet this resolutely positive man a few years ago, and also to hear about the abolition of the security services in Tunisia that caused so much misery and devastation to people’s lives. I really hope that it signals the end of the false presumption, cultivated for nearly ten years now in the “War on Terror,” that devout Muslims are terrorists and that we, in the West, must support the most vile dictators to ensure that they are imprisoned and tortured and killed.

If a new world is to be formed from the ashes of these dark decades of tyranny, it will, if there is finally to be real representation of the people, include all those who contributed so decisively to Tunisia’s revolution — young people, trade unionists, women and groups like Ennahdha — and will never again lead to a dictatorship dominated by a brutal state security apparatus that, for 31 years, as in Tunisia, violently suppressed almost every murmur of dissent, and when it suited the Bush administration, was a willing partner in the disastrous “War on Terror” that, to his shame — and despite praising the will of the people in Tunisia — President Obama has done so little to overturn.

In Tunisia after Ben Ali, Abdallah Hajji (also identified as Abdullah bin Amor), a 55- year old former member of Ennahdha, was recently freed from prison, where he was serving a seven-year sentence after a show trial that followed his repatriation from Guantánamo by the Bush administration in 2007.

In Guantánamo, meanwhile, five Tunisians still languish, even though one, Lotfi bin Ali, was cleared for release by the Bush administration in 2007, and was only prevented from being repatriated after what happened to Abdallah Hajji. He, presumably, could be released immediately, and it is also likely that the other four men would now be willingly repatriated.

Instead, however, Obama seems intent on holding them indefinitely — perhaps because, after all, America likes dealing with dictators, but also, presumably, because lawmakers in Congress have insisted that they have the right to interfere in decisions regarding the disposition of prisoners, and many of them, if pushed, would state explicitly that they do not regard Tunisia as a safe country for the release of any Guantánamo prisoners — even one cleared by President Bush four years ago.

As hope continues to spring to life throughout the Middle East, it seems that, in the corridors of power in the United States, it is missing, presumed dead.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

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

The two Tunisians repatriated from Guantánamo in 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tunisans still in Guantánamo, or freed in other countries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

However, as in the majority of the cases in which the prisoners have lost, there was nothing in the ruling that could be construed as representing the delivery of justice after the eight and a half years that al-Bihani has spent in US custody, as he has been consigned to indefinite detention in Guantánamo, on an apparently legal basis, despite the fact that there is no evidence that he ever took up arms against anyone, or had any contact with anyone involved in preparing, facilitating or supporting acts of international terrorism.

Moreover, in examining his habeas corpus petition, Judge Walton appeared to remain blissfully unaware that, despite being, at most, a lowly foot soldier, al-Bihani was held in a variety of secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan before his transfer to Guantánamo, where he was subjected to torture.

As revealed in the background to al-Bihani’s case, accepted by both al-Bihani and the government, he cut a depressing figure prior to traveling to Afghanistan in the summer of 2000. As Judge Walton explained, “During the time he resided in Saudi Arabia, the petitioner was abusing various drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, hashish, crystal methamphetamine, and depression pills,” Judge Walton also noted, “The petitioner began to ‘increase [his] intake of alcohol and drugs,’ when his fiancee ended their engagement due to her concerns that ‘she would fall out of grace with her father if she married a Yemeni against his wishes.’”

Apparently persuaded to travel to Afghanistan by his brother Mansour, described as “an experienced fighter who fought against the Russians in Chechnya,” and who “had close relationships with senior Chechen fighters and other individuals who were engaged in training men to fight in Chechnya and in other countries,” he traveled to Afghanistan with his brother, where, as Judge Walton concluded, he “received, at a minimum, weapons training” at the al-Farouq training camp, established by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf in the early 1990s, but associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before the 9/11 attacks, and also stayed in Afghan guest houses reportedly associated with al-Qaeda.

In authorizing al-Bihani’s ongoing detention, Judge Walton gave weight to al-Bihani’s admission that he “became, and was part of, al-Qaeda at least during the five months period he was training at al-Farouq,” even though he also noted that his training was far from rigorous. “Although he was enrolled at al-Farouq for approximately five months,” Judge Walton explained, “he only ‘received approximately two months of training,’ because he would train for approximately ‘a week or two weeks’ before feigning illness in order to leave and ‘do hashish or tobacco.’” Judge Walton added that al-Bihani “repeated this cycle several times,” and also explained, “Towards the end of his time at al-Farouq, the trainers at the camp informed him that he was ‘not ready physically because [he] keep[s] leaving and going back, — adding that the trainers reportedly “concluded that he was of ‘no use,’ and ‘they kick[ed him] out of the camp.’”

Personally, I find it troubling that an obviously drug-addled, inconsistent and unreliable recruit can nevertheless be regarded as “part of” al-Qaeda, as it tends to render meaningless the supposed threat posed by al-Qaeda if useless recruits can legitimately be held, even when, as with al-Bihani, they had no knowledge of international terrorism, and not even a demonstrable commitment to al-Qaeda’s military activities in Afghanistan.

Judge Walton, however, seemed unconcerned that there appeared to be no basis for concluding that al-Bihani had ever posed a threat to the United States. Proceeding to an explanation of how he was captured, he explained that, in late 2001, having become separated from his brother Mansour (who was “ill” and was transported to Quetta in “a tractor-trailer truck” for those “who appeared sick or injured”), al-Bihani traveled through Pakistan to Iran, “with a group of other men.” Near Zahedan, he was supposed to be reunited with his brother, and with Hamza al-Qa’eity, who ran a guest house in Kabul described by al-Bihani as “one that jihad fighters used as a transition point.” However, as Judge Walton explained, at “the exact time” that al-Qa’eity arrived to pick him up from the house of an Iranian family, where he was staying, the Iranian police — or intelligence services — “descended on the house and apprehended” him — and, presumably, Hamza al-Qa’eity as well.

The hidden story of ten men rendered from Iran to Afghanistan — including Tawfiq al-Bihani

As I mentioned in the introduction to this article, what Judge Walton appeared not to know — or ignored in his ruling — was the fact that, after al-Bihani was subsequently “flown to Afghanistan” and “transferred to United States custody,” he was held in a variety of secret CIA prisons.

This information is readily accessible, because I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files that al-Bihani was one of ten men seized in Iran who were flown to Afghanistan and then handed over to US forces. One of these men, Aminullah Tukhi, an Afghan released from Guantánamo in December 2007, explained that six Arabs, two Afghans, an Uzbek and a Tajik had been delivered to the Americans, and I was able to identify six of them — Tukhi, Tawfiq al-Bihani, Walid al-Qadasi, a Yemeni transferred to the custody of his home government in April 2004, Wassam al-Ourdoni, a Jordanian released in April 2004, Rafiq Alhami, a Tunisian released in Slovakia in January this year, and Hussein Almerfedi, a Yemeni who won his habeas petition in July this year. Unaccounted for are the other four men mentioned by Aminullah Tukhi — an Arab, an Afghan, the Uzbek and the Tajik — although it seems possible that one of the disappeared was Hamza al-Qa’eity.

Confirmation that al-Bihani was one of the men came from an unexpected source. Abu Yahya al-Libi, one of four prisoners who escaped from Bagram in July 2005, described, in a post on an obscure French language website, which has since disappeared from the Internet, 12 prisoners who were held with him in Bagram, one of whom was Tawfiq al-Bihani. He also explained how all the men had passed through a network of secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, where they had endured “hard torture,” and added, in al-Bihani’s case, that he was captured in Iran at the start of 2002, that he had met him in June 2002 in a prison he identified as “Rissat 2,” and that he was taken to another prison in September 2002, after which he never saw him again, and thought that he may have been transferred to Guantánamo.

Al-Libi also explained that Tawfiq al-Bihani thought that his brother Ghaleb, who had also been in Afghanistan, had been killed, but that the Americans had told him that he had been captured — and it later emerged that this was correct. Ghaleb al-Bihani lost his habeas corpus petition in January 2009, on the basis that he was a cook for Arab forces supporting the Taliban, and also had his appeal denied in January this year, consigning him to the same form of court-approved indefinite detention as his brother.

The torture in secret CIA prisons of three men rendered from Iran to Afghanistan

The accounts of three of the men rendered from Iran to Afghanistan are publicly available, and they are, to be blunt, horrific. Al-Ourdoni, a missionary seized with his wife and new-born child, explained after his release that his American captors “put me in jail under circumstances that I can only recall with dread. I lived under unimaginable conditions that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.” He said that he was first placed in an underground prison for 77 days, and stated, “this room was so dark that we couldn’t distinguish nights and days. There was no window, and we didn’t see the sun once during the whole time.” He added that he was then moved to “prison number three”, where the food was so bad that his weight dropped substantially, and was then held in Bagram for 40 days before being flown to Guantánamo.

In an interview with a UN rapporteur, Walid al-Qadasi provided the following explanation of his treatment, which, like al-Ourdoni’s account, was included in a major UN report on secret detention earlier this year:

He was held in a prison in Kabul. During US custody, officials cut his clothes with scissors, left him naked and took photos of him before giving him Afghan clothes to wear. They then handcuffed his hands behind his back, blindfolded him and started interrogating him. The apparently Egyptian interrogator, accusing him of belonging to al-Qaeda, threatened him with death. He was put in an underground cell measuring approximately two meters by three meters with very small windows. He shared the cell with ten inmates. They had to sleep in shifts due to lack of space and received food only once a day. He spent three months there without ever leaving the cell. After three months, Walid al-Qadasi was transferred to Bagram, where he was interrogated for one month.

In a lawsuit filed in April 2009, Rafiq Alhami stated that, for a year, he was held in three CIA “dark sites,” where “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers,” and where, at various times, he was “stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful stress positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold.” Moreover, at Guantánamo, he told a military review board that one of the prisons was the “Dark Prison” near Kabul, which I have previously described as “a medieval torture dungeon with the addition of ear-splittingly loud music and noise, which was pumped into the cells 24 hours a day,” based on accounts by prisoners who were held there, including the British resident Binyam Mohamed, who described his time there as “the worst days of his captivity” — worse than the 18 months in Morocco, where the CIA’s proxy torturers regularly sliced his genitals with a razorblade.

Alhami told his review board that he was tortured for three months in the “Dark Prison,” where, he said, “I was threatened. I was left out all night in the cold … I spent two months with no water, no shoes, in darkness and in the cold. There was darkness and loud music for two months. I was not allowed to pray … These things are documented. You have them.”

The torture of Tawfiq al-Bihani

However while Judge Walton may not have come across my book, or the inclusion of this information in the UN report on secret detention earlier this year, I can’t understand how he would not have known about al-Bihani’s treatment from his lawyer, George M. Clarke III, because, in the book The Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law, published last year, Clarke reproduced a letter from al-Bihani in which he provided a detailed explanation of what had happened to him after he was delivered to Afghanistan from Iran.

In his letter, al-Bihani explained that he was initially held in a vile Afghan prison in Kabul, where he and the other prisoners from Iran were hidden from Red Cross representatives until one of their fellow prisoners informed them of their existence. His first encounters with US agents — he believes they were from the FBI — took place in this prison, and he described his first interrogation as follows:

I was handcuffed behind and they put a hood on my head so that I could not see anything. When I entered the interrogation room, the American guards pushed me down to the ground in a very savage manner. They started to cut my clothing with scissors. They undressed me completely and I was nude. They made me sit on a chair and it was very cold. I was also afraid and terrorized because the guards were aiming their weapons towards me. The interrogator put his personal gun on my forehead threatening to kill me.

Al-Bihani explained that he stayed in this prison for around ten weeks, and was then moved to another prison where he was held in solitary confinement for “approximately five months and ten days.” He added that the guards were Afghan, that they handed out “very bad treatment,” and that “The interrogation was also very savage.” He was then moved to a third prison, which appears to have been the “Dark Prison,” and en route US soldiers “started to hit me and strangle me, they would put a rope around my neck and I was about to die.” This is his description of the “Dark Prison”:

This was absolutely the worst prison. It was a very dark prison and there was no light, no bed or a carpet, the floor was semi cement. The restraints on my feet were very tight; they put me into a cell and kept me hanging tied to the wall for almost ten days. […]

The irritating music 24 hours a day was very loud and hard banging on the door. When I used to go for interrogations, I was unable to walk because of the restraints on my legs and tightness on my feet.  Would fall down to the ground and scream that I cannot walk. They would pick me up from the ground and I would walk with them while they were hitting me on the way to the interrogation until I would bleed from my feet. When I would fall to the ground, they would drag me while I am on the ground. Then they would bring me back to the cell and sprinkle cold water on me. Sometimes they would put a weapon on my head threatening to kill me using some provocative statements which I cannot mention in this letter.

After ten days, they brought me down from the hanging position and made me sit on the floor. Then they tied my hands upwards for approximately one month so that I could not lie down on the floor for comfort, therefore I was unable to sleep except for quarter of an hour every day.

After one month and ten days, they removed all my restraints, however I was unable to rest or sleep because of extreme hunger and cold and the loud irritating music and the banging on the door. I stayed in this prison for approximately two months and a half and I had no idea whether it is day or night as it was extremely dark and oppressive conditions.

After this, al-Bihani was moved to Bagram, where, he said, “the treatment was very bad there as well,” and was then flown to Guantánamo.

A bleak conclusion

Beyond a rather obvious question raised by the accounts above — did Tawfiq al-Bihani confess that he was “part of” al-Qaeda (when he so obviously wasn’t) because of the torture to which he was subjected in Afghanistan? — what this apparently overlooked torture account most vividly and balefully demonstrates is how effortlessly the torture of al-Bihani has become irrelevant to his case.

The exposure of torture has derailed other habeas petitions challenged by the government — in, for example, the cases of Mohamed Jawad and Fouad al-Rabiah (who were subsequently released), Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian who is still held, and, less successfully, in the cases of Saeed Hatim and Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman (whose successful petitions are being appealed by the government).

However, in Tawfiq al-Bihani’s case it is difficult to escape the conclusion that, even had Judge Walton known, or chosen to pay attention to these reports, it would not have fundamentally altered his conclusion that this failed recruit was sufficiently involved with al-Qaeda to justify his ongoing detention. That, as I concluded above, already demonstrates that the classification process for determining who may be legally detained is far too loose, but when evidence that al-Bihani was tortured in secret prisons is also removed from the picture, the end result is far bleaker.

Somewhere along the line, questions need to be raised not only regarding the justification for continuing to hold insignificant individuals at Guantánamo who never raised arms against anyone and were not involved in terrorism, but also regarding the ease with which detailed information about the torture of prisoners in a series of secret prisons run by the CIA can be so thoroughly ignored that Judge Walton failed to mention it at all.

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 Firedoglake, The Public Record, The Smirking Chimp, Anti-Fascist Encyclopedia, Antemedius, Op-Ed News and Uruknet.

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. 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), An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition (April 2010), With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo (April 2010), How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (May 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo (May 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web (May 2010), No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court (June 2010), Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo? (June 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: 2 Years, 50 Cases, 36 Victories for the Prisoners (June 2010), Obama Thinks About Releasing Innocent Yemenis from Guantánamo (June 2010), Calling for US Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (June 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Yemeni Seized in Iran, Held in Secret CIA Prisons (July 2010), Innocent Student Finally Released from Guantánamo (July 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals (Part One) (July 2010), Obama and US Courts Repatriate Algerian from Guantánamo Against His Will; May Be Complicit in Torture (July 2010), In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies (July 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals (Part Two) (July 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Mentally Ill Yemeni; 2nd Judge Approves Detention of Minor Taliban Recruit (August 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of Afghan Shopkeeper at Guantánamo (September 2010), Nine Years After 9/11, US Court Concedes that International Laws of War Restrict President’s Wartime Powers (September 2010), Fayiz Al-Kandari, A Kuwaiti Aid Worker in Guantánamo, Loses His Habeas Petition (September 2010), Heads You Lose, Tails You Lose: The Betrayal of Mohamedou Ould Slahi (September 2010), First Guantánamo Habeas Appeal to US Supreme Court (Fawzi al-Odah, October 2010).

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.

This is the third 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 Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven.

This third article tells the stories of 22 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 Four, where 19 more stories are told. Two of these men have won their habeas petitions, but are still held, and three others have lost their petitions (although none could remotely be described as terrorists). As before, the majority of the prisoners are Yemenis, and although many have presumably been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, they are waiting to see if the President will, at any point in the future, lift the unprincipled moratorium on transfers to Yemen that he announced in January.

ISN 152 Al Khalaqi, Asim (Yemen)
As described in The Guantánamo Files, al-Khalaqi stated that he “went to Pakistan with a friend to preach with Jamaat-al-Tablighi, but decided to go to Afghanistan after discovering that there were too many Tablighi representatives in Pakistan. He explained that he and his friend were successful in their mission, but everything changed after 9/11, when his friend ‘went one day to go eat lunch and didn’t return home.’ He then met an Afghan, who advised him to leave because Arabs were being killed, and explained that this man took him in his car to the foothills where he joined a group of Arabs crossing the mountains to Pakistan and handed himself in to the army on arrival.” The US authorities allege that he undertook military training and was on the front lines at Bagram.

ISN 153 Suleiman, Fayiz (Yemen)
According to a summary of evidence at Guantánamo, Suleiman “identified himself as a trained imam in Jeddah,” and stated that various sheikhs “would frequent his facility to solicit money for other countries and to address jihad.” He added that the majority of the sheikhs’ talks “focused on Chechnya.” Although he was accused by unknown sources of training to make poisons at Kandahar airport and of being in Tora Bora, he maintained that “he had no military service and he had no desire to serve in such a capacity,” stated that he was “never trained on the use of weapons,” and “denied any connection with al-Qaeda or the Taliban.”

ISN 156 Latif, Adnan Farhan Abdul (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Latif, who was cleared for release by a military review board in 2007, stated that he had sustained a serious head injury in an automobile accident in 1994, and had spent years trying to find affordable medical treatment. After being told about the health-care office of a Pakistani aid worker in Afghanistan who would treat him, he said that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, and explained that, when the US-led invasion began, he fled to the border town of Khost and then made his way into Pakistan, where he was arrested by Pakistani forces, along with about 30 other Arabic-looking men. He told his lawyer, Marc Falkoff, that he later learned that each of them had been turned over to the US military for a bounty of $5000. On July 21 this year, Latif won his habeas corpus petition, but he has still not been released. This is partly because of President Obama’s unprincipled moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo, even though it has been repeatedly established that Latif is suffering from schizophrenia, and has attempted to commit suicide on numerous occasions, and partly, as Lette Taylor of Human Rights Watch explained in a recent article for Global Post, because the US government “informed the court shortly after the ruling that it [was] giving ‘serious consideration’ to appealing his release.” I need hardly add that, in light of Latif’s serious mental problems, even entertaining an appeal marks out the Obama administration as fully capable of plumbing depths of cruelty that are, essentially, no different from the brutal innovations of the Bush administration.

ISN 163 Al Qadasi, Khalid (Yemen)
Little is known of al-Qadasi, because, as the authorities at Guantánamo have explained, “he claims that he is willing to spend the rest of his life in prison and has emphatically stated that he would rather die than answer questions.” The authorities have apparently ascertained that he served in the Yemeni army as a young man and traveled to Afghanistan in July 2001, and al-Qadasi has apparently stated that he “left Yemen for Pakistan to obtain medical treatment,” and has also said that he “never possessed any weapons in Afghanistan, as he was unable to fight due to his bad back.” The only evidence against him is a claim by an unidentified source that he was a mujahideen fighter who came to Tora Bora, and other claims that he stayed in a guest house in Kabul and traveled on a truck from a guest house in Jalalabad to Tora Bora.

ISN 165 Al Busayss, Said (Yemen)
Al-Busayss, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, apparently “traveled to Afghanistan in late 2000, attended a Taliban training camp and fought on the front lines until his unit withdrew, when he was given the option of staying or escaping. Choosing the latter, he fled to Pakistan, where he ‘surrendered his weapon and was arrested by Pakistani police,’” as I explained in The Guantánamo Files.

ISN 167 Al Raimi, Ali Yahya (Yemen)
Al-Raimi, who was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, was just 17 at the time of his capture, and has stated that he didn’t want to go to Afghanistan, because he had a job in a restaurant in Yemen, but his parents, who were living in Afghanistan, forced him to visit. He added that, once he was there, his father and brother told him that he could only return to Yemen if he agreed to attend al-Farouq (the main camp for Arabs, associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) for two months’ training. He said that he got sick at the camp, went to a clinic in Kabul, and then returned to resume training, but added that this was four days before 9/11, after which “the training stopped and the camp was closed down.” After the US-led invasion began, he said that he was unable to contact his family, so he crossed the mountains with some friends, and was in Pakistan for a few days before he was arrested in a car by Pakistani soldiers. In the unclassified summary of evidence, one of the factors justifying his detention was, “The detainee’s country of origin does not participate in joint enforcement of the global war on terrorism.”

ISN 168 Hakimi, Adel (Hakeemy) (Tunisia)
Before traveling to Afghanistan, Hakimi had lived in Belgium, and for eight years in Italy, where, as I explained in an article in 2008, he had worked as a chef’s assistant in several hotels in Bologna. “I lived with Italians in their homes,” he told Cori Crider of Reprieve (his London-based lawyers) during a visit at Guantánamo in May 2008. “I am used to their culture. The Italians worked alongside me, they respected me, they treated me as their brother.” According to Reprieve, he traveled to Pakistan to get married and was living in Jalalabad, near his wife’s family, when the US-led invasion began in October 2001, and was then seized crossing the border like most of the other men described in this article. Although he was cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board under the Bush administration, both the US authorities and investigators in Europe still seem to regard him as a member of a group of Tunisians who joined al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and who helped recruits cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan, according to a Belgian police report produced at the 2003 trial in Belgium of Sliti’s uncle, Amor Sliti, when he and Hisham Sliti (ISN 174) were sentenced in absentia. His lawyers argue that the allegations are false, and are based on testimony extracted through torture, but since last summer, there have been rumors that he and Sliti might be extradited to Belgium.

ISN 170 Masud, Sharaf (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, it was reported that Masud traveled to Afghanistan “because he heard that the Afghan leader led by Islamic ways” and that he supported the Taliban, but “did not travel to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban … because it was Muslim versus Muslim.” He stated that he “left Kabul because the Afghans were trying to kill Arabs in the market,” took a taxi back to Jalalabad, and then joined a group of people walking to the border, where he was arrested after asking to be taken to his embassy. There are no allegations that he took part on any kind of combat — only claims that he stayed in guest houses for four months — and a ludicrous allegation by a “senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” who “noted the detainee looked familiar and that he may be a Tunisian with connections to Italy.”

ISN 171 Alahdal, Abu Bakr (Yemen)
According to the US authorities, Alahdal “served as a fighter for the Taliban Arab forces” at Bagram, but then “contracted malaria and some other unidentified illness” and was sent to a hospital in Kabul, where he spent two months recuperating. He then made his way to Jalalabad, where he “waited to be recalled to the front lines,” but “withdrew to a village on the outskirts of Jalalabad,” from where he made his way to Pakistan, where he was turned in by villagers. In Guantánamo, he has been a long-term hunger striker. Although he only weighed 99 pounds on arrival, his weight dropped at one point to just 81 pounds, and he was force-fed daily from the end of August 2005 until the publicly-released weight records ended in December 2006, when he still weighed only 101 pounds (PDF).

ISN 174 Sliti, Hisham (Tunisia)
In January 2009, Sliti, who had lived in various countries in Europe, including Belgium and Italy, lost his habeas corpus petition, when Judge Richard Leon ruled that he was “part of or supporting Taliban or al-Qaeda forces,” based on claims made by the government that he traveled to Afghanistan as “an al-Qaeda recruit … at the expense of known al-Qaeda associates and on a false passport provided to him by the same,” that he stayed in a guest house and a mosque, and attended a training camp, which also had connections to al-Qaeda, and that he was “instrumental” in “starting a terrorist organization with close ties to al-Qaeda.” As I explained in an article at the time, “The problem with all of these allegations is that Sliti’s story actually suggests that all these conclusions are based on guilt by association. He may well have been connected with others who were involved in or interested in terrorism, but his own trajectory is that of a junkie rather than a jihadist, or, if you prefer, a tourist rather than a terrorist.” Judge Leon disregarded Sliti’s own claim that he went to Afghanistan “to kick a long-standing drug habit and to find a wife,” but it was certainly true that he had been a drug addict in Europe (where he had been imprisoned on several occasions), and he also has a worldly cynicism that is fundamentally at odds with the fanatical rigor of al-Qaeda. In a review board at Guantánamo, he explained that he only ended up in Afghanistan because he had begun attending mosques in Belgium, where the country had been portrayed as “a clean, uncorrupted country where he could study Sharia and further his religious education,” but that what he found instead was that “I didn’t care for the country. It was very hot, dusty and [the] women were ugly. The atmosphere and environment didn’t agree with me.” Despite this, he, like Adel Hakimi (ISN 168, above) faces possible extradition to Belgium, where he was sentenced in absentia in 2003.

ISN 178 Baada, Tareq (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, it was alleged that Baada, who denied being a member of al-Qaeda, trained al-Farouq, and that he and a group of fighters were then assigned to the third line, about 4 km south of the front line near Kabul. It was also alleged that, after the fall of Kabul, he fled to Tora Bora, where he was put on guard duty. One of the most persistent hunger strikers at Guantánamo, he weighed 121 pounds on arrival at the prison, but in January 2006, when he was one of a handful of hunger strikers to continue after the prison-wide strike of 2005 was largely halted, he weighed just 94 pounds (PDF). In March 2007, Sami al-Haj (the al-Jazeera cameraman released in 2008) mentioned that he was one of three prisoners who had been on hunger strike — and force-fed — for the previous year.

ISN 189 Gherebi, Salem (Libya)
Little is known of Gherebi. Initially, it was alleged that he arrived in Afghanistan in 1995, having lost most of the fingers of his right hand in an explosives accident in Tajikistan the year before, and that he was an al-Qaeda operative in Kabul, who had “reportedly” trained at an al-Qaeda training camp in 1996 (an allegation that borders on the implausible, as Osama bin Laden only returned to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996). By 2006, the US authorities had dropped the claims about losing his fingers and being an al-Qaeda member in exchange for a new set of allegations, most of which centered on his purported links with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Deciding that his name was actually Rafdat Muhammed Faqi Aljj Saqqaf, the authorities alleged that he had lived in Pakistan in the early 1990s and then, fearing that talks between the Libyan and Pakistani governments would lead to the deportation of all Libyans from Pakistan, had moved back to Afghanistan, where he stayed in refugee camps.

ISN 195 Al Shumrani, Mohammed (Saudi Arabia)
The US authorities allege that al-Shumrani left Saudi Arabia for Afghanistan in June 2001, because he “wanted to fight in Chechnya, but was told he would need military training that could best be obtained in Afghanistan.” It is also claimed that he “stated he attended a training camp,” and then spent about five months on the front lines. In what seemed to be an attempt to beef up the allegations, it was also claimed that he “stated that while he was fighting in Afghanistan, he tried to see Osama bin Laden,” and that he “operated a hand-held two-way radio, which he used to request additional supplies” in the Tora Bora area.

ISN 197 Chekhouri, Younis (Morocco)
Chekhouri is accused of being a founder member of the Moroccan Islamic Fighting Group (or GICM, the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain), who had a training camp near Kabul, but he has always maintained that he traveled to Afghanistan in 2001, with his Algerian wife, after six years in Pakistan, where he had first traveled in search of work and education, and has stated that they lived on the outskirts of Kabul, working for a charity that ran a guest house and helped young Moroccan immigrants, and had no involvement whatsoever in the country’s conflicts. He has also repeatedly explained that he was profoundly disillusioned by the fighting amongst Muslims that has plagued Afghanistan’s recent history, and he has also expressed his implacable opposition to the havoc wreaked on the country by Osama bin Laden, describing him as “a crazy person,” and adding that “what he does is bad for Islam.”

ISN 200 Al Qahtani, Said (Saudi Arabia)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, al-Qahtani attended a training camp in Pakistan in 2000, when he also spent some time (possibly a day, possibly a week) with Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-value detainee,” seized in Pakistan in March 2002, for whom the CIA’s torture program was initially developed. Zubaydah’s case reveals the true horror at the heart of the “War on Terror,” because, despite being waterboarded 83 times and held in secret CIA prisons for four and a half years, he was not a senior al-Qaeda operative at all, and was, instead, the mentally troubled gatekeeper of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan. However, although the US authorities have steadily distanced themselves from making grand claims about Zubaydah, al-Qahtani’s brief association with him has probably counted against him in Guantanamo. In his tribunal in 2004, he said that he didn’t know that Zubaydah was allegedly involved with al-Qaeda, and asked, “just because somebody stays at someone’s house, who may not be the best person in the world, does that make the people who stayed at that house bad people?” After returning home, he spoke to an imam who explained that he should help the Taliban because, after the Soviet occupation and the civil war, “they brought peace to 95 percent of the country, except the places where the Northern Alliance were at the time. I don’t think there was anything wrong with helping to make peace after 30 years of fighting.” Returning to Afghanistan in April 2001, he served as a guard on the front lines near Kabul before fleeing to Pakistan with around 15 other people, but pointed out that he was in Afghanistan before 9/11, and insisted, “Even if you say I am right or wrong, I don’t think I did anything wrong. At the time I didn’t think I did anything wrong, and I still don’t. I didn’t do anything illegal or bad to anyone. I want you to understand this.”

ISN 219 Razak, Abdul (China)
Razak 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. 17 of the men were living in a rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains when the US-led invasion began in October 2001, and after the settlement was destroyed in a bombing raid, they made their way to the Pakistani border, where they were seized and later sold to US forces. In The Guantánamo Files, I described Abdul Razak’s story as follows: “Yusef Abbas, who was injured in the raid, said that one man died and ‘we were covered in half a bucket of his body meat.’ After the bombing, he was taken to a hospital in Jalalabad, where Abdul Razak, a Uighur who worked at the hospital and occasionally brought food to the camp, took care of him, until ‘there was a riot in the city’ and he returned to the other Uighurs in the mountains, taking Razak with him.” Five of the Uighurs were released in Albania in May 2006, and the remaining 17 — including Razak — won their habeas corpus petitions in October 2008. However, although 12 of these men have been resettled in Bermuda, Palau and Switzerland, Abdul Razak 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 223 Sulayman, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
On July 21 this year, Sulayman lost his habeas petition. In Guantánamo, he explained that a man identified by the US authorities as a known recruiter for al-Qaeda had facilitated his travel to Afghanistan, although he added that he had been recruited under false pretences and that the man “promised me that I’d be able to get married in Afghanistan. He may have had different intentions for me other than the marriage, but I didn’t know.” This was not the whole story, as Sulayman also conceded that, after arriving in Afghanistan in March 2001, he stayed in Kabul for seven months, and then, when given the opportunity to go to the front lines or the second lines or to return home, he went to the second lines because he didn’t want to fight but he also didn’t want to return home. It was there, he said, that he received some weapons training, and later, after the US-led invasion began, he fled to Pakistan in the company of men that he didn’t know, where he was seized and handed over to US forces. This was enough for him to lose his habeas petition, although it fails to demonstrate that he was a threat to the US, and what his case reveals most of all is how much of the supposed evidence was demonstrably false, and almost certainly produced by unreliable witnesses, either in Guantánamo or in other US-run prisons. These included ludicrous allegations that he was identified as a mortar instructor from a video made in the Tarnak Farms training camp in 2000 (before he arrived in Afghanistan), that he “was identified as an al-Qaeda spokesman and was part of Osama bin Laden’s entourage … during the escape from Tora Bora,” and, most alarmingly, that he was identified as a Taliban prison guard “who used torture techniques on inmates under his control.”

ISN 224 Muhammad, Abd Al Rahman (Yemen)
Muhammad, who was just 19 when he was seized, said that he initially traveled to Karachi to look for work, and stayed for three months with a Yemeni friend. He then visited the Taliban’s office in Quetta, in July or August 2001, “seeking a teaching job in Afghanistan,” but was told that there was “no work in Afghanistan.” After returning to Karachi, he decided to try again, and this time paid for a guide to take him to Kandahar, where he stayed in a madrassa for ten days. After the 9/11 attacks, he said that “the people at the madrassa” sent him to a “known Taliban house” near Kabul, and from there he eventually made his way to the Pakistani border, where he was seized. Although the US authorities came up with an impressive list of documents seized in raids, on which Muhammad’s name and details were allegedly recorded, there is no way of knowing how accurate these records are, as many featured supposed “aliases” that were notoriously generic, and others appear to record the names of prisoners that were leaked to al-Qaeda sympathizers, who duly described them in online postings as al-Qaeda members. For his part, Muhammad “denied that he received any weapons [training] during his one-month stay in Kabul.”

ISN 232 Al Odah, Fawzi (Al Awda) (Kuwait)
Al-Odah, who lost his habeas corpus petition last August, has always claimed that he took a break from work and traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001 to teach the Koran and provide humanitarian aid (which he had done previously in other countries), and has also admitted that he established contact with the Taliban, as they were the government at the time, and spent one day at a Taliban-controlled training camp. He has also stated that, after the US-led invasion, he was sent by a Taliban representative to a safer location outside Kabul, and, from there, traveled to Jalalabad, where he stayed with another family, who gave him an AK-47 assault rifle to protect himself. He then joined other people crossing the mountains to Pakistan, where he handed himself in to the border guards, and was subsequently handed over — or sold — to US forces. However, in what I described as “another shallow victory for the government,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied his habeas petition because she agreed with the government that it was “more likely than not” that he “became part of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan,” basing her ruling, as I described it, “on a dubious assemblage of information that relied more on inconsistencies in al-Odah’s account of his activities than it did on anything resembling concrete evidence, as she herself admitted, when she wrote that there were ‘significant reasons why the Government’s proffered evidence may not be accurate or authentic.’” Al-Odah appealed the ruling, but his appeal was denied by the D.C. Circuit Court in June this year. The result, as I also explained, is that, nine years after the 9/11 attacks, “the United States is still asserting that it has the right to hold a young man who spent just one day at a training camp, who did not flee Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks (perhaps because he feared reprisals if he was found escaping), who traveled with other men to Kabul, and then to Logar and then to Tora Bora and his eventual capture, with no evidence that he ever used the weapon he was given, and no evidence that his training involved anything more than firing a few rounds from an AK-47 in a practice session.”

ISN 233 Salih, Abdul Al Razzaq (Yemen)
Salih is accused of training at al-Farouq, and was also “identified”, by an unknown source, as “a jihadist” in Tora Bora, although he maintained that he traveled to Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks because he “felt compelled to go to Afghanistan to teach the Koran to the Afghanis.” He added that “he was not formally trained in the Koran, but wanted to go just recite what he could.” In reports elsewhere in his Unclassified Summary of Evidence, he reported that a particular sheikh had told him that “it was forbidden to fight for the Taliban,” and that “he doesn’t like violence and was not fighting in Afghanistan, but was seeking a job teaching in a mosque.” In Guantánamo, Salih took part in the mass hunger strike in 2005. Although he weighed a comfortable 160 pounds on arrival at the prison, his weight dropped on two occasions, in December 2005 and January 2006, to just 110 pounds (PDF).

ISN 235 Jarabh, Saeed (Yemen)
The story of Saeed Jarabh is particularly unclear. In his Combatant Status Review Tribunal in 2004, he stated that he traveled to Afghanistan in August or September 2001 to teach the Koran (and also in the hope of finding gold to trade), and refuted a claim that he trained for a week at a camp identified as Abu Abaida by stating, “This was not military training; it was simply shooting for proficiency with friends.” He also denied allegations that he participated in military operations against the US-led coalition, and was present in Tora Bora, stating that he “was not in Tora Bora” and was “captured under false pretences in Pakistan by the Pakistanis.” He added that he “had made a decision to leave Afghanistan long before the war started,” but that “People in Afghanistan lied to him and told him they would help him go home but [instead] turned him over to Americans.” Whether or not this story was true, it was certainly more credible than other, unsubstantiated allegations made by unidentified sources, including a ludicrous claim that he “was a suicide bomber who had sworn bayat (an oath of allegiance) to Osama bin Laden.”

ISN 238 Hadjarab, Nabil (Algeria-France)
In 2001, Nabil Hadjarab, a 22-year Algerian who had been shuttled between France and Algeria throughout his childhood as his family disintegrated around him, was persuaded to travel to Afghanistan by someone who took advantage of his fears about being caught without papers as he applied for formal French residency. After living in Kabul, he then moved to the eastern city of Jalalabad, but as Afghanistan descended into chaos following the US-led invasion in October 2001 and he tried to flee across the mountains to Pakistan, he was wounded by a bomb and taken to a hospital in Jalalabad, where he was sold to US forces. As I explained in a recent article, Hadjarab was cleared for release from Guantánamo under the Bush administration, but was not freed because of long-standing fears about returning him to Algeria, and also because of inertia on the part of the French government, which has refused to offer him a new home, even though he spent much of his childhood in France and has close family there. Now, however, he is at risk of being forcibly repatriated to Algeria after the US Supreme Court refused to intervene to prevent him and four other Algerian prisoners from being transferred against their will, as happened in July with another Algerian, Abdul Aziz Naji.

Note: See Part Four of this series for the stories of the other four Algerians, who, like Nabil Hadjarab, were also cleared for release under President Bush, and have been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force. They are: Motai Saib (ISN 288), Ahmed Belbacha (ISN 290), Djamel Ameziane (ISN 310) and Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed (ISN 311), who was also cleared for release by the US District Court in Washington D.C., when he won his habeas corpus petition (in November 2009).

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, Uruknet, Blog from Middle East and New Left Project.

This second article tells the stories of 32 prisoners seized in Afghanistan, mostly in December 2001. A handful are reportedly significant figures in the Taliban, and most of the rest were either transferred to US custody after a massacre in a fort in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, or were seized after the Battle of Tora Bora, a showdown between al-Qaeda and US forces in the mountains near Jalalabad. Noticeably, only a few are accused of any serious involvement with al-Qaeda or terrorist activities (although these claims are themselves dubious), and four others have lost their habeas corpus petitions. It is also worth remarking that the majority of the men discussed in this chapter are Yemenis, and that many have presumably been cleared for release by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, but are waiting to see if the President will, at any point the future, lift the unprincipled moratorium on transfers to Yemen that he announced in January.

ISN 004 Wasiq, Abdul-Haq (Afghanistan)
Reportedly the Taliban’s deputy minister of intelligence, he was seized in a Special Forces operation in Ghazni in December 2001, with Gholam Ruhani (released in December 2007). However, in his review board at Guantánamo in 2005, he claimed that “he was attempting to assist the US in capturing Mullah Mohammed Omar.”

ISN 006 Noori, Mullah Norullah (Afghanistan)
Noori was reportedly the governor of Balkh province under the Taliban, and according to press reports at the time, helped Mullah Mohammed Fazil (see ISN 007, below) negotiate the surrender of Kunduz, the last Taliban stronghold in the north of Afghanistan, with General Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance in November 2001. In Guantánamo, he played down his role, describing himself not as “a member of the Taliban,” but as a “soldier with them,” who had joined them in 1999. However, in a summary of evidence in January 2007, the US authorities clearly identified him as a significant figure in the Taliban.

ISN 007 Fazil, Mullah Mohammed (Afghanistan)
Reportedly the Taliban’s deputy defense minister, press reports in November 2001 stated he led the negotiations with General Dostum for the surrender of Kunduz. Both he and Noori surrendered to Dostum and were then kept under informal house arrest until they were handed over to US forces. In other reports at the time, Mohammed Muhaqiq, a leader of the Hazara, the ethnic group most persecuted by the Taliban, suggested that a number of Taliban leaders, including Noori and Fazil, should be prosecuted for war crimes, including ethnic cleansing. Like Noori, he tried to play down his role, but in a summary of evidence in October 2007 it was stated that approximately 3000 Taliban troops were under his control in October 2001.

ISN 088 Awad, Adham Ali (Yemen)
Seized after a group of al-Qaeda soldiers besieged in a hospital surrendered him to the Afghan authorities in December 2001, Awad, who was just 19 years old at the time, stated that he had been wounded in a bombing raid while walking through a market in Kandahar, but lost his habeas corpus petition in August 2009, when Judge James Robertson accepted what he described as a “gossamer thin” case put forward by the government. In June 2009, his appeal was denied by the D.C. Circuit Court.

ISN 239 Aamer, Shaker (UK-Saudi Arabia)
Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, was born in Saudi Arabia and, in 1996, moved to the UK after traveling in the US, Europe and the Middle East. He has a British wife, and four British children, the youngest of whom he has never seen. Aamer’s road to Guantánamo began when he, along with Moazzam Begg, took his family to live in Kabul, in June 2001, to work for a charity involved in humanitarian aid projects, including a girls’ school and various well-digging projects. After the US-led invasion in October 2001, Aamer arranged for the evacuation of his family from Afghanistan, but was thwarted in his own attempts to leave. He was taken in by an Afghan family, but was then seized by Afghan soldiers, who held him and abused him for several weeks before handing him over — or, more probably, selling him — to US forces. After horrendous abuse in US custody in Afghanistan, including prolonged sleep deprivation and starvation, so that he lost 60 pounds in weight, he apparently made a number of false confessions used by the US to justify his detention, and was then transferred to Guantánamo, where he became one of the most significant prisoners, attracting the support of his fellow inmates, and the fear and suspicion of the authorities, because of his relentless advocacy on behalf of those held without rights in the “War on Terror.” Charismatic and eloquent, he brokered a deal that brought a halt to the prison-wide hunger strike in the summer of 2005, but when the authorities reneged on their promise to make the prison more compliant with the Geneva Conventions, he was then imprisoned in solitary confinement for at least 18 months, and, ever since, has been held in a block reserved for prisoners regarded by the authorities as non-compliant or particularly influential. Despite being cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration in March 2007, the British government claims that negotiations for his release to the UK have stalled because of security concerns on the part of the US authorities, but this seems implausible, as any security concerns could easily be addressed in the UK. Instead, it appears that Aamer is still held because of what he knows, including knowledge of the terrible events of June 9, 2006, when three prisoners died and, he has stated, he was tortured to within an inch of his life. His presence in the UK is vital to the inquiry into British complicity in torture announced by Prime Minister David Cameron in July, in part because he won a court case in the UK in December 2009, to secure information relating to his allegations that British agents were in the room when he was tortured by US forces, and the campaign to free him from Guantánamo continues.

ISN 240 Al Shabli, Abdullah (Saudi Arabia)
The US authorities allege that al-Shabli was “recruited to go to al-Farouq camp by a mujahideen fighter who had fought in Afghanistan,” that he was “supplied with a false Yemeni passport, travel funds, tickets and the locations of guest houses in Afghanistan,” and that he trained at al-Farouq, and at another camp in Kabul, although he was not at either camp for long, as he only arrived in Afghanistan in August 2001, and al-Farouq closed after the 9/11 attacks. The authorities also made an attempt to link him with Osama bin Laden, but it was not entirely convincing. It was alleged that he stated that he “saw Osama bin Laden passing by in the Tora Bora mountains,” but it not clear that he was ever in Tora Bora, because, elsewhere in the government’s evidence, it was stated that, after fleeing Kabul, he stayed in a house in Jalalabad for three weeks, and then traveled in a convoy towards the Pakistani border. When the convoy came under fire, he and others were taken in by Afghan locals, who then arranged for them to be seized by Northern Alliance soldiers. At no point in this story, therefore, was there any suggestion that he engaged in combat, or had even been in a position where he might have engaged in combat, and it is surprising that he was not released in 2006 0r 2007, when dozens of Saudi prisoners were released.

The following seven prisoners survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in November 2001, which followed the surrender of the northern city of Kunduz, when several hundred Taliban foot soldiers, who had been told that they would be allowed to return home if they surrendered — and, it seems, a number of civilians — were taken to a fortress run by General Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance. Fearing that they were about to be killed, a number of the men started an uprising, which was suppressed by the Northern Alliance, acting with support from US and British Special Forces, and US bombers. Hundreds of the prisoners died, but around 80 survived being bombed and flooded in the basement of the fort, and around 50 of these men ended up at Guantánamo. All but these seven have been released.

ISN 091 Al Saleh, Abdul (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, al-Saleh said that he had answered a fatwa calling for young men to travel to Afghanistan, but felt that “the Taliban cheated him because he was fighting the Northern Alliance, which was not a cause that he believed in; therefore, it was not really a jihad for him.” He also denied knowing any members of al-Qaeda, and stated that, if returned to Yemen, he would “get married” and would “disregard anyone who suggests that he fight jihad.”

ISN 115 Naser, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
Naser was accused of arriving in Afghanistan in January 2001 and fighting on the Taliban front lines for six months at Khawaja Ghar, prior to his capture. It was also stated that, in Guantánamo, he had been “cited for numerous incidents of failure to comply, guard harassment, assault, and inciting of disturbances during his detention.” However, it was also noted that he “denie[d] seeing Osama Bin Laden while in Afghanistan,” and “stated that if he were released, he would return home to the family farm and get married.”

ISN 117 Al Warafi, Mukhtar (Yemen)
Al-Warafi had his habeas corpus petition denied in March 2010 by Judge Royce C. Lamberth. Al-Warafi claimed that he had traveled to Afghanistan to work as a medic, and had tended wounded Taliban fighters at a clinic in Kunduz, but Judge Lamberth denied his habeas petition not only because he believed that he had been acting as part of the Taliban’s “command structure,” but also because Congress had removed the Geneva Conventions’ requirement not to imprison medics when passing the Military Commissions Act in 2006, which cynically stated, “No person may invoke the Geneva Conventions … in any habeas corpus proceeding … as a source of rights in any court of the United States.”

ISN 128 Al Bihani, Ghaleb (Yemen)
Al-Bihani had his habeas corpus petition denied in January 2009 by Judge Richard Leon. He had worked as a cook for Arab forces supporting the Taliban, and Judge Leon concluded that this met the definition of “support” for al-Qaeda or the Taliban that justified his detention. He explained that “faithfully serving in an al-Qaeda-affiliated fighting unit that is directly supporting the Taliban by helping prepare the meals of its entire fighting force is more than sufficient to meet this Court’s definition of ‘support,’” and added, “After all, as Napoleon was fond of pointing out, ‘An army marches on its stomach.’” Al-Bihani appealed, but his appeal was denied by the D.C. Circuit Court in January 2010, in a ruling in which the court claimed that his argument that “the war powers granted [to the President] by the AUMF [the Authorization for Use of Military Force] and other statutes are limited by the international laws of war” was “mistaken.”

ISN 131 Ben Kend, Salem (Yemen)
Ben Kend (also identified as Salem Ahmed Hadi) reportedly fought on the Taliban front lines for six months, prior to his capture. However, in a statement prepared for a review board in 2006, he stated that he was “shocked” to see an allegation that he had “fought with the Taliban in Kabul and in Kandahar from July 2001 to December 2001.” Leaving aside the fact that he was seized in November 2001, he “responded that he did not fight in Kandahar, although he was in the area.”

ISN 202 Bin Atef, Mahmoud (Yemen)
Bin Atef is accused of arriving in Afghanistan for jihad in June 2001, training at al-Farouq, and fighting on the Taliban front lines. In an interrogation, he apparently stated that “his enemies were the Northern Alliance,” and also stated that “he never shot at or killed anyone,” and that, although he “was asked to take an oath to Osama bin Laden, [he] did not take one since he might have been obligated to do things that he might not want to do.”

ISN 434 Al Shamyri, Mustafa (Yemen)
He reportedly fought with the Taliban for ten months after answering a fatwa. One unidentified source claimed that he was “a trainer at al-Farouq,” and another allegation stated, implausibly, “Indications are that the detainee was a commander of troops at Tora Bora” (this was impossible, as he was captured before the battle of Tora Bora). One other allegation in particular — that “A detained al Qaida official identified [him] as a Yemeni national who participated in the Bosnian Jihad” — is unlikely, as he would have been only 15 or 16 years old at the time. It was also claimed that, in Guantánamo, he “was cited for harassing guards, inciting disturbances and several hostile acts.”

ISN 440 Bawazir, Mohammed (Yemen)
Bawazir may have been present at Qala-i-Janghi, but he denied it. As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, he also denied claims that he trained at al-Farouq and fought with the Taliban, stating that he traveled to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid, and also spent time visiting the front lines with a religious figure who used to ask the soldiers if the knew why they were fighting, stating, “Religion is not all about fighting.” He claimed that all the allegations against him — including a claim that he attended Osama bin Laden’s daughter’s wedding in Kandahar — came about because he was tortured. “When I came to Mazar-e-Sharif they questioned me [and asked] me if I was from al-Qaeda,” he said. “They used to hit me physically until they broke my skull … Then I had to say yes I had met Osama bin Laden, that I talked with the Taliban, that I knew about nuclear rockets, and that I know everything about what al-Qaeda is up to.” In 2005, Bawazir embarked on a hunger strike (the largest of many throughout the prison’s history), which involved painful force-feeding, and at one point his weight dropped to just 100 pounds. In November 2009, he petitioned the D.C. District Court to declare that force-feeding was “tantamount to torture,” but Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that she did not have the “appropriate expertise” to decide whether that was true.

ISN 441 Al Zahri, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
In statements at Guantánamo, al-Zahri apparently admitted traveling to Afghanistan in the hope of fighting in Chechnya, but ended up fighting against the Northern Alliance, when he was wounded and subsequently seized by US forces. He may have been at Qala-i-Janghi, although this is not clear, and he has also provided conflicting accounts of his allegiances, on occasions mentioning his admiration for al-Qaeda and claims that he met Osama bin Laden on several occasions, and on one other occasion denouncing bin Laden “as a heretic, who attacked civilians — in violation of the laws of Islam.”

ISN 461 Al Qyati, Abdul Rahman (Yemen)
Al-Qyati, who was cleared for release by a military review board under President Bush, reportedly traveled to Afghanistan in May 2001, trained at al-Farouq, and was a guard “for 39 high-level Taliban personnel” at Kandahar airport, where he was seized in November 2001. According to his habeas corpus petition, submitted in December 2008, although listed as a Yemeni, he was “born and raised in Saudi Arabia and has never lived in, or even traveled to Yemen.”

The following 16 prisoners were mostly captured around the Tora Bora region in December 2001, following a showdown between al-Qaeda (and Taliban forces supporting them), and the US, which provided bombers to back up a military campaign that was primarily conducted by Afghan forces. Notoriously, the US allowed Osama bin Laden and other senior leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban to escape from Tora Bora. Around 50 men seized at this time ended up in Guantánamo, although it is by no means certain that all of them had been involved in the conflict. Around three dozen of these prisoners have already been released.

ISN 242 Qasim, Khaled (Yemen)
In his tribunal at Guantánamo, Qasim stated that he had traveled to Afghanistan in late 1999, but denied undertaking any military training, and claimed that he had sat around in guest houses for two years. He did, however, admit that he was in the Tora Bora mountains in November 2001, and said that, after hiding in caves for several weeks, he and his companions descended from the mountains when one of them was injured, which was when they were arrested. The US authorities allege that he traveled to Afghanistan after responding to a fatwa, that he stated that he “originally wanted to fight in Kashmir, because Muslims were being killed there,” that he attended al-Farouq on two occasions, and spent some time on the Taliban front lines before traveling to Tora Bora. It is not known whether the authorities have also been relying on other allegations, which seem less reliable: that he “has been identified as an al-Qaeda instructor,” who trained fighters at “an unidentified location” near Bagram airbase, that he “was in charge of a group at Tora Bora,” and that he “has been identified as somebody who is experienced in explosives and was an instructor at al-Farouq.”

ISN 244 Nasir, Abdul Latif (Morocco)
Nasir, also identified as Abdullatif Nasser, is, according to the US authorities, a veteran fighter who had spent three years fighting with the Taliban, had attended three or four training camps, and was seized in Tora Bora. The authorities also allege that he was “a member of the al-Qaeda Explosives Committee and an explosives instructor,” although it is unclear how much of this is truth, and how much is fiction. Nasir himself has stated that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, and that he “disagreed with what bin Laden and al-Qaeda were doing outside of Afghanistan.” He has also stated that “he did not think Osama bin Laden was in a position to issue a fatwa because he is not an Islamic scholar,” and condemned the 9/11 attacks because it was “against Islamic principles to attack innocent people.” According to his lawyers, he had worked as a small-scale businessman in Libya and Sudan, and had also spent time in Yemen and Pakistan. In Guantánamo, he has experienced particularly harsh treatment, because he has stood up for the rights of his fellow prisoners, and has refused to stay silent in the face of injustice.

ISN 321 Kuman, Ahmed Yaslam Said (Yemen)
Kuman, who was 20 years old when seized, was initially accused of traveling to Afghanistan in response to a fatwa, training at several camps including al-Farouq, and fighting against the US-led coalition in Bagram and Tora Bora. He was reportedly captured during Ramadan by the Northern Alliance. By 2006, the US authorities had built up a more detailed profile of his supposed activities, but it is unclear whether the allegations are necessarily reliable. Apparently identified “at a guest house on the Taliban front lines in Kabul” in late 1999, he was also “identified as the bus driver for a guest house in Kandahar,” was “seen in Tora Bora,” where he “was a fighter,” was “identified as suspected al-Qaeda due to his association with the Kandahar Airport group,” and was identified “as having been a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.” While some of these claims sound unnervingly like “confessions” produced under dubious circumstances by Kuman’s fellow detainees (and the Kandahar airport allegation is particularly associated with a notoriously unreliable witness), it was also alleged that he “claimed he was personal friends with Osama bin Laden’s son,” that bin Laden “was like a father to him,” and that he claimed he had access to bin Laden “at any time because of this relationship.” Although there have been no reports about how Kuman has been treated in Guantanamo, it appears that he has been a consistent hunger striker. He weighed just 115 pounds on arrival, in May 2002, and at one point, in January 2004, his weight dropped to just 91 pounds (PDF).

ISN 498 Haidel, Mohammed (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, Haidel stated that he traveled to Afghanistan “to get married and for a change of environment.” The US authorities alleged that he trained at al-Farouq, was sent to the front lines in Kabul, and was then driven with other fighters, to Tora Bora, where, he said, “he sat in a cave for fifteen days,” and was then injured by a bomb blast, captured by the Northern Alliance and taken to a prison in Kabul, before being handed over to the Americans. In response to an allegation that he received mortar training, Haidel said, “When I was in the Kandahar prison, the interrogator hit my arm and told me I received training in mortars. As he was hitting me, I kept telling him, ‘No, I didn’t receive training.’ I was crying and finally I told him I did receive the training. My hands were tied behind my back and my knees were on the ground and my head was bleeding. I was in a lot of pain, so I said I had the training. At that point, with all my suffering, if he had asked me if I was Osama bin Laden, I would have said yes.” A long-term hunger striker at Guantánamo, Haidel weighed just 105 pounds on arrival in May 2002. In November 2002, his weight dropped to just 90 pounds, and at the time that the Pentagon’s declassified weight records came to an end, in November 2006, he weighed just 102 pounds.

ISN 502 Bin Ourgy, Abdul Bin Mohammed (Tunisia)
Formerly an Italian resident, bin Ourgy, who was cleared for release from Guantanamo by a military review board under the Bush administration, stated that he traveled to a training camp in Afghanistan in 1997 that was unconnected to al-Qaeda, and that he married an Afghan woman in 2000. A “senior al-Qaeda lieutenant” accused him of being an explosives expert, who was at Tora Bora, and was also involved in the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, on September 9, 2001, but these allegations are, of course, untrustworthy, as they may have been extracted through the use of torture. In July 2009, it was suggested that he might be transferred to Italian custody, to face a trial. The Italian media reported that he was “suspected of having had links in Milan with people who sought volunteers to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with Islamic insurgents,” but in December 2009, when two other Tunisians were transferred to Italian custody, he remained in Guantánamo.

ISN 506 Al Dhuby, Khalid (Yemen)
Allegedly recruited for military training in Afghanistan after being shown videos of atrocities in Chechnya, al-Dhuby reportedly arrived at al-Farouq in late July 2001, and trained for a month and a half until the camp closed. He was then taken to Tora Bora, where he “stayed in one of several caves large enough to fit three or four people,” and then left the area with a group of other men. He said that as they passed through a valley he “saw planes dropping bombs on their location and stated the bombing went on for one night,” and added that he “hid from the bombs until the next morning,” but that many of the men traveling with him “were killed and injured by the bombing.” After the bombing, he was seized by Northern Alliance soldiers and held in an Afghan prison in Kabul before being handed over — or sold — to US forces. At Guantánamo, he maintained that he had never fired a shot at anyone, that he “was not a fighter or a killer,” and that he only “wanted to train to protect himself and his family as well as defend his country.”

ISN 508 Al Rabie, Salman (Yemen)
In Guantánamo, the authorities could not initially decide whether they thought al-Rabie (also identified as Salman Rabeii), who was 20 years old at the time of his capture, had been seized in Tora Bora, or in Jalalabad, as he claimed. By 2006, they decided that he had attended al-Farouq in August 2001, and that he was captured “coming out of the Tora Bora mountains” on December 16, 2001 “after surrendering to Afghan forces.” In October 2006, however, his father told Gulf News that Salman had only traveled to Afghanistan in search of his brother, Fawaz. “I sent Salman to look for his brother and bring him back from Afghanistan, but the war broke out and he could not come back. He was detained and put in Guantánamo,” he said.

ISN 509 Khusruf, Mohammed (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Khusruf, who was seized after a bombing raid in the Tora Bora region, said that he went to Afghanistan to teach the Koran, and asked, “Is it really reasonable that al-Qaeda or the Taliban, in bad need of men to fight, have to go to Yemen to find men at 60 years old to fight? Is this logical?” (according to US records, he was actually 51 years old at the time of his capture). He admitted training at al-Farouq, but said that he only did so because the man who arranged his travel told him he needed to be able to defend himself. He also explained that, after his arrest, he was moved from a jail in Jalalabad to “an underground prison” in Kabul — possibly the CIA’s “Dark Prison,” or else an Afghan jail — where “they would interrogate and beat us.” He added that those who were wounded “were also there” — presumably some of the other men rounded up in the Tora Bora region, who also ended up in Guantánamo.

ISN 511 Al Nahdi, Sulaiman (Yemen)
Cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, al-Nahdi lost his habeas petition in February 2010, when Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that he had “entered into the ‘command structure’ of al-Qaeda during his travel from Pakistan to Afghanistan, during his attendance at al-Farouq, and through his role as a guard at Tora Bora, even though these demonstrations of his involvement in the “command structure” actually demonstrated how generally insignificant he was. As I explained at the time, “In a review board at Guantánamo, he explained that the leaders of al-Farouq ‘ordered us to move from one place to another. They told us to go to Tora Bora so that is where we went.’ Judge Kessler also noted that al-Nahdi had stated that ‘[a]t the time, you could not ask them why and where you were going. You cannot refute them. You had to do what they told you to do.’”

ISN 522 Ismail, Yasin (Yemen)
In April 2010, Ismail, who may have been just 19 when he was seized, lost his habeas petition when Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. refused to accept his claim that he had been kidnapped in Kabul by Afghans and taken to Tora Bora, where he was sold to US forces, and concluded instead that he had trained at al-Farouq and had traveled to Tora Bora as a fighter, like Sulaiman al-Nahdi. Nevertheless, it is far from reassuring that, throughout his time in US custody, he has alleged that he was tortured and subjected to sexual humiliation, and that he has been subjected to regular assaults by the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF), teams of five soldiers who respond to the most minor infractions of the rules with brutality.

ISN 535 El Sawah, Tariq (Egypt-Bosnia)
The last prisoner put forward for a trial by Military Commission under President Bush, El-Sawah, now 52 years old, is a veteran of the Bosnian conflict, who had married a local woman and had then traveled to Afghanistan, where he became an explosives expert at al-Farouq. Ferociously opposed to the Northern Alliance, but not to the US, he apparently became one of the most useful informers within Guantánamo, according to an article in the Washington Post in March 2010, which explained that, according to a former military intelligence official, “He was an old-soldier type who’d just had a bellyful. Right after he got to Guantánamo, he told the interrogators he’d had it,” and he became “the source of 150 first-rate information reports.” Former prisoners dispute this account, questioning El-Sawah’s mental health, and the quality of his information, but it has led to a strange situation for El-Sawah and Mohamedou Ould Slahi (ISN 760), who, unlike El-Sawah, was tortured until he decided to start talking (and whose value as an informer is therefore suspicious as well). As “two of the most significant informants ever to be held at Guantánamo,” in the Post’s words, they live in “a little fenced-in compound,” allowed to write, in Slahi’s case, and to paint, in El-Sawah’s case. As the Post also explained, “Each has a modular unit outfitted with a television. Each has a well-stocked refrigerator. They share a garden, where they grow mint for tea.” However, notwithstanding doubts about the quality of their evidence as informers, the Post article pertinently pointed out how shabbily informers are treated in the post-9/11 world, explaining, “Some military officials believe the United States should let them go — and put them into a witness protection program, in conjunction with allies, in a bid to cultivate more informants,” and quoting W. Patrick Lang, a retired senior military intelligence officer, who said, “I don’t see why they aren’t given asylum. If we don’t do this right, it will be that much harder to get other people to cooperate with us. And if I was still in the business, I’d want it known we protected them. It’s good advertising.”

ISN 549 Al Dayi, Omar (Yemen)
Al-Dayi, who weighed just 98 pounds when he arrived in Guantánamo, is accused of traveling to Afghanistan in August 2001. It is also alleged that he stayed at a safe house in Kandahar, but became ill with malaria after one day, and “had trouble standing and walking,” and that, after six weeks at the safe house, he and others in the house were told to go to Jalalabad, where they stayed in another safe house for a few weeks before leaving for Tora Bora. In the mountains, it was alleged that al-Dayi “was shown to his position,” with 10-12 other Arabs, but that his group, though armed, “spent most of its time hiding in one of the three caves located close to its position.” Wounded in the leg by a missile, he was then “evacuated by an Afghan on a donkey to a nearby village,” and driven to the hospital in Jalalabad, where he stayed for two months “before being taken by Americans to a prison in Kabul” — presumably the “Dark Prison” — before his transfer to Guantánamo.

ISN 550 Zaid, Walid (Yemen)
As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, Zaid, who was wounded in the left foot in an air raid in the Tora Bora region, and was then hospitalized in Jalalabad before being handed over — or sold — to US forces, denied that he went to Afghanistan for “Jihad readiness military training,” as alleged, and said that he had just finished his final year studying Arabic literature at college, and went to Afghanistan a fortnight before 9/11 because he hoped to teach Arabic in an Afghan school. He admitted attending al-Farouq, but said that he had only done so because some Afghan acquaintances said that Afghanistan “was a country with a great deal of fighting,” and suggested that he should get some training in self-defence. At other times, he appears to have conceded that he traveled to Afghanistan to support the Taliban, but he has maintained that he “harbors no ill will towards the United States” and “only wishes to return home and put this part of his life behind him.”

ISN 552 Al Kandari, Fayiz (Kuwait)
A Kuwaiti from a wealthy family, with a history of humanitarian work, al-Kandari has always maintained that he was a humanitarian aid worker who arrived in Afghanistan in August 2001, was caught up in the chaos following the 9/11 attacks and the US-led invasion of October 2001, and was seized by Afghan forces and sold to the US military in December 2001, as he tried to cross the mountains to Pakistan. Despite this, the US authorities allege that between August and December 2001, he somehow managed to attend al-Farouq, “provided instruction to al-Qaeda members and trainees,” “served as an adviser to Osama bin Laden,” and “produced recruitment audio and video tapes which encouraged membership in al-Qaeda and participation in jihad.” The authorities took these allegations so seriously that, in November 2008, he was put forward for a trial by Military Commission, although the charges have not been revived under President Obama. Sadly, the US authorities seem to have encouraged themselves to believe that al-Kandari is significant because he has been particularly resistant to the pressure to cooperate and has steadfastly refused to make false statements about himself or about anybody else. Over the years, he has been subjected to a vast array of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which, as his military defense lawyer, Lt. Col. Barry Wingard described them, “have included but are not limited to sleep deprivation, physical and verbal assaults, attempts at sexual humiliation through the use of female interrogators, the ‘frequent flier program,’ the prolonged use of stress positions, the use of dogs, the use of loud music and strobe lights, and the use of extreme heat and cold.” On September 17, 2010, Fayiz al-Kandari lost his habeas corpus petition.

ISN 553 Al Baidhani, Abdul Khaliq (Saudi Arabia)
Also identified as Abdul Khaled al-Bedani, he was just 18 at the time of his capture, and, by his own account, arrived in Afghanistan with particularly unfortunate timing. He admitted that he was recruited to receive military training, but said that he was in a guest house in Kabul, awaiting training, when he heard about 9/11 and decided to leave Afghanistan immediately. As this was an impossible task for a teenager without a passport (like all other recruits, he was obliged to hand in his passport “for safekeeping” when he arrived), he ended up fleeing with other recruits to Tora Bora, where he shared a bunker with a number of armed men and was provided with a gun. Wounded during a bombing raid, he was “then picked up by local Afghans who turned him over to the Northern Alliance.” Although he had received no military training and insisted that he never fired a shot, his admission that he was “provided with a weapon” was sufficient for his tribunal at Guantanamo to decide that he had “participated in military operations against the coalition.”

ISN 554 Al Assani, Fehmi (Yemen)
Cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, al-Assani, like Sulaiman al-Nahdi (ISN 511), lost his habeas petition in February 2010, when Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that he had “entered into the ‘command structure’ of al-Qaeda during his travel from Pakistan to Afghanistan, during his attendance at al-Farouq, and through his presence at Tora Bora, even though these demonstrations of his involvement in the “command structure” actually demonstrated how generally insignificant he was. As I explained at the time, there there was “something rather pathetic about al-Nahdi’s claim that many of the men at Tora Bora, ‘including himself, were scared, and only wanted to go home after the fighting began,’ and the report of his attempt to leave (which, Judge Kessler noted, demonstrated only that he “acted in proper ‘command mode’”), when he ‘asked his commander … if he could leave, and after being rebuked did not attempt to do so.’”

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