With Boumediene, therefore, the Supreme Court sent a clear message to both the executive and the politicians in Congress that passing new laws — 2005’s Detainee Treatment Act and 2006’s Military Commissions Act — to deprive the prisoners of the right to hear why they are being held was actually unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court had been stirred to this apparently unusual ruling — granting habeas rights to foreigners detained in wartime — because of its grave concerns that the prisoners, held neither as Prisoners of War, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminals, who could face a trial in the US court system, had never been adequately screened through the administrative process that the government had established in response to Rasul, and had, literally, no recourse to justice whatsoever.

In this they were undoubtedly correct. The administrative hearings — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals — were savaged last year by a former insider, Lt, Col. Stephen Abraham, who derided them for drawing on appallingly weak, generalized and unsubstantiated information masquerading as “evidence,” and for being designed, essentially, to rubber-stamp the government’s unchecked assertions that the prisoners were “enemy combatants,” who could be held without charge or trial.

Two weeks after Boumediene, the Court of Appeals was finally allowed to scrutinize the government’s case against one of these “enemy combatants.” The case, Parhat v. Gates, had, like the prisoners themselves, been held in a legal limbo pending the Supreme Court’s decision, but once the judges were free to act they duly ruled that the four-year old designation of Hufaiza Parhat, a Chinese Muslim, as an “enemy combatant” was “invalid,” and lambasted the quality of the government’s evidence as being akin to a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Since then, however, the headline writers have moved on, because most of the response to Boumediene and Parhat is now taking place behind the scenes. After some grumbling from the President, who told a Republican party meeting, “With this decision, hardened terrorists, hardened foreign terrorists, now enjoy certain legal rights previously reserved for American citizens,” and an extraordinary tirade from John McCain, the administration was forced to concede that it had no chance of amending the Constitution any time soon, and resorted, instead, to delaying tactics.

As the US District Court moved swiftly, and Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth announced, on July 2, that Senior Judge Thomas F. Hogan had been assigned “to coordinate and manage proceedings in all Guantánamo Bay cases so that these cases can be addressed as expeditiously as possible,” the Department of Justice began dragging its heels.

When lawyers for the prisoners and DoJ representatives met Judge Hogan last week, Assistant Attorney General Gregory Katsas “asked for two months to recruit lawyers and at least another two months to amend the existing returns [roughly 100 in total] and file 100 new ones.” He claimed, additionally, that the effort would strain the Justice Department’s resources “almost to the breaking point.”

“To its credit,” as the Miami Herald explained in a pointed editorial, “the court was skeptical, to say the least. Judge Hogan said he could not fathom why evidence would suddenly have to be changed if it had been considered strong enough to warrant holding the detainees for periods of up to six years.” In Hogan’s own words, “If it wasn’t sufficient, then they shouldn’t have been picked up.”

As the Legal Times blog put it, Judge Hogan added that he “wanted the returns filed sooner,” said he had “misgivings about granting the government ‘carte blanche’ to augment its evidence ‘without saying why,’” and reminded the government of what the Supreme Court had stated in Boumediene: “The cost of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody.” With a final flourish, he told the DoJ in no uncertain terms, “The time has come to move these forward. Set aside every other case that’s pending in the division and address this case first.”

The government was no more fortunate when it came up against District Judge Richard Leon, who had decided not to transfer his cases — 12 in total, involving 35 prisoners — to Judge Hogan. “This is going to be moved as fast as possible,” Judge Leon told a similar gathering of Guantánamo lawyers and DoJ representatives. “These men have waited long enough to get a decision. The Supreme Court has spoken. They want this done. By God, we’ll get this done.”

Judge Leon also explained, as Reuters described it, that he “would not allow the Department of Defense or the CIA to delay the cases while reviewing classified information used to hold the prisoners as enemy combatants.” “Let there be no doubt that the Department of Defense and the CIA must be prepared to come to the courtroom and defend their decisions if we get any sense that there is an effort by those agencies to slow” down the proceedings,” he said, adding, in a comment that echoed Judge Hogan’s doubts about the government’s delaying tactics, “that he probably would require the government to show why it wants to file new evidence to justify holding a detainee.” He then “ordered both sides to provide status reports by July 18, addressing issues including when and where the detainee had been taken into custody” and “scheduled closed meetings with both sides for July 23 and 24,” adding that he wanted to decide the cases before the next President takes office in January 2009.

Lawyers for the prisoners are now working overtime preparing their cases, in the hope that the elusive justice that their clients have been seeking for so many years is almost within reach.

Problems remain, however. Even with rulings comparable to Parhat v. Gates, the difficulty of finding new homes for many of these men has not been resolved. Hufaiza Parhat remains in Guantánamo, despite his success in the Court of Appeals, because he cannot be returned to China, as a result of treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture.

The government recently announced that 54 prisoners in total (20 percent of Guantánamo’s current population) are awaiting release from Guantánamo if suitable homes can be found. As I have reported before, many of these men are from countries including Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, where they too would face torture — or worse — if repatriated, and there are fears that, even if many of the other prisoners are finally vindicated by a US court, many of them will also be unable to return home.

As the Miami Herald editorial concluded, accurately, “In cases where the government’s evidence is either weak or nonexistent, judges will be able to order suspects released, but they lack authority to bring detainees into the United States. That’s why the Bush administration should be working overtime to find countries that will take them back.”

Few are mentioning it, but it should also be asked if now is not the time for serious discussions to take place regarding finding homes for these men in the country whose government was responsible for their wrongful imprisonment in the first place.

Andy is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

There is, therefore, enormous excitement in the media about the first ever release of images from interrogations in Guantánamo: seven and a half hours of footage (highlights available here in a ten-minute version) from interrogations of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight with US soldiers in Afghanistan in July 2002.

In February 2003, when he was still only 16, Omar was visited by representatives of his home country’s Air Force Office of Special Investigations. As has already been widely reported, the video footage from these interrogations — released to Omar’s Canadian lawyers, Nathan Whitling and Dennis Edney, as the result of a decision in May by the Supreme Court of Canada and a decision in June by the Federal Court of Canada — shows Omar displaying his wounds, weeping uncontrollably and pulling at his hair in despair.

Despite the excitement, however, documents relating to these interrogations have been available for the last six days, and it’s my belief that they demonstrate the confusion of a desperately lonely imprisoned child without any of the dubious voyeurism that the images bring, whilst also allowing a useful distance from which to appreciate the general coldness and indifference of the interrogators. As Whitling noted in an email accompanying the documents’ release, “The documents paint a picture of a victimized and exploited boy.”

The Canadian representatives interrogated Omar for four days, and in three separate documents relating to the sessions they ran through the lines of questioning they pursued, which were mainly to do with his family history and his knowledge of al-Qaeda. Omar’s father, who funded orphanages in Afghanistan, was also friendly with Osama bin Laden, and Omar and his three brothers spent much of their childhood in Afghanistan and Pakistan, on occasion sharing a compound with the bin Laden family.

Absent from these reports, however, is any detailed questioning relating to Omar’s supposed crime — the killing of a US soldier during the firefight in which he was captured, the veracity of which has only recently been exposed to scrutiny. Also missing are the odd flashes of humanity that can be gleaned from the videotape, when, for example, one of the interrogators attempts to calm Omar, who is clearly distraught, by saying, “I know this is stressful.”

These human touches are, however, overshadowed by the interrogators’ general indifference to Omar’s plight. As Whitling and Edney noted when they released the documents, although Omar was clearly “suffering from severe emotional problems connected with his detention and interrogation, crying heavily on more than one occasion,” the Canadian officials “dismissed his claims of abuse on the flimsiest of pretexts,” writing, in one of the reports, that his allegations of torture at the US prison in Bagram, Afghanistan, which have, of course, subsequently been verified by numerous sources, “did not ring true.”

The interrogators were also indifferent when Omar broke down after describing how he was severely wounded in one eye during the firefight that led to his capture. One report relates, “Khadr stated, ‘I lost my eyes,’ indicating that when he was shot, it affected his vision. Khadr put his head back in his hands and cried heavily. The interrogators left him at this point.” On another occasion, another report states, “Khadr has not received any letters from family since being detained. The interviewers then provided Khadr with a letter, which had recently arrived at Camp Delta. The letter was from his grandmother in Canada. Khadr was left alone to review the letter. Khadr was watched using a video monitor and a one-way piece of glass. Khadr appeared to cry while reading the letter. Tears were coming from his eyes and he was rubbing his eyes and nose.”

This might not be quite so worrying if Omar was an adult at the time of his capture and interrogations — although it would still raise uncomfortable questions about Canadian complicity in the US detention of a Canadian citizen in worryingly novel circumstances, held neither as a Prisoner of War protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as a criminal suspect facing a regular trial.

Given Omar’s circumstances, however, it directly contravenes the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which both the United States and Canada are signatories, which stipulates that juvenile prisoners — defined as those accused of a crime that took place when they were under 18 years of age — “require special protection.” The Optional Protocol specifically recognizes “the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities”, and requires its signatories to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”

Clearly, these requirements have not been fulfilled in Omar’s case, and the Canadians’ complicity in Omar’s detention and interrogation also, of course, make a mockery of the Canadian government’s insistent mantra — that it would not intervene in Omar’s case since it had received assurances from the United States that Omar was being treated humanely — which, as Whitney notes, “has now been proven to have been an attempt to misinform the Canadian public.”

Also included in the documents released by Whitling and Edney, although not featured in the videotapes, are notes from a second visit with Omar, by Jim Gould of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, in March 2004. In a summary of the visit by R. Scott Hetherington, the Director of the Foreign Intelligence Division, Gould, who regarded himself as “an amateur observer of the human condition,” described Omar as “a thoroughly ‘screwed-up’ young man,” adding, pertinently, “All those persons who have been in positions of authority over him have abused him and his trust, for their own purposes. In this group can be included his parent and grandparents, his associates in Afghanistan and fellow detainees in Camp Delta and the US military.” Significantly, Gould also noted that, as during the visit in 2003, Omar “recanted all previous statements, including his confession to having thrown the grenade that killed the American soldier.”

Despite being rather patronizing about Omar, Gould’s statement included riveting details of the US military’s treatment of Omar, explaining that, “in an effort to make him more amenable and willing to talk,” the authorities had placed him on the “frequent flyer program,” the euphemistic name for a program of prolonged sleep deprivation. “For the three weeks prior to Mr. Gould’s visit,” the report continued, Omar “has not been permitted more than three hours in any location. At three hour intervals he is moved to another block, thus denying him uninterrupted sleep.” Gould was also told that Omar would “soon be placed in isolation for up to three weeks” and would then be interviewed again.

Although Gould was critical of Omar’s US interrogator, noting that he “seemed to be trying to intimidate Omar or force Omar to talk rather then trying to cajole him into cooperation,” he was unconcerned about the prolonged sleep deprivation, noting, nonchalantly, that Omar “did not appear to have been affected by three weeks on the ‘frequent flyer’ program.” Four years later, however, on June 25, 2008, Mr. Justice Richard Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada thought differently, and ruled that this treatment constituted a breach of the United Nations Convention against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. As Nathan Whitling noted, without elaboration, “The Canadian government did not attempt to appeal this decision.”

The most distressing anecdote from Gould’s report, however, which, bizarrely, he portrayed as an example of Omar “hav[ing] some feelings,” followed a session with an interrogator from the Department of Defense, who had shown him a photo of his family, only for Omar to deny that he knew anyone in the picture. “Left alone with the picture and despite his shackles,” the report continued, “Omar urinated on the picture. The MPs cleaned him, the picture and floor and again left him alone with the picture — after shortening his shackles so that he couldn’t urinate on the picture again. But, with the flexibility of youth, he was able to lower his trousers and again urinated on the picture. Again the MPs cleaned up and left him alone with the picture on a table in front of him. After two and a half hours alone and probably assuming that he was no longer being watched, Omar laid his head down on the table beside the picture in what was seen as an affectionate manner.”

This is an example of Omar “hav[ing] some feelings”? In my world, which I hope you share, it shows a horrendously isolated and abused teenager displaying mood swings that are symptomatic of extreme mental disturbance.

As Dr. Eric Trupin, who has conducted extensive research on the effects of incarceration on adolescents, explained in 2005 after reviewing the results of mental status tests administered by Omar’s US lawyers, which followed three years of interrogations that began as soon as Omar was captured, and which had a cumulative effect that the Canadians either could not or would not consider:

The impact of these harsh interrogation techniques on an adolescent such as O.K. [Omar], who also has been isolated for almost three years, is potentially catastrophic to his future development. Long-term consequences of harsh interrogation techniques are both more pronounced for adolescents and more difficult to remediate or treat even after such interrogations are discontinued, particularly if the victim is uncertain as to whether they will resume. It is my opinion, to a reasonable scientific certainty, that O.K.’s continued subjection to the threat of physical and mental abuse places him at significant risk for future psychiatric deterioration, which may include irreversible psychiatric symptoms and disorders, such as a psychosis with treatment-resistant hallucinations, paranoid delusions and persistent self-harming attempts.

For more on the background to Omar Khadr’s story, and his abuse in US detention, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

As published on the Huffington Post, Anti-war.com, AlterNet, ZNet and CounterPunch.

This additional chapter complements Chapter 6 of The Guantánamo Files, looking at the stories of 22 Saudi prisoners not mentioned in the book. They were amongst the 250 or so prisoners (almost one-third of Guantánamo’s entire population) who were captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. In the next online chapter I’ll be looking at the stories of the Yemenis captured at the same time.

This is an anniversary of sorts, as this is my 250th post since I first began blogging about Guantánamo last May, and I’m delighted to be able to report that, since I posted the last online chapter two months ago, the sins of the executive with regard to the “War on Terror” (indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, and without an adequate screening process), as mandated by a spineless Congress, have been resolutely challenged by the judiciary.

Last month, fed up with the administration’s persistent refusal to grant the prisoners a fair hearing to ascertain whether there was, in fact, any reason to hold them, the Supreme Court, which had first granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in June 2004, only to have them removed by Congress, reinstated their habeas corpus rights, but this time grounded them in the US Constitution, beyond the whims of the executive and the politicians.

Two weeks later, the Court of Appeals, examining the first of many cases that had been on hold pending the Supreme Court’s decision, ruled decisively in favor of a Chinese prisoner, Huzaifa Parhat, stating that the tribunal which determined that he was an “enemy combatant,” who could be held indefinitely, was “invalid,” and deriding the government’s evidence as being akin to the nonsense poetry of Lewis Carroll.

And today, in the Washington Post, an article about New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer’s forthcoming book, The Dark Side, explains why these verdicts are so important, dealing another blow to the validity of the tribunal process, and reinforcing what I discovered during my research for The Guantánamo Files: that the overwhelming majority of the prisoners were either innocent men or Taliban foot soldiers with no knowledge of al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks.

Mayer describes the findings of a classified CIA report which, as the Post describes it, was “prepared in the summer of 2002 by a senior CIA analyst who was invited to the prison camp in Cuba to help Defense Department officials grapple with a major problem: They were gleaning very little useful information from the roughly 600 detainees in custody at the time.” After studying the prisoners’ cases, the analyst concluded that a third of them “had no connection with terrorism whatsoever.” The article continues: “Many were essentially bystanders who had been swept up in dragnets or turned over to the US military by bounty hunters.” Mayer adds that, when the findings were reported to Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, Guantánamo’s commander, Dunlavey “not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half — were in error.”

Mayer also explains why no action was taken to free all these wrongly imprisoned men, laying the blame squarely on Vice President Dick Cheney’s senior counsel (and now Chief of Staff), David Addington. Describing Addington as “adamant and imperious” (as all who have studied his recent testimony before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee can confirm), Mayer quotes him as saying, “There will be no review. The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.”

Keep David Addington in mind as you read this latest online chapter.

NOTE: The first three additional chapters are available here, here and here.

Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands — known collectively as the Chagos Islands — were shamefully cleared of their existing population in the late 1960s, to make way for a US airbase on Diego Garcia itself. This was a manifestation of the “special relationship” between the UK and the US, which involved the old empire facilitating its successor’s global reach, in exchange for a significant discount on the UK’s Trident nuclear missile programme.

Ever since, the exiled Chagossians have been attempting to regain access to their ancestral lands, but with limited success. Although successive British governments have toned down the racist rhetoric used at the time of the islanders’ forced removal — when official documents referred to them as “Tarzans or Men Fridays” — Diego Garcia and the Chagos Islands have remained at the forefront of a colonial mindset that has never quite been extirpated from the Foreign Office’s mentality.

Although the islanders won a stunning victory in the High Court in 2000, which ruled that their expulsion had been illegal, the government fought back in 2003, when Prime Minster Tony Blair invoked an ancient and archaic “royal prerogative” to strike down their claims once more. Although the court of appeal reversed this decision in May 2006, ruling that the islanders’ right to return was “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings,” it was clear that, in the struggle between a group of cruelly disposed islanders on the one hand, and the US military-industrial complex on the other, the Chagossians’ fight was far from over.

Last week, just after a party of Chagossians visited London to hear lawyers for the Foreign Office appealing in the House of Lords against the 2006 verdict and claiming, as the Guardian put it, that “[a]llowing the Chagossian islanders to go back to their Indian Ocean homes would be a ‘precarious and costly’ operation,” and that “the United States had said that it would also present an ‘unacceptable risk’ to its base on Diego Garcia,” David Miliband, the foreign secretary, delivered a short statement relating to the other scandal of Diego Garcia: its use for “extraordinary rendition” flights in the “War on Terror.”

After years of denials by the British government that rendition flights had passed through Diego Garcia, David Miliband admitted in February that he had just been informed by his US counterparts that, upon searching their records, they had discovered that two flights had stopped on Diego Garcia in 2002. “In both cases a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia,” Miliband said. “The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then.”

At the time, I noted that this appeared to be a sly form of damage limitation, as there was compelling evidence that, far from being used on just two occasions as a transit point, the island had actually housed a secret prison. Three examples will suffice for now, although it’s a safe bet that more revelations are forthcoming.

In October 2003, Time magazine ran an exclusive feature by Simon Elegant focusing on the imprisonment of Hambali, a “high-value detainee,” who spent years in various secret CIA prisons — including Diego Garcia — until he was transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. Other evidence came from Council of Europe investigator (and Swiss senator) Dick Marty, who reported in June 2006 that, having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, he had “received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees.’”

The final piece of evidence came from inside the US administration itself, when Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, and currently a professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, let slip on two occasions that Diego Garcia had housed a secret prison. In May 2004, he blithely declared, “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, “They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

David Miliband’s statement last Thursday did nothing to suggest that the British government had any intention of pushing the matter further with its US allies, even though, as the sovereign power in charge of the islands, the ministers are unable to evade responsibility for what has taken place on Diego Garcia.

Rather feebly, the foreign secretary stated that, after sending a list of possible rendition flights that may have passed through British territory to the US authorities, “The United States Government confirmed that, with the exception of two cases related to Diego Garcia in 2002, there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the United Kingdom, our Overseas Territories, or the Crown Dependencies, with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”

Reprieve, the legal action charity that has spent several years investigating “extraordinary rendition” and secret prisons, responded by pointing out that the British government “intentionally failed to ask the right questions of the US, and accepted implausible US assurances at face value,” noting that the Foreign Office had declined to ask the US government for the names of the prisoners transported via Diego Garcia in 2002, that it had failed to ask if any other rendition flights had passed through Diego Garcia, even if, as the US asserted, no other planes landed there, and had also failed to ask whether any other flights passed through UK territory en route to engaging in “extraordinary rendition,” which would make the UK complicit in the crime.

The British government faced a fresh barrage of criticism just three days later, when the Foreign Affairs Select Committee published its latest report (PDF) on the Overseas Territories. With reference to Diego Garcia, the Committee declared that “it is deplorable that previous US assurances about rendition flights have turned out to be false. The failure of the United States Administration to tell the truth resulted in the UK Government inadvertently misleading our Select Committee and the House of Commons. We intend to examine further the extent of UK supervision of US activities on Diego Garcia, including all flights and ships serviced from Diego Garcia.”

For good measure, the Committee also had harsh words about the government’s treatment of the Chagossians, noting, “We conclude that there is a strong moral case for the UK permitting and supporting a return … for the Chagossians. The FCO (Foreign Office) has argued that such a return would be unsustainable, but we find these arguments less than convincing.”

Under pressure on two fronts over Diego Garcia, it remains to be seen whether the government can once more worm its way out of trouble. Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, is keen not to let this happen. Speaking after the report was published, he chastised the foreign secretary for dismissing his concerns about “extraordinary rendition” when he first raised the issue last October. “The Foreign Secretary persistently gave me the brush-off. He said we could rely on US assurances,” Tyrie said, adding, “My allegations were correct. The Foreign Secretary’s brush-off was not just misplaced, it was a disgrace.”

Reprieve was even more blunt, stating, “This remains a transatlantic cover-up of epic proportions. While the British government seems content to accept whatever nonsense it is fed by its US allies, the sordid truth about Diego Garcia’s central role in the unjust rendition and detention of prisoners in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ cannot be hidden forever.”

Andy is the author of The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

As published on Indymedia, CounterPunch and ZNet.

The Miami Herald reported that the US administration blamed the Algerian government for the delay in repatriating cleared Algerians from Guantánamo, citing a comment by Sandra Hodgkinson, the Defense Department deputy in charge of detainee affairs, who said earlier this year that the Algerian authorities “simply decided that they do not want to accept back any of the detainees from the United States.” Hodgkinson added that the Algerian government’s stance was “discouraging,” and claimed that, last summer, as the Herald described it, “Washington and Algiers agreed on [the] repatriation of a number of Algerians she would not quantify. Then the North African nation reversed course.”

There is, undoubtedly, some truth to Hodgkinson’s claims, but it is not the whole story, as the case of another cleared prisoner, Ahmed Belbacha, demonstrates. A former football player in Algeria, who had been working for a government-owned oil company, Belbacha fled to the UK when Islamist militants threatened his life, and settled in the southern coastal town of Bournemouth, where he found steady employment and a group of close friends.

While waiting to see if his asylum claim was successful, Belbacha took a month’s vacation to visit Damascus, Tehran and an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan, and it was while he was in Pakistan that he was seized by opportunistic soldiers and sold to US forces. When he was finally cleared for release from Guantánamo in February 2007, having been found not to pose a threat to the US or its allies — including the UK and Algeria — his return to the UK was refused by the British government, on the grounds that he was not technically a resident at the time of his capture (even though he had already spent two productive years in the UK).

His lawyers at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve were then obliged to mount a series of successful legal actions in the US courts to prevent his return to Algeria, where he is at risk not only from the terrorists who had previously threatened him, but also from the Algerian intelligence services, who, as one of his lawyers, Zachary Katznelson, explained last summer, “have told Reprieve that if Ahmed returns, they cannot ensure that he will be safe — from their own personnel.” Katznelson also said, “He says his cell in Guantánamo is like a grave and that although it sounds crazy he would rather stay in those conditions than go back to Algeria. The fact is that he is really, really scared about what might happen to him in Algeria.”

Sadly, while Ahmed Belbacha’s fears are genuine, and should, by law, be respected by the US administration, which is a signatory to international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture, the administration has persistently demonstrated its determination to bypass its obligations by signing “memoranda of understanding” with abusive regimes including Libya, Tunisia and Jordan. For its part, Algeria has refused officially to sign a “memorandum of understanding,” but, as the case of Ahmed Belbacha shows, this has not prevented the US authorities from attempting to strike deals with the Algerian government.

Moreover, although the “memoranda of understanding” purport to guarantee humane treatment, they are clearly worthless. Last June, when two cleared Tunisians, Lotfi Lagha and Abdullah bin Omar, were repatriated, their “humane treatment” consisted of summary imprisonment, abuse, threats to rape bin Omar’s wife and daughters, and, finally, show trials based on false evidence obtained from other prisoners tortured in Tunisia, in which the two men received jail sentences of three and seven years.

The UK, too, has been involved in similar underhand activity, making equally worthless agreements with these same regimes in an attempt to rid itself of unwanted foreign nationals, who have never been charged with a crime, but who have been held in prison, or under draconian control orders, which amount to house arrest. This imprisonment without charge or trial is based on secret evidence, which has never been disclosed, but which, like the “evidence” against the Guantánamo prisoners, is often of dubious provenance. Where it has surfaced it has hinted at ineptitude on the part of the British intelligence services, or false information obtained from prisoners tortured in other countries, including Algeria.

Although a number of courts have intervened to prevent the repatriation of some of those held in Britain’s various Guantánamo-influenced forms of detention — to Libya, Jordan, and, in a few cases, Algeria — other Algerians have either failed to prevent their deportation in the courts, or have given up on the law entirely, bowing to the pressure exerted on them to force them to return “voluntarily” to the countries of their birth by doing just that. The results have been mixed, with some released, while others have been tried and sentenced for dubious terrorism-related offences (despite UK assurances to the contrary), but throughout this process the treatment appears to have been arbitrary, and it is for this reason that I chose the “Russian roulette” analogy in the heading of this article.

In Guantánamo, Ahmed Belbacha’s fear of repatriation is not unique. Several other cleared Algerian prisoners are also terrified of returning to the country of their birth, although their lawyers have not been obliged to take legal action, because the US administration has not, to date, attempted to send them home.

From what I understand, however, the two men repatriated last week had decided, unlike Ahmed Belbacha, that they preferred to take their chances with repatriation. No news has yet emerged from Algeria to indicate whether or not Mustafa Hamlili and Abdul Raham Houari were freed on their return, or whether — in the disturbing game of Russian roulette that confronts Algerians repatriated after facing allegations of impropriety, however groundless — they are, as you read this, facing ill-treatment, possible torture, show trials and further imprisonment. What is certain, however, is that neither man ever constituted a threat to either the United States or to Algeria.

The first, Abdul Raham Houari, who was just 21 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan, in November or December 2001, appears to be one of countless impressionable young men fired up by false hopes that Afghanistan would be an inspirational place for a young Muslim to visit. At a military review board hearing in December 2005, he denied an allegation that his travel had been funded by al-Qaeda, and explained that his journey to Pakistan had been facilitated by a Pakistani youth mosque, and that he had paid for his own travel. He also explained that, although he had stayed in a guest house in Bagram, Afghanistan, where he had been taught how to use a Kalashnikov, he had not engaged in hostilities against either the Northern Alliance or the United States. He added that he was injured while sleeping, when someone accidentally detonated a grenade, and that when he awoke he was in a vehicle near a hospital, and was then taken to the hospital, where he was later seized and transferred to Guantánamo.

All that can be gleaned of his behavior in Guantánamo comes from this same transcript, where it was alleged that his “[o]verall behavior has been generally non-compliant and aggressive,” and that he “has failed to comply with guards’ instructions on a number of occasions. He has been informed to keep his clothes on and has repeatedly ignored those orders and has stood in his cell naked.” A sign that this may have been less to do with deliberate insubordination, and more to do with a head injury and unaddressed mental health issues can be found in Houari’s reply. “I have never misbehaved while being a Detainee,” he said. “I am under medication for my head injury and I removed my clothes because I had a headache.”

The second man, Mustafa Hamlili, was, like at least 120 other prisoners in Guantánamo, seized in Pakistan, and not, as the administration has repeatedly alleged, on the battlefields of Afghanistan. 42 years old when he was dragged from his home, in a village near Peshawar, on May 25, 2002, the former university professor, who fought the Russians in Afghanistan, ran through his history in a dignified and eloquent manner during his tribunal at Guantánamo. Declaring his innocence, he explained, “For the last 15 years, I have not [had] any problems with anyone in my village. Anyone in my village can verify that. I am 45 and I am not going to do anything foolish. If I were going to do these things, I would have done them when I was younger. I am a Muslim. Islam is against all terrorism, violence and problems between people.”

According to the timeline of events described by Hamlili, he traveled to Pakistan from Saudi Arabia in 1987 and took up a job with the International Islamic Relief Organization, a large and well-funded Saudi charity, working in the Orphans’ Department and looking after a school until it closed in 1990. He then supported himself and his family by working as a welder and a honey seller for the next ten years, traveling to the Yemen from 1995-97, when he took the opportunity to study because he didn’t need a visa, and then returning to Pakistan.

He explained that from June to September 2001 he worked for the charity al-Wafa in Kandahar, digging wells and remodelling mosques, until the office closed. Dozens of prisoners at Guantánamo — all now released — were held because the US regarded al-Wafa as an organization that was associated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, although Hamlili was not convinced by the associations suggested by the authorities, explaining that he “never suspected al-Wafa was a terrorist organization because they had blankets, medicine, hospitals, and equipment to repair roads.” He also told his tribunal that he began working with al-Wafa because “I was told there was a Saudi organization that was looking for employees,” adding, crucially, “The Arabs in Afghanistan didn’t want to work for al-Wafa because they considered it working for [the] Saudi government. I was proud to be working for a humanitarian organization.”

Throughout his tribunal, it was unclear what Hamlili had done to be designated as an “enemy combatant,” and his Personal Representative (the military officer appointed in place of a lawyer) duly spoke up on his behalf, saying, “The Pakistani police and the Americans confiscated his audiotapes and books but found nothing to connect him with any terrorist activities.”

Hamlili himself summed up his predicament when asked why he thought he was arrested. “From what I understand,” he said, “the Pakistani intelligence was under pressure from the Americans to deliver al-Qaeda operatives and other terrorists. The Pakistani intelligence arrested people (some were poor and innocent) so they could show Americans they were working with them. The Pakistani officer that arrested me said I had nothing to worry about. I would be released shortly since they were looking specifically for al-Qaeda members.” Shamefully, Hamlili’s story is far from unique, although other tales of opportunistic arrests were not always expressed as eloquently by other prisoners rounded up by the Pakistani authorities to “show Americans they were working with them.”

At the conclusion of his hearing, when asked, “Have you ever worked for al-Qaeda or supported them in any way?” Hamlili reinforced the case for his innocence by delivering the following stinging rebuke: “No, I would rather starve than work for that organization. They try to control you and do things to your religion.”

In his last known hearing, in July 2006, Hamlili maintained the dignity he had shown previously, speaking about the conditions in the prison that had led, the previous month, to three prisoners committing suicide. “What happened because of [the abuse of] the Koran and other things could have been avoided if you had consulted with senior detainees about some matters,” he said. “With my regret, the miscommunication and mistreatment created problems and uprising. I am sorry for the ones who killed themselves recently. If they were around me, the wise one, the senior, I would have stopped it from happening because it is against my religion. I ask God to fix things and take care of mankind.”

In conclusion, the following exchange, which touched on issues relating to his possible repatriation, contained a measured defense of his religion, and his position on extremism, which I hope has come to the attention of the Algerian authorities:

Presiding Officer: I realize that you denied a lot of the allegations against you in regards to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Should you return to Algeria, what kind of assurances can the Board have that you are not going to return to this kind of activity again?

Detainee: If I wanted to be one of them, I would have worked for them before I got to this detention. I did not participate before and I will never do that in the future. I pray and fast; I read the Koran. I am a Muslim. I am a peaceful man. I like to do good things to people, which is what out prophets teach us. What’s happening now with these groups is not a representation of Islam because Islam is very clear. Islam religion is a humane religion. Islam teaches people to work together.”

Parts of this article are drawn from my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

As published on Anti-war.com and CounterPunch. An edited version was published on the Huffington Post.

Gray’s chart-topping song Babylon, played repeatedly at ear-piercing volume, is one of dozens of songs, by artists including Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, Rage Against the Machine and Britney Spears, that has been used by the US military as part of a package of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” intended to “break” prisoners held without charge or trial in the “War on Terror” — in Guantánamo, in Iraq, and in secret prisons run by the CIA.

As the Guardian recently explained, the use of Babylon first came to light “after Haj Ali, the hooded man in the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, told of being stripped, handcuffed and forced to listen to a looped sample of Babylon, at a volume so high he feared that his head would burst.”

Complaining that the only part of the torture music story that gets noticed is its “novelty aspect” — which he compared to “Guantánamo[‘s] Greatest Hits” — Gray delivered a powerful indictment of the misappropriation of his and other artists’ music.

“What we’re talking about here is people in a darkened room, physically inhibited by handcuffs, bags over their heads and music blaring at them for 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he told the BBC. “That is torture. That is nothing but torture. It doesn’t matter what the music is — it could be Tchaikovsky’s finest or it could be Barney the Dinosaur. It really doesn’t matter, it’s going to drive you completely nuts.” He added, “No-one wants to even think about it or discuss the fact that we’ve gone above and beyond all legal process and we’re torturing people.”

This is the second time that Gray has spoken out about the use of music as torture. Two weeks ago, he explained, “The moral niceties of whether they’re using my song or not are totally irrelevant. We are thinking below the level of the people we’re supposed to oppose, and it goes against our entire history and everything we claim to represent. It’s disgusting, really. Anything that draws attention to the scale of the horror and how low we’ve sunk is a good thing.”

Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents over 30 prisoners at Guantánamo, recently launched an initiative, Pull the Plug on Torture Music, encouraging artists to sign up to prevent the use of their music as part of the US military’s torture techniques, to insert a clause in their contracts preventing the misuse of their music, and, in general, to raise awareness of the issue by spreading the word and playing anti-torture gigs.

Others who have signed up for Reprieve’s initiative include Massive Attack (who recently hosted a series of Reprieve events at their Meltdown festival at London’s Southbank Centre), Alabama 3, Elbow, the Magic Numbers, Seize the Day, and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, who told Spin magazine in 2006, “The fact that our music has been co-opted in this barbaric way is really disgusting. If you’re at all familiar with the ideological teachings of the band and its support for human rights, that’s really hard to stand.”

Whether you like David Gray’s music or not should be irrelevant. He understands what’s really going on with the use of music as torture, and he’s been brave enough to raise his head above the parapet, which is not something that musicians are always prepared to do.

Andy is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

As published on Indymedia, DC Indymedia and NYC Indymedia.

A Saudi who was held in secret CIA custody from November 2002, when he was captured in the United Arab Emirates, until September 2006, when he was transferred to Guantánamo with 13 other “high-value detainees,” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), al-Nashiri is the 22nd prisoner to be put forward for trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo, and the seventh of the 14 “high-value detainees” to be charged.

In the charge sheet (PDF), al-Nashiri, who has previously been described as al-Qaeda’s operations chief in the Arabian peninsula, is accused of conspiracy, murder in violation of the rules of war, using treachery or perfidy, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, and terrorism. The charges relate in particular to his alleged role in the attacks on the USS The Sullivans and the USS Cole in 2000, and the French tanker Limburg in 2002. To increase the impact the announcement, moreover, the Pentagon indicated that it would be seeking the death penalty if he is convicted.

The problem with this otherwise seemingly valid pursuit of justice against a genuine terrorist is that al-Nashiri is one of three prisoners whose torture at the hands of CIA operatives has been publicly admitted. In February, the CIA’s director, Gen. Michael Hayden, told Congress that three “high-value detainees” were subjected to waterboarding in CIA custody: al-Nashiri, KSM (put forward for trial in February and arraigned last month), and Abu Zubaydah (who has not yet been charged, perhaps because of conflicts over his significance). Waterboarding is a form of controlled drowning, which the administration — Gen. Hayden included — refuses to acknowledge as torture, even though the torturers of the Spanish Inquisition had no hesitation in labeling it, unambiguously, as “tortura del agua.”

Al-Nashiri may well be guilty of all the charges against him, but it’s noticeable that, at his tribunal in Guantánamo last year, he was one of only three “high-value detainees” (KSM and Abu Zubaydah were the others) to claim that he had made false allegations because he was tortured. He said that he made up stories tying him to the bombing of the USS Cole and confessed to involvement in several other plots — the attack on the Limburg (see photo), other plans to bomb American ships in the Gulf, a plan to hijack a plane and crash it into a ship, and claims that Osama bin Laden had a nuclear bomb — in order to get his captors to stop torturing him. “From the time I was arrested five years ago,” he said, “they have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way, and another time they tortured me in a different way. I just said those things to make the people happy. They were very happy when I told them those things.”

The administration seems confident that it can exclude all mention of torture from the planned trials at Guantánamo, either by using evidence obtained by “clean teams” of FBI agents, who politely asked the prisoners to repeat what they had previously confessed under torture, or by allowing the government-appointed judges to use their discretion to pretend that the CIA’s secret prisons — and the torture that took place there — never existed.

In the real world, however, where evidence obtained through torture is inadmissible, it remains unclear whether the government’s attempts to set up an offshore judicial system for alleged terrorists, which openly mocks America’s core values, will ever be successful. It is now over six and a half years since the system of trials by Military Commission was introduced, which was conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his senior counsel (and now chief of staff) David Addington, and the government has yet to secure a clear victory.

The only verdict to date is in the case of the Australian David Hicks, who was repatriated to serve a nine-month sentence after accepting a plea bargain, in which he admitted providing “material support for terrorism,” in March 2007. Conveniently for the administration, this involved Hicks renouncing well-documented claims that he was tortured and abused in US custody. It also, however, involved Hicks receiving a sentence far shorter than that which prosecutors had first mooted — up to 20 years, according to some reports, which would have been comparable to the draconian sentence imposed in 2002 on John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” — which did nothing to reinforce the government’s long-cherished claims that Hicks was one of “the worst of the worst.”

And elsewhere, of course, as the Court of Appeals reminds us, the quality of the administration’s post-9/11 detention policies is most realistically compared to the nonsense spouted by an absurd character in a late nineteenth century English poem.

Andy is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

As published on the Huffington Post and CounterPunch.

At the heart of this fantasy world are the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs). Introduced in summer 2004, in a deliberate snub to the Supreme Court, which had just ruled that, contrary to the administration’s assertions, Guantánamo was run by the US and not by Cuba, and that the prisoners had the right to know why they were being held (under the “Great Writ” of habeas corpus, inherited from the British, and designed to prevent executive tyranny), the CSRTs were pale mockeries of the Geneva Conventions’ Article 5 battlefield tribunals, which were intended to separate soldiers from civilians swept up by accident in the heat of battle.

The battlefield tribunals, which the United States promoted and used in wars from Vietnam onwards, took place close to the time and place of capture, so that witnesses could reasonably be called, and enabled the US military, during the first Gulf War, to send home nearly a thousand men who would otherwise have been wrongly held as Prisoners of War.

Post-9/11, with the Geneva Conventions shredded by the administration, the prisoners at Guantánamo — “detainees” held as “enemy combatants” without rights — had to wait two and a half years until, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the administration introduced the CSRTs, which were ostensibly empowered to call witnesses, but in reality did no such thing.

Far from the time and place of capture, the prisoners’ requests for outside witnesses were all refused (on the basis that the most powerful government in the world was unable to track them down, even if they were serving in the US-backed Afghan government). In addition, the prisoners were refused the right to legal representation, and were prey to secret evidence, which was not disclosed to them, and which was frequently nothing more than hearsay, spurious allegations furnished by bounty hunters selling innocent men or foot soldiers to the US military as “terrorists,” or blatantly false confessions obtained from other prisoners through the use of torture, coercion or bribery.

The disgraceful failings of the CSRTs have been analyzed in depth, in particular in a February 2006 report by the Seton Hall Law School (based on a series of “Unclassified Summaries of Evidence” released by the Pentagon in 2005), in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (based on a detailed analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon in 2006), and in statements made last year (here and here) by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who worked on the CSRTs, and who concluded that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, consisting of intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” that “what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” and that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

Until now, however, the tribunals’ failings had never been deconstructed by a US court, and certainly not with the acute savagery reserved for last week’s ruling in the case of Parhat v. Gates. As one of dozens of cases that had been stuck in a legal roadblock after the executive persuaded Congress to change the law to remove the prisoners’ habeas rights (a decision which was only finally reversed three weeks ago, when the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutional habeas corpus rights), the bare bones of the Parhat verdict, reported last week, were explosive enough. In a one-page ruling, the judges in the Court of Appeals in Washington — noticeably, two Republicans and a Democrat — “held invalid a decision of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal” that Huzaifa Parhat — one of 18 Uighurs (Muslims from an oppressed outpost of China), who are not even alleged to have raised arms against the US — was an enemy combatant,” and “directed the government to release or transfer” him (or to hold a new tribunal “consistent with the Court’s opinion”).

Now that the full opinion (PDF) has been released, however, the damage to the administration’s credibility is even more pronounced. Tearing into the so-called evidence, the court reserved particular venom for the government’s claim that Parhat was an “enemy combatant” because he was “affiliated with forces associated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.” The government’s verdict hinged on a claim that the camp in which the Uighurs had been living in Afghanistan (before it was bombed by US forces, forcing them to flee to Pakistan, where they were sold to the US military) was run by a man who ran a Uighur independence movement (the East Turkistan Independence Movement), which was allegedly “associated” with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, even though, as the judges noted, “no source document evidence was introduced to indicate … that the Detainee had actually joined ETIM.”

Furthermore, the judges scolded the government for its shoddy attempts to link ETIM to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, noting that, as the Afghan government, the Taliban had provided “housing” to a variety of groups, “which no doubt ranged from orphanages to terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda,” but that these groups were not all “‘associated’ with the Taliban in a sense that would make them enemy combatants,” and singled out for particular criticism a piece of exculpatory evidence — a claim by another Uighur that the camp actually predated the Taliban regime — which was excluded from Parhat’s CSRT.

They also took exception to the government’s claim that its “evidence” was reliable because it was repeated in a number of different classified documents, noting that the sources for this supposed “evidence” were both vague and impenetrable. They explained that descriptions of ETIM’s activities, and its purported relationship to al-Qaeda, were repeatedly described “as having ‘reportedly’ occurred, as being ‘said to’ or ‘reported to’ have happened, and as things that ‘may’ be true or are ‘suspected’ of having taken place. But in virtually every instance, the documents do not say who ‘reported’ or ‘said’ or ‘suspected’ those things … Because of those omissions, the Tribunal could not and this court cannot assess the reliability of the assertions in the documents. And because of this deficiency, those bare assertions cannot sustain the determination that Parhat is an enemy combatant.”

The judges also attacked an additional claim that the information would not have been included if it wasn’t reliable. “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” the judges stated, “thus rendering superfluous both the role of the tribunal and the role that Congress assigned to this court,” when, having stripped the prisoners of their habeas rights, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 allowed them the limited review that led, eventually, to the momentous decision in Parhat.

The judges also visited territory covered by Lt. Col. Abraham, demolishing “the government’s contention that it can prevail by submitting documents that read as if they were indictments or civil complaints” and that it can “simply assert as facts the elements required to prove that a detainee falls within the definition of enemy combatant,” noting that following this line of argument “would require the courts to rubber-stamp the government’s charges, in contravention of our understanding that Congress intended the court to engage in meaningful review of the record.”

In another line of attack, the judges noted that Parhat’s lawyers had argued that the Chinese government — the Uighurs’ only enemy, according to their many accounts at Guantánamo — was the source of some of the classified information used against him during his tribunal, which prompted Judge Merrick B. Garland to conclude, “Parhat has made a credible argument that — at least for some of the assertions — the common source is the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs.”

In the most stunning passage, however — and the one that brings Lewis Carroll and the fantasies of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass into sharp focus — Judge Garland quoted from Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark as another method of discrediting the government’s argument that its evidence was reliable because it was mentioned in three different classified documents. In one sentence, which, either by happy coincidence or deliberate design, shines an unwavering light on the post-9/11 fantasy world in which evidence can be conjured up out of nowhere, Judge Garland, who was joined in the unanimous opinion by Chief Judge David B. Sentelle and Judge Thomas B. Griffith, wrote, “Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact the government has ’said it thrice’ does not make an allegation true.”

Do you remember the trial at the end of Alice in Wonderland?

“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
“Who cares for you?” said Alice … “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

As published on Anti-war.com, CounterPunch, the Huffington Post and AlterNet.

In a one-page ruling in the case of Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur (a Muslim from the oppressed Xinjiang province of China), the US Court of Appeals in Washington “held invalid a decision of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal that petitioner Huzaifa Parhat is an enemy combatant.” The court also “directed the government to release or transfer Parhat” (or, more worryingly, “to hold a new Tribunal consistent with the Court’s opinion”), and also “stated that its disposition was without prejudice to Parhat’s right to seek release immediately through a writ of habeas corpus in the district court, pursuant to the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush.”

The verdict has been a long time coming. When Guantánamo opened in January 2002, the prisoners, who had been designated as “enemy combatants” on capture, were deprived of all rights until the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul that they had statutory habeas corpus rights. This ruling paved the way for the prisoners to meet with lawyers to build habeas cases, but in the meantime the administration subjected the prisoners to administrative reviews — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) — which prevented them from having legal representation, relied upon secret evidence that could have been obtained through torture or coercion, and, as former insider Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham explained last year, were, in complete contrast to the purpose of Rasul, essentially designed to rubber-stamp their prior designation as “enemy combatants” without rights.

In a further blow to Rasul, Congress was persuaded to pass the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) in 2005, which removed the prisoners’ habeas rights, and limited any review of their cases to the Circuit Courts (rather than the Supreme Court), apparently preventing any independent fact-finding to challenge the substance of the administration’s allegations, and mandating the judges to rule only on whether or not the CSRTs had followed their own rules, and whether or not those rules were valid. Since last summer, when the Supreme Court agreed to hear Boumediene, the DTA cases have been on hold, as the lower court judges awaited the Supreme Court’s verdict.

Given these limitations, the verdict of the DC Circuit Court judges is nothing short of astonishing. The full details are not yet clear, as the Court also noted that “the opinion contains classified information that the government had initially submitted for treatment under seal,” and that “a redacted version for public release is in preparation,” but, as the Los Angeles Times noted, “those familiar with the panel’s decision … said it suggested that other judges might follow its lead and challenge the government’s underlying reasons for keeping detainees like Parhat in military custody for so long.”

Underlining the triumph of the verdict, but also the long injustice that preceded it, Parhat’s lawyer, Sabin Willett, said, “It is a tremendous day. It is a very conservative court, but we pressed ahead and we won unanimously. But Huzaifa Parhat is now in his seventh year of imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay, and he doesn’t even know about this ruling because he’s sitting in solitary confinement and we can’t tell him about it. That’s what we do to people in this country — we put them in solitary confinement even when they are not enemy combatants.”

This is no exaggeration on Willett’s part. Twenty-two Uighurs were originally held in Guantánamo, and all but four were, like Huzaifa Parhat, seized by enterprising Pakistani villagers, who were no doubt eager for the substantial bounties offered by US forces for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.” It has been established beyond a doubt that these 18 men had fled persecution in China, and were eking out a meager living in a run-down hamlet in Afghanistan’s eastern mountains, when they were bombed by US forces following the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and subsequently fled to Pakistan, where they were seized and transferred to US custody.

Despite cynical attempts to portray them as separatist “terrorists” with links to al-Qaeda (which was part of a deal between the US and China to prevent Chinese opposition to the invasion of Iraq), US forces knew from at least 2003 that none of the men posed a threat to the US or its interests, that they only had one enemy — China — as they had all insisted repeatedly, and that they had no connection whatsoever with the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

And yet the Uighurs’ stories demonstrate some of the more egregious flaws in the tribunal system at Guantánamo. Although their stories were identical, some of the men were judged to be “enemy combatants,” while others were cleared for release. This infuriated the administration to such an extent that, in the cases of at least two of the men, Anwar Hassan and Hammad Mohammed, further tribunals were convened, on the orders of Matthew Waxman, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Detainee Affairs, which reversed the earlier verdicts. Hassan’s lawyers, Angela Vigil and George Clarke, 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 was, instead, based solely on “communications” from Waxman “pressing for a reversal” of the first CSRT determination.

Although the administration pandered further to Chinese pressure by allowing Chinese interrogators to visit the men (and in some cases to threaten them) at Guantánamo, they drew the line at returning them to certain torture in their homeland. In May 2006, after trawling the world for suitable host countries, Albania was prevailed upon to accept five of the men, but the rest — Huzaifa Parhat included — remain in solitary confinement, as Sabin Willett noted, even though they are not “enemy combatants,” and never have been.

The following exchange comes from Huzaifa Parhat’s CSRT, which took place nearly four years ago. In it, he explains why he left his homeland, why he is opposed to Chinese rule, and why he is a supporter rather than an opponent of the United States. Sadly, although the Circuit Court’s ruling in Parhat v. Gates is legally significant, it cannot wipe away the scandal of Parhat’s horrific and ongoing isolation in Guantánamo, and nor can it provide him with a new home. Perhaps, as another of his lawyers, Susan Baker Manning, explained (in the Washington Post’s words), “the best option is to release them to the United States.”

An excerpt from Huzaifa Parhat’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal

Detainee: They are saying that we are against the United States. Is that right?

Tribunal President: Yes.

Detainee: That is not true because from the time of our great-grandparents centuries ago, we have never been against the United States and we do not want to be against the United States … Also, I can represent for 25 million Uighur people by saying that we will not do anything against the United States. We are willing to be united with the United States. I think that the United States understands the Uighur people much better than other people.

The reason we went into Pakistan was because in China there is torture and too much pressure on the Uighur people. Lately they have laid off the Uighur people from their jobs … and filled all the jobs with immigrant Chinese.

The Uighurs have families and need support to eat and if we don’t do something then how are we going to live? If they (fellow Uighurs) wanted to go and farm they would have to pay a lot of taxes. If they can’t pay the taxes, they would take away their property.

So many people are without an education because they (the Chinese) are asking too much money for an education. Now there are a great number of young people on the streets with no education. The Uighur people only have the privilege of having two children. If a female gets pregnant with a third child, the government will forcibly take the kid through abortion.

Lots of Uighur people are so poor that we can’t afford to eat meat weeks to months at a time. Turkistan [the Uighurs’ name for their homeland] has a lot of natural resources and they (the Chinese) don’t use one or two percent of it for Turkistan. They take the majority of the resources day and night to the mainland in China. If they torture us everyday and pressure us too much, then what are we going to do? How are we going to live? In the future, what will the next generation do? How will they survive? That is why I left my country to try to get something, get back and liberate my people and get our country independence … That is the reason we went to Afghanistan.

Andy is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press/the University of Michigan Press).

As published on Anti-war.com, CounterPunch and the Huffington Post.

Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity that represents 35 of the 273 prisoners still in Guantánamo, has just released a report, The Forgotten Italian Residents in Guantánamo Bay (also here in Italian), in an attempt to find a solution to the plight of six of its clients. The six men are Italian residents, who, with one exception, have been cleared for release from Guantánamo after multiple military reviews, but cannot be returned to the country of their birth, Tunisia, because of international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture.

The stories of the six men represented by Reprieve are typical of the random dragnets and lack of efficient screening that have so thoroughly undermined the US administration’s claims that the prison housed “the worst of the worst.” Adel al-Hakeemy, for example (photo, left), traveled to Pakistan to get married, and was living in Jalalabad, in Afghanistan, near his wife’s family, when the US-led invasion began in October 2001. Far from being a militant, he was in fact a chef, and had lived in Italy for eight years, working as a chef’s assistant in several hotels in Bologna. “I lived with Italians in their homes,” he told Cori Crider of Reprieve during a visit at Guantánamo last month. “I am used to their culture. The Italians worked alongside me, they respected me, they treated me as their brother.” Hedi Hamamy, who moved to Italy in 1987, worked as a porter in Bologna, and later worked in a restaurant. Like Adel al-Hakeemy, he also married in Pakistan, and was seized by opportunistic Pakistani police, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Reprieve’s third Tunisian client, Lotfi bin Ali (known to the US authorities as Mohammed Abdul Rahman) has a pacemaker and is in poor health. Cleared for release in 2006, he explained to his review board in Guantánamo, “I have told my story five hundred times. I went to Pakistan for drugs. I was sick and I wanted to heal myself, so I went to Pakistan.” He also traveled, he said, “to get married and relax and to get out of what I was in.”

The last three men — Saleh Sassi, Adel Ben Mabrouk and Hisham Sliti — traveled to Afghanistan, but none of them so much as raised a finger against US forces. Sassi (known to the US authorities as Sayf bin Abdallah) lived in Italy from 1998 to 2001, and has family in Turin. Apparently persuaded to visit Afghanistan during a vacation from work, he was wounded when a truck he was traveling in was shot at. Hospitalized, first in Kabul, and then in Khost, he was transported to the Pakistani border, where he was seized by the Pakistani authorities. Ben Mabrouk, who lived in Italy from 1999 to 2001, working in restaurants in Naples and Rome, and as a barber in Milan, decided to visit Afghanistan because, as he explained in his tribunal at Guantánamo, he had heard that the Taliban “welcome all the Muslims.”

Hisham Sliti, who arrived in Italy in 1995, and spent time working on fishing boats, hoped to kick a heroin habit that he had picked up in Italy. “If I went to Afghanistan I would be a long way from the haunts where I could get drugs,” he explained in 2007. “It would be a chance to make a fresh start, a clean break. I thought I could study my religion, and hopefully I might be able to afford to get married and settle down. I emphatically did not go to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban or for anyone else.” As Reprieve noted, Sliti was particularly disappointed by life in Afghanistan. “I hated life under the Taliban,” he explained, complaining, as the report describes it, that he “found the culture as oppressive as the heat: he couldn’t meet women, couldn’t smoke cigarettes — as an unmarried man, he couldn’t even rent a house.”

Hisham Sliti’s parents, from the front cover of Reprieve’s report.

With the exception of Hisham Sliti, who, as Reprieve notes, “is not an extremist, but has simply been a victim of his own outspokenness in criticizing the mistreatment of those held in Guantánamo” (and has been treated brutally as a result), all of these men have been cleared for release, which is as close as the notoriously unapologetic post-9/11 US administration gets to admitting that it has made mistakes in its colossally ill-informed hunt for “terror suspects” over the last six and a half years.

The stories of the Italian residents are part of a long and seemingly intractable problem faced by the authorities at Guantánamo: how to find homes for cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated? The need to find safe havens for these men is of enormous significance. Although they have been cleared of posing a threat to the United States or its allies (including Italy), they are all victims of verdicts produced in absentia in the Tunisian courts of the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, which only came about after other prisoners in Tunisia were tortured to provide false allegations against them.

If returned, these men would face show trials similar to those that resulted in prison sentences — of three and seven years — for two other Tunisians, Lotfi Lagha and Abdullah bin Omar, who were returned from Guantánamo last June. What made the verdicts even more shocking was the fact that the US government had signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Tunisia, which purported to guarantee that the men would receive “humane treatment.” The worthlessness of the agreement was highlighted last October, when, in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that Lotfi bin Ali “cannot be sent to Tunisia because he could suffer ‘irreparable harm’ that the US courts would be powerless to reverse.”

According to lawyers’ estimates, as many as 70 of the remaining prisoners — from human rights-abusing countries including China, Uzbekistan, Libya and Algeria, as well as Tunisia — are in this predicament, but although the Pentagon has been actively shopping around on behalf of 23 of these men — and has been doing so for several years — it has met with no success. With the exception of Albania, which was prevailed upon to accept five innocent Chinese Uyghurs, an Egyptian cleric, an Algerian teacher and a refugee from the Russian Federation in 2006, no other country has stepped forward to help the US administration clean up it own mess by offering asylum to foreign nationals captured by mistake and held for years at Guantánamo.

The Italian residents should, however, be a different matter. Although proposals within the EU to provide asylum to some of the cleared prisoners are moving at a snail’s pace, three countries have already acted successfully on behalf of their residents. This in itself is a major step forward, as there was initially no desire whatsoever to address the plight of European residents in Guantánamo after all the European nationals — 21 men from the UK, France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and Spain — were repatriated in 2004 and 2005.

The first returned resident, Lahcen Ikassrien, was not accepted for benevolent reasons. A Spanish resident, of Moroccan origin, he was, essentially, extradited from Guantánamo in July 2005, to face trial in connection with allegations that he had links to the Syrian-born Spaniard Imad Yarkas, who was serving 12 years in prison for belonging to al-Qaeda, but on his return, when he finally entered a courtroom, as opposed to the lawless cells of Guantánamo, the case against him collapsed. When he was finally freed in October 2006, the Associated Press reported that the court concluded, “It has not been proved that the accused, Lahcen Ikassrien, was part of a terrorist organization of Islamic-fundamentalist nature, and more specifically, the al-Qaeda network created by Bin Laden.”

The other residents — Murat Kurnaz from Germany (released in August 2006), Bisher al-Rawi from the UK (released in March 2007), and Jamil El-Banna, Omar Deghayes and Abdulnour Sameur, also from the UK (released in December 2007) — are more representative of how European residents, cleared in Guantánamo, can be safely returned without posing any threat to their adopted countries. Murat Kurnaz’ problem was that, though born in Germany, his parents were Turkish “guest workers,” and he was not, therefore, granted citizenship. Although his case was shamefully ignored by the German government for many years (despite the fact that it was obvious from almost the moment he was captured that he was no terrorist), it was not until Angela Merkel became Chancellor that his return was negotiated. He has since written a book, Five Years of My Life, and travels widely to promote it.

For the British residents, threats of legal action were required to push the government into action — in particular in the cases of Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna, who were seized during a business trip to the Gambia after the British intelligence services provided patently false intelligence to their American counterparts — but, like Murat Kurnaz, they too have all been freed, having been found to pose no threat whatsoever to the British state.

It remains to be seen if the Italian government will do the same for its forgotten residents, but as Reprieve notes throughout the report, the fact that Italian interrogators visited the men in Guantánamo in 2002 and 2003, and that they shared their information with the US authorities, makes the Italian government complicit in the abuse of the men at Guantánamo, and reinforces its “moral duty” to act on their behalf (the photo of Adel al-Hakeemy at the start of this article was part of the exchange of “intelligence,” and was provided to the Italians by the US authorities). In one of the most telling passages in the report, Adel al-Hakeemy explained to his lawyers, “I was in Camp Delta when the Italians came. I told them we were treated badly. One of them agreed with everything I said about my treatment, and said he knew what was happening here.”

With Berlusconi in charge — and racism, sadly, a prevalent issue — the release of the men to Italy may seem unlikely, but it was encouraging that, after Reprieve’s report was issued, and an article about the men, by Carlo Bonini, was published in the respected newspaper La Repubblica, 41 Italian Senators demanded an investigation into Italy’s role in interrogating the men, which indicates that there is, at least, some political will to address the plight of Italy’s forgotten residents in Guantánamo.

The Senators, to their credit, pointed out that the role played by the Italian secret services “would be in serious breach of the UN Convention Against Torture and the European Convention on Human Rights,” and added their dismay that, “between 2002 and 2003, ‘extraordinary renditions’ operations took place, to the detriment of six Tunisian citizens, for years living legally in Italy.” They also took note of another sign of the Italian government’s involvement with highly dubious US actions, pointing out, as was also mentioned in the report, that the men were delivered to Guantánamo “on flights made through Italian airspace, with the complicity — or at least the tacit consent — of the Italian authorities.”

As published on the Huffington Post, CounterPunch and ZNet.