It is, of course, the Guantánamo files that have encouraged me to think every day about the whistleblower responsible for providing them to WikiLeaks, as we all owe a great debt to whoever it was who leaked them. I worked with WikILeaks as a media partner for the release of these documents, liaising with nine media organisations (including McClatchy, the Washington Post,  the Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais), and although their impact was overshadowed — rather conveniently, it seems — after just a week, when Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan, I have continued analyzing them ever since, creating a 70-part, million-word series, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” which will be complete by spring 2012.

The documents — Detainee Assessment briefs prepared by the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force at Guantánamo — profile all but three of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, and provide details of what was ascertained about the prisoners, and who provided that information. The documents clarify that many prisoners were completely innocent, detained because the Bush administration arrogantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions, and its tried and tested methods for screening prisoners seized in wartime to make sure that civilians had not been swept up with soldiers.

They also reveal how, because of the Bush administration’s desire for actionable intelligence, the detention program was driven not by the universally accepted policy of keeping combatants off the battlefield until the duration of hostilities (or trying terror suspects in federal courts), but on the basis of exploiting them for their perceived intelligence, and regularly assessing both their intelligence value and their perceived risk through an alarmist classification process, in which even innocent people seized by mistake were judged to be a “low risk” rather than no risk at all.

Most importantly, however, the documents reveal the extent to which filling an experimental prison with prisoners largely rounded up randomly, or as a result of substantial bounties paid to America’s allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then attempting to establish reasons for holding them, led to a harrowing mixture of torture, coercion and bribery, in which prisoners falsely incriminated themselves, or were falsely, or dubiously incriminated in the statements of their fellow prisoners — who were not only held in Guantánamo, but also in secret prisons run by the CIA, where the use of torture was rife.

As a result, the Guantánamo files reveal how the entire intelligence program is a worthless house of cards built on torture and abuse, involving a handful of unreliable witnesses who turn up in the files over and over again, and, although a skeleton of this story was available before the files were publicly released, through other documents made available as a result of court cases, the release of the files made public by WikiLeaks adds hugely important detail to the stories, which, when viewed objectively, thoroughly destroys any rationale for Guantánamo that was conjured up by the Bush administration and that, sadly, has been maintained by far too many vengeful cheerleaders for torture and arbitrary detention in America’s most powerful institutions.

The abuse of Bradley Manning in US custody

In May last year, after the US government seized Bradley Manning, it soon became apparent that he was accused of leaking the “Collateral Murder” video, and on July 5, 2010, he was charged (PDF) with “transferring classified data onto his personal computer and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system in connection with the leaking of a video of a helicopter attack in Iraq in 2007,” and “communicating, transmitting and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source and disclosing classified information concerning the national defense with reason to believe that the information could cause injury to the United States.”

Since I first picked up on his story, I have followed it with great interest, initially because the video was picked up so widely, and because it was a high-profile release for WikiLeaks, but in the last seven months, of course, I have been thinking of Bradley Manning regularly, because, if it was he who leaked the Guantánamo files, then his actions have enabled me to undertake the most forensic deconstruction of Guantánamo in its lamentable 10-year history.

From what we know of his motivations, Manning was assigned to Iraq in October 2009, at the age of 20, but soon became (or had already become) thoroughly disillusioned with the militarism of the US, its brutal foreign policy and its cynical political maneuvering. With access to a huge database of classified information — which, ironically, was opened up to millions of US government employees after the breakdown of inter-agency communications that allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen — he decided that he had to leak some of the classified information he had access to so that it would lead to “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms,” because, if that did not happen, he was convinced that we were “doomed as a species.”

Since he was first seized and imprisoned in Kuwait in May last year, Bradley Manning has attracted widespread support, not just because of his determination to expose war crimes and injustice that the US government would prefer to keep hidden, but also because of his treatment by the military authorities, and by extention, by the Commander-in-Chief of the United States, President Obama.

Manning was moved to a military prison in Quantico, Virginia, in July last year, and it was from this prison that disturbing details began to emerge about his treatment, as I discussed, in particular, in my articles, Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”?, Psychologists Protest the Torture of Bradley Manning to the Pentagon; Jeff Kaye Reports, and Former Quantico Commander Objects to Treatment of Bradley Manning, the Alleged WikiLeaks Whistleblower. Among the disturbing details to emerge was information about his chronic isolation, and about the enforced use of nudity to humiliate him, al of which provided uncomfortable echoes of the Bush administration’s torture program, as used in military brigs on the US mainland on two US citizens, Jose Padilla (who lost his mind as the result of his torture) and Yaser Hamdi, and US resident Ali al-Marri.

In March, when updated charges were filed against Manning, I wrote another article, Death Penalty for Bradley Manning, the Alleged WikiLeaks Whistleblower?, because the 22 charges included a capital offense — “aiding the enemy” — for which the government stated that it would not seek the death penalty, although, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it appeared that it would be up to the presiding judge to decide what charges to refer to court-martial and whether to impose the death penalty.

The charges were followed by further criticism of Obama’s position regarding Manning’s treatment. In April, for example, Professor Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, complained about the conditions of his confinement, along with over 300 other legal experts, as I explained in another article. Later that month, a former colleague of Manning’s provided a powerful defense of Manning, and of WikiLeaks, and finally, on April 20, Manning was moved to Fort Leavenworth where there was a marked improvement in his conditions. As the Guardian reported:

Under the old prevention order [a spurious "prevention of injury" order], Manning was forced to strip naked and wear just a smock at night, he had no bedding and was not permitted any personal items in his cell. He was kept locked up in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in a windowless cell, and allowed only to walk in a yard on his own for that final hour.

In Fort Leavenworth, by contrast, he has a large window that lets in natural light. He has a normal mattress and bedding and his clothes are not removed at night. Manning can have personal objects in his cell, including books and letters from family and friends, as well as legal documents relating to his case. He can write whenever he wants.

His new life of detention is also considerably less lonely. There are five other pretrial prisoners and Manning spends much of the day in their company. His cell is connected to a common area used by four of the detainees with a television and exercise machine, table and shower area.

The Guardian also explained that the “improvement in Manning’s prison life is testament to the power of a sustained campaign by his supporters and politicians to end what was deemed virtual torture against him,” noting that the Pentagon “had been flooded with emails and lobbied by representatives such as Dennis Kucinich,” who took up his cause. The Democratic congressman from Ohio said that Manning’s improved conditions “can only be attributed to the public campaign that brought great pressure on the Department of Defense.”

Bradley Manning’s hearing

Now, seven months after he was moved to Fort Leavenworth, Manning has been told that he is to have a hearing — at Fort Meade in Maryland, on December 16, the day before his 24th birthday, which will be the start of what the Guardian described as “the most high-profile prosecution of a whistleblower in a generation.”

The hearing (an Article 32 hearing), which was announced by Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, is expected to last five days, and “will be the first opportunity for prosecuting officers and Manning’s defence team to present their cases.” Although it is only a preliminary hearing, “both sides will be able to call and cross-examine witnesses.” The Guardian noted that the standard of proof in an Article 32 hearing is “relatively low,” and that all the prosecution has to do is to present “sufficient evidence” to prove there is “reasonable cause to believe” that Manning committed the offences of which he is accused. If successful, “a recommendation will be made to a military general who will decide whether or not to proceed to a full trial.”

As the Guardian noted, although Manning has been “charged with multiple counts of obtaining and distributing state secrets to unauthorised parties” (in other words, to WikiLeaks), as well as being charged with “aiding the enemy,” he is “specifically accused of having handed more than 50 of about 150,000 secret US government cables to the whistleblowing website – offences that carry a possible sentence of up to 52 years.” His charge sheet also includes “16 counts of wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet knowing that it is accessible to the enemy; five counts of theft of public property or records, eight of transmitting defence information, two of fraud in connection with computers and five of violating army information security,” in the Guardian‘s words. It was also noted that, if he is convicted of all the charges, he “would face a maximum sentence of confinement for life.”

Supporters responded positively to the news. Jeff Paterson, a supporter involved with the Bradley Manning Support Network, said, “We will be protesting against the charges levelled at Bradley Manning. If he is proven to have been the WikiLeaks source, then to us Bradley is a hero: he’s the most important whistleblower in decades.”

In addition, Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, who contributed greatly to discrediting the Vietnam War, said, “The charges against Bradley Manning are an indictment of our government’s obsession with secrecy. Manning is accused of revealing illegal activities by our government and its corporate partners that must be brought to the attention of the American people.”

The Guardian also noted that the “five counts of theft of public records” in the charges against Manning were submitted under the Espionage Act, the same law used, unsuccessfully, to prosecute Ellsberg. In further comments, Ellsberg said that “if Manning were found to be the source of the WikiLeaks documents, ‘he deserves our thanks and has my admiration. He is unreservedly a hero,’” and he added that “the WikiLeaks exposure of illegal war crimes by US forces in Iraq had been crucial to the decision of the Iraqi government to insist on legal jurisdiction over all American soldiers, which in turn forced the Obama administration to pull all remaining troops from the country.”

On Tuesday, as the Guardian reported, the Bradley Manning Support Network, which has “paid for the bulk of his legal fees so far,” stated that Manning’s defence team was “planning to call 50 witnesses” at the hearing, “promising to turn the proceedings into a detailed legal battle over the merits of the prosecution case against him.” The Guardian noted, “Many legal angles will be pursued, with witnesses ranging from experts on whistle blowing to IT specialists who can comment on technical details relating to Manning’s access to intelligence databases.”

The Guardian also explained that this strategy was unusual for defence teams in Article 32 proceedings, who normally “limit their engagement to a minimum, in order to withhold from the prosecution elements of their approach that could be crucial in any eventual trial.” Jeff Paterson explained that Coombs “intends to present a pretty vigorous defence on many different angles, which is how Bradley Manning himself envisioned being represented,” and told journalists and supporters on a conference call that Coombs “would call as many of the 50 witnesses he has identified as the army will allow,” adding that if he is “permitted to call all 50 — which is considered unlikely — the hearing will take much longer than the five days earmarked for it,” and “if he is not allowed to call many of the witnesses,” he “will release the entire list of names for the public to see.”

Whatever happens on December 16, Manning’s supporters will be making sure that the world hears about it, and about their conviction that he is a hero. The Bradley Manning Support Network plans to hold a rally outside the hearing at Fort Meade on December 16, followed by a march on December 17, Manning’s 24th birthday, and my thoughts will be with him.

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.

And yet, that is what happened on Friday, when Anwar Al-Awlaki (aka al-Awlaqi, or Aulaqi) and Samir Khan, both US citizens, were killed in a drone strike in Yemen, along with several companions. Al-Awlaki, an imam who had left the US in 2002, had aroused the US government’s wrath because his anti-American sermons were in English, and readily available online, and because he openly advocated violence against the United States.

It has also been widely reported that he apparently met three of the 9/11 hijackers, that he had been in email contact with Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the sole suspect in the killing of 13 military personnel at Fort Hood, in Texas, in November 2009, who he later reportedly described as a “hero,” and that he was allegedly involved in planning the failed plane bombing on a flight into Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, for which a Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was arrested.

In December 2009, when the US first claimed to have killed al-Awlaki in a drone strike that killed 30 other people — all, conveniently, described as “suspected militants” by Yemeni security and government sources — the Washington Post reported that US officials said that al-Awlaki had been “moving up the ranks” of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, “having recently been promoted to regional commander.” However, the officials also “described him less as an operational leader than an inspirational one, whose contacts with members took place largely online.”

This is an important distinction, but it is one that has largely been overlooked when al-Awlaki has been discussed in the mainstream media in the US, even though Americans, through the First Amendment to the US Constitution, are supposed to be uniquely placed to understand the difference between free speech and action.

The other US citizen to be killed on Friday, Samir Khan, was also deeply disliked by the US government. A former “Internet Jihadist” in the US, as the New York Times revealed in an interview with him in 2007, he moved to Yemen in 2009, where he became the editor of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s online English language magazine, Inspire. Despite this, he, unlike al-Awlaki, had not even been put on a hit list at the time of his death, relegating him to the same kind of non-status as the foreigners — Afghans, Pakistanis and others — who are regularly killed by drone strikes in Pakistan.

There are three main problems with the killings — one, as hinted at above, involves the use of drones in general, the second involves the legality and wisdom of assassinations in other countries, and the third involves the legality and wisdom of assassinating US citizens.

Are drone killings legal?

In the first instance, the killings mark an expansion of the US government’s program of using remotely-controlled drones to kill its enemies — or its perceived enemies — which is pushing at the limits of what can legitimately be regarded as warfare — if, indeed, it has not already exceeded those limits.

No one seems to have any accurate estimate of how many people have died in the drone killings, which have been taking place since 2004, but whose use has increased dramatically under President Obama, although there have reportedly been at least 270 attacks, and anywhere between 1,600 and 2,600 casualties. Moreover, in July 2009, Daniel L. Byman, a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, noted in an article for the Brookings Institution that, according to estimates, “for every militant killed, 10 or so civilians also died,” adding that, “Beyond the humanitarian tragedy incurred, civilian deaths create dangerous political problems.”

Byman also noted that, in Pakistan, the last thing the Pakistani government needs are American efforts that backfire on them, which, of course, may also be fatally counter-productive for American aims. He quoted counterterrorism expert David Kilcullen, who said at a conference on Pakistan’s future in Washington D.C. in 2009, “When we intervene in people’s countries to chase small cells of bad guys, we end up alienating the whole country and turning them against us.”

In October 2009, Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, questioned whether Obama’s drone-killing program was legal. Alston told a conference, “My concern is that drones/Predators are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law.” Having submitted a report to the UN General Assembly (PDF), he said, “The onus is really on the United States government to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary extrajudicial executions aren’t in fact being carried out through the use of these weapons.”

Alston highlighted three particular problems, stating, “I would like to know the legal basis upon which the United States is operating, in other words … who is running the program, what accountability mechanisms are in place in relation to that.” He also asked for disclosure of the “precautions the United States is taking to ensure that these weapons are used strictly for purposes consistent with international humanitarian law,” and also asked “what sort of review mechanism” there was “to evaluate when these weapons have been used.”

No answer was forthcoming, and the program not only continued, but expanded into other countries — including, of course, Yemen. However, although the Obama administration is obviously not troubled by what it is doing, a warning was sounded in the Washington Post on October 2 by John Bellinger, legal adviser for the State Department from 2005 to 2009.

Bellinger wrote that, although the drone program had been “highly effective in killing senior al-Qaeda leaders,” the administration “needs to work harder to explain and defend its use of drones as lawful and appropriate — to allies and critics — if it wants to avoid losing international support and potentially exposing administration officials to legal liability.”

As he proceeded to explain, the justification for the program (as with the occupation of Afghanistan, illegal wiretapping and the detention program at Guantánamo) is the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which empowered the President to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against nations, organizations or persons who planned, committed or aided the 9/11  attacks. Bellinger also noted that the US government “believes that drone strikes are permitted under international law and the United Nations Charter as actions in self-defense, either with the consent of the country where the strike takes place or because that country is unwilling or unable to act against an imminent threat to the United States.”

As he also noted, however, “the US legal position may not satisfy the rest of the world,” because no other government “has said publicly that it agrees with the US policy or legal rationale for drones,” and it would be wise for President Obama “to try to build a broader international consensus.”

Is Obama’s assassination program legal and/or appropriate?

Closely related to the question of the drone program’s legality are questions about the Obama administration’s reintroduction of an assassination program. A source of huge internal wrangling in the Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations, assassination was largely ignored by the Bush administration, which became obsessed with a global web of torture prisons and “extraordinary rendition,” sending its alleged terrorism-related enemies to be tortured or “disappeared” in other countries. However, as Obama demonstrated in May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, assassination by death squad was another part of his contentious anti-terror arsenal.

As with the drone program, international criticism of the assassination of Osama bin Laden was muted to non-existent. In his Washington Post op-ed, John Bellinger accurately noted that “European allies, who vigorously criticized the Bush administration for asserting the unilateral right to use force against terrorists in countries outside Afghanistan, have neither supported nor criticized reported US drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Instead, they have largely looked the other way, as they did with the killing of Osama bin Laden.”

While questions about the legality of killing bin Laden are likely to resurface the more assassinations take place, the problem is also, as with the drone strikes, that it might be hugely counter-productive politically, further inflaming tensions in Pakistan or Yemen, for example, where military options cannot possibly be the only measure of success, as battles for hearts and minds also need to be won. As Daniel Byman wrote about the use of drones in Pakistan, “The real answer to halting al-Qaeda’s activity in Pakistan will be the long-term support of Pakistan’s counterinsurgency efforts,” and, for Yemen, a similar answer must apply.

Is the assassination of US citizens legal and/or appropriate?

Moving from the assassination program to the killing of Americans in particular, the addition of US citizens to the list of targets could hardly be more contentious had it been designed by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. As Guantánamo shows, Americans are supposed to be protected from the excesses of their own government, while foreigners have no protection whatsoever — although John Walker Lindh, judicially sacrificed as the “American Taliban,” was excluded in the early days of the “war on terror,” when he received a 20-year sentence as part of a punitive plea deal that involved him agreeing not to talk about the torture he had suffered at the hands of US soldiers.

After Lindh, the only other precedents for abusing Americans as though they were foreigners are the cases of the three Americans imprisoned as “enemy combatants” on the US mainland under George W. Bush — Yaser Hamdi, Ali al-Marri and Jose Padilla. Hamdi, born in the US but living in Saudi Arabia since he was a child, was held briefly at Guantánamo and then transferred to the US, where he was tortured and then released, and al-Marri was a legal US resident who was also tortured as an “enemy combatant,” although he was moved into the criminal justice system under Obama, and tried and convicted of charges relating to terrorism in 2009.

Until last Friday’s assassinations in Yemen, the most alarming case of an American stripped of his rights in the “war on terror” was Jose Padilla, a US citizen who was held by his own government for three and half years in chronic isolation until he lost his mind, and then transferred into the criminal justice system, where he was tried and convicted for little more than a thought crime, and sentenced to 17 years and four months in prison — a sentence that, two weeks ago, an appeal court judged too lenient.

Technically, al-Awlaki’s inclusion on a target list maintained by the US military’s shadowy Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and the decision, in April 2010, to add him to “a list of suspected terrorists the CIA is authorized to kill,” which “required special approval from the White House” (as the Washington Post described it), is legal, because, in December last year, Judge John D. Bates of the District Court in Washington D.C. dismissed a lawsuit contesting President Obama’s “targeted killing” policy, which was submitted on behalf of al-Awlaki’s father.

Judge Bates ruled that “the plaintiff did not have legal standing to challenge the targeting of his son,” and also concluded, alarmingly, “that there are circumstances in which the Executive’s unilateral decision to kill a US citizen overseas is ‘constitutionally committed to the political branches’ and judicially unreviewable.”

This was unacceptable to the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, acting on behalf of al-Awlaki’s father, who asked three particular questions that I found important:

Outside of the context of armed conflict, should it not be the case that the government can only carry out the “targeted killing” of an American citizen “as a last resort to address an imminent threat to life or physical safety”?

Why did the court not order the government to disclose the legal standard it uses to place US citizens on government kill lists?

How is it that judicial approval is required when the United States decides to target a US citizen overseas for electronic surveillance, but that, according to defendants, judicial scrutiny is prohibited when the United States decides to target a US citizen overseas for death?

These questions were unanswered, and they remain unanswered now, prompting John Bellinger to recommend that the Obama administration “should provide more information about the strict limits it applies to targeting and about who has been targeted,” and rendering more chilling the words of Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, back in December, when, after Judge Bates’ ruling, he said:

If the court’s ruling is correct, the government has unreviewable authority to carry out the targeted killing of any American, anywhere, whom the president deems to be a threat to the nation. It would be difficult to conceive of a proposition more inconsistent with the Constitution or more dangerous to American liberty.

As Jaffer also noted:

It’s worth remembering that the power that the court invests in the president today will be available not just in this case but in future cases, and not just to the current president but to every future president. It is a profound mistake to allow this unparalleled power to be exercised free from the checks and balances that apply in every other context. We continue to believe that the government’s power to use lethal force against American citizens should be subject to meaningful oversight by the courts.

In America today, however, when the courts have demonstrated that they are generally even more unwilling to challenge executive power when wielded by President  Obama than they were under George W. Bush, one of the bizarre results is that the approval for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki really did take place in an executive bubble, apparently approved by a secret Justice Department opinion, but unrelated to what anyone else thinks, not just in America but anywhere else in the world. And this, I think, is as troubling as the assassination program itself and the new policy of waging war remotely, which appear to be permanently evading scrutiny.

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.

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

A former gang member and a convert to Islam, Padilla was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, in connection with an alleged “dirty bomb plot” that never existed, on May 8, 2002, as he returned from Pakistan. Held for a month as a material witness, he was then designated an “enemy combatant” by President George W. Bush, and held in complete isolation in a military brig for the next three and half years — a process that also involved prolonged sensory deprivation. According to the psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty, who spent 22 hours with Padilla in 2006, “What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind.”

In November 2005, fearing that Padilla might successfully challenge the government’s argument that it had the right to hold a US citizen indefinitely without charge or trial on the US mainland, and subject him to torture, the Bush administration suddenly indicted Padilla on charges of conspiracy “to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas,” and transferred him out of the brig. However, the injustice did not come to an end, as the courts then took over.

The charges against Padilla were based on the Bush administration’s claim that, along with alleged facilitators Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, he was part of a Florida-based plot to aid Islamic extremists in holy wars abroad, and his trial took place in the summer of 2007. However, the judge, Marcia Cooke, refused to allow Padilla or his lawyers to make any mention of what had happened in the three and a half years that he was held in a legal black hole.

On August 16, 2007, the jury found him guilty, and on January 22, 2008, he received a sentence of 17 years and 4 months. This was in spite of the fact that the conspiracy in which he was reportedly involved had not taken place, and he had been involved in only seven of the hundreds of phone calls monitored by the FBI between his two co-defendants (who also received prison sentences). It also came about in spite of the fact that all that could be confirmed of his intent, in physical terms, was his signature on an application form for a military training camp in Afghanistan that he may or may not have actually attended.

Padilla appealed against his sentence, and so did the Bush administration, whose position — that his sentence was too lenient — was adopted by the Obama administration, which has repeatedly clung to the same position maintained by its predecessor when it comes to “national security” issues involving terrorism.

Two weeks ago, the latest phase in this alarming saga of paranoia, torture and injustice took place in Florida, when the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit not only backed the government against Padilla, but went so far as to vacate the original sentence (PDF), in effect telling the judge that she had been too lenient, and that she should revisit her ruling and hand down a much longer sentence.

The majority judges in the three-judge panel — the notoriously right-wing judges Joel F. Dubina and William Prior — claimed that Padilla’s original sentence was “substantively unreasonable because it does not adequately reflect his criminal history, does not adequately account for his risk of recidivism, was based partly on an impermissible comparison to sentences imposed in other terrorism cases, and was based in part on inappropriate factors.”

The dissenting judge, Rosemary Barkett, was thoroughly critical of her colleagues’ actions, specifically noting that:

In reversing Padilla’s sentence, the majority fails to adhere to the principles articulated by the Supreme Court and this Circuit requiring appellate courts to accord the trial judge the “considerable discretion” granted district courts in sentencing and to guard against substituting its judgment for that of the trial judge.

Continuing, she referred to a precedent from the Eleventh Circuit, in which, in a case in 2009, it was noted:

We may vacate a sentence because of the variance only if we are left with the definite and firm conviction that the district court committed a clear error of judgment in weighing the … factors by arriving at a sentence that lies outside the range of reasonable sentences dictated by the facts of the case. However, that we might reasonably have concluded that a different sentence was appropriate is insufficient to justify reversal.

Judge Barkett also took exception to her colleagues’ arguments that the trial judge had erred when she refused to give Padilla a sentence that was a minimum of 30 years, as they thought appropriate according to sentencing guidelines. Spelling out what judicial discretion means, she again referred to the precedent from the Eleventh Circuit in 2009, in which it was noted:

The district court must evaluate all of the … factors when arriving at a sentence, but is permitted to attach great weight to one factor over others. In assessing the factors, the sentencing court should remember that each convicted person is an individual and every case is a unique study in the human failings that sometimes mitigate, sometimes magnify, the crime and the punishment to ensue.

Primarily, however, Judge Barkett was concerned to point out that a sentence less than the full maximum could be justified when, as in Padilla’s case, “the trial judge correctly concluded that a sentence reduction is available to offenders who have been subjected to extraordinarily harsh conditions of pre-trial confinement.”

Judge Cooke may have refused to allow any discussion of Padilla’s torture in his trial, but she did note that the conditions in which he was held “were so harsh that they warrant consideration,” and, as Judge Barkett noted, Padilla had been able to highlight his torture when he was being sentenced which was so harrowing that it was not easy to ignore, As she wrote in her dissenting opinion:

Padilla presented substantial, detailed, and compelling evidence about the inhumane, cruel, and physically, emotionally, and mentally painful conditions in which he had already been detained for a period of almost four years. For example, he presented evidence at sentencing of being kept in extreme isolation at the military brig in South Carolina where he was subjected to cruel interrogations, prolonged physical and mental pain, extreme environmental stresses, noise and temperature variations, and deprivation of sensory stimuli and sleep.

Judge Barkett also highlighted one more area in which her Eleventh Circuit colleagues had crossed a line, which concerned their allegations about his perceived susceptibility to recidivism. Even though, after serving his sentence, Padilla would be “in his mid-fifties,” and “subject to a twenty-year term of supervised release,” her fellow judges nevertheless concluded that Judge Cooke “erred in determining that Padilla will not pose a high risk of recidivism.”

Even though there was no evidence to support the judges’ fears, and even though they explicitly stated in their opinion that a trial judge is allowed to “find that recidivism generally decreases with age,” she noted that the majority “not only rejects that presumption for Padilla, but goes one step further and decides that trial judges may no longer consider, for anyone convicted of a terrorism-related offense, the likelihood that the risk of recidivism will decrease with age.”

Judge Barkett’s dissenting opinion was important, but unfortunately it did nothing to stem the institutionalized paranoia and injustice that has plagued Jose Padilla since he was imprisoned as an “enemy combatant” in May 2002.

I have never understood how far too many Americans accepted the torture of Jose Padilla — an American citizen on US soil, and not even a foreigner held at Guantánamo — without recognizing that, although a Latino Muslim convert was today’s “enemy combatant,” tomorrow it might be some other demonized American.

I was also astonished when no one cared that Padilla’s torture was not mentioned in his trial, and he received a sentence of seventeen years and four months for little more than a thought crime.

The ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit two weeks ago only adds to the bitter legacy of Jose Padilla’s brutalization at the hands of his own government, revealing how, for terror suspects held as “enemy combatants” — like Padilla, or, again, the prisoners at Guantánamo — all sense of proportion can be dismissed, even by those who should know better.

For these scaremongers, who are found in Congress as well as the courts, the end result of their sustained hysteria about terrorism is a twisted version of reality in which it is legitimate to complain that sentences are not long enough, and that the crime of terrorism is so unique and dangerous that judges can argue that there is no possibility of being reformed — even when, as in Jose Padilla’s case, the US government actually spent three years destroying his mind through torture, rendering him largely incapable of anything, and without anyone responsible for that being held accountable.

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.

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

This is Part 6 of the 70-part series.

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

The release of the documents prompted international interest for a week, until it was arranged by President Obama (whether coincidentally or not) for US Special Forces to fly into Pakistan to assassinate Osama bin Laden. At this point an unprincipled narrative emerged in the mainstream media in the US, in which, for sales and ratings if nothing else, unindicted criminals from the Bush administration — and their vociferous supporters in Congress, in newspaper columns and on the airwaves — were allowed to suggest that the use of torture had led to locating bin Laden (it hadn’t, although some information had apparently come from “high-value detainees” held in secret CIA prisons, but not as a result of torture), and that the existence of Guantánamo had also proved invaluable in tracking down the al-Qaeda chief.

This latter point was particularly galling for those who had championed WikiLeaks’ important release of the Detainee Assessment Briefs, as they contributed significantly to establishing that, in fact, the opposite was true, and that the kind of targeted and precise information that was necessary to track down bin Laden was almost impossible to secure in Guantánamo. On the face of it, the Detainee Assessment Briefs were stuffed with allegations against numerous prisoners which purported to prove how dangerous they were, but in reality the majority of these statements were made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners, in Kandahar or Bagram in Afghanistan prior to their arrival at Guantánamo, in Guantánamo itself, or in the CIA’s secret prisons. In all three environments, torture and abuse had been rife.

The supposedly reliable witnesses whose testimony has been repeatedly used by the US government include Abu Zubayadah, for whom the post-9/11 torture program was specifically invented. Held for four and half years in secret prisons before his transfer with 13 others to Guantánamo in September 2006, Abu Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, on 83 occasions in August 2002. Although the Bush administration touted Zubaydah as al-Qaeda’s number 3,  the US has steadily walked back from those lofty claims, as it has become apparent that he was, in fact, the mentally troubled gatekeeper of a training camp that was not associated with al-Qaeda, as the FBI had always maintained. The Obama administration has not abandoned all claims that Zubaydah was an active US enemy — now portraying him as the leader of what appears to be a spectral militia — but as the case has collapsed against him and the truth about his torture has been exposed, the inherent unreliability of his statements has also been revealed.

Other “high-value detainees,” themselves tortured in CIA prisons in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania and elsewhere, or in proxy facilities in other countries, including Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, also turn up regularly in the allegations, as do a handful of notoriously unreliable witnesses from Guantánamo itself, who became informants either because they could no longer stand the pressure, or because they were drawn by the offers of preferential treatment. Both are understandable, of course, and while the most notorious example is Yasim Basardah, a Yemeni whose reliability was called into question by intelligence agents and military personnel, the statements of other unreliable witnesses (who, like Basardah, were also regard with suspicion by some intelligence officials, and, since 2008, by judges ruling on the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions) pepper the allegations. Moreover, these false allegations are supplemented by other false statements made, at some time or other, by almost every prisoner held at Guantánamo, as only a handful were able to resist ever telling false stories out their fellow prisoners — to avoid punishment, if not to secure favorable treatment. For further information, see my introductory article for the Wikileaks documents, “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies.”

The truth about the men held at Guantánamo is that the vast majority were either innocent men or insignificant foot soldiers for the Taliban, engaged in combat with the Northern Alliance before the 9/11 attacks, and unconnected with international terrorism. The truth also is that the Bush administration ordered the military not to screen the prisoners on capture, leading to a dragnet of “Mickey Mouse” prisoners, as was noted by Maj. Gen, Michael Dunlavey, a commander of the prison in 2002. Contributing to this was the decision to offer substantial bounty payments for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects to the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, and as a result, the Detainee Assessment Briefs largely reveal stories of numerous innocent or insignificant prisoners (often for the first time), and, even more importantly, reveal to the discerning eye the extent of the lies and distortions used to build up a body of “evidence” that is no such thing, and that, instead, is largely a house of cards, and a monstrous indictment of the Bush administration’s failures in the “War on Terror,” and Obama’s failures in not finding a way to close Guantánamo as he promised.

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

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

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

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

Yasser Hamdi (ISN 9, USA-Saudi Arabia) Transferred to US custody on the US mainland April 2002, released September 2004

Yasser Hamdi, also described as Yaser Hamdi, and initially identified by the US authorities as Himdy Yasser, was one of 14 Guantánamo prisoners whose profiles did not appear in Wikileaks’ April 2011 release of Detainee Assessment Briefs for almost all the prisoners. As I explained in my article, “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files“:

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

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

Abdul Sattar Safeezi (ISN 11, Pakistan) Released September 2004

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar” (one of 12 additional online chapters, telling stories that were not available in The Guantánamo Files, either for reasons of space, or because they were not known at the time), I noted that Safeesi, who was 30 years old, was one of 35 prisoners transferred to Pakistani custody in September 2004 and released in June 2005, and that, on his release, he told the Nation (a Pakistani newspaper) that he was “tortured and his beard was forcibly shaved” by US troops at Guantánamo. “The Americans removed our beards and have been spitting over the holy Book,” he said, adding that the prisoners protested at the abuse of the Koran and went on hunger strikes.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 20, 2003, which was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” it was noted that he was born in 1971, and his name was given as Abdul Sedar Nafessi. It was also stated that, as well as having latent tuberculosis (in common with many of the prisoners), he had been diagnosed with “Schizophrenia, and a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” although it was also claimed that he was “otherwise in good health.”

In assessing his case, it was noted that he had “stated that he was part of a fighting force of the [Pakistani militant group] Harkat ul-Jihad al- Islami (HUJI) that was sent to the second defense line near Kunduz, Afghanistan.” When Kunduz fell in November 2001, he and 50 to 100 others retreated “after receiving the order to travel to Mazar-e-Sharif, AF, to surrender.” On the way, however, their convoy “came under attack in which all their trucks were destroyed and many were killed.” The following morning, he joined another convoy heading to Mazar to surrender, which was stopped by Northern Alliance troops, who took all the passrngers into custody after they surrendered.

It was also stated, as a reason for his transfer to Guantánamo on or around February 4, 2002, that he was transferred “because of his knowledge of financial support supplied to the Taliban by Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islami, members of the Taliban, the Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islami, detainees who were in Kandahar, and persons who attended the Petroman College in Pakistan,” but, as I explained in my article, How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files (originally published on WikiLeaks’ website when the Guantánamo files were first published, as part of my work liaising between WikiLeaks and its media partners):

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

In its assessment, the Task Force claimed that he had been “deceptive during interrogations,” and that he “may have been involved in several different activities with HUJI to include computer assistance, establishing email accounts and delivering finances to the Taliban for the HUJI.” It was also noted, “Based on previous statements by the detainee, he may have been associated with Al-Qaida members.” These were vague, unsubstantiated claims, but although the Task Force  concluded that he was “assessed as not being a member of Al-Qaida, nor Taliban,” he was assessed as being “associated with a terrorist organisation,” and as having “demonstrated a commitment to Jihad as well as participated in hostile action against the US or its allies.”

As a result, it was stated that he was “still of intelligence value to the United States,” and that he posed “a medium threat to  the US, its interests or its allies,” and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he “be retained under DoD control.” It was also noted that there had been a disagreement between JTF-GTMO and the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF), which had approved his transfer to the control of another government on May 12, 2003. He was finally repatriated a year after this Detainee Assessment Brief, and 16 months after CITF had recommended his transfer.

Shabidzada Usman (ISN 12, Afghanistan) Released May 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar,” I noted that Usman, whose real name was Sahibzada Osman Ali, was 19 years old at the time of his capture, and was released with Shah Mohammed (see ISN 19, below). It also appears that he had been mistakenly described as being an Afghan and was actually a Pakistani. In September 2008, journalist Mark Bowden recalled traveling to Pakistan in 2003 to meet the men, who, as he noted, “hailed from tiny villages in the mountainous region of Pakistan where al-Qaeda and the Taliban have been hiding.” He wrote that, as an American, he “was nervous traveling in that region, and honestly didn’t know what to expect when I found them,” but explained:

I was greeted with warmth and elaborate courtesy. Both were men in their early 20s, uneducated, unworldly, and dirt poor. They had been rounded up by entrepreneurial Afghani warlords who were being paid $4000 a head to capture jihadis for the Americans. Four thousand dollars is a huge payday in Afghanistan, and the warlords were not discriminating. Both apparently hapless young Pakistanis were among the original herds of elaborately restrained detainees in orange jumpsuits delivered to Camp X-Ray, the ones who were all treated like mass murderers. Some of them were. Many, it turns out, were not.

He added, “Maybe the authorities and I both have it wrong. Perhaps these two are huddling right now with Osama bin Laden himself, but they have stood in my mind ever since as examples of why detainees deserve a hearing of some kind, whether in federal court or before some panel that is seen to be fair and reasonably concerned about basic justice.”

In an article in October 2003, Bowden also explained that both men “told me that except for some roughing up immediately after they were captured, they were not badly treated at Camp X-Ray. They both felt bored, lonely, frustrated, angry and helpless (enough for Shah Mohammed to attempt suicide), but neither believed that he would be harmed by his American captors, and both regarded the extreme precautions (shackles, handcuffs, hoods) that so outraged the rest of the world as comical. ‘What did the American soldiers think I could do to them?’ asked Sahibzada, who stands about 5ft 8in and weighs little more than 11st.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated October 1, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that, in mid-October 2001, he had “traveled to Afghanistan for the purpose of performing Islamic missionary work, and met other Pakistanis, who were traveling there for the same purpose. [He] joined the other Pakistanis on their quest to teach the Koran to all they encountered.” After eight days, however, he “was coerced to join the group as they traveled to northern Afghanistan to fight in the Jihad against the Northern Alliance. Fearing for his life, [he] complied,” traveling with the group to Kunduz, where he received one day’s training on the Kalashnikov. After 20 days in Kunduz (and with no mention made of engaging in combat), he tried to escape as the Northern Alliance advanced, but was captured. He was apparently sent to Guantánamo on January 10, 2002, the day before the prison officially opened, on the spurious basis that his transfer was because of “his knowledge of specific information on various cities, religious leaders, and Abdul Ghaffar, the leader of a group of Pakistani boys in Afghanistan who were sent from Pakistan to fight in the Jihad.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [12] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida and as not being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on all the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for release or transfer to the control of another government.” It was also noted, “During a visit to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 3 to 10 August 2002, Pakistani Intelligence officers interrogated [Usman] and concluded that he had little or no intelligence value. They stated that their government would accept custody of [him] if released by the US government.”

Shah Mohammed Alikhel (ISN 19, Pakistan) Released May 2003

As I explained in Chapter 9 of The Guantánamo Files, drawing on reports in Time and the BBC, Mohammed, a 20-year old baker from the Swat valley in the North West Frontier Province, was … captured in Mazar-e-Sharif. He said that he was “kidnapped by an Uzbek commander and sold to the Americans for a bounty,” and explained that he only went to Afghanistan in search of a better job: “I was employed by the Taliban to bake bread for them, and they paid me a monthly stipend for these services. I had nothing to do with the military side of things in Afghanistan.”

I also noted, drawing on a New York Times report, that he had attempted suicide four times before his release. “I was trying to kill myself,” he said. “I tried four times, because I was disgusted with my life. It is against Islam to commit suicide, but it was very difficult to live there. A lot of people did it. They treated me as guilty, but I was innocent.” In his BBC interview, he spoke about how he felt that he had been used in medical experiments. “They used to tell me I was mad,” he said. “I was given injections at least four or five times as well as different tablets. I don’t know what they were meant for.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated September 27, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” this account was reinforced by the US military’s findings. It was stated that Alikhel, who was born in 1981, “was employed as a baker in Pakistan, and traveled to Kunduz, Afghanistan, when offered work as a baker and cook for the Taliban.” It was also noted that “Northern Alliance forces captured him while he was fleeing Kunduz for Afghanistan,” and that, after being held in Sheberghan (which was not mentioned), he was flown to Guantánamo, arriving on January 14, 2002. The spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo was that it was “based on his knowledge of logistical and medical support for Taliban units operating in Kunduz area since October 2001, and of recruiting activities in Swat, Pakistan.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [19] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida, and as not being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey recommended that he be “considered for  transfer or release to the control of another government.” It was also noted that the Pakistani government had “stated it [was] willing to accept custody of [ISN 19], if released by the US government.” It was also noted that the Task Force had “notified the Criminal Investigative Task Force of its recommendation on 31 July 2002.”

In May 2009, when the Pentagon issued contentious allegations about the number of former Guantánamo prisoners who were “confirmed or suspected of reengaging in terrorist activities” (PDF), Shah Mohammed was included as a “confirmed” case of a former detainee who had “Reengaged in Terrorism,” and it was stated, although without any evidence being provided, that he had been “[k]illed fighting US forces in Afghanistan.”

Isa Khan (ISN 23, Pakistan) Released September 2004

As I explained in Chapter 9 of The Guantánamo Files, Khan, a 26-year old doctor, was seized by the Northern Alliance after the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif. Originally from Bannu in the North West Frontier Province, he had moved to Mazar with his wife and his six-year old son, and was running a clinic at the time of his capture.

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, dated March 20, 2004, which was an “Update Recommendation to Transfer to the Control of Another Country for Continued Detention (TRCD),” little was made of his profession. Instead, after noting that his real name was, apparently, Isaka I. Bannu, and that he was born on April 1, 1975, the Task Force focused its assessment on the perceived threat he posed.

After noting that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller had recommended that Khan “be retained in DoD control,” based on an assessment that he was “possibly affiliated with Al-Qaeda and [had] connections to high level Taliban officials,” it was stated that “[c]ontinued interrogations have shown no connections between the detainee and Al-Qaeda,” and that “[previous information indicating that [he] was a Taliban Orderly has been found to be incorrect.” It was also stated that, although he was “married to the daughter of a Taliban Judge, and admit[ted] to knowing several mid- to high-level Taliban members,” there was “no evidence” to indicate that he was a member of the Taliban.

As a result, he was determined to be “of low intelligence value due to his knowledge of mid- to high-level Taliban members and the drug trade in Afghanistan,” but was also described as “a medium risk,” who “may possibly pose a threat to the US, its interests and its allies,” because he was assessed “as still having high-level Taliban connections.” The Task Force recommended that he “be transferred to the control of another country for continued detention.” but it was also noted that the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF) had been “unable to make a risk assessment” as of November 2003 and had “recommended that the detainee be retained in DoD [control],” although this disagreement was obviously resolved by September 2004, when he was freed.

Khan was also interviewed for a major McClatchy Newspapers report on 66 released prisoners in 2008, in which he was identified as Issa Khan. Speaking to Tom Lasseter in Islamabad, he “said that he understood why men would take up arms against US forces in the region.” “The equation,” he explained, “was simple: If you put men in captivity and treat them badly, they will want to fight you when they’re released.”

Confirming that his father-in-law was the Taliban’s chief judge in Mazar-e-Sharif. Khan told Lasseter that he had moved to Mazar in 1998 with his Afghan wife, and had “set up a small medical practice.” After his capture by Northern Alliance troops, he was taken to a house “that was being used to hold prisoners, mostly foreigners such as himself, who could be sold to US forces for bounties,” where he was held for 126 days and interrogated occasionally by American soldiers. “Their one question,” he said, “was, ‘Where is Osama bin Laden?’” He continued, “If you said you are Taliban, they would ask you where Osama bin Laden was and beat you if you said you didn’t know. If you said you weren’t Taliban, they would say you were lying and beat you” — and I have to say that it would be harder to find a more succinct example of the ways in which interrogation policies in the “War on Terror” resembled the witch hunts of the 17th century.

After his transfer to the US prison at Kandahar, where there was more violence, Khan was flown to Guantánamo, which, he said, “wasn’t much different, except that detainees had regained some of their weight and had enough stamina to protest and, often, fight with guards.” As Khan explained, “We were tired of being there, so we wanted the Americans to kill us.” As an example, he said that, “when a female guard whom [he] disliked walked by, ‘We put soap and pee in our cups of water and threw it at her.’” He added that, “If other guards got within reach, the detainees punched them.”

Asked about interrogations, Khan described the kinds of practices that were routinely applied, between late 2002 and June 2004, to at least a hundred prisoners regarded as valuable and/or uncooperative: “They were put in cold rooms for 10 hours. They were strapped to chairs and made to listen to loud American rock music for hours on end.” He added, “When prisoners took part in protests, soldiers often held them down and shaved their heads, eyebrows and beards, sometimes leaving tufts of hair here and there just to make them look ridiculous.” He also explained how female soldiers “were used to taunt the prisoners,” who would “tell the men they were menstruating and then touch them, sometimes with wet hands, an act intended to make them unclean for prayer.” They also “danced in front of the men, trying to arouse them, to shame them” — activities confirmed elsewhere, by former military personnel and by the FBI.

On his return to Pakistan, he was imprisoned in Peshawar for questioning, where he learned that “his wife had been killed in 2001 and that his 7-month-old son had been missing since then.” He was cleared for release by five Pakistani intelligence officers and police officials, who found that “no anti-state or terrorist activities could be linked to him,” and concluded that he had gone to Afghanistan to live with his wife’s family and “nothing else,” but he never received any help or compensation. He told Lasseter that the Pakistani government “said it would help him start a new business, maybe a fish farm, but the money never came,” and added, “People bring me books about Guantánamo, and ask if what they say is true. I tell them to get the books away from me; I don’t want to think about that place.”

Asad Ullah (ISN 47, Pakistan) Released July 2003

As I explained in “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (3) – ‘Osama’s Bodyguards,” Asadullah Jan, to give him his full name, was also interviewed by Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers for a major report on 66 released prisoners in 2008, and was clearly nervous when he met Lasseter in Abbottabad, in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Now working as a construction worker, Jan explained that he “has to check in regularly with police,” who “watch his movements closely,” and added that in 2007, after he met with representatives of a Western aid group, who “wanted to know about his experiences in Guantánamo and his treatment in Pakistan after he was released,” agents of Pakistan’s notorious military intelligence service (the ISI) “hauled him in for four days of interrogations and threats.”

Although the Pentagon claimed that Jan was 20 years old when he was seized, he explained to Lasseter that he was just 16 when, as he described it, Pakistani police arrested him at a checkpoint in Kohat, Pakistan, as he returned from visiting members of his extended family in the Afghan province of Zormat. Lasseter was unable to verify this story, of course, although he noted that Jan’s father, who had spoken to a Pakistani translator working for McClatchy, had mentioned that he had said that his son “had been convinced to go [to Afghanistan] by some friends.”

However, while this may suggest that he had in fact traveled to assist the Taliban, it was clearly no basis for what happened next. As Jan explained, he was taken to Peshawar jail, where many of the foreigners captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan were also held, and after about a month was taken to be interrogated by three CIA agents, who, he said, had some “surprising questions.” “One of them asked if I was the son of Osama bin Laden,” he said, adding, “The Pakistani intelligence had told them this.” Despite explaining that he was “born to a family of Afghan refugees in Pakistan who originally were from Zormat and that he made regular trips back to his ancestral home,” he was transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airport a few days later.

His descriptions of his experiences match many other accounts of the typical abuse at Kandahar, which I reported at length in Chapter 8 of The Guantánamo Files. “They took us to a tent, and stripped off all my clothes and took pictures of me naked, wearing shackles,” he said. “The soldiers were laughing at me. Then four of the soldiers came around me and began kicking and punching me. I fell down and tried to stand up but they kept hitting me. I could hear them laughing.” He also described how he and 15 other men “slept on the dirt, surrounded by a perimeter of concertina wire.” “We were sitting on the ground, in winter, with no blanket,” he said. “I had bruises on my body from the beating; my bones hurt.”

After about a month at Kandahar, Jan was flown to Guantánamo. He explained that, although he weighed about 132 pounds when he was initially arrested, his weight had dropped to 100 pounds on his arrival at Guantánamo. He also said that he was “interrogated more than 100 times: What is your name? Where are you from? Why were you in Afghanistan? Are you a member of the Taliban? Are you a member of al-Qaeda?” And although he only spent 18 months in Guantánamo, he said that he was still haunted by the experience. “I never feel relaxed,” he said. “There’s always something bothering me, there’s always something pressing down on my mind.” He added, “pointing to his receding hairline and haggard face,” as Lasseter described it, “I used to be very healthy and good-looking. But look at me now. You would never guess that I’m 22.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief, on February 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was stated that he was born in 1981 and had been persuaded to travel to Afghanistan for jihad “to repent for his sins of smoking opium and having premarital sex.” He apparently set off for Kabul from his home in the North West Frontier Province in November 2001. Wounded in Bagram during the coalition bombing campaign, he managed to flee to Kabul and to get a taxi back to Pakistan, but as he headed towards Peshawar, his vehicle was stopped at a checkpoint, and, [w]hen the Pakistan Army saw that [he] had what appeared to be war wounds,” he was “taken into custody and later transferred to US forces.” The spurious reason for his transfer to Guantánamo on January 15, 2002 was “because of his knowledge of Taliban recruiting procedures in Pakistan and organisations that supported jihad in Afghanistan and Kashmir.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [47] is assessed as not affiliated with Al-Qaida, and as not being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of  Guantánamo at the time, recommended that he be “considered for  transfer or release to the control of another government.”

Abdullah Tabarak (ISN 56, Morocco) Released July 2003

Abdullah Tabarak (also identified as Abdullah Tabarak Ahmad) was one of 14 Guantánamo prisoners whose profiles did not appear in Wikileaks’ April 2011 release of Detainee Assessment Briefs for almost all the prisoners, and, as I explained in my article, “WikiLeaks and the 14 Missing Guantánamo Files“:

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

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

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

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

Mishal Al Shedoky (ISN 71, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (1) – The Qala-i-Janghi Massacre,” I explained that it was probable that four Saudis released in May 2003 — 19-year old Mishal al-Shedoky, 19-year old Fahd al-Shabrani, 23-year old Fawaz al-Zahrani and 20-year old Ibrahim al-Shili — were survivors of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, but nothing at the time was known of the circumstances of their capture, only what happened to them after their repatriation.

In 2006, Human Rights Watch reported that in May 2005, after a four-day closed trial in which the men were not allowed legal representation, the Greater Riyadh Court sentenced them to six months in prison for “leaving the country without permission,” although they were all released for time served. As a condition of their release, the Saudi authorities apparently “prevented them from speaking openly about their experiences in Guantánamo and their time in Saudi custody.”

Al-Shedoky was born in 1982, and it was noted in his Detainee Assessment Brief on February 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” in which he was described as Mesh al-Muhammed Rashid al-Shedoky, that, with a friend, he traveled to Afghanistan for jihad in June 2001. It was also noted that, “As a Taliban member operating in Afghanistan as a foreign fighter” (an illogical description when examined closely), he trained for two weeks at the al-Farouq camp near Kandahar, and then, presumably, traveled to either the front lines or the rear lines, although no details were provided. Instead, it was noted that, after surrendering to the Northern Alliance, he was transported to the Qala-i-Janghi fort — and makeshift prison — in Mazar-e-Sharif (although no mention was made of the massacre, which he was fortunate to survive). The spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo on January 20, 2002 was “because of his knowledge of Taliban’s organisation, strength, equipment, and procedures and of Taliban leadership at the al-Farouq camp,” which was interesting phrasing when al-Farouq was, in more guarded moments, described by the US authorities solely as being associated with Osama bin Laden.

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as neither valuable nor tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [71] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or US interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller recommended that he be “considered for  transfer or release to the control of another government.”

According to a report in the New York Times in July 2004, al-Shedoky and the other three men were released as part of a prisoner swap, in which five British prisoners and two other prisoners were released from Saudi jails. In addition, in February 2009, al-Shedoky’s name was included, as one of 11 former Guantánamo prisoners, on a list of 85 wanted Saudi militants. He was described as Mishaal Mohammed Rasheed al-Shadoukhi, but there was no indication given as to why he was an alleged militant.

Fahd Al Shabrani (ISN 80, Saudi Arabia) Released May 2003

Released in May 2003, like Mishal al-Shedoky (ISN 71, see above) and two others, al-Shabrani (described as Fahed al-Sharbani) was, like the others, sentenced to six months in prison for “leaving the country without permission” in May 2005, although all four were released for time served. In his Detainee Assessment Brief on February 8, 2003, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” it was noted that he was born in 1982 and that he had been “diagnosed with and treated for osteomylitis [which the PubMed Health website describes as "an acute or chronic bone infection"] related to a clavicle fracture,” but that he was “otherwise in good health.”

It was also noted that al-Shabrani had been recruited “to participate in jihad in Afghanistan” in late October 2001, and that he agreed to take part because he “wanted to fight communists and [Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah] Massoud’s troops who [he] believed were killing innocent Muslims.” Paying for his own journey — a sign that he was inspired to travel for jihad rather than directly recruited — he took an overland route to Afghanistan through Iran, traveling by car to Kunduz, where he “joined a group of approximately 100 Arabs” under the command of a man identified as Abdul Salam.

He apparently “never witnessed any battles or enemy troops,” and, after two weeks on the front lines, was “ordered to retreat.” After then surrendering to Northern Alliance forces, when he was apparently wounded (although the circumstances of this were not explained), he was taken to Qala-i-Janghi, where, like Mishal al-Shedoky, he survived the massacre. The spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo  on February 7, 2002 was “because of his knowledge of Islamic radical groups recruited from Saudi Arabia and of Arabs fighting in the Taliban under Abdul Salam.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as neither valuable nor tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [80] is assessed as being neither affiliated with al-Qaida nor a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes. [He] has not expressed thoughts of violence nor made threats toward the US or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention. Based on the above, detainee does not pose a future threat to the US or its interests.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller recommended that he be “considered for  transfer or release to the control of another government.”

Rasul Kudayev (ISN 82, Russia) Released February 2004

One of four prisoners from the former Soviet Union who survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, Kudayev (also identified as Rasul Kudaev), a Balkar from Kabardino-Balkaria, north of Georgia, was just 17 at the time of his capture. A former wrestling champion, he apparently left home to avoid military service, and in December 2002], Igor Tkachyov, the head of a team of Russian officials who visited the Russian prisoners at Guantánamo, explained to the St. Petersburg Times that they had all traveled via Tajikistan, where members of the Islamic opposition to President Rahmonov helped them get to Afghanistan. He added that once they were there they “found themselves in a kind of totalitarian sect commanded by the Taliban … They were not allowed to be alone and had to do everything together, obeying strict regulations that left no time for anything but prayers.”

In his Detainee Assessment Brief on December 5, 2002, which was a “Transfer Recommendation,” he was described as Abdullah D. Kafkas, and it was acknowledged that he was born in 1984 — and was therefore, just 17 at the time of his capture in November 2001, as I explained in my articles, “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo” and “WikiLeaks and the 22 Children of Guantánamo.” It was also noted that he had “a retained bullet in his right pelvis from a previous gunshot wound,” but was “otherwise in good health.”

When it came to his reasons for being in Afghanistan, and the circumstances of his capture, the Joint Task Force agreed with Kudayev’s own account, told by family members in his absence. It was noted that he “entered Afghanistan in November 2001 to escape military service in Russia,” and stayed with an Uzbeki group in Kunduz, “where he worked in an Arab medical clinic for foreign fighters.” It was also noted that he had “served as a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, going as far as taking up arms with the Taliban,” and had, at some point, been transferred by the Taliban to an Uzbeki group in Kandahar. From there, he ended up back in the north, “located in Mazar-e-Sharif during the uprising,” which was actually a reference to Qala-i-Janghi, and his survival of the massacre.

The spurious reason given for his transfer to Guantánamo, “on or about” February 12, 2002, was because of “his knowledge regarding events that occurred at Mazar-e-Sharif from November 2001 to December 2001, information on Uzbeki Islamic radical groups, and possible information about Taliban members.”

In its assessment, the Joint Task Force stated that it “consider[ed] the information obtained from and about him as neither valuable nor tactically exploitable,” and added, “Based on current information, detainee [82] is assessed as not affiliated with al-Qaida or as being a Taliban leader. Moreover … the detainee has no further intelligence value to the United States and will not be seen for further intelligence purposes.” In a significant diversion from the regular script at this point, it was additionally noted, “Since the Russian government has agreed to incarcerate this detainee upon his transfer, he poses no future threat to the US or its allies. In addition, the Russian government has agreed to share all intelligence derived from him while under their control with the United States.” As a result, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller recommended that he “be considered for transfer to the control of the Russian government,” and it was also noted, “During a visit to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 14 to 19 November 2002, Russian Intelligence officers interrogated [ISN 82] and stated that their government would accept custody of [him] if released by the US government.”

When Kudayev and six other Russians were released in 2004, they “were initially held in a detention center in the southern town of Pyatigorsk that is run by the FSB, the domestic successor of the KGB,” as the Washington Post explained in an article in September 2006. The Post‘s article also confirmed that “Russian authorities had assured the US government that they would investigate the inmates, and they were held on suspicion of crossing international borders illegally and mercenary activity.” Russian officials also denied allegations made by one of the men, Airat Vakhitov, that, as the Post put it, “the prisoners were immediately subjected to physical abuse.” He said at a news conference in Moscow in 2005, “They told me to get down on my knees and pray as a Christian to Jesus Christ. I refused. They beat me and burnt my back with cigarette butts.”

The Post further explained that all seven were released in June 2004, “after prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence to hold them,” but also noted that their release “did not end official interest in the men.” Saadiya Chaudary, a London-based lawyer working with the human rights group Reprieve, said, “They have been subjected to constant surveillance and questioning, home raids which have taken place at all hours of the day and night, [and] mistreatment during these raids and during arrests.”

Two of the former prisoners, Timur Ishmuratov and Ravil Gumarov, were then seized after a gas line explosion in January 2005, and imprisoned in May 2006 for 13 and 11 years, even though their lawyers alleged that their confessions were coerced, and researchers from Human Rights Watch uncovered a confession from another man, which was hidden during the trial. In addition, Rasul Kudayev “was arrested in the southern Russian city of Nalchik after an assault on government facilities in October 2005 and accused of leading a group that killed a police officer in the attack. His lawyers and family said he was tortured into signing a confession.” His torture was also discussed in a letter from Airat Vakhitov in December 2005, in this RFE/RL report from January 2006, and, in particular, in a Human Rights Watch report, “The Stamp of Guantánamo,” published in March 2007, in which his mother stated that he “returned from Guantánamo in poor health … he suffered from hepatitis, stomach ulcers, the after-effects of a bullet he received in the hip in Afghanistan that was never removed, serious headaches, high blood pressure, and other ailments.” The latest report about him, in 2008, indicated that he was still imprisoned.

Munir Bin Naseer (ISN 85, Pakistan) Released November 2003

In “The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras (7) – From Sheberghan to Kandahar,” I described how bin Naseer, described as Munir Naseer, was also interviewed by Tom Lasseter for McClatchy Newspapers’ award-wining series on released Guantánamo prisoners. Naseer was 22 years old at the time of his capture, and Tom Lasseter found him speaking English with an American accent and working in a call center in Karachi, where he handled calls for a mortgage broker in the United States. “What’s up?” he asked, adding, “There are too many freaking mortgages in your country, but you gotta do what you gotta do.”

However, Naseer turned serious when the topic of Guantánamo was raised. “I went for jihad,” he said when asked why he had traveled to Afghanistan in late 2001. “I said let’s do it, and I went off. Everybody was astonished.” As Lasseter explained, there was “little to indicate that Naseer was anything other than what he appear[ed] to be: a guy who got swept up in radical Islam in his early 20s and went to fight in Afghanistan as much out of a sense of adventure as anything else.”

Naseer explained that his group of “mostly Taliban” fighters got lost on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif, but that when they asked for help at a farm, they were betrayed. The men in the house, who “said they supported the Taliban,” invited Naseer and his companions to eat dinner and stay the night, but handed them over the next morning to a local Northern Alliance commander, who took them to Sheberghan prison.

Naseer explained that he “spent about two and a half months in the jail, sick with diarrhea and fever,” in a 6 by 10 feet cell, which he shared with 35 other men. He added that “the guards let him alone,” but that others “weren’t so lucky.” “The Northern Alliance guys used to take people outside and beat them with iron rods, half-naked in the snow … when a person didn’t stand up after the beating, it meant that he was dead. They would pick him up and throw him in a ditch. Guys would go out and not come back.” It was, he added, “kind of hellish.”

He was then transferred to Bagram, where he spent about a month before his flight to Guantánamo. “I was beaten a lot at Bagram,” he said. “I spoke English. I would say, ‘Why are you acting so tough? You didn’t catch us, you bought us.’ They [the guards] would say, ‘Shut the fuck up, you’re al-Qaeda.’” He added, as Lasseter described it, that “almost all the men he knew there had been handed over by Pakistani troops who’d caught them crossing over from Afghanistan and collected bounties for them, or, like himself, were picked up by Afghan Northern Alliance fighters who also collected bounties.”

In Guantánamo, he said that he was interrogated every two or three days for the first year, but that in the second year he was only interrogated once a month, or once every two months. “It was the same thing” as in Bagram, he said, where he thought the interviews “lacked imagination.” “Name? Address? Why did you come to Afghanistan? Where did you get your training? Have you seen Osama bin Laden?”

However, he was not subjected to physical violence in Guantánamo, and eventually he decided to stop cooperating. “They said you won’t go home if you don’t talk. I said OK, and didn’t answer their questions. So they sent me to isolation for three or four days.” He added that he ran into particular trouble in the cellblocks, where, because he could speak English, he got into arguments with the guards. “They would say all Muslims are terrorists,” he said. “I would say, ‘Shut up,’ which they hated. They said, ‘You are telling us to shut up?’ I would say, ‘Yes, shut the fuck up.’ I would get into an argument with them; they would send the men in black [the Extreme Reaction Force (ERF) or Immediate Reaction Force (IRF)] … they would tell you to kneel down. If you didn’t kneel down, they would spray you with pepper spray and then they would do the helicopter –- they would tie your arms and legs together and pick you up in the air, like a helicopter, you know? And then they took you to isolation.”

Naseer also explained that it was easy to despair in Guantánamo, thinking that you were “never going to see home again,” and added, “I saw a lot of people go mad.” He was released in November 2003, and was then imprisoned for another year, but although he had a wife and four-month child at the time of his interview, he explained that his misadventure had derailed his life. “Before, I wanted to do computers,” he admitted. “Now I’m kind of lost.”

In his assessment at Guantánamo, dated November 29, 2003, which was a “Recommendation to Retain under DoD Control,” it was stated that his name was Monir Naseer, that he was born in 1978, and that he had been “diagnosed with Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease and Anemia,” but was “otherwise in good health.” Much of the rest of the account in the file supplements information in the account he gave to Tom Lasseter. While running a computer store in Karachi with his older brothers, he “admitted that he became upset when the Americans attacked Afghanistan and decided he would fight on behalf of the Taliban.” He then attended a training camp in Pakistan for two weeks, run by Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM), elsewhere described as “a Tier 1 terrorist target, which is defined as terrorist groups, especially those with state support, that have demonstrated the intention and the capability to attack US persons or interests.” After training, he traveled to Kunduz, where he reportedly “joined the Taliban on the frontlines.” Captured after Kunduz fell, he was transported to Guantánamo on January 14, 2002, on the spurious basis that it was “because of his affiliation with the Taliban and his membership of JEM.”

Bizarrely, his fluency in English led his interrogators to think that he might have been Monir Ali, the friend of the three British prisoners known as the Tipton Three, who disappeared when they were seized in Kunduz in November 2001, and has never been seen again. As the Task Force explained, “analysis indicates that [he] may be a British citizen and may possibly be the ‘fourth’ individual that the Tipton Three traveled with” — although of course that particular sentence doesn’t actually make sense. Obsessed with prisoners who spoke English, because of a paranoia that they were planning attacks on the West, the Task Force noted with suspicion that the Joint Detentions Operation Group had “noted on many occasions” that he spoke fluent English, that he had “translated between detainees, guards and medical staff,” and that his correspondence was also “written in English, indicating that he likely received formal education in English.”

As a result of his affiliation with Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Task Force described him as being “of intelligence value to the United States,” and of posing “a medium threat to the US, its interests or its allies,” and recommended that he be detained under DoD control. This evidently conflicted with the opinion of the Criminal Investigative Task Force, but, “In the interest of national security and pursuant to an agreement between the CITF and JTF GTMO Commanders, CITF defer[red] to JTF GTMO’s assessment that [he] pose[d] a medium threat.” Despite this, he was apparently released the very next day.

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

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

Two suspicious omissions: Abdullah Tabarak and Abdurahman Khadr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The US “enemy combatant”: Yasser Hamdi

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

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

The late arrivals — in 2007 and 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eight others, released between 2003 and 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As published exclusively on WikiLeaks.

I tackled all of these dangerous lies and distortions in my articles, With Osama bin Laden’s Death, the Time for US Vengeance Is Over, Osama bin Laden’s Death, and the Unjustifiable Defense of Torture and Guantánamo and No End to the “War on Terror,” No End to Guantánamo, but although I also implied that it was ridiculous to continue holding people at Guantánamo whose only crime seems to have been that they saw Osama bin Laden from afar while attending a training camp in Afghanistan, what I didn’t reflect on directly were specific victims of the hysteria of the “War on Terror.”

Clearly, this process includes dressing up soldiers at Guantánamo as terrorists to placate those who believe that being strong means being both brutal and stupid, but, as the lawyer Frank Lindh explained in an op-ed in the New York Times last week, it also includes his son, John Walker Lindh, forever tarred as “the American Taliban,” who was one of the first scapegoats of the “War on Terror.”

Seized by the Northern Alliance and transferred to US custody after the horrific Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, Lindh was never sent to Guantánamo (even though he had been designated as Guantánamo prisoner number 1 — ISN number 001), because the horrors of Guantánamo were only for foreigners, and not for anyone in possession of an American passport.

As part of his sacrifice, after he had been moved to Camp Rhino near Kandahar, where he was stripped naked, blindfolded, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, held in a shipping container ringed with barbed wire and interrogated by the US military and the CIA, who reported regularly to Donald Rumsfeld (and where soldiers scrawled “shithead” on his blindfold and told him he would be hanged), John Walker Lindh was held on two ships (the USS Peleliu and the USS Bataan), and was brought to the US on January 22, 2002, and charged on February 5 on ten charges relating to his alleged involvement with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

In July 2002, Lindh was persuaded to accept a plea deal, which not only gagged him throughout his sentence and prevented him from challenging anyone in authority about his shameful abuse in US custody prior to his trial, but also led to a punitive 20-year sentence, announced on October 4, 2002, which he is still serving in at the Federal Correctional Institution at Terre Haute, Indiana. He is held in one of the Communication Management Units (CMUs) for mainly Muslim prisoners that have come under intense criticism from human rights activists, as I explained in two recent articles, Guantánamo in America (Part One): NPR Explains How Muslims Are Deprived of Fundamental Rights in Secretive Prison Units and Guantánamo in America (Part Two): The Nation Reveals More About the Secretive Prison Units for Muslims and Other Perceived Threats.

Below is Frank Lindh’s appeal for the US government to free John Walker Lindh after nearly ten years in prison. This makes the still largely unaccepted point — which I wholeheartedly endorse — that supporting the Taliban was not an act of terrorism.

Bin Laden’s Gone. Can My Son Come Home?
By Frank Lindh, New York Times, May 21, 2011

On the evening of May 1, we learned that Osama bin Laden had been killed. The following dawn, I left my house in the Bay Area to catch a bus to Oakland International Airport. I flew to Indianapolis for a scheduled visit with my son, John Walker Lindh, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind.

I love my son. I enjoy our periodic visits and our weekly telephone calls, but this visit felt different. “If Bin Laden is dead,” I kept thinking, “why can’t John come home?”

A convert to Islam, John was found, unarmed and wounded, in a warlord’s fortress in northern Afghanistan in December 2001. He was subjected to physical and psychological abuse — a precursor to the mistreatment of many prisoners, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, by the American military during the George W. Bush era. Marines took a photograph of John, blindfolded, bound and naked. It was published and broadcast worldwide.

In post-9/11 America, John became a symbol of “the other.” He was called the American Taliban. A traitor. Detainee No. 1 in the war on terrorism.

President George W. Bush called John a “Qaeda fighter.” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said, inaccurately, that he had been captured “with an AK-47.” Attorney General John Ashcroft said John had “turned his back on our country and our values.” Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani suggested that John be put to death for treason; polls showed that many Americans agreed.

This was heartbreaking to me and John’s mother. The son we know is intelligent, spiritual and good-natured. He has a wry sense of humor. He is fluent in Arabic, and curious about the history of the world’s languages and cultures.

John was not running away from anything when he first went overseas. He had a passionate desire to embrace all aspects of Islam, including the Arabic language. He embarked on an unusual odyssey of learning and adventure with full support from his parents. He selected Yemen, where he traveled in 1998, at age 17, because it was one of the best places to learn classical Arabic.

In November 2000, John left Yemen for Pakistan, and the next April, he wrote to me and his mother to say he was going into the mountains of Pakistan for the summer. That was the last we heard from him. Throughout the summer, and especially after 9/11, our family became increasingly worried about John’s whereabouts and his welfare. In December 2001 we were shocked to learn from the news that John had been found among a group of Taliban prisoners who had survived an uprising and massacre at an old fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif.

Like Ernest Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War, John had volunteered for the army of a foreign government battling an insurgency. He thought he could help protect Afghan civilians against brutal attacks by the Northern Alliance warlords seeking to overthrow the Taliban government. His decision was rash and blindly idealistic, but not sinister or traitorous. He was 20 years old.

Before 9/11, the Bush administration was not hostile to the Taliban; barely four months before the attacks it gave $43 million in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. There was nothing treasonous in John’s volunteering for the Afghan Army in the spring of 2001. He had no involvement with terrorism.

I was stunned when I learned that John had gone to Afghanistan. It wasn’t our fight; he put himself in harm’s way without his parents’ approval. He did not go into Afghanistan alone; he took his family with him, and we all have suffered for his impulsive choice.

But John’s case was never about evidence. It was based purely on emotion — shock and anger over 9/11, compounded with a deep frustration that Bin Laden was able to escape from American forces. During the prison raid in which John was captured, another young American, a C.I.A. officer named Johnny Michael Spann, was fatally shot. Mr. Spann’s father has pushed for harsh punishment. I respect his grief, and his son’s heroism. But his belief that John somehow was responsible for, or could have prevented, the death of his son is mistaken.

In fact, in a plea deal in October 2002, the government dropped its most serious accusations against John, including terrorism and conspiracy to kill Americans. John acknowledged only that he had aided the Taliban and carried weapons. For this, he accepted a term of 20 years’ imprisonment. He turned 30 in February.

On May 2 and 3, I had two long visits with John. He remains idealistic and spiritual, and a practicing Muslim. He once told me he thought Bin Laden had done more harm to Islam than anyone in history. As I said farewell, we both felt a sense of closure. I saw grief in his eyes over the pain he has caused himself and his family.

John was a scapegoat, wrongly accused of terrorism at a moment when our grieving country needed someone to blame because the real terrorist had gotten away. Now that Bin Laden is dead, I hope President Obama, and the American people, can find it in their hearts to release John, and let him come home. Ten years is enough.

Note: Readers who wish to know more about John Walker Lindh may be interested in this 2006 story in Esquire, and this April 2009 profile in GQ. There is also a campaigning website that may be of interest, entitled Free John Walker Lindh.

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.

While sympathizing fully with Pfc Manning’s plight, I do hope that those supporting him will also realize that the humiliation to which he is being subjected, and its probable intent — to make him produce false confessions about his relationship with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks — is not unique, as it echoes the conditions in which prisoners in the “War on Terror” — at Guantánamo and elsewhere, including, in three instances, on the US mainland — were held by the Bush administration, whose detention also involved torture and abuse, and the creation of circumstances in which confessions would be produced, whether they were true or not.

This was part of a disgraceful policy that has not come to an end under President Obama, as Guantánamo is still open, and 172 men are held there, with the administration, Congress and the courts having all conspired to prevent the release of any of them (even though 89 of them have been cleared for release). In addition, at Bagram in Afghanistan, there are still men held who were seized up to nine years ago in other countries, and were rendered to Bagram (after a tour of a variety of secret CIA prisons), where they remain in a legal black hole.

While I encourage readers to spare a thought for those still held in Guantánamo and Bagram, I reiterate that I understand the significance of Bradley Manning’s plight, as it is unaccepable that the ill-treatment of such a prominent prisoner is continuing, despite international outrage, just as it is unacceptable that he has not yet been put forward for trial, as he has now been held for nearly a year, since his initial arrest in Kuwait last May.

In an important update to Manning’s story, the website The Western Front recently interviewed Evan Knappenberger, an Iraq War veteran and former Army intelligence specialist, who graduated from the same intelligence school as Manning, and who has some important insights: firstly, about how dehumanizing it was working as an intel analyst in Iraq, and how, at the same time, when it came to having access to classified documents on the Defense Department’s online network, “Army security is [or was] like a Band-Aid on a sunken chest wound.”

Knappenberger also explains how the leaking of information by Manning (if indeed it was him) “has raised consciousness quite a bit of the true nature of what’s going on,” adding that he is appalled by the military’s obsession with classifying as secret everything that takes place in its wars, and how he is also appalled that Manning, as a whistleblower, should have rights and protections that are denied to him, and also regards his treatment as a disgrace.

This is a powerful interview, and I do hope that you have the time to read it, and also to circulate it to others.

Manning Peer Sheds Light on WikiLeaks: Former military intel analyst shares his thoughts on the motive of alleged leaks
By Will Graff, The Western Front, April 15, 2011

Former military intel analyst shares his thoughts on the motive of alleged leaks.

The alleged leaker, intelligence specialist Private First Class Bradley Manning, is now in Quantico military prison in Virginia, where he has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest in July 2010. On April 10, nearly 300 top legal scholars, authors and experts signed a letter condemning his treatment as torture.

Evan Knappenberger, an Iraq War veteran and former intelligence specialist in the Army, graduated from the same intelligence school as Bradley Manning in May 2004 and was given secret clearance.

Knappenberger is now a junior at Western majoring in mathematics. He was interviewed last week for a PBS Frontline documentary about WikiLeaks, Manning and military information security. The Western Front interviewed Knappenberger about his experience in the military and his connection to WikiLeaks.

The Western Front: What  is your connection to Bradley Manning?

Evan Knappenberger: Well, I have a couple connections to Bradley. The first is that we both went to the same intelligence school. We went to the same basic training company, pretty much an identical track all the way through.

They have [Manning’s] chat logs with the guy who turned him in. He talks about why he [leaked the documents]. He says on those chat logs that it’s out of principle. He didn’t like what he saw in Iraq. He talks about the collateral murder video, watching civilians get killed by American soldiers pretty much unprovoked. He had a change of heart, I think, that’s why he says he decided to release all these documents — if in fact, it was him that did it.

I was involved in torture in Iraq. Part of an intel analyst’s job is “targeting.” You take a human being and put him on a piece of paper, distill his life into one piece of paper. You’ve got a grid coordinate of where he lives and a little box that says what to do with him: kill, capture, detain, exploit, source — you know, there’s different things you can do with him. When I worked in “targeting,” it was having people killed.

The thing that gets me about that is I don’t think anybody who’s aware of what’s going on can do that work for very long without having a major problem come up. Most of the guys I went through intel school with, who went to Iraq with me, are either dead, killed themselves, are in a long-term care institution or completely disabled. I’m actually 50 percent disabled via PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), mostly because of the stuff that happened.

The Western Front: What kind of access did you have here and in Iraq?

Evan Knappenberger: Army security is like a Band-Aid on a sunken chest wound. I remember when I was training, before I had my clearance even, they were talking about diplomatic cables. It was a big scandal at Fort Huachuca [in Arizona], with all these kids from analyst school. Somebody said [in the cables] Sadaam wanted to negotiate and was willing to agree to peace terms before we invaded, and Bush said no. And this wasn’t very widely known. Somehow it came across on a cable at Fort Huachuca, and everybody at the fort knew about it.

It’s interesting the access we had. I did the briefing for a two-star general every morning for a year. So I had secret and top-secret information readily available. The funny thing is, Western’s password system they have here on all these computers is better security than the Army had on their secret computers.

There are 2 million people, many of them not U.S. citizens, with access to SIPRNet [Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, the Department of Defense’s largest network for the exchange of classified information and messages]. There are 1,400 government agencies with SIPR websites. It’s not that secret.

The Western Front: Do you think private military contractors play a role in this?

Evan Knappenberger: Oh yeah. I worked in a place called a SCIF [Secret Compartmentalized Information Facility] and almost anybody, if they spoke English, could get in there. It wasn’t hard at all.

Every military base has [a SCIF]. There’s one in Bellingham, too. It’s by the airport. The only security they have at the SCIFs I worked at was one guy on duty at a desk. They had barbed wire you could literally step right over.

We basically gave [the Iraqi army] SIPRNet. It’s not official, but if you’ve got a secret Internet computer sitting there with a wire running across from the American side of the base, with no guard, you’re basically giving them access.

Then in every Iraqi division command post, you have a SIPRNet computer, with all the stuff Bradley Manning leaked and massive amounts more.

I could look up FBI files on the SIPRNet. In fact, I was reading Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels book, and I was like “this sounds cool,” and I looked up all the Hell’s Angels.

We looked up the JFK assassination, I couldn’t find anything on that. It was kind of a game, but, yeah, that’s the SIPRNet. You’ve got access to every so-called sensitive piece of information.

You’ve basically got us sitting there in an Iraqi division command post, and to make it all better, the U.S. Army put one guard guy there to guard it. They would switch us off every 12 hours with another guy. If he gets up to go to the bathroom, the SIPRNet is just sitting there. All you need is knowledge of the English language and knowledge of how to use Internet Explorer.

The Western Front: Is all the information Bradley Manning leaked on those computers under the same security?

Evan Knappenberger: He has top-secret clearance, and it’s a little better. It’s like there’s one more door you have to go through to get to the top-secret computers, maybe. Sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t.

The Western Front: What do you think the release of these documents and WikiLeaks have accomplished?

Evan Knappenberger: I think it has raised consciousness quite a bit of the true nature of what’s going on. Anybody now can go see the daily incident log of what happened in Iraq. What WikiLeaks did, what all of this did, is give real credibility to people who want to tell the truth. You can corroborate stories.

The Western Front: What do you think the attacks on WikiLeaks and Manning’s imprisonment say about freedom in the United States?

Evan Knappenberger: The fact we think we can classify everything that goes on in a war is ridiculous. And the fact that the press really doesn’t have the freedom to report on the military is ridiculous.

The second part of it is Bradley Manning and his treatment. If he was in any other government agency or private agency, he’d be considered a whistleblower. He’d have protections, but he’s not. It shows the gap of human rights in our military.

If he was anybody else, he’d be covered under the whistleblower protections or the freedom of speech. If a reporter gets classified information and publishes it, it’s not a crime. WikiLeaks is a reporting agency, so they should be covered under that. And anybody that works for them, i.e. Bradley Manning, should be covered under that, too.

The Western Front: What should people know about Bradley Manning and why should they care about this issue?

Evan Knappenberger: This is an American citizen. He’s an all-American kid. Born and raised in Oklahoma. If the constitutional rights don’t apply to him, it should scare everybody. Even if you don’t agree with what he allegedly did, you still have the obligation to care about the fact that he hasn’t been afforded his trial and he’s been treated with cruel and unusual punishment. Even if you’re against freedom of the press in this case, you still have the obligation to care about the kid. He’s being tortured.

It has been almost a year. They wake him up every five minutes. He’s stripped naked every day. The lights have been on in his cell 24/7 for a year. He gets one visitor a week. He can’t exercise in his cell, gets an hour a day to walk around a larger cell with no bed in it for exercise. Every human rights organization in the world has condemned his treatment as torture. That should scare the shit out of us because he’s not some Islamic fundamentalist who talks about Jihad, he’s an American kid, modern guy, who listens to pop music and happens to be gay.

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.

In a legal letter to the US authorities, which was released by his lawyer a month ago, Manning described his conditions of confinement in his own words, which were reported in the Guardian as follows:

[Manning explained] how he was placed on suicide watch for three days from 18 January. “I was stripped of all clothing with the exception of my underwear. My prescription eyeglasses were taken away from me and I was forced to sit in essential blindness.”

Manning writes that he believes the suicide watch was imposed not because he was a danger to himself but as retribution for a protest about his treatment held outside Quantico the day before. Immediately before the suicide watch started, he said guards verbally harassed him, taunting him with conflicting orders.

When he was told he was being put on suicide watch, he writes, “I became upset. Out of frustration, I clenched my hair with my fingers and yelled: ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why am I being punished? I have done nothing wrong.’”

He also describes the experience of being stripped naked at night and made to stand for parade in the nude, a condition that continues to this day. “The guard told me to stand at parade rest, with my hands behind my back and my legs spaced shoulder-width apart. I stood at parade rest for about three minutes … The [brig supervisor] and the other guards walked past my cell. He looked at me, paused for a moment, then continued to the next cell. I was incredibly embarrassed at having all these people stare at me naked.”

In the letter, Manning’s lawyer, David E. Coombs, also included excerpts from the brig’s observation records, in which it is repeatedly stated that Manning is “respectful, courteous and well spoken” and that he “does not have any suicidal feelings at this time”. Coombs also noted that, in 16 entries between August last year and January this year, Manning “was evaluated by prison psychiatrists who found he was not a danger to himself and should be removed from the PoI order.”

In response to this clear abuse, critics began to emerge from unusual places. State Department P.J. Crowley, for example, was obliged to resign after he publicly complained that the Pentagon’s handling of Manning was “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid,” and this week nearly 300 of what the Guardian described as “America’s most eminent legal scholars” (plus other leading academics) have signed a letter complaining about Manning’s treatment. Initiated on the blog Balkinization, and written by two distinguished law professors, Bruce Ackerman of Yale and Yochai Benkler of Harvard, the complaint (published in full below) states that the “degrading and inhumane conditions” to which Pfc Manning is being subjected are illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.

As the Guardian reported, they “claim Manning’s reported treatment is a violation of the US constitution, specifically the Eighth Amendment forbidding cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment that prevents punishment without trial,” and, “in a stinging rebuke to Obama,” state that “he was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency.”

The complaint has been published in the New York Review of Books, and its signatories include Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor “considered to be America’s foremost liberal authority on constitutional law,” who “taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign.” Other signatories include Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Bill Clinton’s former labour secretary Robert Reich, President Theodore Roosevelt’s great-great-grandson Kermit Roosevelt, and Norman Dorsen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Tribe, who joined the Obama administration last year as a legal adviser in the Justice Department, but who left his post three months ago, told the Guardian that the treatment of Manning was objectionable “in the way it violates his person and his liberty without due process of law and in the way it administers cruel and unusual punishment of a sort that cannot be constitutionally inflicted even upon someone convicted of terrible offences, not to mention someone merely accused of such offences.”

Yochai Benkler also spoke to the Guardian, stating, “It is incumbent on us as citizens and professors of law to say that enough is enough. We cannot allow ourselves to behave in this way if we want America to remain a society dedicated to human dignity and process of law.” Adding that Manning’s conditions were being used “as a warning to future whistleblowers,” he also said, “I find it tragic that it is Obama’s administration that is pursuing whistleblowers and imposing this kind of treatment.”

As well as alienating nearly 300 legal experts, President Obama has also angered the UN Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Juan Mendez, who, as the Guardian explained, “issued a rare reprimand to the US government on Monday for failing to allow him to meet in private Bradley Manning,” which is “the kind of censure the UN normally reserves for authoritarian regimes around the world.”

Professor Mendez said, “I am deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication of the US government with regard to my attempts to visit Mr Manning.” He added, “I am acting on a complaint that the regimen of this detainee amounts to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or torture,” but “until I have all the evidence in front of me, I cannot say whether he has been treated inhumanely.”

Professor Mendez also explained that:

[T]he vast majority of states allowed for visits to detainees without conditions. But the US department of defence would not allow him to make an “official” visit, only a “private” one. An official visit would mean he meets Manning without a guard. A private visit means with a guard. Also, anything the prisoner says could be used in a court-martial.

Adding that his mandate was “to conduct unmonitored visits,” Professor Mendez also stated, “I am insisting the US government lets me see him without witnesses. I am asking [the US government] to reconsider.”

In conclusion (as the pressure will no doubt continue to mount against President Obama, who has tried and failed to wash his hands of responsibility for Pfc Manning’s treatment), I’m cross-posting below the complaint by Bruce Ackerman and Yochai Benkler, as promised:

Private Manning’s Humiliation
By Bruce Ackerman and Yochai Benkler

Bradley Manning is the soldier charged with leaking U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks.

He is currently detained under degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral.

For nine months, Manning has been confined to his cell for 23 hours a day. During his one remaining hour, he can walk in circles in another room, with no other prisoners present. He is not allowed to doze off or relax during the day, but must answer the question “Are you OK?” verbally and in the affirmative every five minutes. At night, he is awakened to be asked again, “are you OK” every time he turns his back to the cell door or covers his head with a blanket so that the guards cannot see his face. During the past week he was forced to sleep naked and stand naked for inspection in front of his cell, and for the indefinite future must remove his clothes and wear a “smock” under claims of risk to himself that he disputes.

The sum of the treatment that has been widely reported is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against punishment without trial. If continued, it may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture, defined as, among other things, “the administration or application … of … procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.”

Private Manning has been designated as an appropriate subject for both Maximum Security and Prevention of Injury (POI) detention. But he asserts that his administrative reports consistently describe him as a well-behaved prisoner who does not fit the requirements for Maximum Security detention. The Brig psychiatrist began recommending his removal from Prevention of Injury months ago. These claims have not been publicly contested. In an Orwellian twist, the spokesman for the brig commander refused to explain the forced nudity “because to discuss the details would be a violation of Manning’s privacy.”

The Administration has provided no evidence that Manning’s treatment reflects a concern for his own safety or that of other inmates. Unless and until it does so, there is only one reasonable inference: this pattern of degrading treatment aims either to deter future whistleblowers, or to force Manning to implicate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a conspiracy, or both.

If Manning is guilty of a crime, let him be tried, convicted, and punished according to law. But his treatment must be consistent with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There is no excuse for his degrading and inhumane pre-trial punishment. As the State Department’s PJ Crowley put it recently, they are “counterproductive and stupid.” And yet Crowley has now been forced to resign for speaking the plain truth.

The WikiLeaks disclosures have touched every corner of the world. Now the whole world watches America and observes what it does; not what it says.

President Obama was once a professor of constitutional law, and entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader. The question now, however, is whether his conduct as Commander in Chief meets fundamental standards of decency. He should not merely assert that Manning’s confinement is “appropriate and meet[s] our basic standards,” as he did recently. He should require the Pentagon publicly to document the grounds for its extraordinary actions — and immediately end those which cannot withstand the light of day.

Signed:

Bruce Ackerman, Yale Law School
Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School

Additional Signatories (institutional affiliation, for identification purposes only):

Jack Balkin, Yale Law School
Richard L. Abel, UCLA Law
David Abrams, Harvard Law School
Martha Ackelsberg, Smith College
Julia Adams, Sociology, Yale University
Kirsten Ainley, London School of Economics
Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University
Philip Alston, NYU School of Law
Anne Alstott, Harvard Law School
Elizabeth Anderson, Philosophy and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan
Kevin Anderson, University of California
Scott Anderson, Philosophy, University of British Columbia
Claudia Angelos, NYU School of Law
Donald K. Anton. Australian National University College of Law
Joyce Appleby, History, UCLA
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Princeton University
Stanley Aronowitz, Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD, social psychologist, Project on Ethics and Art in Testimony
Reuven Avi-Yonah, University of Michigan Law
H. Robert Baker, Georgia State University
Katherine Beckett, University of Washington
Duncan Bell, Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge
Steve Berenson, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Michael Bertrand, UNC Chapel Hill
Christoph Bezemek, Public Law, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Michael J. Bosia, Political Science, Saint Michael’s College
Bret Boyce, University of Detroit Mercy School of Law
Rebecca M. Bratspies, CUNY School of Law
Jason Brennan, Philosophy, Brown University
Talbot Brewer, Philosophy, University of Virginia
John Bronsteen, Loyola University Chicago
Peter Brooks, Princeton University
James Robert Brown, University of Toronto
Sande L. Buhai, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles
Ahmed I Bulbulia, Seton Hall Law School
Susannah Camic, University of Wisconsin Law School
Lauren Carasik, Western New England College School of Law
Teri L. Caraway, University of Minnesota
Alexander M. Capron, University of Southern California, Gould School of Law
Michael W. Carroll, Law American University
Marshall Carter-Tripp, Ph.D, Foreign Service Officer, retired
Jonathan Chausovsky, Political Science, SUNY-Fredonia
Carol Chomsky, University of Minnesota Law School
John Clippinger, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Andrew Jason Cohen, Georgia State University
Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University
Marjorie Cohn, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Doug Colbert, Maryland School of Law
Sheila Collins, William Paterson University
Nancy Combs, William& Mary Law School
Stephen A. Conrad, Indiana University Mauer School of Law
Steve Cook, Philosophy, Utica College
Robert Crawford, Arts and Sciences, University of Washington
Thomas P. Crocker, University of South Carolina
Jennifer Curtin, UCI School of Medicine
Deryl D. Dantzler, Walter F. Gorge School of Law of Mercer University
Benjamin G. Davis, University of Toledo College of Law
Rochelle Davis, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
Wolfgang Deckers, Richmond University, London
Michelle M. Dempsey, Villanova University School of Law
Wai Chee Dimock, English, Yale University
Sinan Dogramaci, Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
Zayd Dohrn, Northwestern University
Jason P. Dominguez, Texas Southern University
Judith Donath, Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Norman Dorsen, New York University School of Law
Michael W. Doyle, International Affairs, Law and Political Science, Columbia
Bruce T. Draine, Astrophysics, Princeton University
Jay Driskell, History, Hood College
Michael C. Duff, University of Wyoming College of Law
Lisa Duggan, Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU
Stephen M. Engel, PhD, Political Science, Marquette University
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Graduate Center,CUNY
Simon Evnine, Philosophy, University of Miami
Mark Fenster, Levin College of Law, University of Florida
Martha Field, Harvard Law School
Justin Fisher, Philosophy, Southern Methodist University
William Fisher, Harvard Law School
Joseph Fishkin, University of Texas School of Law
Mark Fishman, Sociology, Brooklyn College
Martin S. Flaherty, Fordham Law School
George P. Fletcher, Columbia University, School of Law
John Flood, Law and Sociology, University of Westminster
Michael Forman, University of Washington Tacoma
Bryan Frances, Philosophy, Fordham University
Katherine Franke, Columbia Law School
Nancy Fraser, Philosophy and Politics, New School for Social Research
Eric M. Freedman, Hofstra Law School
Monroe H. Freedman, Hofstra University Law School
Kennan Ferguson, University of Wisconsin, MilWaukee
John R. Fitzpatrick, Philosophy, University of Tennessee/Chattanooga
A. Michael Froomkin, University of Miami School of Law
Gerald Frug, Harvard Law School
Louis Furmanski, University of Central Oklahoma
James K. Galbraith, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin
Herbert J Gans, Columbia University
William Gardner, Pediatrics, Psychology,& Psychiatry, The Ohio State University
Urs Gasser, Harvard Law School, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Julius G. Getman, University of Texas Law School
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University
Bob Goodin, Australian National University
Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, Human Rights, University of Washington
David Golove, NYU School of Law
James R. Goetsch Jr., Philosophy, Eckerd College
Thomas Gokey, Art and Information Studies, Syracuse University
Robert W. Gordon, Yale Law School
Stephen E. Gottlieb, Albany Law School
Mark A. Graber, University of Maryland School of Law
Jorie Graham, Harvard University
Roger Green, Pol. Sci. and Pub. Admin., Florida Gulf Coast
Daniel JH Greenwood, Hofstra University School of Law
Christopher L. Griffin, Visiting, Duke Law School
James Grimmelmann, New York Law School
James Gronquist, Charlotte School of Law
Jean Grossholtz, Politics, Mount Holyoke College
Lisa Guenther, Philosophy, Vanderbilt University
Christopher Guzelian, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Gillian K. Hadfield, Law, Economics, University of Southern California
Jonathan Hafetz, Seton Hall University School of Law
Lisa Hajjar, University of California – Santa Barbara
Susan Hazeldean, Robert M. Cover Fellow, Yale Law School
Dirk t. D. Held, Classics, Connecticut College
Kevin Jon Heller, Melbourne Law School
Lynne Henderson, UNLV–Boyd School of Law (emerita)
Stephen Hetherington, Philosophy, University of New South Wales
Kurt Hochenauer, University of Central Oklahoma
Lonny Hoffman, Univ of Houston Law Center
Michael Hopkins, MHC International Ltd
Nathan Robert Howard, St. Andrews
Marc Morjé Howard, Government, Georgetown University
Kyron Huigens, Cardozo School of Law
Alexandra Huneeus, University of Wisconsin Law School
David Ingram, Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago
David Isenberg, Isen.com
Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard Kennedy School
Christopher Jencks, Harvard Kennedy School
Paula Johnson, Alliant International University
Robert N. Johnson, Philosophy, University of Missouri
Albyn C. Jones, Statistics, Reed College
Lynne Joyrich, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
David Kairys, Beasley Law School
Eileen Kaufman, Touro Law Center
Kevin B. Kelly, Seton Hall University School of Law
Antti Kauppinen, Philosophy, Trinity College Dublin
Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law School
Daniel Kevles, Yale University
Heidi Kitrosser, University of Minnesota Law School
Gillian R. Knapp, Princeton University
Seth F. Kreimer, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Alex Kreit, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Stefan H. Krieger, Hofstra University School of Law
Mitchell Lasser, Cornell Law School
Mark LeBar, Philosophy, Ohio University
Brian Leiter, University of Chicago
Mary Clare Lennon, Sociology, The Graduate Center, CUNY
George Levine, Rutgers University
Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School
Margaret Levi, Pol. Sci., University of Washington and University of Sydney
Tracy Lightcap, Political Science, LaGrange College
Daniel Lipson, Political Science, SUNY New Paltz
Stacy Litz, Drexel University
Fiona de Londras, University College Dublin, Ireland
John Lunstroth, University of Houston Law Center
David Luban, Georgetown University Law Center
Peter Ludlow, Philosophy, Northwestern University
Cecelia Lynch, University of California
David Lyons, Boston University
Colin Maclay, Harvard University, Berkman Center
Joan Mahoney, Emeritus, Wayne State University Law School
Chibli Mallat, Visiting Professor, Harvard Law School
Phil Malone, Harvard Law School
Jane Mansbridge, Harvard Kennedy School
Jeff Manza, Sociology, New York University
Dan Markel, Florida State University
Daniel Markovits, Yale Law School
Richard Markovits, University of Texas Law School
Michael R. Masinter, Nova Southeastern University
Ruth Mason, University of Connecticut School of Law
Rachel A. May, University of South Florida
Jamie Mayerfeld, Political Science, University of Washington
Diane H. Mazur, University of Florida Levin College of Law
Jason Mazzone, Brooklyn Law School
Jeff McMahan, Philosophy, Rutgers University
Richard J. Meagher Jr., Randolph-Macon College
Agustín José Menéndez, Universidad de León and University of Oslo
Hope Metcalf, Yale Law School
Frank I. Michelman, Harvard University
Gary Minda, Brooklyn Law School
John Mikhail, Georgetown University Law Center
Gregg Miller, Political Science, University of Washington
Eben Moglen, Columbia Law School and Software Freedom Law Center
Immanuel Ness, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Charles Nesson, Harvard University
Joel Ngugi, Law, African Studies, University of Washington
Ralitza Nikolaeva, ISCTE Business School, Lisbon University Institute
John Palfrey, Harvard Law School
James Paradis, Comparative Media Studies, MIT
Emma Perry, London School of Economics and Political Science
Charles Pigden, University of Otago
Adrian du Plessis, Wolfson College, Cambridge University
Patrick S. O’Donnell, Philosophy, Santa Barbara City College
Hans Oberdiek, Philosophy, Swarthmore College
Duane Oldfield, Political Science, Knox College
Michael Paris, Political Science, The College of Staten Island (CUNY)
Philip Pettit, University Professor of Politics and Human Values, Princeton
Frank A. Pasquale, Seton Hall Law School
Matthew Pierce, University of North Carolina
Charles Pigden, Philosophy, University of Otago
Leslie Plachta, MD MPH, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Thomas Pogge, Yale University
Giovanna Pompele, University of Miami
Joel Pust, Philosophy, University of Delaware
Ulrich K. Preuss, Law& Politics, Hertie School of Governance, Berlin
Margaret Jane Radin, University of Michigan and emerita, Stanford University
Aziz Rana, Cornell University Law School
Gustav Ranis, Yale University
Rahul Rao, School of Oriental& African Studies, University of London
Calair Rasmussen, Affiliation: Political Science, University of Delaware
Daniel Ray, Thomas M. Cooley Law School
Jeff A. Redding, Saint Louis University School of Law
C. D. C. Reeve, Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bryan Register, Philosophy, Texas State University
Robert B. Reich, University of California, Berkeley
Cassandra Burke Robertson, Case Western Reserve University School of Law
John A. Robertson, University of Texas Law School
Corey Robin, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
Clarissa Rojas, CSU Long Beach
Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Susan Rose-Ackerman, Law, Political Science, Yale University
Norm Rosenberg, History, Macalester College
Clifford Rosky, University of Utah
Brad R. Roth, Poli. Sci. and Law, Wayne State University
Barbara Katz Rothman, Sociology, City University of New York
Bo Rothstein, Political Science, University of Gothenburg
Laura L. Rovner, University of Denver College of Law
Donald Rutherford, Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
Leonard Rubenstein, JD, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Chester M. Rzadkiewicz, History, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
DeWitt Sage, Filmmaker
Cindy Skach, Comparative Government and Law, Oxford
William J. Talbott, Philosophy, University of Washington
Natsu Taylor Saito, Georgia State University College of Law
Dean Savage, Queens College, Sociology, CUNY
Kent D. Schenkel, New England Law
Kim Scheppele, Princeton Univeristy
Ben Schoenbachler, Psychiatry, University of Louisville
Jeffrey Schnapp, Harvard University
Kenneth Sherrill, Political Science, Hunter College
Claire Snyder-Hall, George Mason University
Jeffrey Selbin, Yale Law School
Wendy Seltzer, Fellow, Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
Jose M. Sentmanat, Philosophy, Moreno Valley College, California
Omnia El Shakry, History, University of California
Scott Shapiro, Yale University
Stephen Sheehi, Languages, Lit. and Cultures, University of South Carolina
James Silk, Yale Law School
Robert D. Sloane, Boston University School of Law
Ronald C. Slye, Law, Seattle University
Matthew Noah Smith, Philosophy, Yale University
Stephen Samuel Smith, Political Science, Winthrop University
John M. Stewart, Emeritus, Psychology, Northland College
Peter G. Stillman, Vassar College
Alec Stone Sweet, Yale Law School
Robert N. Strassfeld, Case Western Reserve University School of Law
Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, SUNY-Buffalo Law School
Jeanne Theoharis, Brooklyn College of CUNY
Frank Thompson, University of Michigan
Matthew Titolo, West Virginia University College of Law
Massimo de la Torre, University of Hull Law School
John Torpey, CUNY Graduate Center
Vilna Bashi Treitler, Black& Hispanic Studies, Baruch College, City
Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard University
David M. Trubek, University of Wisconsin (emeritus)
Robert L. Tsai, American University, Washington College of Law
Peter Vallentyne, Philosophy, University of Missouri
Joan Vogel, Vermont Law School
Paul Voice, Philosophy, Bennington College
Victor Wallis, Berklee College of Music
David Watkins, Political Science, University of Dayton
Jonathan Weinberg, Wayne State University
Henry Weinstein, Law, Literary Journalism, University of California
Margaret Weir, Political Science,University of California, Berkeley
Christina E. Wells, University of Missouri School of Law
Danielle Wenner, Rice University
Bryan H. Wildenthal, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Langdon Winner, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Naomi Wolf, author
Lauris Wren, Hofstra Law School
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Attorney and author
Betty Yorburg, Emerita, City University of New York
Benjamin S. Yost, Philosophy, Providence College
Jonathan Zasloff, UCLA School of Law
Michael J. Zimmer, Professor of Law, Loyola University Chicago
Lee Zimmerman, English, Hofstra University
Mary Marsh Zulack, Columbia Law School

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.

Capt. MacMichael makes a number of valid and powerful points, in particular asking why Manning is being held for so long before trial (in violation of his Sixth Amendment rights), and also questioning his conditions of confinement. On the first point, he states, “I question the length of confinement prior to conduct of court-martial. The sixth amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing to the accused in all criminal prosecutions the right to a speedy and public trial, extends to those being prosecuted in the military justice system.” On the second, he notes, “I seriously doubt that the conditions of his confinement — solitary confinement, sleep interruption, denial of all but minimal physical exercise, etc. — are necessary, customary, or in accordance with law, US or international.”

This is an important letter, already doing the rounds on the Internet, and I’m happy to play a part in getting it out to more people. As with so many aspects of the “War on Terror” — which this is clearly part of — it is often military figures (whether retired or still serving) who recognize, and are disturbed by the extent to which the Executive branch of government, and often lawmakers in Congress, continue to trample on the law, and on rights enshrined in the Constitution, in furtherance of political aims.

General James F. Amos
Commandant of the Marine Corps
3000 Marine Corps Pentagon
Washington DC 20350-3000

Dear General Amos:

As a former regular Marine Corps captain, a Korean War combat veteran, now retired on Veterans Administration disability due to wounds suffered during that conflict, I write you to protest and express concern about the confinement in the Quantico Marine Corps Base brig of US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Manning, if the information I have is correct, is charged with having violated provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by providing to unauthorized persons, among them specifically one Julian Assange and his organization Wikileaks, classified information relating to US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and State Department communications. This seems straightforward enough and sufficient to have Manning court-martialed and if found guilty sentenced in accordance with the UCMJ.

What concerns me here, and I hasten to admit that I respect Manning’s motives, is the manner in which the legal action against him is being conducted. I wonder, in the first place, why an Army enlisted man is being held in a Marine Corps installation. Second, I question the length of confinement prior to conduct of court-martial. The sixth amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing to the accused in all criminal prosecutions the right to a speedy and public trial, extends to those being prosecuted in the military justice system. Third, I seriously doubt that the conditions of his confinement — solitary confinement, sleep interruption, denial of all but minimal physical exercise, etc. — are necessary, customary, or in accordance with law, US or international.

Indeed, I have to wonder why the Marine Corps has put itself, or allowed itself to be put, in this invidious and ambiguous situation. I can appreciate that the decision to place Manning in a Marine Corps facility may not have been one over which you had control. However, the conditions of his confinement in the Quantico brig are very clearly under your purview, and, if I may say so, these bring little credit either to you or your subordinates at the Marine Corps Base who impose these conditions.

It would be inappropriate, I think, to use this letter, in which I urge you to use your authority to make the conditions of Pfc. Manning’s confinement less extreme, to review my Marine Corps career except to note that my last duty prior to resigning my captain’s commission in 1959 was commanding the headquarters company at Quantico. More relevantly, during the 1980s, following a stint as a senior estimates officer in the CIA, I played a very public role as a “whistleblower “ in the Iran-contra affair. At that time, I wondered why Lt. Col. Oliver North, who very clearly violated the UCMJ — and, in my opinion, disgraced our service — was not court-martialed.

When I asked the Navy’s Judge-Advocate General’s office why neither North nor Admiral Poindexter were charged under the UCMJ, the JAG informed me that when officers were assigned to duties in the White House, NSC, or similar offices they were somehow not legally in the armed forces. To my question why, if that were the case, they continued to draw their military pay and benefits, increase their seniority, be promoted while so serving, and, spectacularly in North’s case, appear in uniform while testifying regarding violations of US law before Congress, I could get no answer beyond, “That’s our policy.”

This is not to equate North’s case with Manning. It is only to suggest that equal treatment under the law is one of those American principles that the Marine Corps exists to protect. This is something you might consider.

Sincerely,

David C. MacMichael

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.

I’m particularly interested in Jeff’s article, because he also homes in on “the use of bogus Prevention of Injury (POI) orders to justify some of the conditions of Manning’s imprisonment,” which, while supposedly “aimed at protection against suicidal self-harm,” actually “amount to psychological harassment and cruel treatment.” As Jeff notes, “Rather than ‘protecting’ PFC Manning, the orders assist in breaking him down psychologically,” and it is this aspect of Manning’s treatment — aimed, very possibly, at “breaking” him so that he will make some sort of confession implicating Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, as a player in the leaks, rather than an uninvolved recipient of leaked material — that I discussed in my recent article, Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”?.

Psychologist Organization Protests to Gates on Bradley Manning’s Solitary Confinement
Jeff Kaye, FireDogLake, January 3, 2011

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), a non-profit organization of psychologists committed to social change and social justice, has written a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, protesting “the needless brutality of the conditions to which 23-year-old PFC Bradley Manning is being subjected” at the Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia. He has been accused of unauthorized access to classified material, some of which he allegedly downloaded to his computer, as well as other computer and security-related charges.

It is widely speculated that these charges relate to materials turned over to the Wikileaks website, including a video of an Apache helicopter attack civilians in Baghdad, the Iraq War logs, and thousands of State Department diplomatic cables. The military charge sheet accuses Manning of “wrongfully introducing more than 50 classified United States Department of State cables onto his personal computer, a non-secure information system.” It also alleges he downloaded a Powerpoint presentation, and “a classified video of a military operation filmed at or near Baghdad, Iraq, on or about 12 July 2007.”

Manning was held for approximately three weeks at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait before being transferred to Quantico, where he has remained in solitary confinement since late last July. In an article last month, I reported on PFC Manning’s current psychological state, as best as I could determine from speaking to David House, who had just visited him, and on the deleterious effects of solitary confinement in general. PsySR’s letter speaks at length also about the harsh conditions of solitary, and notes “no such putative risk can justify keeping someone not convicted of a crime in conditions likely to cause serious harm to his mental health.”

Isolation is truly a form of torture, and one often practiced in the so-called civilized world. A vicious form of solitary confinement known as “Special Administrative Measures” or SAMs were imposed by the Bush Administration Department of Justice on Syed Fahad Hashmi, and renewed by Attorney General Holder under President Obama. The SAMs meant Hashmi was kept in 23-hour lockdown and isolation before trial for three long years.

While it is used to break and control prisoners in America’s Supermax prisons, when used on accused prisoners, such as the detainees at Guantanamo, it can be used to “exploit” the prisoner. Such “exploitation” is a key component of torture programs, as the torture regime seeks not just information, but ways to manipulate prisoners for political benefit, or for use by intelligence agencies. Recently, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange told Sir David Frost on Frost’s interview program that airs on English Al-Jazeera that he believes the tortuous conditions of Manning’s solitary confinement are meant to force Manning to implicate him in supposed crimes against the American government. (See video of the Assange-Frost interview here.)

Assange has repeatedly said he does not know if Manning leaked the material to Wikileaks or not, but noted in an interview with Cenk Uygur at MSNBC last month:

If we are to believe the allegations, then this man acted for political reasons. He is a political prisoner in the United States. He has not gone to trial. He’s been a political prisoner without trial in the United States for some six or seven months. That’s a serious business. Human rights organizations should be investigating the conditions under which he is held and is there really due process there?

If there is one aspect of Manning’s situation I wish PsySR had emphasized more, it concerns the use of bogus Prevention of Injury (POI) orders to justify some of the conditions of Manning’s imprisonment, including use of a rough, heavy “suicide blanket,” limitations on time out of his cell, waking him in the night to “check” on him, as well as “checking” on him every five minutes or so during the day to ask if he is alright, even though he is under 24-hr. video surveillance. In addition, he is not allowed any personal items in his cell. He is not allowed to exercise in his cell, either. While it supposedly is aimed at protection against suicidal self-harm, the POI orders amount to psychological harassment and cruel treatment. Rather than “protecting” PFC Manning, the orders assist in breaking him down psychologically.

The POI orders are supposedly in place due to an assessment made by military mental health professionals. But reportedly a military psychiatrist found Manning not to be suicidal, and it’s unclear why he remains under POI orders. Quantico Public Affairs Officer Lt. Brian Villiard told Dennis Leahy at A World Without Borders last week that “a board meets ‘frequently’ to reassess the [POI] situation.”

What follows is the text of the PsySR letter. PsySR is not affiliated with the larger American Psychological Assocation (APA). Neither APA nor the American Psychiatric Association has apparently made any statement on Manning’s onerous conditions of confinement.

PsySR Open Letter on PFC Bradley Manning’s Solitary Confinement

January 3, 2011

The Honorable Robert M. Gates
Secretary
100 Defense Pentagon
Washington, DC 20301

Dear Mr. Secretary:

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) is deeply concerned about the conditions under which PFC Bradley Manning is being held at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia. It has been reported and verified by his attorney that PFC Manning has been held in solitary confinement since July of 2010. He reportedly is held in his cell for approximately 23 hours a day, a cell approximately six feet wide and twelve feet in length, with a bed, a drinking fountain, and a toilet. For no discernible reason other than punishment, he is forbidden from exercising in his cell and is provided minimal access to exercise outside his cell. Further, despite having virtually nothing to do, he is forbidden to sleep during the day and often has his sleep at night disrupted.

As an organization of psychologists and other mental health professionals, PsySR is aware that solitary confinement can have severely deleterious effects on the psychological well-being of those subjected to it. We therefore call for a revision in the conditions of PFC Manning’s incarceration while he awaits trial, based on the exhaustive documentation and research that have determined that solitary confinement is, at the very least, a form of cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment in violation of U.S. law.

In the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court case Medley, Petitioner, 134 U.S. 1690 (1890), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller wrote, “A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.” Scientific investigations since 1890 have confirmed in troubling detail the irreversible physiological changes in brain functioning from the trauma of solitary confinement.

As expressed by Dr. Craig Haney, a psychologist and expert in the assessment of institutional environments, “Empirical research on solitary and supermax-like confinement has consistently and unequivocally documented the harmful consequences of living in these kinds of environments . . . Evidence of these negative psychological effects comes from personal accounts, descriptive studies, and systematic research on solitary and supermax-type confinement, conducted over a period of four decades, by researchers from several different continents who had diverse backgrounds and a wide range of professional expertise… [D]irect studies of prison isolation have documented an extremely broad range of harmful psychological reactions. These effects include increases in the following potentially damaging symptoms and problematic behaviors: negative attitudes and affect, insomnia, anxiety, panic, withdrawal, hypersensitivity, ruminations, cognitive dysfunction, hallucinations, loss of control, irritability, aggression, and rage, paranoia, hopelessness, lethargy, depression, a sense of impending emotional breakdown, self-mutilation, and suicidal ideation and behavior” (pp. 130-131, references removed).

Dr. Haney concludes, “To summarize, there is not a single published study of solitary or supermax-like confinement in which non-voluntary confinement lasting for longer than 10 days where participants were unable to terminate their isolation at will that failed to result in negative psychological effects” (p. 132).

We are aware that prison spokesperson First Lieutenant Brian Villiard has told AFP that Manning is considered a “maximum confinement detainee,” as he is considered a national security risk. But no such putative risk can justify keeping someone not convicted of a crime in conditions likely to cause serious harm to his mental health. Further, history suggests that solitary confinement, rather than being a rational response to a risk, is more often used as a punishment for someone who is considered to be a member of a despised or “dangerous” group. In any case, PFC Manning has not been convicted of a crime and, under our system of justice, is at this point presumed to be innocent.

The conditions of isolation to which PFC Manning, as well as many other U.S. prisoners are subjected, are sufficiently harsh as to have aroused international concern. The most recent report of the UN Committee against Torture included in its Conclusions and Recommendations for the United States the following article 36:

“The Committee remains concerned about the extremely harsh regime imposed on detainees in “supermaximum prisons”. The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to, the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (art. 16).

The State party should review the regime imposed on detainees in “supermaximum prisons”, in particular the practice of prolonged isolation.” (Emphasis in original.)

In addition to the needless brutality of the conditions to which PFC Manning is being subjected, PsySR is concerned that the coercive nature of these conditions — along with their serious psychological effects such as depression, paranoia, or hopelessness — may undermine his ability to meaningfully cooperate with his defense, undermining his right to a fair trial. Coercive conditions of detention also increase the likelihood of the prisoner “cooperating” in order to improve those circumstances, even to the extent of giving false testimony. Thus, such harsh conditions are counter to the interests of justice.

Given the nature and effects of the solitary confinement to which PFC Manning is being subjected, Mr. Secretary, Psychologists for Social Responsibility calls upon you to rectify the inhumane, harmful, and counterproductive treatment of PFC Bradley Manning immediately.

Sincerely,

Trudy Bond, Ph.D.
Psychologists for Social Responsibility Steering Committee

Stephen Soldz, Ph.D.
President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility

For the Psychologists for Social Responsibility Steering Committee

An article by Dennis Leahy at the Bradley Manning Support Network website describes how concerned readers can register their opinions with the military authorities (bold emphasis in original):

The Bradley Manning Support Network calls upon Quantico base commander COL Daniel Choike and brig commanding officer CWO4 James Averhart to put an end to these inhumane, degrading conditions. Additionally, the Network encourages supporters to phone COL Choike at +1-703-784-2707 or write to him at 3250 Catlin Avenue, Quantico, VA 22134, and to fax CWO4 Averhart at +1-703-784-4242 or write to him at 3247 Elrod Avenue, Quantico, VA 22134, to demand that Bradley Manning’s human rights be respected while he remains in custody.

Full disclosure note from Jeff: I have been a paying member of PsySR, though I have not participated in any organizational activities, nor am I a member of any of their committees. Any of my own opinions expressed here are my own, and cannot be attributed to PsySR.

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.