Archive for October, 2009

So it’s good news — of a sort — from Guantánamo, as two more prisoners were released on Thursday. The first is Khalid al-Mutairi, a Kuwaiti whose habeas corpus petition was granted by District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly two months ago, after she ruled decisively that “there is nothing in the record beyond speculation” that al-Mutairi had been involved in any way with al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Although Judge Kollar-Kotelly ordered the government to “take all necessary and appropriate steps to facilitate” al-Mutairi’s release “forthwith,” one of his attorneys, David Cynamon explained to me recently that “the Justice Department is completely ignoring the habeas rulings issued by the Courts,” and added that he had to threaten a contempt motion in al-Mutairi’s case, in order to get the government to agree to his repatriation, even though the Kuwaiti government has repeatedly asked for his return.

In a sign of the paranoia that dominates the Obama administration’s thinking when it comes to actually releasing prisoners who have been cleared for release (as I discussed in a recent article, “75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today”), the Miami Herald explained that al-Mutairi would be the first returned Kuwaiti to be processed, on his return, in a rehabilitation center “designed to help men jailed for years as jihadists reenter society in the oil-rich emirate.” In a statement, which, to my mind, appeared to respond carefully to the kind of assurances demanded, with no justification, by the Obama administration, a Kuwaiti support group, which has been acting for the Guantánamo prisoners for many years, announced, “The new facility will provide detainees with access to education, medical care, group discussions and physical exercise to help them recover from their long ordeal in Guantánamo.”

Al-Mutairi’s return was, of course, long overdue, as David Cynamon explained, when he told the Associated Press, “It took far too long — more than seven years — to get a fair hearing,” adding, “He lost many years of his life because the US government fought against giving fair hearings to these detainees.” However, his release was clouded by the government’s refusal to also return Fouad al-Rabiah, another Kuwaiti, cleared by a court three weeks ago, whose story, as revealed by Judge Kollar-Kotelly in her ruling, laid bare the awful truth that, although he, like al-Mutairi, was a charity worker seized by mistake, he had been tortured in Guantánamo to falsely confess that he had met Osama bin Laden and had worked with al-Qaeda during the battle of Tora Bora.

If justice was not treated by the Obama administration in such a cavalier manner, Fouad al-Rabiah would have been in the Kuwaiti plane that flew to Guantánamo to pick up Khalid al-Mutairi, returning to his wife and children after eight long years, and I hope — for his sake, and for what little remains of the credibility of the Obama administration when it comes to the habeas rulings (in which 30 out of 38 cases brought by the government have been lost) — that his release will be announced in the very near future, and that there is no truth to the Miami Herald’s disturbing statement that both the Justice Department and the Defense Department “are still studying his file to decide whether to appeal to another civilian court rather than let him go.”

The identity of the other prisoner — released in Belgium — is not known. As the Miami Herald explained, he was “pointedly not identified” on arrival at the military airport in Melsbroek, and, in a statement, the Belgian foreign ministry “urged the media to protect his privacy,” noting that he was “being offered an opportunity to integrate into Belgian society ‘after a particularly difficult time in Guantánamo,’” and emphasizing that, although his nationality was not being identified in a further effort to protect his identity, he “had been cleared of charges by a US court.”

“He comes to Belgium as a free man,” the statement continued, adding that “all the necessary measures for adaptation and rapid integration are being provided.” According to another source, the man will actually be given a new identity on Belgium, to facilitate his prospects of finding a job, and, although I suspect that I know who he is — as there are only a few prisoners cleared by the courts who are seeking asylum in Europe — I will respect the Belgian government’s wishes and not advance my theory in public.

For this man, as for Khalid al-Mutairi, his release is long overdue (as a judge urged the government to take steps to release him “forthwith” up to six months ago), but, as with Fouad al-Rabiah, who remained behind while al-Mutairi was repatriated, it should not be forgotten that 15 other men, cleared by the courts up to a year ago, are also still in Guantánamo, where, it appears, not even a court victory is enough to secure their elusive freedom.

Note: The release of these two men brings the total number of prisoners held at Guantánamo to 222. This figure includes one man, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence after a one-sided trial by Military Commission last November (which is currently being appealed — PDF), and does not include another, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian, moved from Guantánamo to the US mainland in May this year, who — in a sure sign that prisoners can be transferred to the mainland without endangering anyone — is in a federal prison awaiting a federal court trial scheduled to begin next September.

POSTSCRIPT: Arab Times has just published the following report about Khalid al-Mutairi’s return from Guantánamo:

Tears for Mutairi (an excerpt)

Tears of joy flowed freely when the relatives of detainee Khalid al-Mutairi received him on his arrival into the country from Guantánamo Bay early Friday. The meeting hall, where al-Mutairi was taken on his arrival in Kuwait, was transformed into a venue of celebrations when al-Mutairi reunited with his family after eight years in Guantánamo. The intensity of the reunion, combined with enquiries about al-Mutairi’s experiences and his state of health, compelled officials to extend the “meeting” to 35 minutes. The Chairman of the Relatives of the Kuwaiti Detainees Committee in Guantánamo, Khalid al-Odah [whose son, Fawzi al-Odah, had his habeas petition turned down on August 24], confirmed that al-Mutairi was in good health and no evidence of disease or illness had been observed. He added that al-Mutairi was accompanied by a delegation of security personnel and paramedics from Guantánamo Bay, who ensured that he was physically and mentally fit.

Al-Odah said al-Mutairi spoke about his experience at Guantánamo, revealing that he was detained for one year in a cell with Fawzi Al-Odah and met Fayiz al-Kandari and Fouad al-Rabiah regularly. Al-Mutairi added that he was separated from the others five days ago, after which procedures to return him to Kuwait were finalized. He also reported that the other detainees are in good health. Al-Odah disclosed that al-Mutairi is currently under observation at the Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed Armed Forces Hospital and will be referred to the Rehabilitation Center after a week of routine investigations. It has been reported that the administration of the hospital has appointed only one member of the nursing staff to keep a check on the health of al-Mutairi. Security officers have already begun their investigation procedures. The relatives of al-Mutairi have been given permission to visit him during his stay at the hospital.

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.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 17 prisoners released from February to September 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).

Is it really appropriate for the Nobel Peace Prize — granted “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” — to be given to a man who, as Commander-in-Chief, is still presiding over two wars, in which, as the announcement was made, civilians may well have been dying as the result of his orders?

Is it really appropriate for the Nobel Peace Prize to be given to a man who would rather look forward than backwards when it comes to decisions, taken at the highest levels of the previous administration, to turn America from a country that upheld the universal torture ban into a country that sought to redefine torture so that it could torture “high-value detainees” in a network of secret prisons around the world?

Is it really appropriate for the Nobel Peace Prize to be given to a man who, although he ordered the closure of Guantánamo and recognizes that it “set back the moral authority” that, in his opinion, “is America’s strongest currency in the world,” and also that it “became a symbol that helped al-Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause,” endorses indefinite detention without charge or trial for some of the 221 prisoners still held in the prison?

Is it really appropriate for the Nobel Peace Prize to be given to a man who, through the Justice Department, is appealing a ruling extending the habeas corpus rights granted by the Supreme Court to the prisoners at Guantánamo to foreign prisoners seized in other countries and “rendered” to the US prison at Bagram airbase — where some of these men have been held for six years — even though the judge ruled that “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same”?

Is it really appropriate to give the Nobel Peace Prize to a man who, although he revoked some of the Bush administration’s vilest executive orders and swore to uphold the universal torture ban, appears to be actively involved in the rendition of prisoners to the US prison at Bagram airbase?

Is it really appropriate for the Nobel Peace Prize to be given to a man who, although professing his admiration for the Geneva Conventions, has chosen to introduce Guantánamo-style reviews for the 600 or so Afghan prisoners held at Bagram, rather than the competent tribunals stipulated in Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions, and who, as a result, appears to be endorsing the Bush administration’s unilateral rewriting of the Conventions?

In conclusion, although I realize that less deserving men have been given the Nobel Peace Prize in previous years — Henry Kissinger, anyone? — and although I reiterate that Barack Obama seems to be a nice guy, and that his election victory last November lifted a cloud of tyranny from the United States, I also have to note another ironic subtext to the award: that it will, sadly, serve only to inflame the rabid wing of the Republican party, which is predisposed to believe a Democratic President is soft on national security issues, and who would only have respect for the Nobel Committee if it introduced a Nobel War Prize and handed it to Dick Cheney.

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 Common Dreams and Foreign Policy Journal.

In a recent article, “On Guantánamo, Lawmakers Reveal They Are Still Dick Cheney’s Pawns,” I spelled out my despair and disgust at lawmakers from both parties (their names can be found here, here and here), who, since May, have voted for legislation severely curtailing President Obama’s ability to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba by his self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, and who, as a result, have sent just one resounding message to the American people and the wider world: the ghost of Dick Cheney still stalks the corridors of power.

In the article, I ran through these disturbing developments, explaining how, in May, the Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009, which eliminated $80 million from planned legislation intended to fund the closure of Guantánamo, and specifically prohibited the use of any funding to “transfer, relocate, or incarcerate Guantánamo Bay detainees to or within the United States,” and how, in June, the House of Representatives followed up by passing a spending bill turning down the administration’s request for $60 million to close Guantánamo, which also prohibited funds from being used to release detainees from Guantánamo into the United States. The spur for my article came just last week, when Representatives voted overwhelmingly for a nonbinding motion proposed by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ken.), “clearly prohibiting” the transfer of any Guantánamo prisoner to the United States “for whatever reason”; in other words, even for federal court trials, or some revision of the horribly flawed Military Commission trial system favored by the Bush administration.

I’m pleased to say that I was not alone in my despair. On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder stated, “The restrictions that we’ve had to deal with on the Hill give me great concern,” adding, as the Associated Press described it, that he “disputed the claim, made often by Republican lawmakers, that Guantánamo Bay detainees are simply too dangerous to be brought to US soil.” “I don’t see how that in fact is accurate,” Holder said, adding, “You can go through a litany of very, very dangerous people who are safely housed in facilities that pose no dangers to the communities that surround them.” Citing the examples of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, he stated, “I think we have a good track record.”

In combating the fearmongering in Congress that, on last week’s showing, threatens to completely derail the administration’s ability to close Guantánamo at all, Holder was echoing important points made by President Obama in a major national security speech in May, when he stated:

[W]e will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue. Listening to the recent debate, I’ve heard words that are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country … [B]ear in mind the following fact: nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal “supermax” prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists. As Senator Lindsey Graham said: “The idea that we cannot find a place to securely house 250-plus detainees within the United States is not rational.”

Over the last few days, following intense negotiations, it appears that the administration has managed to persuade Democratic senators and congressmen to accept that prisoners can be brought to the US to face trial, although, as Reuters added, the measure added by the Senate stipulated that the administration “would be required to present a risk assessment and give 14 days’ notice before bringing any of the 223 detainees remaining in the facility to the United States to face charges in American courtrooms.” Moreover, although Democrats in the House of Representatives also added an amendment to their bill — less generously demanding that the president provides a “comprehensive disposition plan” at least 45 days before any proposed transfer — these measures still “face a tough vote” before the full Senate and the House of Representatives (as Reuters explained), especially after the widespread capitulation last week to Rep. Rogers and his paranoid talk about “the American people” and their fears of “terrorists in their hometowns, inciting fellow prisoners, abusing our legal system, and terrorizing their communities.”

However, although this is progress of a sort, it should not be forgotten that the nation’s lawmakers persistently failed to call a halt to the excesses of the Bush administration, and, in fact, played a decisive role in propping up a lawless regime by endorsing two pieces of dreadful legislation (the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006), which purported to strip the prisoners of the habeas corpus rights they were granted by the Supreme Court in 2004, revived the Commissions after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal, and also sought to grant immunity for any wrongdoing to the entire Bush administration.

For these lame apologies for legislative scrutiny, lawmakers were severely chastised by the Supreme Court in June 2008, when the nation’s senior judges restored the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights and ruled that the habeas-stripping aspects of the DTA and MCA had been unconstitutional, but as Lt. Col. David Frakt, law professor and former military defense attorney for Guantánamo prisoner Mohammed Jawad explained to me in an email this week, Congress is still behaving unconstitutionally with regard to the right of the Executive branch and the Judiciary to order the release of prisoners from Guantánamo who have won their habeas corpus petitions.

Drawing on the experience of Mohammed Jawad — just one of the 30 prisoners (out of 38 in total) whose release has been ordered by a judge after finding that the government had failed to establish, “by a preponderance of the evidence,” that they had any connection to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban — Lt. Col. Frakt pointed out, with reference to an article I had written suggesting that 31 cleared prisoners in Guantánamo could be released immediately, that I had neglected to mention that an impediment to their immediate release had been established by Congress, which, in summer, “passed a law that requires the Administration to give Congress 15 days notice before releasing anyone from Guantánamo.” Lt. Col. Frakt added, “This was why, when Mohammed Jawad was ordered released, it still took 22 days to release him. The Department of Justice said they needed a week to prepare the notice and then he couldn’t be released until 15 days after that.”

Crucially, Lt. Col. Frakt explained:

I consider this Congressional notification requirement to be blatantly unconstitutional as a violation of the separation of powers. In Jawad’s case, it meant that after the Executive Branch and the Judiciary had concluded there was no lawful basis for the military to detain Mohammed Jawad (after the Department of Justice ultimately conceded the habeas corpus petition), the military was required to continue to detain him at Guantánamo at the order of the legislature, Congress. As I explained in Federal District Court, this placed Jawad in the status of “Congressional prisoner,” a status for which there is no Constitutional authority.

After explaining that Jawad’s defense team “chose not to challenge this ridiculous provision, because a challenge would have likely taken months to work its way through the courts,” Lt. Col. Frakt concluded:

It may be that, if the US is contemplating releasing a detainee that it has the lawful basis to detain under the laws of war, that Congress can legitimately condition the expenditure of US funds to effectuate the release on the provision of this notification to Congress, but for those detainees determined to be unlawfully held, this law simply arbitrarily extends their unlawful stay at Guantánamo. This provision, coupled with the refusal to authorize funds for detainees to be resettled in the United States — even those determined to be innocent of any wrongdoing who should qualify for political asylum — shows the extent of Congressional depravity on any issues related to detainees.

These are tough words, but no less than lawmakers deserve, and as the battle over Guantánamo’s future continues throughout the fall, I hope that officials in the Obama administration will be able to make good use of them. As Lt. Col. Frakt so ably points out, it is completely unacceptable that, on Guantánamo, both the Executive and the Judiciary are now at the mercy of Congress, where lawmakers are not only continuing to endorse Dick Cheney’s evidence-free rationale for arbitrary detention, but have also seized arbitrary detention powers for themselves.

Note: Regular readers will recall that Lt. Col. Frakt was formerly Maj. Frakt, and I’m delighted to announce that he was promoted on October 1 — and that there are, therefore, some rewards for military lawyers who defend the principles they have sworn to uphold.

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, CounterPunch and Antiwar.com. Cross-posted on The Public Record.

Where: Cochrane Theatre, Southampton Row, London WC1
When: Wednesday October 21, 2009. Doors open 6 pm, film starts 7 pm.
Q&A with Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Andy Worthington and Polly Nash starts 8.30 pm.
Tickets are free but must be booked via the Cochrane Theatre website.
This event is in association with Cageprisoners and the Guantánamo Justice Centre (also see here).

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a new documentary film, directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, telling the story of Guantánamo (and including sections on extraordinary rendition and secret prisons) with a particular focus on how the Bush administration turned its back on domestic and international laws, how prisoners were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan without adequate screening (and often for bounty payments), and why some of these men may have been in Afghanistan or Pakistan for reasons unconnected with militancy or terrorism (as missionaries or humanitarian aid workers, for example).

The film is based around interviews with former prisoners (Moazzam Begg and, in his first major interview, Omar Deghayes, who was released in December 2007), lawyers for the prisoners (Clive Stafford Smith in the UK and Tom Wilner in the US), and journalist and author Andy Worthington, and also includes appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Shakeel Begg, a London-based Imam, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Focusing on the stories of three particular prisoners — Shaker Aamer (who is still held), Binyam Mohamed (who was released in February 2009) and Omar Deghayes — “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” provides a powerful rebuke to those who believe that Guantánamo holds “the worst of the worst” and that the Bush administration was justified in responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by holding men neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects with habeas corpus rights, but as “illegal enemy combatants” with no rights whatsoever.

For further information, interviews, or to inquire about broadcasting, distributing or showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” please contact Andy Worthington or Polly Nash. Andy will also be in the United States from November 5 to November 12, 2009, showing the film in New York, Virginia, Washington DC and California, in association with the Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law, World Can’t Wait, the Future of Freedom Foundation and the New America Foundation. Details to follow soon.

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a Spectacle Production (74 minutes, 2009).

About the directors and the production company

Andy Worthington is a journalist, and the author of three books, including The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (Pluto Press). Visit his website here.

Polly Nash is a lecturer at the London College Of Communication (LCC), part of the University of the Arts, London, and has worked in film and TV for 20 years. Core funding for the film was provided by LCC.

Spectacle is an independent television production company specializing in documentary, community-led investigative journalism and participatory media. Spectacle programs have been broadcast across Europe, Australia and Canada and have won international awards. Visit their website here.

For excerpts and extras, follow the links on the Spectacle website. I’m also maintaining a main page for the film here, which will be updated regularly.

Andy’s book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison is 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.

On Friday, just a few hours before I spoke to Jeff Farias, I was interviewed by Scott Horton for Antiwar Radio (the 22-minute show was broadcast on Monday, and is available here — and the MP3 is here). In our tenth outing, Scott and I ran though some recent history: the administration’s decision not to push for new legislation authorizing the indefinite detention of prisoners in Guantánamo (and why it’s only a slight improvement on previous plans), the latest postponement in the fatally flawed Military Commission “terror trials” (which I wrote about here and here), the few dozen people in Guantánamo regarded as having any genuine connection to terrorism, and the government’s claims that, nevertheless, somewhere between 50 and 65 prisoners will eventually be put on trial (although whether in federal courts or in a revived version of the Military Commissions has not yet been decided).

This also allowed me to draw listeners’ attention to what should have been the final word on the unsuitably of the Commissions and the viability of federal court trials: electrifying testimony delivered to a House Committee in July by Maj. David Frakt, the former military defense attorney for Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan prisoner released in August after a judge granted his habeas corpus petition and condemned the government for having no case.

I also had the opportunity to raise the recent motion passed by the House of Representatives and intended to prevent any Guantánamo prisoner from being transferred to the US mainland for any reason — even for federal court trials — which was the subject of my most recent article, “On Guantánamo, Lawmakers Reveal They Are Still Dick Cheney’s Pawns.” Bringing up the topic of spineless lawmakers not only gave Scott and I the opportunity to mention how ridiculous is the Dick Cheney-inspired fearmongering regarding bringing prisoners to the US mainland, but it also allowed Scott to point out how numerous terrorists have been convicted in federal courts, including Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who attempted to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and how they are all safely imprisoned in the kind of impregnable prisons that would also be used for prisoners from Guantánamo.

Scott also asked me about the latest dubious developments regarding the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, which I discussed at length in two previous articles, “Obama Brings Guantánamo And Rendition To Bagram (And Not The Geneva Conventions)” and “Is Bagram Obama’s New Secret Prison?”, focusing, in particular, on the struggle for habeas rights for the foreign prisoners “rendered” to Bagram, who, according to a US judge, should have the same rights as those in Guantánamo, because “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same.” According to the Obama administration, however, they should still have no right to ask — even after six years, in some cases — whether there is any basis for their detention.

The other significant aspect of the story, which we also discussed, was the decision to introduce Guantánamo-style tribunals at Bagram. This was presented as progress, even though it has nothing whatsoever to so with the Geneva Conventions, whose unilateral rewriting by the Bush administration seems to be being maintained by Obama  — or, as Scott described it, we discussed “how Obama picks and chooses which Geneva Convention rules he abides by.”

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.

I like to believe that, despite studying Guantánamo for four years, I still have a sense of humor, but last Thursday I lost it, after 258 members of the House of Representatives (including 88 members of President Obama’s own party) voted for an idiotic, paranoid and unjust motion proposed by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ken.), which was designed to “Prohibit the transfer of GITMO prisoners, period” (those were his exact words). Just 163 Representatives voted against the motion, which, as JURIST described it, also supports “adding Guantánamo detainees to the federal ‘no fly’ list, and adopting Senate language forbidding the release of photos showing detainee abuse.”

Just in case there was any doubt about the motion, Rep. Rogers, in his inimitable style, explained that he was concerned with “protecting the American people from all threats … including the warped intentions of terrorists and radical extremists,” and proceeded to explain that “This motion strengthens the House bill’s current restrictions on Guantánamo Bay detainees by ensuring their names have been put on the No Fly list and by clearly prohibiting their transfer to the United States — for whatever reason.”

After lambasting the Obama administration for having “No plan” for how to close Guantánamo, Rep. Rogers explained that “this motion prohibits the granting of any immigration benefit for any reason. Without such a benefit, there is no legal way to bring these terrorists to American soil and in our constituents’ backyards. And, that means these terrorists cannot be granted the same constitutional rights as American citizens.”

He added, “After all, these detainees are enemy combatants, caught on the battlefield. They are NOT common criminals and they should not be granted legal standing in our criminal courts by bringing them onto US soil. From my point of view, we cannot waver on this issue, nor can we be weak. There is no reason these terrorists, who pose a serious and documented threat to our nation, cannot be brought to justice right where they are in Cuba. And, I certainly think that is where the American people stand on this issue — they don’t want these terrorists in their hometowns, inciting fellow prisoners, abusing our legal system, and terrorizing their communities.”

This, then, is the reason that I have lost my sense of humor. In May, members of the US Senate voted by 90-6 to approve an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009, eliminating $80 million from planned legislation intended to fund the closure of Guantánamo, and specifically prohibiting the use of any funding to “transfer, relocate, or incarcerate Guantánamo Bay detainees to or within the United States.” Defending the amendment, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), speaking for himself and his spineless colleagues who had bowed to a Republican fearmongering campaign, said, “This is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.”

In June, the House of Representatives followed up by passing a spending bill turning down the administration’s request for $60 million to close Guantánamo, which, as JURIST described it, “placed limits on the government’s ability to transfer detainees to the US and release detainees to foreign countries.” Approved by a vote of 259-157, the bill also prohibited funds from being used to release detainees from Guantánamo into the United States. In JURIST’s words, “The legislation [requires] the president to submit to Congress a detailed plan documenting the costs and risks of transferring a detainee to the US for trial or detention at least two months before the detainee is to be transferred. Additionally, the president [has] to notify the governor and legislature of the state to which the detainee is to be transferred at least 30 days before the transfer and must show that the detainee does not pose a security risk. The bill also requires that the president submit a report to Congress before releasing a detainee into his country of origin or last habitual residence unless that country is the US.

Last Thursday’s vote was for a non-binding motion to instruct conferees to follow Rep. Rogers’ motion (see an explanation here) rather than binding legislation, but, at the very least, it signals that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are determined to scupper Barack Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo by January 22, 2010, for two indefensible reasons.

The first is the NIMBY card (Not In My Back Yard), in which lawmakers wail, as Rep. Rogers put it, that “the American people … don’t want these terrorists in their hometowns, inciting fellow prisoners, abusing our legal system, and terrorizing their communities.” This requires everyone involved to conveniently forget that America’s Supermax prisons are the envy of prison-lovers the world over, that convicted mass-murdering criminals — including some convicted of terrorism — are safely locked away in these prisons, and that the rest of the world is looking on and laughing at the lawmakers’ feeble paranoia.

However, the second reason for my despair is rather more fundamental. To hear Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, use the word “terrorists” when referring to the Guantánamo prisoners, and to hear this same word repeated ad infinitum by Rep. Rogers, and by those many members of the Senate and the House who have persistently voted to prevent the closure of Guantánamo, is to step back into those dark months after the 9/11 attacks, when former Vice President Dick Cheney and his closest advisors were hatching their plans to hold anyone who ended up in US custody as an “enemy combatant” — in other words, neither as a criminal nor as a prisoner of war, but as a whole new category of non-being without rights.

It involves stepping back to a time when Cheney and his associates were hatching their plans to hand out bounty payments, averaging $5,000 a head, to the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, who seized at least 86 percent of the men who ended up in Guantánamo, the majority of whom were not “caught on the battlefield,” as Rep. Rogers cla.

It also involves stepping back to when these same men — and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld — were hatching their plans to prevent the military from conducting competent tribunals under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions.

Pioneered by the US, and conducted during every war from Vietnam onwards, competent tribunals were designed to separate soldiers from civilians, in situations in which enemy soldiers did not wear uniforms, by holding tribunals close to the time and place of capture, in which these men could call witnesses to establish their credentials. In the first Gulf War, these tribunals led to nearly three-quarters of 1,200 men being released, but in Afghanistan the administration’s decision not to proceed with the tribunals (which was dictated from the highest levels of government) not only contributed to the filling of Guantánamo with people who were neither soldiers nor terrorists, but also led the administration to conclude that the humane standards of treatment required by the Geneva Conventions for all prisoners (whether uniformed personnel or not) did not apply to “enemy combatants.”

This was just the beginning. Voting to prevent the Obama administration from bringing Guantánamo prisoners to the US for any reason — even for federal court trials — endorses the notion that, having randomly rounded up hundreds of prisoners, and having refused to screen them, it was then justifiable to deprive them of the protections of the Geneva Conventions and to transport them to Guantánamo, where they continued to be held without rights, and where, if the lawmakers had their way, they would remain in that perpetual limbo.

What the nation’s lawmakers seem to be forgetting is that the legal black hole of Guantánamo’s early years was only maintained until June 2004, when no less a body than the US Supreme Court was required to intervene. The Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of granting the prisoners habeas corpus rights because, although some of them may well have been soldiers, who should have been held as prisoners of war, or terrorists, who should have been prosecuted as criminals, the Bush administration’s decision to hold them as “enemy combatants” without rights meant that those who claimed that they were innocent men seized by mistake — perhaps in connection with those bounty payments mentioned above — had no way whatsoever of challenging the basis of their detention. Without the intervention of the Supreme Court, they could have been held for the rest of their lives without ever having been screened adequately to determine whether they were, in fact, terrorists, soldiers or innocent men seized by mistake or sold for money.

Even then, this miserable story was far from over, as lawmakers should recall. In an attempt to ignore the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Bush administration introduced one-sided military tribunals to evaluate the prisoners’ cases, relying on supposed evidence that in fact consisted largely of “confessions” extracted from other prisoners, either through torture or coercion, or through bribery (the promise of better living conditions, or the false promise of freedom), and persuaded Congress (including many of the same cowardly propagandists responsible for the votes in May, June and last Thursday) to pass two hideously flawed pieces of legislation — the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — which purported to strip the prisoners of the habeas rights granted by the Supreme Court.

Last June, the Supreme Court rose up again, this time granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, and setting in motion a process of reviews that, to date, has led to District Court judges examining the government’s supposed evidence in 38 cases, and ruling that, in 30 of these cases (in other words, in 79 percent of the cases), the government failed to establish that the men in question were members of, or supported al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. If the lawmakers cared to read the rulings, they would discover that this was largely because the judges concluded that the government was relying on supposed evidence that in fact consisted largely of “confessions” extracted from other prisoners, either through torture or coercion, or through bribery (the promise of better living conditions, or the false promise of freedom).

Fortunately, the lawmakers are no longer able to prevent these cases from taking place — as no doubt, if they were able, they would yet again cast the remaining prisoners into a lawless abyss — but by making such sweeping generalizations about the “terrorists” in Guantánamo, and about preventing the government from transferring any of these “terrorists” to the US mainland to be imprisoned and to face trials, they are committing a number of grievous errors.

They are preventing justice from being delivered in the cases of the small number of prisoners actually accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and other acts of international terrorism, and they are shamelessly, ridiculously, and unforgivably tarring everyone held at Guantánamo as a “terrorist,” even though the majority of the men have never been charged with any crime, even though the lack of screening and the bounty payments that I mentioned above have been assiduously chronicled by lawyers and writers — myself included — who have not succumbed to a witless parroting of Dick Cheney’s hollow propaganda, and even though judges in US courts continue to demonstrate that, behind the hype and hyperbole, the majority of these men are not “terrorists” at all.

My sense of humor will return (you don’t deal with Guantánamo day in and day out without having a sense of humor, however dark), but my despair at the spinelessness and stupidity of the majority of the nation’s lawmakers will only dissipate when these men and women can be bothered to examine the facts, rather than letting themselves remain infected by the lies and paranoia of the most disgraceful Vice President in American history.

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 exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Dick Cheney’s Pawns On Guantánamo.” Cross-posted on The Public Record and uruknet.

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).

On Friday (at half past midnight in the UK), I was delighted to prop up my wilting eyelids to talk to leading progressive radio host Jeff Farias about the latest disturbing developments in the Guantánamo story. The particular spur for the interview was the recent — and electrifying — District Court ruling in the habeas corpus petition of the Kuwaiti prisoner Fouad al-Rabiah, which I covered in detail in my article, “A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions.”

As well as discussing why the revelations in Fouad al-Rabiah’s case were so shocking, I also had the opportunity to explain why they are, essentially, the tip of a particularly grim iceberg, given that al-Rabiah’s torture and false confessions came about because he was one of at least 100 prisoners in Guantánamo who were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” drawn from torture techniques taught in US military schools (the SERE schools) to train military personnel to resist interrogation if captured. I also had the opportunity to highlight the fact that any fool should have been able to see that the techniques — drawn from those used on captured US pilots in the Korean War — would fail when reverse engineered for use in the real world, because they were explicitly used by the Communist Chinese to produce false confessions in the first place.

Jeff and I also discussed the motivations for the Bush administration’s torture regime, which I explained as a desire for violence and vengeance on the part of senior officials, accompanied by an arrogant and uninformed suspicion of the established rapport-building techniques favored by agencies including the FBI, which eschew torture because it is unreliable and because it produces false confessions, and also because its use destroys the possibility of criminal prosecutions.

In a follow-up to the circumstances of Fouad al-Rabiah’s habeas ruling, we also talked about the failure of anyone in a senior position in the Justice Department to monitor what is happening with the Guantánamo cases, and to prevent the kind of embarrassments in court that are occurring on a regular basis (with 30 of the 38 cases so far decided ending in rulings in favor of the prisoners). This allowed me to lament the fact that one of the reasons that the administration is able to press on regardless is that its embarrassments — and its implicit and unacceptable defense of the Bush administration’s chaotic, cruel and incompetent approach to intelligence-gathering — are not front-page news, and, sadly, are not a cause of consternation to the majority of the American public.

The show is available as a download here (under “10-02-09”), or via the page here. It starts one and a half hours in, and lasts for around 20 minutes.

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.