Andy Worthington » Uyghurs in Guantanamo

Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo

Andy Worthington — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:39:23 +0000

Last Monday, the Supreme Court declined to review a case brought on behalf of seven men in Guantánamo whose release into the United States was ordered by a US judge 17 months ago. The men in question are Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, and the ruling ordering them to be rehoused in the US was made in October 2008 by Judge Ricardo Urbina.

In light of the Supreme Court’s June 2008 ruling, in Boumediene v. Bush, granting the Guantánamo prisoners habeas corpus rights, the government had suffered a humiliating court defeat, and had then abandoned all pretense that the Uighurs — sold to US forces after fleeing a settlement in which they had been living in Afghanistan — were “enemy combatants.” It had long been apparent to the Bush administration that the men had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and the government had also accepted that it could not repatriate them, because they would face torture or other ill-treatment, and so, for many years, the State Department had been obliged to try to find new homes for them in other countries.

This was a difficult task, and although Albania accepted five of Guantánamo’s 22 Uighurs in May 2006, no other country would help out, and it took another two years and four months — and the Boumdediene ruling — until a judge was able to examine their case, and to order that, because no other country had been found that would accept the remaining 17 men, and because the government had conceded that they were not “enemy combatants,” their continued detention was illegal, and the government should offer them new homes on the US mainland.

The government, predictably, appealed, and in February 2009 the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled against the men, and against Judge Urbina’s heroic ruling, casting the men back into legal limbo by ruling that matters relating to immigration were not for the courts to decide, but were, instead, the exclusive preserve of the Executive branch.

In light of the Uighurs’ particular circumstances, this was a callous ruling, but it was unsurprising given that one of the judges in this notoriously conservative court was Judge A. Raymond Randolph, who had the dubious distinction of writing the three major Guantánamo decisions issued by the D.C. Circuit — in Al Odah v. United States, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush — which were all reversed by the Supreme Court.

More surprising was the fact that the Justice Department, under Obama, chose to maintain the Bush administration’s position, but this was a harbinger of further cowardice to come, and although Greg Craig, the White House Counsel, then established a plan to bring two of the Uighurs to the US in April, and secured the agreement of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and defense secretary Robert Gates, Obama quashed the plan when he started taking flak from Republican critics, and the Uighurs were once more abandoned.

Through extraordinary diplomatic maneuvering, Special Envoy Daniel Fried managed to secure new homes for ten of the men in the months that followed. Four went to Bermuda in June, and another six to the island of Palau, in the Pacific, at the end of October. In the meantime, the Supreme Court agreed to take the men’s case, to decide whether Judge Urbina — and the men’s lawyers — had been right, and that habeas was meaningless if a judge was unable to order the release into the US of innocent men, seized by mistake, for whom no other country could be found.

However, before the Mar. 23 deadline arrived for the Supreme Court to review the case, Switzerland threw the government a lifeline, offering new homes to two of the men. This still left five others, but they had all been offered new homes in Palau and another country, which they had refused. As a result, the government asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the case as “improvidently granted,” because of the Swiss offer, and because the other five men “had received offers of resettlement, which were later withdrawn, from the Republic of Palau and a second unidentified country.”

Despite the offers, this remains a complicated situation. Switzerland has made its offer, but has not yet brought the men to their new homes, and the Palau deal is less straightforward than it may at first appear. Although some critics have argued that the men are angling for new homes in the US and have consigned themselves to life imprisonment in Guantánamo by refusing the offer, their lawyers have stated that they had genuine doubts about the terms of resettlement, and fears that they would still not be safe from the Chinese government, which were perfectly legitimate.

Quite how these problems will be resolved is at present unclear. The Supreme Court ruled that, because offers of resettlement had been made, “This change in the underlying facts may affect the legal issues presented,” adding, “No court has yet ruled in this case in light of the new facts, and we decline to be the first.” As a result, the Supreme Court referred the case back to the D.C. Circuit, noting that the court “should determine, in the first instance, what further proceedings in that court or in the District Court are necessary and appropriate for the full and prompt disposition of the case in light of the new developments.”

At first glance, this appears to be bad news, and it is, of course, in the sense that the Uighurs are still stuck at Guantánamo, and the Supreme Court refused to fulfill the dreams of Guantánamo’s fiercest opponents — myself included — who had hoped that the highest court in the land would finally order the Executive to take responsibility for the Bush administration’s horrendous mistakes by giving new homes to wrongly detained men. From my point of view, this would not only encourage other countries to continue taking cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated, but would also demonstrate to the American people, in the clearest manner possible, that not everyone held at Guantánamo was a terrorist, and that terrible mistakes were made.

However, despite this disappointment, the Supreme Court did not merely bounce the case — Kiyemba v. Obama — back to the lower courts. Clearly and deliberately, the justices actually vacated the Court of Appeals ruling, which they need not have done, banishing the judges’ contentious ruling about immigration and the reach of habeas corpus, and allowing the Uighurs’ lawyers to file a petition requesting that the case be remanded back to the District Court to look at anew, with a full exploration of all the issues surrounding habeas rights and the resettlement proposals.

Vacating the Court of Appeals ruling was not only a positive step in terms of reviving the issues outlined above; it also removed some of the other baleful effects of that particular ruling that had impacted negatively on other detainee issues.

In an email exchange, Michel Paradis, a civilian defense lawyer with the Pentagon, assigned to the Military Commissions, explained that “the biggest problem with Judge Randolph’s now vacated decision was that it went far beyond what the facts and issues in the case required,” and that Randolph “strained to reach the most sweeping ground on which to decide the case.”

Paradis continued:

I would not be surprised if there were some debatable issues over the application of immigration laws, but Judge Randolph went far beyond that, and, as he did in Al Odah, Boumediene and Hamdan, threw in a gratuitous paragraph that said GTMO detainees simply do not qualify as persons protected by the Due Process Clause of the Constitution.

The practical effect of this paragraph has been pernicious. In Rasul v Myers [a torture case brought against senior US officials by several British ex-prisoners], Judge Randolph relied on this paragraph to rule that former British detainees are not “persons” and therefore were not protected from religious harassment by federal law. And since the D.C. Circuit’s rulings control the district courts, the district judges have ruled, in the Obaidullah case for example [an Afghan recently put forward for a trial by Military Commission], that forced confessions can be admitted even into a civilian federal court if they happen to have been made by a GTMO detainee. So this paragraph did not simply create second-class persons, it created a class of non-persons. And it did so in a way that was not only dubious legally, but wholly unnecessary.

Moreover, although Judge Randolph papered over Boumediene, Judge Rogers, who concurred with the result in Kiyemba, strongly objected to Judge Randolph’s apparent effort to overrule the Supreme Court. Likewise, in Rasul, Judge Brown, who was one of the Bush administration’s more contentious appointments to the D.C. Circuit, called Judge Randolph’s reasoning “constricted” and “untenable” (strong words for a federal court opinion) and insisted that “’persons’ are individual human beings, of whom the American people are just one class.”

From this, it is clear that the Supreme Court had more in mind than just the Uighurs, and that it was extremely important to dismiss, for the fourth time, an unacceptable ruling made by Judge Randolph. Admittedly, this hurls the Uighurs back into a legal limbo, but my hope is that the case will be returned to the District Court, and that a judge with the decency and respect for the law demonstrated by Judge Urbina in October 2008 will once more be able to address these issues in a responsible manner, and may, for the second time, set in motion a process that, this time, might lead to the resettlement of innocent men from Guantánamo on the US mainland.

Not only would this be the right thing to do, but nothing — and I mean nothing — would do more to silence the opportunistic fearmongers who delight in stirring up hysteria about Guantánamo at very opportunity than for one of these men to be brought to live in America, where ordinary, decent people would soon realize that the hysteria is nothing more than a cynical attempt to preserve the Bush administration’s lies about the wretched experiment undertaken at Guantánamo.

(’’)

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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

Swiss Take Two Guantánamo Uighurs, Save Obama from Having to Do the Right Thing

Andy Worthington — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:10:12 +0000

Congratulations to the Swiss Canton of Jura, which recently accepted the asylum claims of two Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, and to the Swiss federal government for agreeing to accept Jura’s decision on Wednesday.

The two men in question — Arkin Mahmud, 45, and his brother Bahtiyar Mahnut, 32 — were seized with 20 other Uighurs in December 2001. The US authorities realized almost immediately that all of these men, who are Turkic Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and had been seized (or bought) by mistake. However, although the majority of the men were cleared for release by 2005, the Bush administration accepted that it could not return them to China, because of fears that they would face torture or other ill-treatment, but then struggled to find another country that would take them instead.

In May 2006, Albania was persuaded to take five of these men, but the other 17 had to wait until October 2008, when Judge Ricardo Urbina, a US District Court judge, ruled on their long-delayed habeas corpus petitions, and ordered their release into the United States, because no other country had been found that would take them, and because their continued detention was unconstitutional.

Predictably, the Bush administration appealed, and in February 2010 the Obama administration, to its eternal shame, followed suit, backing a ruling by the Court of Appeals, which overturned the lower court ruling, and hurled the Uighurs back into limbo.

In June 2009, the State Department managed to find new homes for four of these men in Bermuda, and in November the Pacific island of Palau took another six. As a result, seven Uighurs remained in Guantánamo, but by taking the brothers, the Swiss government has not only dared to take on the might of the Chinese government, which threatens any country that dares to entertain the prospect of taking any of the men from Guantánamo, but has also helped President Obama out of what appeared to be an intractable problem.

In a statement, the Swiss Justice Ministry said, “Today the Federal Council decided to admit for humanitarian reasons two Uighurs with Chinese citizenship, who have been imprisoned in Guantánamo for years by the United States without being charged with a crime nor [convicted].” Brushing aside the threats that the Chinese government had made last month, when Chinese officials warned that Switzerland should avoid damaging “overall Sino-Swiss relations,” the Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf added that Switzerland has a “stable, good relationship with China, and we want to keep it that way.”

Not mentioned publicly was the fact that, until Jura accepted the men’s asylum claims, one of them, Arkin Mahmud, appeared to stuck at Guantánamo, his only way out being to hope that the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the Uighurs’ case last year, would overturn last February’s appeals court ruling, and allow cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated into the United States.

The problem is that Palau had refused to take Arkin Mahmud, because, as the Washington Post noted in an editorial in October, he “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement.” As a result, Bahtiyar Mahnut turned down Palau’s offer of a new home for himself, in order to stay with his brother, and, as the Post noted, “Unless another country accepts the brothers, they could remain in custody indefinitely — a prospect that is unconscionable and that no doubt informed the justices’ decision to hear the matter.”

As I explained in an article at the time:

[T]he Supreme Court was faced with a tricky legal decision, because the justices will be considering whether, in defense of habeas corpus, and in reference to the unique position in which the Guantánamo prisoners are held, they are being asked to decide whether a judge has the power to order the release of prisoners into the US, when all the precedents, as the Court of Appeals made clear, establish that the admission of foreigners into the US is a matter for the executive and legislative branches of government.

At the time, the Post reached a principled conclusion with profound implications for the government, arguing that the “moral and ethical imperatives” were “clear and compelling,” and that the government should introduce “narrowly crafted legislation that would allow Mr. Mahmud and Mr. Mahnut into the United States, where they could remain together and Mr. Mahmud could get the medical help he needs.”

This “narrowly crafted legislation” will not now be needed, but it remains to be seen if the imminent release of Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut will affect the Supreme Court’s planned deliberations about the remaining five Uighurs.

The Supreme Court has scheduled argument for March 23 to decide whether to overturn the precedents regarding the admission of foreigners into the US, when, as in the cases of the Uighurs, these men are held in Guantánamo because it is not safe to repatriate them, and no other nation will take them.

The men’s lawyers will argue, as they have consistently, that the Supreme Court ruling in June 2008, granting constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights to the prisoners, is meaningless if a judge cannot actually order prisoners to be released.

As the Associated Press explained on Wednesday, the government could now try to argue that the Supreme Court should drop the case, because the remaining Uighurs were apparently offered new homes in Palau but turned down the offer. Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel at The Constitution Project, told the AP that she feared this outcome. “I would not be surprised,” she said, “if the administration says that the Uighurs themselves are at fault that they have not been resettled to Palau.”

However, Sabin Willett, an attorney who has represented the Uighurs for many years, was more hopeful, telling the AP by email that he “expects the case to go forward.” I tend to share Willett’s optimism, but not, of course, if the remaining five men are miraculously resettled in some other country, perhaps just days before the March 23 deadline.

If there is one thing we have learned from the Obama administration, since the President shelved plans made last April by his counsel, Greg Craig, to bring the Uighurs to live in the US, it is that, regardless of whether senior officials may agree in private that resettling the Uighurs in the US would be the right thing to do, they are not prepared to tackle their critics — and the Bush administration’s poisonous legacy — head-on. Instead, senior officials prefer not only to avoid confrontation, but also, sadly, to avoid doing anything that would demonstrate to the American public that enormous mistakes were made at Guantánamo, and that the rhetoric of Dick Cheney and his thriving acolytes is disturbingly mistaken.

I can think of no finer way to demonstrate this than to allow the Uighurs to walk free on the streets of, say, Washington D.C., but it remains clear that this is not something that the administration will undertake willingly, and in the meantime, the people of Bermuda and Palau have been learning this instead, and are soon to be joined by the people of Switzerland.

President Obama is fortunate to have such kind allies, but he himself is the loser, the longer he refuses to tackle those who insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that everyone who was held at Guantánamo was a “terrorist,” and that it is somehow appropriate to continue to deprive innocent men of their liberty in Guantánamo, rather than giving them new homes in the country that, through cruelty and incompetence, deprived them of so many years of their lives.

(’’)

As published on Antiwar.com, ZNet, the Huffington Post and CounterPunch. Cross-posted on Common Dreams and The Public Record.

Guantánamo: Idealists Leave Obama’s Sinking Ship

Andy Worthington — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:08:02 +0000

Last week, lawyer, ex-Army Captain and Iraq veteran Phillip Carter, described by Glenn Greenwald as “a very harsh critic of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies,” suddenly resigned his post as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Policy, which he had occupied since April. Carter claimed that he was leaving due to “personal issues,” which may be true, but as Greenwald noted, “the policies Obama has adopted in the last six months in the very areas of Carter’s responsibilities were ones Carter vehemently condemned when implemented by Bush.”

Greenwald then proceeded to explain how, in May 2008, Carter had condemned the Bush administration’s Military Commissions (the trial system for Guantánamo prisoners) as “fundamentally and fatally flawed,” arguing that “the rule of law will prevail only if they are perpetually blocked,” and cited a trial in a “civilian court” (his emphasis) of accused terrorists in France that involved “a combination of open and sealed (i.e., classified) evidence to prove the defendants’ guilt in a six-day trial,” which he regarded as the only viable model for the United States to follow.

How disappointing, then, that, just a month after Carter joined the Obama administration, the President announced, in a major national security speech, that the Commissions were back on the table, and Carter then watched, two weeks ago, as Attorney General Eric Holder announced that, although Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks would face a federal court trial in New York, five other prisoners — previously charged in the Bush administration’s Military Commissions — would face what is apparently a second tier of justice based solely on the government’s belief that their cases are weaker: trials in the revamped Military Commissions, which have been brought back from the dead with the help of Congress.

Greenwald also noted that, in another post in April 2008, Carter expressed dismay at the Bush administration’s decision to charge Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a “high-value detainee” held for over two years in secret CIA prisons before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006, in a Military Commission “for acts committed before Sept. 11 — to wit, his alleged participation in the bombing of the US Embassy in Tanzania [in 1998].” Carter focused on the following passage in a Washington Post report: “Almost all of his alleged ‘war crimes’ occurred before the Sept. 11 attacks, and most predated the nation’s fight against terrorism. Four co-conspirators in the Tanzania bombing were convicted in US federal courts. Ghailani, too, was indicted in the United States, but federal authorities have opted to try him before the commission, composed entirely of military officers.”

Rounding on the Bush administration, Carter stated:

I’ll be very interested to see how the Bush administration’s lawyers argue their way around the provision of Article 1 that reads, “No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed”. Setting aside the myriad objections to the military commissions generally, and this case specifically, I think this is going to present a major hurdle for the government.

I’m also concerned about the deliberate decision to take this case away from federal prosecutors … In my opinion, our default choice for the prosecution of suspected terrorists should be federal court … The substantive and procedural due process granted by federal courts has strategic value — it confers legitimacy on the outcome. That legitimacy matters for the struggle against terrorism, and I think it’s crucial that we evaluate our prosecutorial decisions with that strategic calculus in mind.

As Greenwald noted, bringing the story up to date:

While the Obama administration commendably sent Ghailani to New York to be tried in a civilian court, it just announced two weeks ago that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, whose case originated as a criminal investigation with the FBI, would now be turned over to a military commission for prosecution in connection with the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole — raising all of the serious objections Carter voiced to the Ghailani case.

There’s more to Greenwald’s article — regarding Carter’s opposition to the use of the “state secrets” privilege, his concerns regarding the distinction between conventional wars of the past and the “War on Terror” when claiming presidential power, and his willingness to prosecute Bush administration officials and lawyers for war crimes, all of which have also been ignored by President Obama — but I’d like now to move onto the second departure from the administration: that of Greg Craig, the former White House Counsel, who resigned on November 13.

Craig is no darling of the left, as is apparent from complaints about his business dealings, including his relationship with Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s former Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff. However, on national security issues, his departure set the seal on the demise of a period of principled optimism that marked the first few months of the Obama administration, and that has degenerated into chaos and confusion ever since. A former foreign policy advisor to Senator Edward Kennedy and to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who served as special counsel in the White House of President Bill Clinton, and directed the team that defended Clinton against impeachment, Craig not only brought a wealth of political experience to Barack Obama’s administration, but was also the main driver of the policies designed to overturn and repudiate the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies in the “War on Terror.”

As Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf explained two weeks ago in an article in Time, “The Fall of Greg Craig,” Barack Obama “tasked Craig with dismantling Bush’s interrogation and detention policies” just four days after the Presidential election, and he took to his new job with extraordinary vigor, “creating one of the largest White House counsel’s offices ever, with dozens of high-powered lawyers, compared with only a handful who served under Bush in early 2001 … Craig’s office was an instant power center in the White House, able to produce answers, memos and ideas seemingly overnight while other parts of the Administration were still getting up and running.”

Despite opposition from the intelligence agencies, Craig drafted the Executive Orders, issued on President Obama’s second day in office, which, singlehandedly, sent a message to the world that the extra-legal horrors of the Bush administration had apparently come to an end. The orders set a one-year deadline for the closure of Guantánamo and called time on the CIA’s use of torture and secret prisons, and President Obama also announced that he was suspending the Military Commissions. Human rights activists were overjoyed, and, as Time noted, “Craig was delivering much of the change Obama had promised during the campaign.”

On March 15, Craig’s insistence on repudiating the Bush administration’s policies and providing the transparent government that Barack Obama had promised was delivered to full effect when, as a result of a long-standing court case initiated by the ACLU, a court deadline was reached regarding the release of classified memos, issued in 2002 and 2005 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which purported to justify the use of torture. When Craig notified the President that the Justice Department planned to make the memos public three days later, Obama asked for a one-month extension to consider his options.

According to Time, when Gen. Michael Hayden, the former Director of the CIA, learned of the administration’s intention to release the memos, he “went ballistic,” calling Craig on March 18 and asking him, “What are you doing?” Hayden claimed that, if Obama released the memos, “al-Qaeda would be able to train its warriors to resist the techniques described in their contents.” Craig was apparently unperturbed. “The President is never going to authorize any of those techniques,” he replied, prompting the following response from Hayden: “Lemme get this right. There are no conditions of threat this nation might face that would prompt you to interrupt the sleep cycle of somebody who may have lifesaving information?” As Time described it, “There was a long silence. Craig would not concede the point.”

This showdown may well have been the high point of Greg Craig’s endeavors to reset America’s moral compass, confirming the President’s commitment to non-abusive interrogation techniques, in the face of Hayden’s extraordinary insistence that sleep deprivation — a clear component of the torture techniques favored by the Bush administration — ought to continue to be part of the agency’s operations.

As Time explained, Hayden refused to back down, and rallied CIA opposition to Craig’s plans. Former Director George Tenet called his former aide John Brennan, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and John Deutch, a CIA Director under President Clinton, called Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon. National Security Council aide Denis McDonough, a former Senate staffer who has “daily access to the President,” was also recruited, and on April 15, as the court’s extension came to an end, Obama “invited eight officers of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center to make their case against release” at a meeting in the Oval Office. That evening, Obama called Rahm Emanuel, his Chief of Staff, to discuss the memos, and discovered that Emanuel was already discussing it “with about a dozen national-security and political advisers.” After joining the meeting, Obama “asked each to state a position and then convened an impromptu debate, selecting Craig and McDonough to argue opposing sides.”

As Time explained, “Craig deployed one of Obama’s own moral arguments: that releasing the memos ‘was consistent with taking a high road’ and was ‘sensitive to our values and our traditions as well as the rule of law.’ Obama paused, then decided in favor of Craig, dictating a detailed statement explaining his position that would be released the next day.”

What happened next signaled the start of the Obama administration’s retreat from the moral high ground, which led to the sidelining of Craig, and, finally, his resignation. Former Vice President Dick Cheney went on the attack, pollsters noted a drop in Obama’s support among independents, and, as a result, Rahm Emanuel “quietly delegated his aides to get more deeply involved in the process.”

Craig, however, remained focused on how to close Guantánamo, as he was, according to Time, “under pressure to eliminate … indefinite detention without charge or trial and the use of military commissions.” On April 17, he assembled officials from a range of government departments, and explained his plan: to bring some prisoners from Guantánamo to the US to face federal court trials, and also to bring others to settle in the United States. The latter were the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province whose release into the United States had been ordered in October 2008 by Judge Ricardo Urbina, after the Bush administration declined to challenge their habeas corpus petitions.

Craig, like Judge Urbina, recognized that, because they could not be repatriated (because of fears that the Chinese government would torture them), because no other country could be found that would take them, and because their continued imprisonment in Guantánamo was unconstitutional, they would have to be brought to the United States. According to Time, defense secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other senior officials “approved Craig’s plan to release two Uighurs in northern Virginia” as part of “a global game to empty the prison. If the two settled without incident, six more would be let into the US. That in turn would help the State Department persuade other countries to take Gitmo detainees. The hope was that those remaining could be tried in federal courts.”

At the meeting on April 17, security measures were planned for monitoring the Uighurs in their new home, and Craig also called for the development of “a plan to convince Congress and the public that it was a good idea.” The Uighurs’ lawyers had apparently agreed that their clients could be tagged, to play down security fears, and a Defense Department official told Time that the planned arrival of the Uighurs in the US “was a matter of days, not weeks.”

It was a fine and principled plan, and, had it happened, it would, I believe, have made the closure of Guantánamo by January 2010 possible. However, what happened instead is that another Cheney-baiting court case, concerning the release of photos showing the abuse of prisoners by US forces, reared up to derail the administration. On April 16, Craig had explained that the photos would have to be released, and at that point Robert Gates was supportive, and Rahm Emanuel was only concerned about locating a good time to release the information to cause minimal damage. A week later, however, when the government announced its plans to release the photos, senior military figures warned that soldiers in the field would face reprisals, Gates flip-flopped, and Republicans seized on another opportunity to attack the administration.

The uproar over the photos was then revived on April 24, when news of the Uighur resettlement plan was leaked. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell “launched three weeks of near daily attacks on the idea of letting the Uighurs loose in the US,” and although Dick Durbin, a staunch supporter of Obama and the Majority Whip in the Senate, thought the government could win the fight in Congress, cowardice finally prevailed.

By May 8, when Craig was summoned to a meeting with Obama, the tide had turned. “I don’t like my options,” the President said, in relation to the abuse photos, and although Craig explained that his legal team had found no alternative to releasing the photos, Obama directed him to find a way, which he did, by withdrawing approval and paving the way for a legal struggle that reached the Supreme Court this fall. In a one-line ruling on November 30, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling that the pictures be released, citing a provision in the Homeland Security funding bill signed into law on October 28, which authorized the Pentagon to block the release of the pictures, as well as any others which might “endanger” US soldiers or civilians.

Objectively, the refusal to release the photos in May was a distressing volte-face on the part of the administration, but behind the scenes it is now clear that the combined Republican assaults on Obama’s national security credentials led the administration to withdraw completely from Craig’s principled position regarding the Bush administration’s detention policies, compromising on issues that, as Craig had astutely recognized, were not open to compromise or negotiation if they were to succeed in overturning the Bush administration’s toxic legacy.

By the second week of May, Obama had killed the Uighur plan. As Time described it, “Craig never got a chance to argue the case to the President,” and an aide explained, “It was a political decision, to put it bluntly.” Thereafter, Craig was sidelined. The administration failed to fight back when Congress rose up in revolt, threatening to impose its own ban on the release of the photos, withholding funding for the closure of Guantánamo, legislating to prevent prisoners being brought to the US mainland, and interfering in the transfer of prisoners to any other country.

On May 21, Craig, like Phillip Carter, was obliged to watch as President Obama delivered the national security speech in which he not only announced his intention to revive the Military Commissions, but also — presumably to the absolute horror of Craig and Carter — explained that he would continue to hold some prisoners without charge or trial; those who, as he put it, “cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.” By doing so, Obama ignored the sub-text that, if you cannot prosecute someone, it is because the information you are using does not rise to the level of evidence, or is otherwise tainted by torture, and is therefore inherently unreliable.

Six months on, as Greg Craig finally tendered his resignation, the price of subscribing to the Bush administration handbook, instead of standing up to bullying lawmakers and a renegade ex-Vice President, has become distressingly clear.

When it comes to finding new homes for cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated, the administration finally managed to dispose of ten of the Uighurs, in Bermuda and Palau, although seven still remain at Guantánamo, nearly 14 months after Judge Urbina ordered their release, and dozens of other cleared prisoners face indefinite detention at the US government’s pleasure, because other countries — unenthused by Obama’s inability to bring even a single man to settle on the US mainland — have not rallied sufficiently to the cause.

Moreover, although the administration finally announced federal court trials for the five men accused of involvement with the 9/11 attacks on November 13 (the same day that Greg Craig resigned), Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder not only had to fight back against a wave of Republican fearmongering that has only grown in strength throughout the year, but also lost whatever credibility this should have given them — in the eyes of those whose allegiance is to the rule of law — by announcing that five others would face trials by Military Commission. They also conceded that Guantánamo would not close by January 2010, and let slip that some of those still held — those described by Obama in May as prisoners who “cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people” — would likely remain imprisoned forever without charge or trial.

Forgive me if I have oversimplified matters, but it appears to me that the failure to deliver a single, coherent system of justice to the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo, the failure to close the prison by Greg Craig’s deadline, the failure to kill the Military Commissions once and for all, and the acceptance, rather than the elimination of indefinite detention without charge or trial (which is at the very heart of the Guantánamo regime established by George W. Bush) demonstrate what happens when tough battles on points of principle give way to cowardice and political maneuvering, as exemplified in the poisonous compromises embraced six months ago by the Obama administration.

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

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

Guantánamo Uighurs In Palau: First Interview And Photo

Andy Worthington — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:15:24 +0000

In the first interview with one of the six Uighurs recently released from Guantánamo to the Pacific nation of Palau, Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C. spoke by phone to Anwar Hassan, who revealed that, although the men were enjoying their new-found freedom, they were all concerned that they were unable to contact their families. As RFA described it, “Hassan said that strict Chinese government controls on Internet and phone communication with the Uighurs’ homeland following ethnic violence in July have prevented them from doing so.”

“We haven’t been able to talk to our family members yet,” Anwar Hassan said in the telephone interview. “We have stayed eight years in the jail … Our biggest desire on getting out of the jail was to talk to our family members and let them know we are alive and give them some peace of mind,” he said.

He added, “Even though we are free now, in one sense our situation isn’t too different from when we were in jail, as the Chinese government has blocked all communication channels to our homeland. I think this is because the Chinese government does not want the outside world to know what happened in our homeland so they can strike harder against our people. Now, this has become our main concern.”

Three of the recently released Uighurs in the kitchen of their new home in Palau, November 2, 2009 (Photo: Bernadette Carreon, AFP, Getty Images).

RFA explained that Hassan, and the other men who flew to Palau with him — Ahmad Tourson, Abdul Ghappar Abdul Rahman, Edham Mamet, Adel Noori and Dawut Abdurehim — received a warm welcome from the country’s president, Johnson Toribiong. “The president of Palau greeted us and met with us when we got here,” Hassan said. “He is a very easy-going and pleasant man. Everybody here is very good to us.”

However, he also explained that he and his companions “had very mixed feelings on the occasion of their release,” as RFA described it. “We spent eight years of our lives over there for nothing. There was no reason given for that kind of treatment, and even thinking about the experience causes great pain,” he said. “On the other hand,” he added, “when the Chinese government demanded that the US hand us over to them, the American government refused to give us to them, so when we think about that, we are very happy to be here.”

Hassan also explained that Palau “won’t be the final destination for the men, who have been caught up by political forces far beyond their control,” as RFA put it. “We are living here temporarily,” he said. “So our main concern is: where is our next stop? When will it happen? How soon? All of these questions are bothering us right now.”

For Agence France-Presse, Bernadette Carreon visited the men in Koror, the capital of Palau, and reported that they “spent their first day of freedom on Monday shopping.” As they walked around the shops being greeted by the local people, they were accompanied by their translator, Mampimin Ala, who was flown in from Australia to help them adjust. AFP also explained that they had “penciled in a day’s swimming at the spectacular Rock Islands … after revealing that was one of life’s treats they missed most while detained at the US naval base in Cuba.”

George Clarke, one of the lawyers for the men, who traveled to Palau with them, told AFP, “They have not touched the water for eight years,” adding, “They are happy that the Palawan people have accepted them and relieved that they have finally been released from jail,” Gitanjali Gutierrez, another of their US lawyers, said it was “important for them to meet as many locals as possible in the next few days as [they] rebuild their lives in freedom.”

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

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), A Letter To Barack Obama From A Guantánamo Uighur (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Real Uyghur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda? (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Uighurs In Bermuda: Interviews And New Photos (June 2009), Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now! (June 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China? (July 2009), Chair Of The American Conservative Union Supports The Guantánamo Uighurs (July 2009), Three Uighurs Talk About Chinese Interrogation At Guantánamo (July 2009), House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo (July 2009), A Profile of Rushan Abbas, The Guantánamo Uighurs’ Interpreter (August 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

Who Are The Six Uighurs Released From Guantánamo To Palau?

Andy Worthington — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:15:47 +0000

At the weekend, six of the remaining 13 Uighurs in Guantánamo — Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province — were released to resume new lives in the tiny Pacific nation of Palau (population: 20,000). I have written at length about the plight of Guantánamo’s Uighurs, innocent men caught up in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, who were mostly seized and sold to US forces by Pakistani villagers after fleeing a settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains where they had been living a Spartan live for several months, free from Chinese oppression. Some were hoping to make their way to Turkey, to find work, but had found their way hard, and had been advised to seek out the settlement; others nursed futile dreams of rising up against the Chinese government, and, while working to make the settlement habitable, occasionally shot a few rounds on their only weapon, an aged Kalashnikov.

I have also written about how the US authorities knew, almost immediately, that these men had no connection to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but how, nevertheless, they flew them to Guantánamo, allowed Chinese interrogators to visit them, and tried, in their tribunals at Guantánamo, to make out that they were connected to a Uighur separatist group, which, obligingly had been designated by the Bush administration as a terrorist group to secure leverage with the Chinese government in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

I have also written about how five of the 22 Uighurs in Guantánamo were released in Albania in May 2006, and how the others had to wait another two years for a US court to have the right to examine one of their cases, concluding that the government’s supposed evidence resembled a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I also explained how, last October, the government abandoned trying to claim that any of the other 16 were “enemy combatants,” but appealed when, ruling on their habeas corpus petitions, Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered their release into the United States, because they could not be returned to China, where there were fears that they would be tortured, because no other country had been found that would accept them, and because their continued detention in Guantánamo was unconstitutional.

I have also written about how the Obama administration shamefully defended its predecessor’s opinion in the Court of Appeals, and refused to push to release the men in the US, and how, as a result, officials were once more obliged to scour the world seeking countries prepared to enrage China by accepting any of them, finally persuading Bermuda to take four in June, and now persuading Palau to take another six.

I have also written up the stories of these men, in my book The Guantánamo Files, in additional online chapters, and in articles over the last few years, but I am drawing them together here to tell the stories of six men who, nearly eight years after their wrongful and mistaken capture, are finally free from Guantánamo, even if an uncertain future awaits them on an island with no other Uighurs, and only a transient Muslim population of immigrant workers.

Survivors of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre

Although three of them, discussed below, were amongst the 18 seized together by Pakistani villagers, three others were seized in different circumstances. Two, remarkably, survived a notorious massacre in a fortress in northern Afghanistan before they even ended up in US custody. Seized by soldiers of the US-backed Northern Alliance (the opposition to the Taliban), they and other randomly-seized prisoners were taken to Qala-i-Janghi, a mud-walled fortress under the command of the warlord General Rashid Dostum, along with hundreds of mainly Arab and Pakistani fighters for the Taliban, who had left the city of Kunduz, the Taliban’s last outpost in the north of Afghanistan, after a surrender was negotiated between the Northern Alliance and senior Taliban leaders.

Tricked into believing that they would be allowed to return home, some of the men responded to the betrayal — and fears that they were to be executed — by starting an uprising, which was savagely put down by US bombers, representatives of the US and British Special Forces, and Alliance soldiers. The survivors hid in a basement while the battle raged, and 86 men emerged a week later, after the basement had been bombed and, eventually, flooded. The survivors included three Uighurs, and two of these men — Ahmad Tourson and Nag Mohammed — were released in Palau.

Almost nothing is known about Mohammed (identified on his release as Edham Mamet), who was 26 years old at the time, as he refused to take part in his tribunal at Guantánamo or any of the military’s annual review boards, and also refused to meet with his lawyers, but Tourson, who was 30 when seized, attended his tribunal — one of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), deliberately one-side affairs convened in 2004-05 to assess whether the prisoners were “enemy combatants,” who could continue to be held without charge or trial — and willingly explained how, in 2000, he had traveled to Afghanistan with his family, but was caught in the street by Northern Alliance forces in November 2001 and taken to Qala-i-Janghi.

Describing the circumstances of his arrest, he said, “Foreigners, bad people, good people, soldiers, fighters. Everybody walks through the street and I am passing through the road, then I am captured by General Dostum’s troops. It does not explain that all these people are al-Qaeda. It is kind of funny looking. Everybody walks in the street, everybody walks.”

Talking about his experience of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, he stated, “I was taken there when I was captured. I did not participate in the riot. They dropped bombs and I was injured. I was not a soldier.” He also told the tribunal that a Uighur friend of his was killed in Qala-i-Janghi, and provide the panel of military officers with one of the most succinct explanations of why neither he nor any of his fellow Uighurs would wish to fight Americans. “I have nothing against the Americans,” he said. “Why would I participate in the riot? All Uighurs have one enemy, the Chinese. We have no other enemies.”

A stray Uighur seized in Pakistan

The other Uighur who was not seized as part of the group of 18 is Adel Noori, who was 32 years old at the time of his capture, and, who, like his fellow countrymen, maintained in Guantánamo that he had only one enemy — the Chinese Communist government. He explained that he was “never asked to participate in a jihad against the United States while in Afghanistan,” and “had no negative feelings toward the United States.”

Noori had arrived in Kabul in July 2001 and had stayed at a house until the US began bombing the city in October. Denying an allegation that the house was a “training camp,” he explained, “It was a small house and not a training camp. There wasn’t any room for training.” When the bombing began, he said that he and the other Uighurs in the house “ran in all directions for safety.” He and three companions ended up fleeing to Pakistan, where, according to the US authorities, they “were arrested by the Pakistani police while trying to evade detection (dressed in burkas)” in Lahore on January 15, 2002, a desperate ploy at a time when Arabs and other foreigners in Pakistan were being seized and sold to US forces for bounty payments.

Three of the 18 Uighurs seized in Pakistan

Of the three men who were seized after fleeing the settlement in the Tora Bora mountains, Dawut Abdurehim, who was 27 years old at the time and who sold animal skins in China, told his tribunal that he lived at the settlement from June to October 2001, and, in response to an allegation that the settlement had been provided by the Taliban, gave the tribunal a history lesson, explaining how “the Afghan people and the Uighurs have had a relationship since the 1920s,” and how, “In the Taliban’s time, they just gave a place for the Uighur people … The place we stayed had trees around it. We didn’t step into other people’s property. We just stayed where we were.”

Abdurehim also explained that he and his 17 companions were captured in Pakistan after fleeing the settlement when it was destroyed in a US bombing raid. He described how one person was killed in the bombing raid — “his body was exploded” — and how afterwards “we moved around and some places even had monkeys that were also screaming at us.” He also described being visited by a Chinese delegation in Guantánamo, in which, he said, he was vaguely threatened, but reported that “some other Uighurs had conversations with bad, dirty language,” in which they were told that “when we go back to the country, we’d be killed or sentenced to prison for a long time.” He also explained that, after three years in Guantánamo, he had not heard from his family. “They don’t know where I am,” he said. “They think I’m still doing business somewhere.”

Another of the men, Abdulghappar Abdul Rahman, who was 28 at the time of capture, told his tribunal that he had traveled to Afghanistan to “get some training to fight back against the Chinese government,” but although he arrived at the settlement in the mountains near Jalalabad in June 2001, he explained that he actually spent most of his time working on mending the house that was there, and on only one occasion shot three bullets from the solitary Kalashnikov.

In common with his compatriots, he also stressed that he had nothing against the United States. He said that his own people “and my own family are being tortured under the Chinese government,” and when asked, “Was it your intention when you were training to fight against the US or its allies?” came up with an answer that summed up the feelings of all of Guantánamo’s Uighurs even more forcefully than Ahmad Tourson: “I have one point: a billion Chinese enemies, that is enough for me. Why would I get more enemies?”

In December 2007, Abdulghappar wrote a letter from Guantánamo, which I published after it was cleared by the Pentagon’s censors and made available by his lawyers in March 2008. In it, he explained how he and his companions “left our homeland in order to escape from the brutal suppression and unfair treatment from the Chinese government towards our people. The Uighur youth back home were either incarcerated because of false accusations or prosecuted and executed because of bogus allegations. It was extremely difficult for any Uighur to see a future for themselves within our homeland, and both young and middle-aged Uighurs started to leave East Turkistan [the Uighurs’ name for their homeland before Chinese occupation] and try to find survival abroad, if anyone could find a way to get out.”

After explaining the circumstances of the men’s capture, he lamented the fact that the US authorities had failed to recognize their plight:

We were very pleased at the beginning when the Pakistanis turned us over to American custody. We sincerely hoped that America would be sympathetic to us and help us. Unfortunately, the facts were different. Although in 2004 and 2005 we were told that we were innocent, we have been incarcerated in jail for the past six years until the present day. We fail to know why we are still in jail here. We still hope that the US government will free us soon and send us to a safe place. Being away from family, away from our homeland, and also away from the outside world and losing any contact with anyone is not suitable for a human being, as, also, is being forbidden from experiencing natural sunlight and natural air, and being surrounded by a metal box on all sides.

He then described how his health had declined, and how one of his countrymen, Abdulrazaq (who is still at Guantánamo) had been told in August 2007 that he would be released. As a result, he asked to be moved from the isolated cells in Camp 6, and embarked on a hunger strike when his request was refused. Abdulghappar added:

Currently, he is on punishment and his situation is even worse. He is shackled to the restraint chair and force-fed twice a day by the guards, who wear glass shields on their faces … Abdulrazaq would never want to go on hunger strike. However, the circumstances here forced him to do so, as he had no other choice. If the oppression was not unbearable, who would want to throw himself on a burning fire? In the US constitution, is it a crime for someone to ask to protect his health and to ask for his rights? If it does count as a crime, then what is the difference between the US constitution and the Communist constitution?

Little is known of the last man, Anwar Hassan, who was 27 when he was seized, because he, like Nag Mohamed, refused to take part in his tribunal or his review boards. However, his lawyers, Angela Vigil and George Clarke, explained that he was one of several prisoners whose tribunals had been reconvened when they produced what Matthew Waxman, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, regarded as the wrong result. They noted that, “contrary to the government’s suggestion,” the change of determination between the first and second CSRTs was not based on “additional classified information” (of which there was none), but seemed, instead, to have been based solely on “communications” from Matthew Waxman “pressing for [a] reversal” of the first CSRT determination.

The “do-over” tribunals were a low point, even for the Bush administration, with its complete disregard for fairness, justice and the law, but with a massacre, human trafficking for bounty payments, cynical deals between the US and Chinese governments, and hunger strikes and force-feeding as part of these men’s experience of US custody, it remains a disappointment to me that they have now — apparently for nearly $100,000 a head — been thrown on the tender mercies of the people of Palau, rather than being allowed to settle in the United States.

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

As published on the Huffington Post, Antiwar.com and CounterPunch.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 19 prisoners released from February to October 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), A Letter To Barack Obama From A Guantánamo Uighur (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Real Uyghur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda? (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Uighurs In Bermuda: Interviews And New Photos (June 2009), Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now! (June 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China? (July 2009), Chair Of The American Conservative Union Supports The Guantánamo Uighurs (July 2009), Three Uighurs Talk About Chinese Interrogation At Guantánamo (July 2009), House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo (July 2009), A Profile of Rushan Abbas, The Guantánamo Uighurs’ Interpreter (August 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

Six Uighurs Go To Palau; Seven Remain In Guantánamo

Andy Worthington — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:21:33 +0000

As first reported by the Associated Press, six of the remaining 13 Uighurs in Guantánamo have just arrived on the Pacific island of Palau, where they have been given new homes. The AP’s source said that, overnight, police were guarding the house where the men will live, in the heart of the capital, Koror.

This partly solves one of President Obama’s outstanding problems at Guantánamo, as there were 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) at Guantánamo when Obama took office, and they had already been waiting for three and a half months to be released, after District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered their release into the United States in October 2008. Judge Urbina did so because the government had failed to contest the Uighurs’ habeas corpus petition (after a devastating court defeat in June 2008), because they could not be returned to China, where they were at risk of ill-treatment or worse, because no other country had been found that would take them, and because their continued detention was unconstitutional.

The Bush administration appealed, and, when President Obama took office, he followed the same line, failing to take the opportunity to bring the Uighurs to the States, which would have demonstrated to the American people that they were not terrorists. Bringing the men to the United States would also have demonstrated that the Bush administration made some horrendous mistakes when, as with the Uighurs and countless other prisoners at Guantánamo, it offered bounty payments to its Afghan and Pakistani allies, and failed to provide any screening whatsoever for the prisoners who subsequently ended up in US custody, maintaining, instead, that they were all “enemy combatants,” because the President said they were.

Having backed down at a crucial time — allowing his right-wing detractors to seize the initiative on Guantánamo, reviving Dick Cheney’s unsubstantiated claims that all the Guantánamo prisoners were terrorists — President Obama then went fishing for other nations who were able to resist the wrath of China. In June, four of the Uighurs moved to Bermuda (which is too rich to care about China), and now another six have arrived in Palau (which, conveniently, refuses to recognize the People’s Republic of China, and has diplomatic dealings with Taiwan instead).

Any time innocent men are freed from Guantánamo, the United States claws back a little more of the luster it lost so spectacularly under the Bush administration, but this latest release still leaves seven Uighurs in Guantánamo — not to mention the 60 or so other prisoners who have been cleared for release — and amongst those seven, as the Washington Post reported On October 20, is one man that Palau refused to take. Arkin Mahmud “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement,” and his brother, Bahtiyar Mahnut, turned down Palau’s offer of a new home for himself, in order to stay with him.

This, of course, means that the two men “could remain in custody indefinitely,” a situation that the Post described as “unconscionable,” and it led to the editors proposing that, because the US “has complete control over the fate of these men and should take full responsibility in righting the situation,” the President should introduce “narrowly crafted legislation that would allow Mr. Mahmud and Mr. Mahnut into the United States, where they could remain together and Mr. Mahmud could get the medical help he needs.”

Following up on the story of the men’s release, the New York Times noted that the six men “are expected to remain [in Palau] while seeking a permanent home elsewhere.” Wells Dixon, who represents three of the men at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Times, “Palau is courageous to offer our Uighur clients a temporary home. We are hopeful that other countries like Australia and Germany will resettle them permanently.”

And, he could have added, the United States.

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

Cross-posted on The Public Record, Common Dreams and AlterNet.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), A Letter To Barack Obama From A Guantánamo Uighur (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Real Uyghur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda? (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Uighurs In Bermuda: Interviews And New Photos (June 2009), Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now! (June 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China? (July 2009), Chair Of The American Conservative Union Supports The Guantánamo Uighurs (July 2009), Three Uighurs Talk About Chinese Interrogation At Guantánamo (July 2009), House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo (July 2009), A Profile of Rushan Abbas, The Guantánamo Uighurs’ Interpreter (August 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

Senate Finally Allows Guantánamo Trials In US, But Not Homes For Innocent Men

Andy Worthington — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:49:55 +0000

After railing against Senators and Representatives for their cowardly, uninformed and unacceptable attempts to prevent President Obama from bringing any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland for any reason — even for trials — which I wrote about most recently in an article entitled, “On Guantánamo, Lawmakers Reveal They Are Still Dick Cheney’s Pawns,” I’m delighted to report that, last Tuesday, the Senate finally saw sense, voting, by 79 votes to 19, as part of a $42.8 billion bill for Homeland Security, to accept that the administration can bring prisoners to the US mainland to face trials.

The vote follows a similar climbdown two week ago by the House of Representatives, which had recently allowed itself to be mesmerized by a paranoid motion proposed by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ken.), and the bill will now be signed into law by President Obama.

However, Congress is still interfering to an unacceptable degree in the administration’s plans, insisting, as AFP described it, that the President provides lawmakers with “a detailed assessment of the possible security risk 45 days before” prisoners are brought to trial in the United States,” including “details of the dangers involved, steps to diminish the possible threat, the legal rationale for the transfer, and assurances to the governor of the receiving state that the individual poses little or no security risk.”

In addition, the bill as it was finally passed still allows lawmakers to meddle with plans to transfer prisoners to other countries, requiring as AFP put it, that prisoners “cannot be transferred to another country unless the president gives Congress the name of the detainee, the destination, a risk assessment, and the terms of a transfer.” As Lt. Col. David Frakt, the former military defense attorney for released prisoner Mohamed Jawad, explained to me recently, this is actually an example of Congress reinforcing the powers it granted itself in summer, when lawmakers insisted on being given two weeks’ notice before any prisoner — even those cleared by the courts after successful habeas corpus petitions — can be released.

In Lt. Col. Frakt’s words, what this meant was that Congress had decided that, for this two-week period, prisoners cleared by US courts can actually be held “in the status of ‘Congressional prisoner,’ a status for which there is no Constitutional authority,” and this unconstitutional power grab has not been removed in the final discussions regarding the bill.

Even so, the saddest part of the bill — which still casts the gloomiest of light on the lawmakers — is the lawmakers’ insistence that no prisoner can be released onto US soil, either on the mainland or on overseas territories like Guam or Puerto Rico. This has done nothing but alienate European countries, who are being asked to take cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture in their home countries, and, moreover, threatens to bring Congress into conflict with the Supreme Court.

Last Tuesday, as the Senate voted to allow prisoners to be brought to the US to face trial, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case of the Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), who remain in Guantánamo, even though a District Court judge ordered their release into the United States over a year ago, after the Bush administration conceded that they had no connection with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The judge, Ricardo Urbina, ruled that they be brought to the United States, because no other country had been found that would accept them, and because their continued detention in Guantánamo was unconstitutional.

As I explained in an article last week, the Justice Department, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, disagreed, as did the Court of Appeals, which ruled that issues involving the immigration of aliens were matters for the Executive and not the courts to decide, even though the men’s lawyers pointed out that this effectively gutted habeas corpus of all meaning.

President Obama, of course, failed to rise to this challenge by bringing these men to the United States, and, ever since, his administration has scrabbled around, in a generally undignified manner, trying to find new homes for them, sending four to Bermuda in June, and hoping that the rest would be relocated to the remote Pacific island of Palau.

However, as the Washington Post noted in a principled editorial last Wednesday, the stumbling block to this otherwise workable plan to pretend that the United States has no obligations towards men it wrongly imprisoned for nearly eight years is that Palau has refused to take one of the men, Arkin Mahmud, who “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement.” As a result, his brother, Bahtiyar Mahnut, has decided to turn down Palau’s offer of a new home for himself, in order to stay with his brother. As the Post noted, “Unless another country accepts the brothers, they could remain in custody indefinitely — a prospect that is unconscionable and that no doubt informed the justices’ decision to hear the matter.”

The Post proceeded to explain that the Supreme Court was faced with a tricky legal decision, because the justices will be considering whether, in defense of habeas corpus, and in reference to the unique position in which the Guantánamo prisoners are held, they are being asked to decide whether a judge has the power to order the release of prisoners into the US, when all the precedents, as the Court of Appeals made clear, establish that the admission of foreigners in to the US is a matter for the executive and legislative branches of government.

However, as the Post also noted:

[T]he moral and ethical imperatives are clear and compelling. The Uighurs find themselves subject to detention not because they tried to enter the country illegally but because they were snatched in Pakistan and Afghanistan after the United States’ 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and forcibly taken to Guantánamo. The United States has complete control over the fate of these men and should take full responsibility in righting the situation. That should include narrowly crafted legislation that would allow Mr. Mahmud and Mr. Mahnut into the United States, where they could remain together and Mr. Mahmud could get the medical help he needs.

This is a bold move for one of the nation’s leading newspapers to take, but I unreservedly commend the Post’s editors for it, as it addresses a seemingly insoluble quandary, which, it seems to me, cannot otherwise be resolved. Whilst it is probable that a number of the remaining Uighurs will soon start a new life in Palau, the administration may want to think long and hard about what to do with Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut, and to be grateful that only the Washington Post has chosen to shine a spotlight on the continued imprisonment of an innocent man whose detention has not only been regarded as unconstitutional for over a year, but who also “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement.”

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Continued Incarceration of the Innocent.” Cross-posted on The Public Record.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), A Letter To Barack Obama From A Guantánamo Uighur (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Real Uyghur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda? (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Uighurs In Bermuda: Interviews And New Photos (June 2009), Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now! (June 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China? (July 2009), Chair Of The American Conservative Union Supports The Guantánamo Uighurs (July 2009), Three Uighurs Talk About Chinese Interrogation At Guantánamo (July 2009), House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo (July 2009), A Profile of Rushan Abbas, The Guantánamo Uighurs’ Interpreter (August 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

Justice At Last? Guantánamo Uighurs Ask Supreme Court For Release Into US

Andy Worthington — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:16:50 +0000

One year and two weeks ago, District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered that 17 Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo be released into the United States. Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, the Uighurs were seized and sold to US forces by Pakistani villagers in December 2001, after they had fled a settlement in the Afghan mountains, where they had ended up after fleeing Chinese oppression.

One of the men had secured a resounding court victory last June, when appeals court judges ruled that the government had failed to prove that he was an “enemy combatant,” involved in any way with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and in the wake of this ruling the government abandoned all pretense that any of other 16 men were “enemy combatants” either.

Last October, reviewing the habeas corpus petitions of these 17 men, Judge Urbina ordered their release into the United States for three compelling reasons: firstly, because they could not be returned to China, where there were fears that they would be subjected to ill-treatment, torture or worse; secondly, because no other country had been found that would accept them, despite the State Department scouring the globe; and thirdly, because it was unconstitutional for the United States to be holding innocent men at Guantánamo.

After years of indifference — or worse — on the part of the US authorities, who knew that these men were innocent almost from the moment that they were seized, this was a proud moment for US justice, and appeared to provide the remedy that the Supreme Court intended for prisoners at Guantánamo who were found to be innocent by a court, when the nation’s most important judges granted them constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights in June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush.

However, the Bush administration disagreed, appealing the ruling and persuading a notoriously Conservative bench of the Court of Appeals to rule that, on questions regarding the immigration of aliens into the United States (even those who had been wrongly detained in an experimental prison camp for over six years), the decision was in the hands of the Executive, and not the courts.

In what I regard as one of the weakest moments of the Obama presidency regarding Guantánamo, the Justice Department maintained the same line as the Bush administration in February this year, when the Court of Appeals reconvened en banc (with a full panel of judges) to make a final ruling, in which they officially reversed Judge Urbina’s principled decision to order the men’s release into the United States.

Had the government backed down, the four Uighurs who took up residence in Bermuda in June — where they soon demonstrated to any open-minded local that they were not, and had never been terrorists — would have performed the same remarkable task on the streets of Washington D.C. instead, and even Americans seduced by the Bush administration’s unsubstantiated rhetoric about the “terrorists” of Guantánamo would have been able to discover, first hand, that the Bush administration made mistakes at Guantánamo, and that innocent men were held.

Salahidin Abdulahad and Khalil Manut, photographed by Michelle Shephard for the Toronto Star, enjoy their new-found freedom by fishing in the ocean in Bermuda, June 2009.

Instead, lawmakers of both parties — spurred on by the dark rumblings of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who ghoulishly reappeared, encouraged by the mainstream media, who behaved as though he was still in power — reinforced the Court of Appeals’ ruling, passing legislation preventing the release of any Guantánamo prisoner (however innocent) onto the US mainland.

Betrayed by the Executive branch, Congress and the Court of Appeals, the Uighurs’ lawyers were obliged to appeal to the Supreme Court, which they did in April, asking that the justices address the following question (PDF):

Whether a federal court exercising its habeas jurisdiction, as confirmed by Boumediene v. Bush, has no power to order the release of prisoners held by the Executive for seven years, where the Executive detention is indefinite and without authorization in law, and release into the continental United States is the only possible effective remedy.

In the meantime, the government found a new home in Bermuda for four of the men, and began the negotiations that, to date, appear to have secured the agreement of six of the remaining 13 men that they will be resettled on the remote Pacific island of Palau.

In June, the Supreme Court deferred a decision on the Uighurs — perhaps to allow the government time to find new homes for the men — but on Tuesday the justices unexpectedly agreed to hear the case, Kiyemba v. Obama, which, of course, touches on the very territory that they last visited in June 2008.

Oral argument in the case is not expected until next year, and in the meantime the government may find new homes for the remaining 13 Uighurs, rendering the case moot, but in briefs the battle lines have been drawn.

On the one hand is the government, endorsing Bush-era policies, and stating, via Solicitor General Elena Kagan, that the Uighurs’ remedy has been granted by a court, and that they are “free to go to any country that is wiling to accept them,” but that “there is a fundamental difference between ordering the release of a detained alien to permit him to return home or to another country, and ordering that the alien be brought to and released in the United States without regard to immigration laws.”

And for the Uighurs, there is Sabin Willett, a Boston-based attorney, and his team, who argue that the Court of Appeals’ ruling made a mockery of the habeas rights extended to the prisoners by the Supreme Court, and transformed Judge Urbina’s ruling into nothing more than an empty gesture. Willett explained that it made courts “powerless to relieve unlawful imprisonment, even when the executive brought the prisoners to our threshold, imprisons them there without legal justification, and — as seven years have so poignantly proved — there is nowhere else to go.”

In a statement issued via the Center for Constitutional Rights, he added, “We now have asked the Supreme Court to hear the Uighur cases, and rule that the writ of habeas corpus guarantees to the innocent not just a judge’s learned essay, but something meaningful — their release.”

As the eighth anniversary of the men’s wrongful capture approaches, they surely deserve nothing less.

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

As published on the Huffington Post.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), A Letter To Barack Obama From A Guantánamo Uighur (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Real Uyghur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda? (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Uighurs In Bermuda: Interviews And New Photos (June 2009), Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now! (June 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China? (July 2009), Chair Of The American Conservative Union Supports The Guantánamo Uighurs (July 2009), Three Uighurs Talk About Chinese Interrogation At Guantánamo (July 2009), House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo (July 2009), A Profile of Rushan Abbas, The Guantánamo Uighurs’ Interpreter (August 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

Finding New Homes For 44 Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners

Andy Worthington — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:33:12 +0000

In a recent article, “75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today,” I examined the implications of an announcement that 75 of the remaining 223 prisoners in Guantánamo have been cleared for release. This came by way of a list posted in the prison, identifying the prisoners by nationality, and a statement by a military spokesman, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, who explained, “It was an opportunity to just provide better communication. There’s a lot of information out there and you get a lot of things from a lot of different angles. It helps put it in a more succinct context for them [the prisoners].”

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

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

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

Who are the 44 prisoners?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What has the Task Force been doing for eight months?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today

Andy Worthington — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:49:04 +0000

Last week, the Obama administration finally admitted that it might not be possible to close Guantánamo by the President’s self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, when defense secretary Robert Gates told ABC News’ “This Week” that it was “going to be tough” to meet the deadline. The announcement followed what appeared to be strategic leaks by administration insiders, which were designed to blame White House Counsel Greg Craig for the government’s woes.

Why it has taken so long to clear 75 prisoners for release

It was Craig who had pushed for the deadline, but although the Washington Post, in a joint article with ProPublica, reported several critical comments from current officials, claiming that Craig’s drive to set a deadline flew in the face of conflicting advice — in particular, a claim by “a senior government lawyer” that “The entire civil service counseled him not to set a deadline” — others were more supportive. The Post closed its article with a comment from an administration official who was “more effusive,” and who stated, “Greg Craig is a hero. He took responsibility for this policy from the beginning, and he has guts and character. If we can’t get it done by the deadline, then at least we’ll have done as much as we can as smoothly as we could have.” In addition, in his interview with ABC News, Secretary Gates also declared his support for the initiative:

When the president elect met with his new national security team in Chicago on December 7th … last year, this issue was discussed, about closing Guantánamo and executive orders to do that and so on. And the question was, should we set a deadline? Should we pin ourselves down? I actually was one of those who said we should because I know enough from being around this town that if you don’t put a deadline on something, you’ll never move the bureaucracy. But I also said and then if we find we can’t get it done by that time but we have a good plan, then you’re in a position to say it’s going to take us a little longer but we are moving in the direction of implementing the policy that the president set. And I think that’s the position that we’re in.

Moreover, the lion’s share of the blame for delays in the closure of Guantánamo actually lies with lawmakers and with other officials in the Obama administration. After the President issued executive orders on his second day in office, which included the Guantánamo deadline, the administration then dithered, failing to support Guantánamo’s most celebrated innocents, the Uighurs, whose release into the United States was ordered by District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina last October, by backing the Court of Appeals in its decision to overturn that ruling in February this year.

This cowardice then allowed paranoid and opportunistic right-wingers to seize the initiative, reviving the Bush administration’s deceitful claims that Guantánamo is “full of terrorists” (as particularly promoted by former Vice President Dick Cheney), and encouraging both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives to pass legislation preventing the transfer of prisoners to the United States and withholding funding for the prison’s closure.

In addition, the government’s decision to support the Court of Appeals in the Uighurs’ case was not the only example of the Justice Department’s distressing failure to confront the many injustices inherited from the Bush administration. Since Obama came to power, those charged with preparing the government’s opposition to other prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions — apparently functioning without adequate insight from above — have persistently failed to recognize the weaknesses in the government’s case against a large number of the prisoners, and have repeatedly humiliated themselves in court, challenging habeas corpus petitions that they have not only lost, but that have been accompanied by withering criticism from the judges involved (see the cases of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco and Fouad al-Rabiah for the most severe examples).

The only apparent explanation for this lack of oversight is that, rather than focusing on the supposed evidence — or lack of it — in the habeas cases, the administration has focused instead on its own alternative to the court reviews, an interagency Task Force that has been reviewing the cases independently.

Last week, amidst the general gloom, some good news emerged from the Task Force, when a military spokesman announced that the interagency review had, to date, cleared 78 of the remaining prisoners. Three were released on the eve of the announcement (a Yemeni, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, who was repatriated five months after a judge ordered his release, and two Uzbeks, Oybek Jabbarov and Shakhrukh Hamiduva, cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, who were sent to Ireland), but the information released in connection with the remaining 75 prisoners provides a fascinating snapshot into the workings of the Task Force and some of the difficulties of dealing with the toxic legacy of the Bush administration, even though, in other ways, the announcement also confirms the existence of an unnerving paralysis on the part of the Obama administration when it comes to actually releasing prisoners, and also raises questions about what the Task Force has actually been doing for the last eight months.

The 31 prisoners who could be released today

Of the 75 prisoners cleared for release, 18 had their release ordered by the courts, after successful habeas petitions, and of the remaining 57, at least 21, and probably as many as 36, were, like the Uzbeks mentioned above, cleared for release between 2006 and 2008 by Bush-era military review boards. For the first time, the Obama administration identified prisoners cleared for release by their nationalities, and although no names were given — to protect those who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they would face torture on their return, for whom delicate negotiations are ongoing with third countries who might take them — it is readily apparent from the list that, in the cases of 31 of these prisoners — from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — the need for anonymity is unnecessary, as none of these men have any reason to fear being returned to their home countries.

More significantly, there is no reason for any of these men to be held at Guantánamo for one minute longer, and no reason why they should not be put on a plane and flown home today, but such is the taint of Guantánamo that the administration has found reasons to delay releasing these men, even though they have been cleared for release by a combination of Bush-era military review boards, the US courts, and the Obama administration’s own interagency Task Force.

Of these 31 men, two — Khalid al-Mutairi and Fouad al-Rabiah — are Kuwaitis, who secured resounding victories in their habeas cases (especially Fouad al-Rabiah, whose extraordinarily story of torture and false confessions was mentioned above). Inexplicable delay forms part of their story too, as al-Mutairi was cleared two months ago and is still held, but I am optimistic that both men will soon be repatriated.

Three others are Saudis, and although their identities have not been revealed, and it is uncertain if they are the three remaining Saudis who were cleared for release during the Bush administration, there appears to be no good reason for their continued detention, as I explained in an article in March, when six cleared Saudis were held, and before three were released (see here and here).

Paranoia regarding the Yemenis

However, the biggest story by far, when it comes to prisoners cleared for release who are still held, concerns the Yemenis, who make up 26 of the 75 prisoners cleared for release (and around 95 of the 223 prisoners still held in Guantánamo). They include Yasim Basardah, who was cleared for release by a District Court judge in April, and Ayman Batarfi, a doctor whose release was approved by the Task Force that same month, essentially to head off a humiliating defeat in court. The others have not been identified, although it seems likely that they include some, if not all of the 12 Yemenis approved for release between 2006 and 2008 by Bush-era military review boards. And yet, despite the fact that some of these men have been cleared twice over the last three years, and despite the fact that, in April, the judge in Ayman Batarfi’s case, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, criticized the government’s behavior in the strongest possible terms, these 26 men are still imprisoned in Guantánamo.

To understand quite how severely the courts regard the continued detention of men who have been cleared for release, it is worth recalling that, back in April, when Judge Sullivan accepted the government’s sudden decision to release Batarfi, he made a point of publicly stating that he hoped it was not “another ploy not to return Dr. Batarfi to his country of origin but to continue with his deprivation of his fair day in court,” and requested status reports every 14 days. He also stated:

I’m not going to continue to tolerate indefinite delay on the part of the United States government. I mean, this Guantánamo issue is a travesty. It ranks up there with the internment of Japanese-American citizens years ago. It’s a horror story in the American system of jurisprudence, and quite frankly, I’m not going to buy into an extended indefinite delay of this man’s stay at Guantánamo, or anyone else on my calendar.

That was six months ago, and I take it that, as a result, Judge Sullivan has now had to endure twelve status reports explaining why the government has not yet been able to free Dr. Batarfi (which must have pushed his patience to its limits). However, as an article in Sunday’s New York Times explained, the fear of releasing Yemenis is so deep-seated that the administration will resort to the most ludicrous claims to prevent their release.

The Times article discussed Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, the man freed last weekend, five months after District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ordered his release, but although the author, Scott Shane, spelled out that Ali Ahmed, a teenager seized in a guest house in Pakistan, was cleared by Judge Kessler, who “ruled that his incarceration had never been justified and ordered the government to get to work ‘forthwith’ on his release,” and although he added that his lawyer, Brent N. Rushforth, stated that his client was known as “the sweet kid” to other prisoners in Guantánamo, this was not enough for the government, and it appears that Ali Ahmed may only have been released because Judge Kessler was on the verge of openly criticizing the government. As the Times described it, she “appeared to be losing patience with the delay in complying with her May 11 release order,” and this coincided with Ali Ahmed’s release.

For some time now, the government has been trying to persuade the Saudi government to extend its successful rehabilitation program — which processed over a hundred Saudi ex-prisoners in 2006 and 2007 — to the Yemenis, because it fears that, even though cleared for release, they might still constitute a threat. Negotiations have proven to be thorny — in particular, it seems, because the Saudi model relies upon strong family support that would not be available for the Yemenis in Saudi Arabia — but when the administration’s fears are spelled out, as they were in the Times on Sunday, it is clear that they are, to put it bluntly, completely unreasonable. In Scott Shane’s words, Obama administration officials explained that, “Even if Mr. Ahmed was not dangerous in 2002 …Guantánamo itself might have radicalized him, exposing him to militants and embittering him against the United States.”

The officials have valid fears about political instability in Yemen, and the existence of terrorist groups, even though the Yemeni authorities have stated that none of the 16 Yemenis returned from Guantánamo “have joined terrorist groups,” but whatever their fears, they do not seem to have reflected that, if their rationale for not releasing any of the Yemenis from Guantánamo was extended to the US prison system, it would mean that no prisoner would ever be released at the end of their sentence, because prison “might have radicalized” them, and also, of course, that it would lead to no prisoner ever being released from Guantánamo.

To me — and to many other readers, I hope — this is simply unacceptable, but it demonstrates yet again that only at Guantánamo can fear trump justice to such an alarming degree.

In a second article to follow soon, I’ll look at the cases of the other 44 prisoners cleared for release by the Guantánamo Task Force, from countries including Algeria, China, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will face torture on their return, and ask why the Task Force’s decisions so closely mirror those already taken by Bush-era military review boards, and whether the administration is doing all it can to mitigate the taint of Guantánamo and to find new homes for these men in other countries.

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

As published on AlterNet, the Huffington Post and The Public Record. Cross-posted on Mother Jones.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009).

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