Archive for June, 2010

UN Secret Detention Report (Part Three): Proxy Detention, Other Countries’ Complicity, and Obama’s Record

To complement my recent article, “UN Human Rights Council Discusses Secret Detention Report,” in which I explained how, two weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council had — after some delays — finally discussed the findings of the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, 186-page report issued in February (PDF), I’m posting the section of the report that deals with US secret detention policies since the 9/11 attacks, in the hope that it might reach a new audience — and provide useful research opportunities — as an HTML document.

I do, however, urge everyone to read the whole report, because the introduction and conclusions are important, as are the sections establishing the legal approach to secret detention and its historical context, the section detailing current practices in 25 other countries worldwide, and the annexes, which contain government responses to a questionnaire about secret detention, and a number of case studies.

Given the length of this section of the report (pp. 43-89), I’m publishing it in three parts. The first, published here, provided an introduction, and dealt with “The ‘high-value detainee’ programme and CIA secret detention facilities,” the second looked at “CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones,” and the third, published below, looks at “Proxy detention sites,” “Complicity in the practice of secret detention” and “Secret detention and the Obama administration.”

Please note that I have inserted hyperlinks where possible. However, the original report contains footnotes, and not all of these provide links to websites. In most cases, I have added the information contained in the footnotes in square brackets, but for full details, please see the original.

Excerpts from the UN “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” February 2010

Prepared by Martin Scheinin, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Shaheen Ali, the vice-chair of the Working Group on arbitrary detention, and Jeremy Sarkin, the chair of the Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances.

C. Proxy detention sites

141. Since 2005, details have emerged of how the United States was not only secretly capturing, transferring and detaining people itself, but also transferring people to other States for the purpose of interrogation or detention without charge. The practice had apparently started almost simultaneously with the high-value detainee programme. The British Government transmitted to the experts a summary of conclusions and recommendations of the Intelligence and Security Committee report on rendition (2007), in which it was noted that “the Security Service and SIS were … slow to detect the emerging pattern of “renditions to detention” that occurred during 2002” [The summary was sent in response to a questionnaire on allegations of rendition and detention sent by the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, dated 8 July 2009]. The CIA appears to have been generally involved in the capture and transfer of prisoners, as well as in providing questions for those held in foreign prisons. Beyond that, a clear pattern is difficult to discern: some prisoners were subsequently returned to CIA custody (and were generally sent on to Guantanamo), while others were sent back to their home countries, or remained in the custody of the authorities in third countries.

142. The Government of the United States has acknowledged that “some enemy combatants have been transferred to their countries of nationality for continued detention” [E/CN.4/2004/3, para. 69]. In its report to the Committee against Torture on 13 January 2006, the Government attempted to deflect criticism of its policy of sending detainees to countries with poor human rights records, including those where they might face the risk of torture, declaring that “the United States does not transfer persons to countries where the United States believes it is ‘more likely than not’ that they will be tortured … The United States obtains assurances, as appropriate, from the foreign government to which a detainee is transferred that it will not torture the individual being transferred” [CAT/C/48/Add.3/Rev.1, para. 30. See also the reply of the Government to a general allegation regarding the its involvement in one case of extraordinary rendition transmitted by the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, in which it affirmed that “the United States does not transport individuals from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture. Furthermore, the United States has not transported individuals, and will not transport individuals to a country where the Government believes they will be tortured” (A/HRC/10/9, para. 425)]. Various United Nations bodies, including the experts and the Committee against Torture, have criticized heavily this policy of “extraordinary rendition” in a detailed way in the past, defining it as a clear violation of international law. They also expressed concern about the use of assurances [See A/HRC/6/17/Add.3, para. 36; A/HRC/4/40, paras. 43 and 50; E/CN.4/2004/3, para. 69; A/HRC/4/41, para. 458 and A/60/316, para. 45; CAT/C/USA/CO/2, paras. 20-21; and A/60/316, E/CN.4/2006/6 and A/HRC/4/40, paras. 52-56].

143. Given the prevailing secrecy regarding the CIA rendition programme, exact figures regarding the numbers of prisoners transferred to the custody of other Governments by the CIA without spending any time in CIA facilities are difficult to ascertain. Equally, little is known about the number of detainees who have been held at the request of other States, such as the United Kingdom and Canada. While several of these allegations cannot be backed up by other sources, the experts wish to underscore that the consistency of many of the detailed allegations provided separately by detainees adds weight to the inclusion of Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, the Syrian Arab Republic, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Djibouti as proxy detention facilities where detainees have been held on behalf of the CIA. Serious concerns also exist about the role of Uzbekistan as a proxy detention site.

1. Jordan

144. At least 15 prisoners, mostly seized in Karachi, Pakistan, or in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, claim to have been rendered by the CIA to the main headquarters of the General Intelligence Department of Jordan in Amman, between September 2001 and 2004. They include three men and one juvenile subsequently transferred to Guantanamo via Afghanistan:

Jamal Mar’i, a Yemeni, and the first known victim of rendition in the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Seized from his house in Karachi, on 23 September 2001, he was held for four months in Jordan before being flown to Guantanamo, where he remains [PDF, pp. 130-44] [Postscript: he was freed in December 2009].

Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian, was rendered to Jordan after handing himself to Mauritanian authorities on 28 November 2001. Mr. Slahi was held in Jordan for eight months, and described what happened to him as “beyond description”. He was then transferred to Afghanistan, where he spent two weeks, and arrived in Guantanamo, where he remains, on 4 August 2002 [PDF, pp. 28-38; PDF, pp. 184-218][Postscript: he won his habeas petition in March 2010].

Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, a Yemeni, was rendered to Jordan after his capture in Karachi on 7 February 2002. Flown to Afghanistan on 8 January 2004, he was held there for eight months, then flown to Guantanamo on 20 September 2004. Still held at Guantanamo, he has stated that he was continuously tortured throughout his 23 months in Jordan. [Postscript: his torture was referred to by a US judge in this habeas petition].

Hassan bin Attash, a Saudi-born Yemeni, was 17 years old when he was seized in Karachi on 11 September 2002 with Ramzi bin al-Shibh. He was held in Jordan until 8 January 2004, when he was flown to Afghanistan with Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi. He was then delivered to Guantanamo with al-Sharqawi on 20 September 2004. Still held at Guantanamo, he has stated that he was tortured throughout his time in Jordan.

145. Also held were Abu Hamza al-Tabuki, a Saudi seized by United States agents in Afghanistan in December 2001 and released in Saudi Arabia in late 2002 or early 2003, and Samer Helmi al-Barq, seized in Pakistan on 15 July 2003, who was kept for three months in a secret prison outside Pakistan, before being transferred to Jordan on 26 October 2003. He was released on bail in January 2008 [Others reportedly held in Jordan are Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni student rendered from Karachi on 23 October 2001, who has not been heard of since; Ibrahim al- Jeddawi, a Saudi seized in Yemen (or Kuwait) in the first half of 2002, who was reportedly transferred to Saudi custody; at least five other men (three Algerians, a Syrian and a Chechen), seized in Georgia in 2002; an Iraqi Kurd, possibly seized in Yemen; and a Tunisian, seized in Iraq. The current whereabouts of all these men is unknown. According to former prisoners interviewed by Human Rights Watch, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, seized with Hassan bin Attash and one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006, was also held in Jordan for an unspecified amount of time, as was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, seized in Afghanistan in late 2001, who was subjected to multiple renditions. See also para. 146. For Samer Helmi al-Barq, see Amnesty International, submission to the United Nations Universal Periodic Review, February 2009 (PDF)].

2. Egypt

146. At least seven men were rendered to Egypt by the CIA between September 2001 and February 2003, and another was rendered to Egypt from the Syrian Arab Republic, where he had been seized at the request of the Canadian authorities:

Abdel Hakim Khafargy, an Egyptian-born, Munich-based publisher, was allegedly seized in Bosnia and Herzegovina on 24 September 2001, and rendered to Egypt a few weeks later, after being held by United States forces at its base in Tuzla. He was returned to Germany two months later [PDF].

Mamdouh Habib, an Australian seized in Pakistan in November 2001, was rendered to Egypt three weeks later and held for six months. Transferred to Guantanamo in June 2002, he was released in January 2005. He claims to have been tortured throughout his time in Egypt [For recent developments, see this article].

Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, a Pakistani-Egyptian national, was seized by the Indonesian authorities in Jakarta on 9 January 2002, flown first to Egypt and then to Bagram, where he was held for 11 months. He arrived in Guantanamo on 23 March 2003 and was released in August 2008. Mr. Madni indicated that, during his detention in Cairo, he was subjected to ill-treatment, including electroshocks applied to his head and knees and, on several occasions, he was hung from metal hooks and beaten. Furthermore, he reported that was denied medical treatment for the blood in his urine [Interview with Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni (annex II, case 15)].

As confirmed by the Government of Sweden in its response to a letter sent by the experts, following a decision made by the Government to refuse asylum in Sweden to the Egyptian citizens Mohammed Alzery and Ahmed Agiza and to expel them, they were deported to Egypt by the Swedish Security Police with the assistance of the United States authorities (CIA). Both have said that they were tortured in Egyptian custody [Agiza v Sweden, communication 233/2003 (CAT/C/34/D/233/2003); and Alzery v Sweden, communication 1416/2006 (CCPR/C/88/D/1416/2005)]. Alzery was released on 12 October 2003 without charge or trial, but was placed under police surveillance. Ahmed Agiza had already been tried and sentenced in absentia by an Egyptian military court at the time of the decision by the Government of Sweden to deport him. In April 2004, the court’s decision was confirmed and Agiza was convicted on terrorism charges following a trial monitored by Human Rights Watch, which described it as “flagrantly unfair”.

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a Libyan, an emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, was seized by Pakistani officials in late 2001 while fleeing Afghanistan and was rendered to Egypt where, under torture, he claimed that there were links between Al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, which were used by the United States administration to justify the invasion of Iraq. Also held in secret CIA detention sites in Afghanistan, and possibly in other countries, he was returned to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in 2006, where he reportedly died by committing suicide in May 2009.

Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (also known as Abu Omar), an Egyptian, was kidnapped in Milan on 17 February 2003, and rendered to Egypt, where he was held for four years (including 14 months in secret detention) before being released [For more details on this case, in particular with regard to the abduction of Abu Omar in Milan and the ensuing judicial proceedings in Italy, see the section on Italian complicity in the renditions programme below]. Allegations of ill-treatment in Egyptian detention include being hung upside down and having had electric shocks applied to his testicles [PDF, p, 4].

The eighth man, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, a Canadian-Egyptian national, was seized at Damascus airport on his arrival from Toronto on 11 November 2001. He was held in the Far Falestin prison in the Syrian Arab Republic until 25 January 2002, when he was transferred to Egyptian custody, where he remained in various detention sites (including in secret detention until August 2002) until his release on 7 March 2004. During the initial period of his detention in Egypt, he was subjected to heavy beatings and threats of rape against his sister. At a later stage during the secret detention phase, he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back practically continuously for 45 days in a solitary confinement cell, which he described as being very painful and which made it hard to use the toilet and wash. He was also subjected to sleep deprivation [Internal inquiry into the actions of Canadian officials in relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin, pursuant to an Order in Council dated 11 December 2006. See also Commission of inquiry into the actions of Canadian officials in relation to Maher Arar, report of the fact finder of 14 October 2005].

3. Syrian Arab Republic

147. At least nine detainees were rendered by the CIA to the Syrian Arab Republic between December 2001 and October 2002, and held in Far Falestin, run by Syrian Military Intelligence. All those able to speak about their experiences explained that they were tortured. As in the case of Egypt (see para. 146 above), other men were seized at the request of the Canadian authorities:

Muhammad Haydar Zammar, a German national, was seized in Morocco on 8 December 2001, and rendered by the CIA to Far Falestin on 22 December 2001. In October 2004, he was moved to an “unknown location”; in February 2007, he received a 12-year sentence from the Higher State Security Court. He was convicted of being a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, a crime punishable by death in the Syrian Arab Republic [See A/HRC/7/4/Add.1., this Amnesty International appeal, and CAT/C/49/Add.4]. In its reply for the present study, the Government of Morocco indicated that the police had arrested Mr. Zammar following information that he had been implicated in the events of 11 September 2001. The Government also stated that Mr. Zammar had not been subjected to secret or arbitrary detention in Morocco, and that he had been transferred to the Syrian Arab Republic on 30 December 2001, in the presence of the Syrian Ambassador accredited to Morocco.

Three detainees were rendered to the Syrian Arab Republic on 14 May 2002: Abdul Halim Dahak, a student seized in Pakistan in November 2001, Omar Ghramesh and an unnamed teenager, the latter being seized with Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on 28 March 2002 [Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Rendition Programme, Hurst & Co., 2006), pp. 4, 54 and 284]. All had been tortured. Their current whereabouts are unknown.

Noor al-Deen, a Syrian teenager, was captured with Abu Zubaydah and rendered to Morocco, then to the Syrian Arab Republic. His current whereabouts are unknown.

According to Abdullah Almalki (see para. 148 below), two other prisoners, Barah Abdul Latif and Bahaa Mustafa Jaghel, were also transferred from Pakistan to the Syrian Arab Republic, the first in February/March 2002, the second in May 2002. Both had been tortured. Their current whereabouts are unknown.

Yasser Tinawi, a Syrian national seized in Somalia on 17 July 2002, was flown to Ethiopia by United States agents, who interrogated him for three months. On 26 October, he was flown to Egypt; on 29 October 2002, he arrived in the Syrian Arab Republic. In March 2003, he received a two-year sentence from a military court.

Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian national, was seized at John F. Kennedy airport in New York on 26 September 2002, held for 11 days in the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Manhattan, then rendered to the Syrian Arab Republic on 8 October, via Jordan [A/HRC/4/33/Add.3, paras. 33, 43-45, footnote 11], where he was held in secret detention at Far Falestin until later that month. Jordan alleged that Mr. Arar had arrived in Amman as an ordinary passenger, but was asked to leave the country because his name was on a list of wanted terrorists, and given a choice of destination. It also alleged that he had asked to be voluntarily taken by car to the Syrian Arab Republic. During his period at Far Falestin, he was severely beaten with a black cable and threatened with electric shocks: “The pattern was for Mr. Arar to receive three or four lashes with the cable then to be questioned, and then for the beating to begin again.” The torture allegations were found to be completely consistent with the results of the forensic examinations conducted in Canada. On 14 August 2003, Mr. Arar was moved to Sednaya prison and released on 29 September. The official inquiry in the Arar case also stressed the catastrophic impact of the described events in terms of his and his family’s economic situation and his family life in general.

148. When Ahmad Abou El-Maati (see para. 146) was held in Far Falestin in the Syrian Arab Republic, he was held in solitary confinement in poor conditions and subjected to ill-treatment, including blindfolding, forced to remove almost all his clothes, beaten with cables, forcible shaving and had ice-cold water poured on him. Abdullah Almalki, a Canadian-Syrian national, also spent time in secret detention in the Syrian Arab Jamahiriya, in Far Falestin, from 3 May to 7 July 2002, when he received a family visit. On 25 August 2003, he was sent to Sednaya prison. He was released on 10 March 2004. He returned to Canada on 25 July 2004 after being acquitted of all charges by the Syrian State Supreme Security court [Internal inquiry, paras. 10-38].

149. Another Canadian, Muayyed Nureddin, an Iraqi-born geologist, was detained on the border of the Syrian Arab Republic and Iraq on 11 December 2002, when he returned from a family visit in northern Iraq. He was secretly detained for a month in Far Falestin, then released on 13 January 2003 [Internal inquiry, paras. 10-38].

150. In its response to the questionnaire sent by the experts, the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic stated that the country had no secret prisons or detention centres. There were no cases of secret detention, and no individuals had been arrested without the knowledge of the competent authorities. No authorization had been granted to the security service of any foreign State to establish secret detention facilities in the Syrian Arab Republic. A number of foreign individuals had been arrested in the country at the request of other States, and had been informed of the legal basis for the arrests and their places of detention. The above-mentioned States were also informed of whether the individuals concerned had been brought before the Courts or transferred outside of the country. Individuals belonging to different terrorist groups had been prosecuted and detained in public prisons, in compliance with relevant international standards. They would be judged by the competent judicial authorities. Court proceedings would be public and be held in the presence of defence lawyers, families, human rights activists and foreign diplomats. Some would be publicized through the media. The Interpol branch within the Security Service of the Ministry of the Interior was cooperating with international Interpol branches with regard to suspected terrorist and other criminal activities.

4. Morocco

151. At least three detainees were rendered to Morocco by the CIA between May and July 2002, and held in Temara prison, including the following:

Abou Elkassim Britel, of Moroccan origin and an Italian citizen through marriage and naturalization, was seized in Lahore, Pakistan, on 10 March 2002. He stated that he was tortured in Pakistani custody. On 23 May 2002, he was rendered by the CIA to Morocco, where he was held in secret detention until February 2003, and where he alleged he was also tortured. He was released in February 2003, but in May 2003 was seized again, held for another four months in Temara, then sentenced to 15 years in prison, which was reduced to nine years on appeal [Interview with Khadija Anna L. Pighizzini, wife of Abou Elkassim Britel (annex II, case 7)]. In its submission for the present study, the Government of Morocco stated that Mr. Britel had not been subjected to “arbitrary detention or torture” between May 2002 and February 2003, or between May and September 2003.

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national and British resident, was seized in Karachi, Pakistan, on 10 April 2002. He was held for approximately three months, during which time he was subjected to torture. On 21 July 2002, he was rendered by the CIA to Morocco, where he was held for 18 months in three different unknown facilities. During that period, he was allegedly threatened, subjected to particularly severe torture and other forms of ill-treatment; deprived from sleep for up to 48 hours at a time; and his prayers were interrupted by turning up the volume of pornographic movies. In January 2004, he was flown to the CIA “dark prison” in Kabul, and in May he was moved to Bagram. He was flown to Guantanamo on 20 September 2004, and was released in February 2009 [Interview with Binyam Mohamed (annex II, case 18); see also the finding of two British High Court judges that the treatment to which he had been subjected presented an “arguable case of torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” (PDF)] [The third prisoner is Noor al-Deen (see para. 147), who was moved to the Syrian Arab Republic in 2003].

5. Pakistan

152. From December 2001 until the summer of 2002, when the majority of the detainees who ended up in Guantanamo were seized, detention facilities in Pakistan, where several hundred detainees were held before being transferred to Kandahar or Bagram, were a crucial component of what was then, exclusively, a secret detention programme. Many of these men, seized near the Pakistani border, or while crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, were held in prisons in Kohat and Peshawar, but others were held in what appear to be impromptu facilities, which were established across the country in numerous locations. The then President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, stated that:

Since shortly after 9/11, when many Al-Qaida members fled Afghanistan and crossed the border into Pakistan, we have played multiple games of cat and mouse with them. The biggest of them all, Osama bin Laden, is still at large at the time of this writing, but we have caught many, many others. Some are known to the world, some are not. We have captured 672 and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars [Pervez Musharraf, In The Line Of Fire: A Memoir, Free Press, 2006].

153. Two former prisoners, Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes, described their experiences of secret detention in Pakistan to the experts:

Omar Deghayes, a Libyan national and British resident, was arrested in April 2002 at his home in Lahore after a hundred people in black tracksuits surrounded the house. In the presence of an American officer, he was then taken, handcuffed and hooded, to a police station and, shortly afterwards, to an old fortress outside Lahore, where he was held with other men from Palestine, Tunisia, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and Egypt, and beaten and kicked, and heard electroshocks and people screaming. According to his account, “the place was run by Pakistanis and appeared to be a maximum security prison for extremist opponents that were traded with different States such as Libya and the United States.” He also stated that he was tortured for a month without any contact with the external world, and that the ill-treatment included punching, beating, kicking, stripping, being hit in the back with wooden sticks, and stress positions for up to three days and three nights. In mid-May, two Americans in plain clothes visited, took photographs and asked questions. He was then moved to a place in Islamabad, which looked like a barracks, where he was held incommunicado for one month without access to a lawyer or ICRC, and was interrogated in a nearby house by American officers, who identified themselves as CIA, and, on one occasion, by a British agent from MI6. He said that torture took place in the barracks but not during the interrogations, and that he was subjected to drowning and stress positions, and recalled a room full of caged snakes that guards threatened to open if he did not speak about what he had done in Afghanistan. He then met with British and American officers, who finally “acquired” him with other detainees, and took him to Bagram, where he was heavily tortured and sexually abused by American soldiers. He was flown to Guantanamo in August 2002, and released in December 2007 [Interview with Omar Deghayes (annex II, case 8)].

Moazzam Begg, a British citizen, moved to Kabul, with his wife and three children, to become a teacher and a charity worker in 2001. After leaving Afghanistan in the wake of the United States-led invasion, on 31 January 2002, he was abducted from a house in Islamabad, where he was living with his family, and taken to a place in Islamabad (not an official detention facility), where those who held him were not uniformed officers and there were people held in isolation. Held for three weeks, he was moved to a different venue for interviews with American and British intelligence officers, but his wife did not know where he had been taken, and he was denied access to a lawyer or consular services. He was then taken to a military airport near Islamabad and handed over to American officers. He was held in Afghanistan and Guantanamo for three years, and was released in January 2005 [Interview with Moazzam Begg (annex II, case 6)].

6. Ethiopia

154. The Government of Ethiopia served as the detaining authority for foreign nationals of interest to United States and possibly other foreign intelligence officers between 30 December 2006 and February 2007 [For allegations in interviews conducted by Federal Bureau of Investigation officers, see for example the case of Meshal vs Higgenbotham. See also Human Rights Watch, “Why am I still here?: the 2007 Horn of Africa renditions and the fate of those still missing” (PDF)]. On 2 May 2007, a number of special procedures addressed the Government of Ethiopia, adding the following details:

In December 2006, the conflict between the militias of the Council of Somali Islamic Courts and the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, supported by armed forces of Ethiopia, caused a large flow of refugees seeking to cross the border from Somalia into Kenya. On 2 January 2007, Kenyan authorities announced the closure of the border for security reasons. Since then, it is reported that the Kenyan security forces have been patrolling the border and have arrested a number of those seeking to cross it. Kenya has deported at least 84 of those arrested back to Somalia, from where they were taken to Ethiopia [A/HRC/7/3/Add.1, para. 71].

155. The experts interviewed two of those captured between December 2006 and February 2007: Bashir Ahmed Makhtal (mentioned in the Special Rapporteur’s communication) and Mohamed Ezzoueck. The latter, a British national, was detained on 20 January 2007 in Kiunga village, Kenya, after crossing the Somali-Kenyan border and then transferred to Nairobi, where he was held in three different locations. Mr. Ezzoueck reported having been detained in Kenya for about three weeks and then transferred to Somalia, where he was held for a few days before being transferred, via Nairobi, back to London. According to his testimony, he was interrogated by a Kenyan army major and Kenyan intelligence service officers, FBI officers and British security services officers, and repeatedly asked about his involvement with terrorist groups, including Al Qaida [Interview with Mohamed Ezzouek (annex II, case 10)]. Mr. Makhtal, an Ethiopian-born Canadian, was arrested on the border between Kenya and Somalia on 30 December 2006 by intelligence agents and held at a police detention centre. He was subsequently transferred by car to a prison cell in Gigiri police station in Nairobi. On 21 January 2007, the Kenyan authorities sent him to Mogadishu. On the following day, he was taken to Addis Ababa by an Ethiopian military plane. He was then held for approximately 18 months incommunicado in Mekalawi federal prison, often in solitary confinement and in poor conditions, then ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment by the High Court of Ethiopia [Interview with Bashir Makhtal (annex II, case 16)].

156. In a letter dated 23 May 2007, the Government of Ethiopia informed the relevant special procedures mandate holders that the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia had handed over to Ethiopia 41 individuals captured in the course of the conflict in Somalia; most of these detainees had been released. Only eight of the detainees remained in custody by order of the court. The Government also noted that “the allegation that there are more than seventy others in addition to those named in the communication is false, as are the allegations that the detainees are held incommunicado, and that they might be at risk of torture” [A/HRC/7/3/Add.1, para. 71]. However, in September 2008, Human Rights Watch published a report stating that at least 10 detainees were still in Ethiopian custody, and the whereabouts of others were unknown [PDF].

7. Djibouti

157. The experts received information proving that a detainee in the CIA secret detention programme, Mohammed al-Asad, had been transferred by Tanzanian officials by plane to Djibouti on 27 December 2003 [High Court of Tanzania at Dar es Salaam, criminal application No. 23 of 2004, Abdullah Salehe Mohsen al-Asad vs. Director of Immigration Services ex parte Mohamed Abdullah Salehe Mohsen Al-Asaad counter affidavit, 30 June 2004]. In Djibouti, Mr. al-Asad was detained for two weeks in secret detention, where he was interrogated by a white English-speaking woman and a male interpreter, mostly on his connections to the al-Haramain foundation. The woman identified herself as American. Mr. al-Asad’s own recollection is consistent with his having been held in Djibouti. One of his guards told him that he was in Djibouti and there was a photograph of President Guelleh on the wall of the detention facility. After approximately two weeks, Mr. al-Asad was taken to an airport in Djibouti, where a team of individuals dressed entirely in black stripped him, inserted an object in his rectum, diapered and photographed him, and strapped him down in a plane. The detention site may have been in Camp Lemonier, which allegedly has been used on a short-term or transitory basis for several detainees being transferred to secret detention elsewhere.

8. Uzbekistan

158. No confirmation has ever been provided by either the Government of the United States or that of Uzbekistan that detainees were rendered to proxy prisons in Uzbekistan. In May 2005, however, the New York Times spoke to “a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States” who stated that the United States had sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation. A United States intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent was in the dozens. The New York Times also obtained flight logs, showing that at least seven flights were made to Uzbekistan from early 2002 to late 2003” by two planes associated with the CIA rendition programme (a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737), and noted that, on 21 September 2003, both planes had arrived at Tashkent. According to the newspaper, the flight logs showed that “the Gulfstream had taken off from Baghdad, while the 737 had departed from the Czech Republic”. On 14 August 2009, the BBC interviewed Ikrom Yakubov, an Uzbek intelligence officer who has been granted political asylum in the United Kingdom, who stated that the United States had rendered terrorist suspects for questioning to Uzbekistan, but added, “I don’t want to talk about it as there might be serious concerns for my life in the future to discuss renditions.” On 22 August 2009, the story resurfaced once more, when Der Spiegel reported that, in an arrangement between the private security firm Blackwater and the CIA, Blackwater and its subsidiaries had been commissioned “to transport terror suspects from Guantanamo to interrogations at secret prison camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan”.

D. Complicity in the practice of secret detention

159. After September 2006, the direct role of the CIA in secret detentions seemed to have shrunk significantly, with “current and former American Government officials” explaining in May 2009 to the New York Times that, in the last two years of the Bush administration, the Government of the United States had started to rely heavily on the foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the newspaper, “in the past 10 months, … about a half-dozen mid-level financiers and logistics experts working with Al-Qaida have been captured and are being held by intelligence services in four Middle Eastern countries after the United States provided information that led to their arrests by local security services”. Instead of actively detaining persons in secret, the United States — and many other countries — became complicit in the practice of secret detention. For the purposes of the present study, the experts state that a country is complicit in the secret detention of a person in the following cases:

(a) When a State has asked another State to secretly detain a person (covering all cases mentioned in paras. 141-158 above);

(b) When a State knowingly takes advantage of the situation of secret detention by sending questions to the State detaining the person or by soliciting or receiving information from persons who are being kept in secret detention. This includes at least the following States:

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in the cases of several individuals, including Binyam Mohamed [Interview with Binyam Mohamed (annex II, case 18)], Salahuddin Amin, Zeeshan Siddiqui, Rangzieb Ahmed and Rashid Rauf [PDF]. In its submission for the present study, the British Government referred to ongoing and concluded judicial assessment of the cases and stressed the work of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, as well as its policy of clear opposition to secret detention [According to the Government of the United Kingdom, the judge in Mr Ahmed’s case stated, “I specifically reject the allegations that the British authorities were outsourcing torture”. The judge examined Mr. Amin’s allegations and found that there was no evidence to suggest that the British authorities had been complicit in his unlawful detention or ill-treatment in Pakistan];

Germany, in the case of Muhammad Haydar Zammar, who was reportedly interrogated on at least one occasion, on 20 November 2002, by agents of German security agencies while he was secretly held in the Syrian Arab Republic [See “Kanzleramt dealte mit Syriens Geheimdienst”, Der Spiegel, 19 November 2005]. The Government reported having been informed about four cases of renditions or enforced disappearances concerning the Federal Republic of Germany: the cases of Khaled El-Masri, Murat Kurnaz, Muhammad Haydar Zammar and Abdel Halim Khafagy, which occurred between September 2001 and the end of 2005. However, the German authorities did not directly or indirectly participate in arresting these persons or in rendering them for imprisonment. In the cases of El-Masri and Khafagy, the German missions responsible for consular assistance had no knowledge of their imprisonment and were therefore unable to ensure that their rights were observed or guarantee consular protection; in the cases of Zammar and Kurnaz, the German authorities worked intensively to guarantee consular protection. However, they were denied access to the detainees and were thereby prevented from effectively exercising consular protection [Response to a questionnaire on allegations of rendition and detention sent by the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, 30 September 2009]. In a letter dated 9 December 2009, the German Federal Ministry of Justice further reported that it had become aware of the case of Mr. Kurnaz on 26 February 2002, when the Chief Federal Prosecutor informed the Ministry that it would not take over a preliminary investigation pending before the Prosecution of the Land of Bremen. The Office of the Chief Federal Prosecutor had received a report from the Federal Criminal Police Office on 31 January 2002 that, according to information by the Federal Intelligence Service, Mr. Kurnaz had been arrested by United States officials in Afghanistan or Pakistan. In the case of Mr. El-Masri, on 8 June 2004, the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Foreign Office received a letter from his lawyer that Mr. El-Masri had been abducted in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on 31 December 2003, presumably transferred to Afghanistan and kept there against his will until his return to Germany on 29 May 2004. The Federal Ministry of Justice was informed about these facts on 18 June 2004. The experts note, however, that according to the final report of a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, the Government became aware of the case of Mr. El-Masri on 31 May 2004, when the Ambassador of the United States informed the Federal Minister for the Interior of Germany [PDF];

Canada, for providing intelligence to the Syrian Arab Republic in the cases of Maher Arar, Ahmad el-Maati, Abdullah Almaki and Muayyed Nureddin. In its submission for the present study, the Government denied that any of the named individuals was detained or seized by a State at the request of Canada. The experts welcome the fact that all the above-mentioned cases have been the subject of extensive independent inquiry processes within Canada and that, in the case of Mr. Arar, substantive reparations has been provided to the victims;

Australia, for providing intelligence to interrogators in the case of the secret detention of Mamdouh Habib. Mr Habib also alleges that an Australian official was present during at least one of his interrogation sessions in Egypt. The experts understand that Mr. Habib is currently suing the Government of Australia, arguing that it was complicit in his kidnapping and subsequent transfer to Egypt. In its submission for the present study, the Government denies that any Australian officer, servant and/or agent was involved in any dealings with or mistreatment of Mr. Habib, and refers to ongoing litigation;

(c) When a State has actively participated in the arrest and/or transfer of a person when it knew, or ought to have known, that the person would disappear in a secret detention facility or otherwise be detained outside the legally regulated detention system. This includes at least the following States:

Italy, for its role in the abduction and rendition of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (also known as Abu Omar), an Egyptian kidnapped by CIA agents on a street in Milan in broad daylight on 17 February 2003. He was transferred from Milan to the NATO military base at Aviano by car, and then flown, via the NATO military base of Ramstein in Germany, to Egypt, where he was held for four years (including 14 months in secret detention) before being released. The European Parliament considered it “very likely, in view of the involvement of its secret services, that the Italian Government of the day was aware of the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar from within its territory” [European Parliament Committee report, paras. 50 and 54]. Prosecutors opened an investigation and charged 26 United States citizens (mostly CIA agents) with abduction, as well as members of the Italian military secret services (SISMI) with complicity in the abduction, among them the head of SISMI [Reply of the Government of Italy to the joint request for relevant information by the four experts (see annex I)]. The Italian Ministry of Justice, however, refused to forward the judiciary’s requests for extradition of the CIA agents to the Government of the United States; as a result, the United States citizens were tried in absentia. On 4 November 2009, the court found 23 of them guilty. The court also convicted two SISMI agents and sentenced them to three years imprisonment for their involvement in the abduction. The then commander of SISMI and his deputy, however, were not convicted, the court having dismissed the cases against them on the grounds that the relevant evidence was covered by State secret [The executive branch of the Government of Italy successfully raised the issue of State secret before the Constitutional Court; see the reply of the Government of Italy to the joint request for relevant information by the four experts (annex I)]. In its submission for the present study, the Government of Italy notes that the case is continuing at the appeal level, which prevents it from drawing any conclusions prior to a definitive verdict;

Kenya, for detaining 84 persons in various secret locations in Nairobi before transferring them on three charter flights between 20 January and 10 February 2007 to Somalia. They were subsequently transferred to Ethiopia, where they were kept in secret detention. They were not provided with an opportunity to challenge their forcible physical removal at any stage (see also paras. 154-156 above) [See also Meshal vs Higgenbotham; Redress and Reprieve report, “Kenya and counter terrorism: a time for change”, February 2009 (PDF), and Human Rights Watch, “Why am I still here?” (PDF). The experts have received allegations of cooperation with United States intelligence that dates back to 2003; see interview with Suleiman Abdallah (annex II, case 2)].

(d) A specific form of complicity in this context are these cases where a State holds a person shortly in secret detention before handing them over to another State where that person will be put in secret detention for a longer period. This includes at least the following countries:

The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, for its role in the case of Khaled El-Masri [Interview with Khaled el-Masri (annex II, case 9)];

Malawi, for allegedly holding Laid Saidi in secret detention for a week;

The Gambia: during an interview with the experts, Bisher al-Rawi reported that, on 8 November 2002, he was arrested upon arrival at Banjul airport by the Gambian Intelligence Agency, then taken to an office and later to a house located in a Banjul residential place before he was handed over to the CIA and rendered to Afghanistan.

(e) When a State has failed to take measures to identify persons or airplanes passing through its airports or airspace after information of the CIA programme involving secret detention had already been revealed. The issue of rendition flights was, and still is, the subject of many separate investigations at the national or regional level. Therefore, the experts decided to refrain from going into the details of this issue [See, inter alia, the European Parliament Committee report, 18 June 2009 (PDF); the statement of the Foreign Secretary to the House of Commons on United States rendition flights, 21 February 2008, and Dick Marty,”Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report” (PDF)].

E. Secret detention and the Obama administration

160. In its response to the questionnaire sent by the experts, the United States stated that:

The Obama Administration has adopted the following specific measures:

Instructed the CIA to close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operated as of January 22, 2009 and ordered that the CIA shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.

Ordered that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed as soon as practicable.

Required the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to be given notice and timely access to any individual detained in any armed conflict in the custody or under the effective control of the United States Government, consistent with Department of Defense regulations and policies.

Ordered a comprehensive review of the lawful options available to the Federal Government with respect to detention of individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.

Reaffirmed that all persons in U.S. custody must be treated humanely as a matter of law.

Mandated that detention at Guantanamo conform to all applicable laws governing conditions of confinement, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and directed a review of detention conditions at Guantanamo to ensure such compliance.

Ordered a review of U.S. transfer policies to ensure that they do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture or otherwise for the purpose, or with the effect, of undermining or circumventing the commitments or obligations of the United States to ensure the humane treatment of individuals in its custody or control. The resulting Task Force on transfer practices recommended to the President in August that (1) the State Department be involved in evaluating all diplomatic assurances; (2) the Inspectors General of the Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security prepare an annual report on all transfers relying on assurances; and (3) mechanisms for monitoring treatment in the receiving country be incorporated into assurances.

Announced the transfer of at least 7 detainees from military custody to U.S. criminal law enforcement proceedings, and transferred 25 detainees to date to third-countries for repatriation or resettlement.

Worked with Congress to revise U.S. laws governing military commissions to enhance their procedural protections, including prohibiting introduction of evidence obtained as a result of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

Expanded the review procedures for detainees held by the Department of Defense in Afghanistan in order to enhance the transparency and fairness of U.S. detention practices. Detainees are permitted an opportunity to challenge the evidence that is the basis for their detention, to call reasonably available witnesses, and to have the assistance of personal representatives who have access to all reasonably available relevant information (including classified information). Proceedings generally shall be open, including to representatives of the ICRC, and possibly to non-governmental organizations.

Established more tailored standards and rigorous procedures for evaluating assertions of the State secrets privilege, including establishing an internal accountability mechanism, ensuring that the privilege is never asserted to avoid embarrassment or conceal violations of law, and creating a referral mechanism to the Office of Inspector General where the privilege is asserted but there is credible evidence of a violation of law. These standards and procedures were established in order to strike a better balance between open government and the need to protect vital national security information.

The Department of Justice initiated a preliminary criminal investigation into the interrogation of certain detainees.

These measures cumulatively seek to reaffirm the importance of compliance with the rule of law in U.S. detention practices, to ensure U.S. adherence to its international legal obligations, and to promote accountability and transparency in this important area of national security policy.

161. The experts welcome the above commitments. They believe, however, that clarification is required as to whether detainees were held in CIA “black sites” in Iraq and Afghanistan or elsewhere when President Obama took office, and, if so, what happened to the detainees who were held at that time. Also, the experts are concerned that the executive order instructing the CIA “to close any detention facilities that it currently operates” does not extend to the facilities where the CIA detains individuals on “a short-term transitory basis”. The order also does not seem to extend to detention facilities operated by the Joint Special Operation Command.

162. The experts also welcome in particular the new policy implemented in August 2009, under which the military must notify ICRC of detainees’ names and identification number within two weeks of capture. Nevertheless, there is no legal justification for this two-week period of secret detention. According to article 70 of the Third Geneva Convention, prisoners of war are to be documented, and their whereabouts and health conditions made available to family members and to the country of origin of the prisoner within one week. Article 106 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (governing the treatment of civilians) establishes virtually identical procedures for the documentation and disclosure of information concerning civilian detainees. Furthermore, it is obvious that this unacknowledged detention for one week can only be applied to persons who have been captured on the battlefield in a situation of armed conflict. This is an important observation, as the experts noted with concern news reports quoting current Government officials saying that “the importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has risen under the Obama administration, which barred the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention”.

163. The situation at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility remains of great concern. In March 2009, United States district Court Judge John D. Bates ruled that the habeas corpus rights granted to the Guantanamo detainees by the Supreme Court in June 2008 extended to non-Afghan detainees who had been seized in other countries and rendered to Bagram because “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same”, and because the review process established at the prison “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo”. The four petitioners were among the 94 prisoners that Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury admitted were held in CIA custody between 2001 and 2005. Judge Bates found that, in holding detainees at Bagram not as prisoners of war but as “unlawful enemy combatants”, the Bush administration had put in place a review process, the Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Board, in which “detainees cannot even speak for themselves; they are only permitted to submit a written statement. But in submitting that statement, detainees do not know what evidence the United States relies upon to justify an ‘enemy combatant’ designation — so they lack a meaningful opportunity to rebut that evidence”.

164. The above-mentioned ruling has been appealed by the current United States administration, even though Judge Bates noted that habeas rights extend neither to Afghan detainees held at Bagram, nor to Afghans seized in other countries and rendered to Bagram. In its appeal against Judge Bates’ ruling, the United States administration notified the court that it was introducing a new review process at Bagram, “modifying the procedures for reviewing the status of aliens held by the Department of Defense at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility” [PDF]. However, the experts are concerned that the new review system fails to address the fact that detainees in an active war zone should be held according to the Geneva Conventions, screened close to the time and place of capture if there is any doubt about their status, and not be subjected to reviews at some point after their capture to determine whether they should continue to be held. The experts are also concerned that the system appears to aim specifically to prevent United States courts from having access to foreign detainees captured in other countries and rendered to Bagram. While the experts welcome the fact that the names of 645 detainees at Bagram are now known, they urge the Government of the United States to provide information on the citizenship, length of detention and place of capture of all detainees currently held at Bagram Air Base.

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

See here for the Bagram prisoner list. For a sequence of articles discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two) (April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison (May 2009), WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009), What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed (August 2009), UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents (October 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?” (January 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive.

UN Secret Detention Report (Part Two): CIA Prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq

Given the length of this section of the report (pp. 43-89), I’m publishing it in three parts. The first, published here, provided an introduction, and dealt with “The ‘high-value detainee’ programme and CIA secret detention facilities,” the second, published below, looks at “CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones,” and the third looks at “Proxy detention sites,” “Complicity in the practice of secret detention” and “Secret detention and the Obama administration.”

Excerpts from the UN “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” February 2010

B. CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones

131. Although it is still not possible to identify all 28 of the CIA’s acknowledged high-value detainees, the figures quoted in a memo of the Office of Legal Counsel of 30 May 2005 written by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury [PDF] indicate that the other 66 prisoners in the CIA programme were regarded as less significant. Some of them were subsequently handed over to the United States military and transferred to Guantanamo, while others were rendered to the custody of their home countries or other countries. In very few cases were they released.

1. Afghanistan

132. Outside of the specific “high-value detainee” programme, most detainees were held in a variety of prisons in Afghanistan. Three of these are well-known: a secret prison at Bagram airbase, reportedly identified as “the Hangar” [See also the interview with Murat Kurnaz (annex II, case 14)], and two secret prisons near Kabul, known as the “dark prison” and the “salt pit”. During an interview held with the experts, Bisher al-Rawi indicated that, in the dark prison, there were no lights, heating or decoration. His cell was about 5 x 9 feet with a solid steel door and a hatch towards the bottom of it. He only had a bucket to use as a toilet, an old piece of carpet and a rusty steel bar across the width of the cell to hang people from. All the guards wore hoods with small eye holes, and they never spoke. Very loud music was played continuously. He also indicated that he had been subjected to sleep deprivation for up to three days and received threats. Binyam Mohamed provided a similar account to the experts [see annex II, case 18], as did the lawyer of Khaled El-Masri [annex II, case 9] and Suleiman Abdallah [annex II, case 2]. The experts heard allegations about three lesser-known prisons, including one in the Panjshir valley, north of Kabul, and two others identified as Rissat and Rissat 2, but it was not yet possible to verify these allegations. Of the prisoners identified as having been held in secret CIA custody (in addition to the above-mentioned high-value detainees), seven were eventually released and four escaped from Bagram in July 2005, namely Abu Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan; Omar al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti, captured in Bogor, Indonesia, in 2002; Muhammad Jafar Jamal al-Kahtani, a Saudi, reportedly [re-]captured in Khost province, Afghanistan, in November 2006; and Abdullah Hashimi, a Syrian, also known as Abu Abdullah al-Shami. Five prisoners were reportedly returned to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in 2006: Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi [see para. 146 below]; Hassan Raba’i and Khaled al-Sharif, both captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2003, who had “spent time in a CIA prison in Afghanistan”; Abdallah al-Sadeq, seized in a covert CIA operation in Thailand in the spring of 2004; and Abu Munder al-Saadi, both held briefly before being rendered to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. In May 2009, Human Rights Watch reported that its representatives briefly met Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi on a visit to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, although he refused to be interviewed. Human Rights Watch interviewed four other men, who claimed that, “before they were sent to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, United States forces had tortured them in detention centers in Afghanistan, and supervised their torture in Pakistan and Thailand”. One of the four was Hassan Raba’i, also known as Mohamed Ahmad Mohamed al-Shoroeiya, who stated that, in mid-2003, in a place he believed was Bagram prison in Afghanistan, “the interpreters who directed the questions to us did it with beatings and insults. They used cold water, ice water. They put us in a tub with cold water. We were forced [to go] for months without clothes. They brought a doctor at the beginning. He put my leg in a plaster. One of the methods of interrogation was to take the plaster off and stand on my leg”.

133. The released detainees are:

Laid Saidi, an Algerian seized in the United Republic of Tanzania on 10 May 2003, was handed over to Malawians in plain clothes who were accompanied by two middle-aged Caucasian men wearing jeans and T-shirts. Shortly after the expulsion, a lawyer representing Mr. Saidi’s wife filed an affidavit with a Tanzanian court, saying that immigration documents showed that Mr. Saidi had been deported through the border between Kasumulu, United Republic of Tanzania, and Malawi. He was held for a week in a detention facility in the mountains of Malawi, then rendered to Afghanistan, where he was held in the “dark prison”, the “salt pit” and another unidentified prison. About a year after he was seized, he was flown to Tunisia, where he was detained for another 75 days, before being returned to Algeria, where he was released.

Three Yemenis — Salah Nasser Salim Ali Darwish, seized in Indonesia in October 2003, Mohammed al-Asad and Mohammed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah — were held in a number of CIA detention facilities until their return to Yemen in May 2005, where they continued to be held, apparently at the request of the United States authorities. Mr. Bashmilah was detained by Jordanian intelligence agents in October 2003, when he was in Jordan to assist his mother who was having an operation. From 21 to 26 October 2003, Mr. Bashmilah was detained without charge and subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including prolonged beatings and being threatened with electric shocks and the rape of his mother and wife [see Declaration of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in support of plaintiffs’ opposition to the motion of the United States to dismiss or, in the alternative, for summary judgment, civil action No. 5:07-cv-02798 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division]. A communication was sent by the special rapporteurs on torture and on human rights while countering terrorism to the Governments of the United States, Indonesia, Yemen and Jordan on the cases of Bashmilah and Salim Ali, who were both detained and tortured in Jordan [E/CN.4/2006/6/Add.1, paras. 93, 126, 525 and 550]. Only the latter country responded, declaring that no record showing that the two men had been arrested for the violations of either the penal, disciplinary or administrative codes, and that they did not have documented files indicating that they posed a security concern, eliminating the possibility of their arrest for what may be described as terrorism [A/HRC/4/33/Add.1, para. 123]. The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention adopted its opinion No. 47/2005 (Yemen) on the case on 30 November 2005, declaring their detention to be arbitrary as being devoid of any legal basis. In its reply to the allegations, the Government of Yemen confirmed that Mr. Bashmilah and Mr. Salim Ali had been handed over to Yemen by the United States. According to the Government, they had been held in a security police facility because of their alleged involvement in terrorist activities related to Al-Qaida. The Government added that the competent authorities were still dealing with the case pending receipt of the persons’ files from the United States authorities in order to transfer them to the Prosecutor [A/HRC/4/40/Add.1, para. 15].

Khaled El-Masri, a German seized on the border of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on 31 December 2003, was held in a hotel room by agents of that State for 23 days, then rendered by the CIA to the “salt pit”. He was released in Albania on 29 May 2004 [Also see Interview with the lawyer of Khaled El-Masri (annex II, case 9)].

Khaled al-Maqtari, a Yemeni seized in Iraq in January 2004, was initially held in Abu Ghraib, then transferred to a secret CIA detention facility in Afghanistan. In April 2004, he was moved to a second secret detention facility, possibly in Eastern Europe, where he remained in complete isolation for 28 months, until he was returned to Yemen and released in May 2007.

Marwan Jabour, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, was seized in Lahore, Pakistan, on 9 May 2004, and held in a CIA detention facility in Afghanistan for 25 months. He was then transferred to Jordan, where he was held for six weeks, and to Israel, where he was held for another six weeks, before being freed in Gaza.

[Also mentioned:] Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish national residing in Germany, interviewed by the experts for the present study, was arrested in Pakistan in November or December 2001 and initially held by Pakistani police officers and officers of the United States. He was then transferred into the custody of the United States at that country’s airbase in Kandahar, Afghanistan, before being taken to the naval base at Guantanamo Bay on 1 February 2002. He was held secretly until May 2002, and released on 24 August 2006.

134. A total of 23 detainees who ended up in Guantanamo were also held in CIA detention facilities in Afghanistan. They include:

(a) Six men seized in the Islamic Republic of Iran in late 2001:

Wassam al-Ourdoni, a Jordanian, who was released from Guantanamo in April 2004. In 2006, he told Reprieve that he had been seized by the Iranian authorities while returning from a religious visit to Pakistan with his wife and newborn child in December 2001, then handed over to the Afghan authorities, who handed him on to the CIA. He said that the Americans “asked me about my relationship with Al-Qaida. I told them I had nothing to do with Al-Qaida. They then put me in jail under circumstances that I can only recall with dread. I lived under unimaginable conditions that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.” He said that he was first placed in an underground prison for 77 days: “this room was so dark that we couldn’t distinguish nights and days. There was no window, and we didn’t see the sun once during the whole time.” He said that he was then moved to “prison number three”, where the food was so bad that his weight dropped substantially. He was then held in Bagram for 40 days before being flown to Guantanamo [Clive Stafford Smith, “Abandoned to their fate in Guantánamo”, Index on Censorship, 2006].

Aminullah Tukhi, an Afghan who was transferred to Afghan custody from Guantanamo in December 2007. He alleged that he had fled from Herat to the Islamic Republic of Iran to escape the Taliban, and was working as a taxi driver when the Iranians began rounding up illegal immigrants towards the end of 2001 [PDF, pp. 71-7].

Hussein Almerfedi, a Yemeni, still at Guantanamo. He alleged that he was “kidnapped” in the Islamic Republic of Iran and held for a total of 14 months in three prisons in Afghanistan, “two under Afghani control and one under US control [Bagram]” [PDF, pp. 31-40].

Tawfiq al-Bihani, a Yemeni, still at Guantanamo. Allegedly, after deciding to flee Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks, he was “arrested by Iranian Police in Zahedan, Iran for entering the country without a visa” and held “in various prisons in Iran and Afghanistan, for approximately one year in total [PDF, pp. 66-9].

Rafiq Alhami, a Tunisian still held at Guantanamo, who alleged that “I was in an Afghan prison but the interrogation was done by Americans. I was there for about a one-year period, transferring from one place to another. I was tortured for about three months in a prison called the Prison of Darkness or the Dark Prison” [PDF, pp. 147-61]. And further: “Back in Afghanistan I would be tortured. I was threatened. I was left out all night in the cold. It was different here. I spent two months with no water, no shoes, in darkness and in the cold. There was darkness and loud music for two months. I was not allowed to pray. I was not allowed to fast during Ramadan. These things are documented. You have them” [PDF, pp. 20-22].

Walid al-Qadasi, a Yemeni who was rendered to the “dark prison” and held in other prisons in Afghanistan, together with four other men whose whereabouts are unknown [In addition, Aminullah Tukhi explained that 10 prisoners in total — six Arabs, two Afghans, an Uzbek and a Tajik — had been delivered to the Americans. Although six of these men are accounted for above, it is not known what happened to the other four: an Arab, an Afghan, the Uzbek and the Tajik]. An allegation letter was sent in November 2005 by the Special Rapporteur on torture in relation to Walid Muhammad Shahir Muhammad al-Qadasi, a Yemeni citizen, indicating that the following allegations had been received: He was arrested in Iran in late 2001. He was held there for about three months before being handed over to the authorities in Afghanistan who in turn handed him over to the custody of the US. He was held in a prison in Kabul. During US custody, officials cut his clothes with scissors, left him naked and took photos of him before giving him Afghan clothes to wear. They then handcuffed his hands behind his back, blindfolded him and started interrogating him. The apparently Egyptian interrogator, accusing him of belonging to Al-Qaida, threatened him with death. He was put in an underground cell measuring approximately two metres by three metres with very small windows. He shared the cell with ten inmates. They had to sleep in shifts due to lack of space and received food only once a day. He spent three months there without ever leaving the cell. After three months, Walid al-Qadasi was transferred to Bagram, where he was interrogated for one month. His head was shaved, he was blindfolded, made to wear ear muffs and a mouth mask, handcuffed, shackled, loaded on to a plane and flown out to Guantanamo, where he was held in solitary confinement for one more month. In April 2004, after having been detained for two years, he was transferred to Sana’a prison in Yemen. In its response, the Government of the United States reiterated its earlier announcements that no Government agency was allowed to engage in torture and that its actions complied with the non-refoulement principle. Opinion No. 47/2005 of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention also concerns Mr. al-Qadasi [See E/CN.4/2006/6/Add.1, paras. 1 and 527, and the response from the Government of the United States (A/HRC/10/44/Add.4, para. 252). See also the report of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 47/2005 (A/HRC/4/40/Add.1)].

(b) Two men seized in Georgia in early 2002 and sold to United States forces:

Soufian al-Huwari, an Algerian, transferred to Algerian custody from Guantanamo in November 2008; and Zakaria al-Baidany, also known as Omar al-Rammah, a Yemeni, still held at Guantanamo. According to Mr. al-Huwari, both were rendered to the “dark prison”, and were also held in other detention facilities in Afghanistan: “The Americans didn’t capture me. The Mafia captured me. They sold me to the Americans”. He added: “When I was captured, a car came around and people inside were talking Russian and Georgian. I also heard a little Chechnyan. We were delivered to another group who spoke perfect Russian. They sold us to the dogs. The Americans came two days later with a briefcase full of money. They took us to a forest, then a private plane to Kabul, Afghanistan” [PDF, pp. 15-23].

(c) Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi national and British resident, was seized in the Gambia in November 2002, and rendered to the “dark prison” at the beginning of December 2002. He was kept shackled in complete isolation and darkness for two weeks. On or around 22 December 2002, he was transferred to Bagram, and then to Guantanamo on 7 February 2003. He was finally released on 30 March 2007. At Bagram, he was reportedly threatened and subjected to ill-treatment and sleep deprivation for up to three days at a time [Interview with Bisher al-Rawi (annex II, case 4)].

(d) Jamil El-Banna, a Jordanian national and British resident, was also seized in the Gambia in November 2002 and rendered to the “dark prison”, then to Guantanamo. He was released from Guantanamo in December 2007.

(e) Six other detainees were flown to Guantanamo on 20 September 2004 after having spent one to three years in custody:

Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani and Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani, Pakistani brothers seized in Karachi, who were held in the “salt pit” [Both Laid Saidi and Khaled El-Masri spoke about getting to know the Rabbani brothers in the “salt pit”];

Abdulsalam al-Hela, a Yemeni colonel and businessman who was seized in Egypt;

Adil al-Jazeeri, an Algerian seized in Pakistan [PDF, pp. 315-34];

Sanad al-Kazimi, a Yemeni seized in the United Arab Emirates [PDF. Also on the flight that took these men to Guantanamo were Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, Hassan bin Attash and Binyam Mohamed. See also paras 151 and 159 below];

Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman seized in Thailand, who was held in isolation in Bagram for a year.

Mr. al-Kazimi was apprehended in Dubai in January 2003 and held at an undisclosed location in or near Dubai for two months. He was then transferred to a different place about two hours away. He was kept naked for 22 days, at times shackled, and subjected to extreme climatic conditions and simulated drowning. After six months, he was transferred to United States custody, allegedly pursuant to the CIA rendition programme. He was taken to Kabul and held in the “dark prison” for nine months, where he suffered severe physical and psychological torture by unidentified persons. He was then transferred to Bagram airbase, where he was held for a further four months in United States custody. Again, he was allegedly subjected to severe physical and psychological torture by what he believed were the same unidentified persons he had encountered in the “dark prison” [See the report of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 3/2009 (United States of America) (A/HRC/13/30/Add.1)].

135. Four other detainees, held in Bagram, are known because lawyers established contact with their families and filed habeas corpus petitions on their behalf:

Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian who was seized in Karachi in May 2002.

Amin Mohammad al-Bakri, a Yemeni who was seized in Bangkok on 28 December 2002 by agents of the intelligence services of the United States or of Thailand. Throughout 2003, his whereabouts were unknown. The Thai authorities confirmed to Mr. al-Bakri’s relatives that he had entered Thai territory, but denied knowing his whereabouts. In January 2004, Mr. al-Bakri’s relatives received a letter from him through ICRC, informing them that he was being kept in detention at the Bagram airbase. It was reported that Mr. al-Bakri was detained owing to his commercial connections with Mr. Khalifa, a cousin of Osama bin Laden later assassinated in Madagascar [Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 11/2007 (Afghanistan/ United States of America) (A/HRC/7/4/Add.1)].

Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni seized in 2004, who was sent to Abu Ghraib before Bagram.

Haji Wazir, an Afghan seized in the United Arab Emirates in late 2002 [PDF].

136. The whereabouts of 12 others are unknown, and the others remain to be identified. It is probable that some of these men have been returned to their home countries, and that others are still held in Bagram. The experts received allegations that the following men were also held: Issa al-Tanzani (Tanzanian), also identified as Soulayman al-Tanzani, captured in Mogadishu; Abu Naseem (Libyan), captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, in early 2003; Abou Hudeifa (Tunisian), captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, at the end of 2002; and Salah Din al-Bakistani, captured in Baghdad. Marwan Jabour also mentioned eight other prisoners. One was Yassir al-Jazeeri (Algerian), seized in Lahore, March 2003 (whom he met), and he heard about seven others: Ayoub al-Libi (Libyan), seized in Peshawar in January 2004; Mohammed (Afghan, born Saudi), seized in Peshawar in May 2004; Abdul Basit (Saudi or Yemeni), seized before June 2004; Adnan (nationality unknown), seized before June 2004; an unidentified Somali (possibly Shoeab as-Somali or Rethwan as-Somali); another unidentified Somali; and Marwan al-Adeni (Yemeni), seized in or around May 2003.

2. Iraq

137. Although the Government of the United States stated that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees seized during the occupation, an unknown number of persons were deliberately held “off the books” and denied ICRC access. In Abu Ghraib, for example, the abuse scandal that erupted following the publication of photographs in April 2004 involved military personnel who were not only holding supposedly significant detainees delivered by the United States military, but others delivered by the CIA or United States Special Forces units. The existence of “ghost detainees”, who were clearly held incommunicado in secret detention, was later exposed in two United States investigations.

138. In August 2004, a report into detainee detentions in Iraq (chaired by former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger) noted that “other Government agencies” had brought a number of “ghost detainees” to detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib, “without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention”, and that, on one occasion, a “handful” of these detainees had been “moved around the facility to hide them from a visiting ICRC team” [PDF].

139. In another report issued in August 2004, Lieutenant General Anthony R. Jones and Major General George R. Fay noted that eight prisoners in Abu Ghraib had been denied access to ICRC delegates by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Commander of the Coalition Joint Task Force in Iraq: “Detainee-14 was detained in a totally darkened cell measuring about 2 metres long and less than a metre across, devoid of any window, latrine or water tap, or bedding. On the door the delegates noticed the inscription ‘the Gollum’, and a picture of the said character from the film trilogy ‘The Lord of the Rings’” [PDF].

140. Although the Schlesinger report noted the use of other facilities for “ghost detainees”, the locations of these other prisons, and the numbers of detainees held, have not yet been thoroughly investigated. In June 2004, the then United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that a suspected leader of Ansar al-Aslam had been held for more than seven months without ICRC being notified of his detention; he also stated: “He was not at Abu Ghraib. He is not there now. He has never been there to my knowledge” [also see this New York Times report]. According to another report, the prisoner was known as “Triple X” and his secret detention was authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who issued a classified order in November 2003 “directing military guards to hide [him] from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters”. In addition, some locations may well be those in which prisoners died in United States custody. In 2006, Human Rights First published a report identifying 98 deaths in United States custody in Iraq, describing five deaths in CIA custody, including Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in Abu Ghraib, and others at locations including Forward Operating Base Tiger, in Anbar province, a forward operating base near Al-Asad, a base outside Mosul, a temporary holding camp near Nasiriyah and a forward operating base in Tikrit [PDF].

For a sequence of articles discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison , Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA) (all May 2009) and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009), When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan (July 2009), US Torture Under Scrutiny In British Courts (July 2009), What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed (August 2009), Torture in Bagram and Guantánamo: The Declaration of Ahmed al-Darbi (September 2009), UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents (October 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), Two Algerian Torture Victims Are Freed from Guantánamo (January 2010), UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?” (January 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive.

UN Secret Detention Report (Part One): The CIA’s “High-Value Detainee” Program and Secret Prisons

Given the length of this section of the report (pp. 43-89), I’m publishing it in three parts. The first, published below, provides an introduction, and deals with “The ‘high-value detainee’ programme and CIA secret detention facilities,” the second looks at “CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones,” and the third looks at “Proxy detention sites,” “Complicity in the practice of secret detention” and “Secret detention and the Obama administration.”

Excerpts from the UN “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” February 2010

IV. SECRET DETENTION PRACTICES IN THE GLOBAL “WAR ON TERROR” SINCE 11 SEPTEMBER 2001

98. In spite of the prominent role played by the United States of America in the development of international human rights and humanitarian law, and its position as a global leader in the protection of human rights at home and abroad following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001, the United States embarked on a process of reducing and removing various human rights and other protection mechanisms through various laws and administrative acts, including the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the USA Patriot Act of 2001, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (which sought to remove habeas corpus rights), as well as various executive orders and memoranda issued by the Office of Legal Counsel that interpreted the position of the United States on a number of issues, including torture. It also sanctioned the establishment of various classified programmes much more narrowly than before [A/HRC/6/17/Add.3, para. 3].

99. The Government of the United States declared a global “war on terror”, in which individuals captured around the world were to be held neither as criminal suspects, put forward for federal court trials in the United States, nor treated as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, irrespective of whether they had been captured on the battlefield during what could be qualified as an armed conflict in terms of international humanitarian law. Rather, they were to be treated indiscriminately as “unlawful enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial or the possibility to challenge the legality of their detention before a court or other judicial authority.

100. On 7 February 2002, the President of the United States issued a memorandum [PDF] declaring that “common article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either Al-Qaida or Taliban detainees”, that “Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants and, therefore, do not qualify as prisoners of war under article 4 of Geneva”, and that “because Geneva does not apply to our conflict with Al-Qaida, Al-Qaida detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war”. This unprecedented departure from the Geneva Conventions was to be offset by a promise that, “as a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva”. This detention policy was defended by the Government in various submissions to the United Nations [See for example CCPR/C/USA/CO/3/Rev.1/Add.1, p. 3; A/HRC/4/41, paras. 453 – 455; and A/HRC/4/40, para. 12], including on 10 October 2007, when the Government stated that the law of war, and not the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, was the applicable legal framework governing the detentions of “enemy combatants” [CCPR/C/USA/CO/3/Rev.1/Add.1, p. 3], and therefore such detentions did not fall within the mandate of the special procedures mandate holders [CCPR/C/USA/3, para. 456, and A/HRC/4/40, para. 12].

101. By using this war paradigm, the United States purported to limit the applicable legal framework of the law of war (international humanitarian law) and exclude any application of human rights law. Even if and when human rights law were to apply, the Government was of the view that it was not bound by human rights law outside the territory of the United States. Therefore, by establishing detention centres in Guantanamo Bay and other places around the world, the United States was of the view that human rights law would not be applicable there. Guantanamo and other places of detention outside United States territory were intended to be outside the reach of domestic courts for habeas corpus applications by those held in custody in those places. One of the consequences of this policy was that many detainees were kept secretly and without access to the protection accorded to those in custody, namely the protection of the Geneva Conventions, international human rights law, the United States Constitution and various other domestic laws. [In its October 2007 submission to the Human Rights Committee, the Government reaffirmed its long-standing position that “the Covenant does not apply extraterritorially” (CCPR/C/USA/CO/3/Rev.1/Add.1, p. 2)].

102. The secret detention policy took many forms. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established its own secret detention facilities to interrogate so-called “high value detainees”. It asked partners with poor human rights records to secretly detain and interrogate persons on its behalf. When the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq started, the United States secretly held persons in battlefield detention sites for prolonged periods of time. The present chapter therefore focuses on various secret detention sites and those held there, and also highlights examples of the complicity of other States.

A. The “high-value detainee” programme and CIA secret detention facilities

103. On 17 September 2001, President Bush sent a 12-page memorandum to the Director of the CIA through the National Security Council, which authorized the CIA to detain terrorists and set up detention facilities outside the United States [PDF]. Until 2005, when the United Nations sent its first of many communications regarding this programme to the Government of the United States, little was known about the extent and the details of the secret detention programme. Only in May 2009 could a definitive number of detainees in the programme be established. In a released, yet still redacted, memo, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury stated that, to date, the CIA had “taken custody of 94 detainees [redacted], and had employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of those detainees.” [PDF, footnote, p. 5]

104. In the report of 2007 on his country visit to the United States (A/HRC/6/17/Add.3), the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism described what was known at that time of these “enhanced techniques” and how they were regarded:

As a result of an apparent internal leak from the CIA, the media in the United States learned and published information about “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA in its interrogation of terrorist suspects and possibly other persons held because of their links with such suspects. Various sources have spoken of techniques involving physical and psychological means of coercion, including stress positions, extreme temperature changes, sleep deprivation, and “waterboarding” (means by which an interrogated person is made to feel as if drowning). With reference to the well-established practice of bodies such as the Human Rights Committee and the Committee against Torture, the Special Rapporteur concludes that these techniques involve conduct that amounts to a breach of the prohibition against torture and any form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

105. Several of the 28 detainees who, according to Mr. Bradbury, were subjected to “enhanced techniques to varying degrees” were also “high value detainees”. Fourteen people were transferred from secret CIA custody in an undisclosed location to confinement at the Defense Department’s detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, as announced by President Bush on 6 September 2006. They were:

Abu Zubaydah (Palestinian), captured in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on 28 March 2002

Ramzi bin al-Shibh (Yemeni), captured in Karachi, Pakistan, on 11 September 2002

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (Saudi), captured in the United Arab Emirates in October or November 2002

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Pakistani), captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on 1 March 2003

Mustafa al-Hawsawi (Saudi), captured with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on 1 March 2003

Majid Khan (Pakistani), captured in Karachi, Pakistan, on 5 March 2003

Waleed Mohammed bin Attash (Yemeni), also known as Khallad, captured in Karachi, Pakistan, on 29 April 2003

Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali (Pakistani) also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, captured with Waleed bin Attash in Karachi, Pakistan, on 29 April 2003

Mohammed Farik bin Amin (Malaysian), also known as Zubair, captured in Bangkok on 8 June 2003

Riduan Isamuddin (Indonesian), also known as Hambali, also known as Encep Nuraman, captured in Ayutthaya, Thailand, on 11 August 2003

Mohammed Nazir bin Lep (Malaysian), also known as Lillie, captured in Bangkok on 11 August 2003

Gouled Hassan Dourad (Somali), also known as Haned Hassan Ahmad Guleed, captured in Djibouti on 4 March 2004

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (Tanzanian), captured in Gujrat, Pakistan, on 25 July 2004

Abu Faraj al-Libi (Libyan), also known as Mustafa Faraj al-Azibi, captured in Mardan, Pakistan, on 2 May 2005 [A/HRC/4/40/Add.1. Pentagon biographies are available here (PDF)]

106. Beyond the transcripts of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, held in 2007 [PDF], and the facts reported in opinion No. 29/2006 (United States of America), adopted by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on 1 September 2006 [A/HRC/4/40/Add.1], the only available source on the conditions in the above-mentioned facilities is a report by ICRC leaked to the media by United States Government officials [PDF]. In spite of the fact that the ICRC report was never officially published, the experts decided to refer to it since information on the 14 was scarce and the United States of America, in spite of requests to be allowed to speak to Guantanamo detainees, did not authorize them to do so. That report details the treatment that most of the 14 had described during individual interviews, and concluded that there had been cases of beatings, kicking, confinement in a box, forcible shaving, threats, sleep deprivation, deprivation/restriction on food provisions, stress positions, exposure to cold temperatures/cold water, suffocation by water and so on. It stressed that, for the entire detention periods, which ranged from 16 months to more than 3 and a half years, all 14 persons had been held in solitary confinement and incommunicado detention. According to the report, they had no knowledge of where they were being held, and no contact with persons other than their interrogators or guards.” ICRC concluded that:

Twelve of the fourteen alleged that they were subjected to systematic physical and/or psychological ill-treatment. This was a consequence of both the treatment and the material conditions which formed part of the interrogation regime, as well as the overall detention regime. This regime was clearly designed to undermine human dignity and to create a sense of futility by inducing, in many cases, severe physical and mental pain and suffering, with the aim of obtaining compliance and extracting information, resulting in exhaustion, depersonalization and dehumanization. The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly, or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel inhuman or degrading treatment.”

107. Despite the acknowledgement in September 2006 by President Bush of the existence of secret CIA detention facilities, the United States Government and the Governments of the States that hosted these facilities have generally refused to disclose their location or even existence. The specifics of the secret sites have, for the most part, been revealed through off-the-record disclosures.

108. In November 2005, for example, the Washington Post referred to “current and former intelligence officers and two other US Government officials” as sources for the contention that there had been a secret CIA black site or safe house in Thailand, “which included underground interrogation cells”. One month later, ABC News reported on the basis of testimonies from “current and former CIA officers” that Abu Zubaydah had been:

… whisked by the CIA to Thailand where he was housed in a small, disused warehouse on an active airbase. There, his cell was kept under 24-hour closed circuit TV surveillance and his life-threatening wounds were tended to by a CIA doctor specially sent from Langley headquarters to assure Abu Zubaydah was given proper care, sources said. Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell, and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after 0.31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

The details of Abu Zubaydah’s treatment have been confirmed by his initial FBI interrogator, who has not confirmed or denied that the location where Abu Zubaydah was held was in Thailand. The Washington Post also reported that the officials had stated that Ramzi bin al-Shibh had been flown to Thailand after his capture. The New York Times again stated in 2006 that Abu Zubaydah was held in Thailand “according to accounts from five former and current government officials who were briefed on the case.” In January 2008, the Asia Times reported that political analysts and diplomats in Thailand suspected that the detention facility was “situated at a military base in the northeastern province of Udon Thani”.

109. The sources of the Washington Post stated that, after “published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down”. The New York Times alleged later that local officials were said to be growing uneasy about “a black site outside Bangkok code-named Cat’s Eye” and that this was a reason for the CIA to want “its own, more permanent detention centers”.

110. In 2008, the Washington Post described on the basis of interviews with “more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials” how a “classified cable” had been sent between the CIA station chief in Bangkok and his superiors “asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a secret CIA prison in Thailand … from August to December 2002 to demonstrate that interrogators were following the detailed rules set by lawyers and medical experts in Washington, and were not causing a detainee’s death.” The newspaper also reported “several of the inspector general’s deputies traveled to Bangkok to view the tapes.” The Office of the Inspector General reviewed 92 videotapes in May 2003, 12 of which included “enhanced interrogation techniques” and identified 83 waterboarding sessions on Abu Zubaydah at a “foreign site”. From the OIG report it seems that Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were detained and interrogated at the same place [PDF, paras. 74 and 91]. This information could not be verified, as the location of the interrogation is redacted in the report of the CIA Officer General, although independent sources informed the experts that the facility was indeed in Thailand and that it was known as the “Cat’s Eye”. The videotapes were however allegedly destroyed in November 2005 by the CIA and, according to the New York Times, the tapes had been held “in a safe at the CIA station in Thailand, the country where two detainees — Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — were interrogated.”

111. In its submission for the present study, the Government of Thailand denied the existence of a secret detention facility in Thailand in 2002/03, stating that international and local media had visited the suspected places and found no evidence of such a facility. In the light of the detailed nature of the allegations, however, the experts believe it credible that a CIA black site existed in Thailand, and calls on the domestic authorities to launch an independent investigation into the matter.

112. In June 2007, in a report submitted to the Council of Europe, rapporteur Dick Marty stated that he had enough “evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania.” [PDF. In its response to the report, Romania contested the evidentiary basis of the findings concerning Romania]. The report drew on testimony from over 30 current and former members of intelligence services in the United States and from Europe. According to the Rapporteur, the Romanian “black site” was allegedly in force from 2003 to the second half of 2005. He also noted that “the majority of the detainees brought to Romania were, according to our sources, extracted ‘out of [the] theater of conflict’. This phrase is understood as a reference to detainee transfers originating from Afghanistan and, later, Iraq”. In August 2009, former United States intelligence officials disclosed to the New York Times that Kyle D. Foggo, at that time head of the CIA’s main European supply base in Frankfurt, oversaw the construction of three CIA detention centres, “each built to house about a half-dozen detainees”. They added that “one jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest”.

113. While the identities of many detainees who were held in these facilities have not been revealed yet, it is known that on or around 24 April 2004, Mohammed al-Asad (see para. 133 below) was transferred with at least two other people from Afghanistan to an unknown, modern facility apparently run by United States officials, which was carefully designed to induce maximum disorientation, dependence and stress in the detainees. Descriptions of the facility and its detention regime were given by Mr. al-Asad to Amnesty International, which established that he had been held in the same place as two other Yemeni men, Salah Ali and Mohammed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah. Research into flight durations and the observations of Mr. al-Asad, Mr. Ali, and Mr. Bashmilah suggest that the facility was likely located in Eastern Europe. Mr. al-Asad was held in a rectangular cell approximately 3.5 x 2.5 m, in which he was chained to the floor in the corner. The first night, Mr. al-Asad was kept naked in his cell. The cell included a speaker, which played noise similar to an engine or machine, and two cameras. For most of his time in the facility, the light in his cell was kept on all night. At one point, Mr. al-Asad met with a man who identified himself as the prison director and claimed that he had just flown in from Washington, D.C. Similarly, Mr. Bashmilah described how the facility where he was held was much more modern than the one in Afghanistan. White noise was blasted into his cell, the light was kept on constantly, and he was kept shackled. The guards in the facility were completely dressed in black, including black face masks, and communicated to one another by hand gestures only. The interrogators spoke to each other in English and referred to information arriving from Washington, D.C. [Declaration of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in support of plaintiffs’ opposition to the motion of the United States to dismiss or, in the alternative, for summary judgement, Civil Action No. 5:07-cv-02798 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division. See also “Surviving the Darkness”, a report by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law (PDF), pp. 34-35]. On 5 March 2005, the United States informed Yemen that Mr. Bashmilah was in American custody. On 5 May 2005, Mr. Bashmilah was transferred to Yemen, along with two other Yemeni nationals, Mr. al-Asad and Salah Nasser Salim Ali Darwish.

114. In Poland, eight high-value detainees, including Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Tawfiq [Waleed] bin Attash and Ahmed Khalfan [al-]Ghailani, were allegedly held between 2003 and 2005 in the village of Stare Kiejkuty [PDF, p. 25. In his report, Dick Marty also noted that “a single CIA source told us that there were ‘up to a dozen’ high-value detainees in Poland in 2005, but we were unable to confirm this number”]. According to the leaked ICRC report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew that he was in Poland when he received a bottle of water with a Polish label. According to ABC News, in 2005, Hassan Ghul and Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman were also detained in the facility in Poland [also see Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 29/2006 (United States of America) (A/HRC/4/40/Add.1, para. 15., and this March 2003 Fox News report]. The Polish press subsequently claimed that the authorities of Poland — during the term of office of President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Prime Minister Leszek Miller — had assigned a team of “around a dozen” intelligence officers to cooperate with the United States on Polish soil, thereby putting them under exclusive American control and had permitted American “special purpose planes” to land on the territory of Poland [Edyta Żemła, Mariusz Kowalewski, “Polski wywiad w służbie CIA”, Rzeczpospolita, 15 April 2009]. The existence of the facility has always been denied by the Government of Poland and press reports have indicated that it is unclear what Polish authorities knew about the facility.

115. While denying that any terrorists had been detained in Poland, Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, the head of the Polish Intelligence Agency in the period 2002-2004, confirmed the landing of CIA flights [Adam Krzykowski , Mariusz Kowalewski, ‘Politycy przeczą’ Rzeczpospolita, 15 April 2009]. Earlier, the Marty report had included information from civil aviation records revealing how CIA-operated planes used for detainee transfers landed at Szymany airport, near the town of Szczytno, in Warmia-Mazuria province in north-eastern Poland, and at the Mihail Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania between 2003 and 2005. Marty also explained how flights to Poland were disguised by using fake flight plans.

116. In research conducted for the present study, complex aeronautical data, including “data strings” retrieved and analysed, have added further to this picture of flights disguised using fake flight plans and also front companies [Data strings are exchanges of messages or digital data, mostly in the form of coded text and numbers between different entities around the world on aeronautical telecommunications networks]. For example, a flight from Bangkok to Szymany, Poland, on 5 December 2002 (stopping at Dubai) was identified, though it was disguised under multiple layers of secrecy, including charter and sub-contracting arrangements that would avoid there being any discernible “fingerprints” of a United States Government operation, as well as the filing of “dummy” flight plans. The experts were made aware of the role of the CIA chief aviation contractor through sources in the United States. The modus operandi was to charter private aircraft from among a wide variety of companies across the United States, on short-term leases to match the specific needs of the CIA Air Branch. Through retrieval and analysis of aeronautical data, including data strings, it is possible to connect the aircraft N63MU with three named American corporations, each of which provided cover in a different set of aviation records for the operation of December 2002. The aircraft’s owner was and remains “International Group LLC”; its registered operator for the period in question was “First Flight Management”; and its registered user in the records of the Eurocontrol Central Route Charges Office, which handles the payment of bills, was “Universal Weather”. Nowhere in the aviation records generated by this aircraft is there any explicit recognition that it carried out a mission associated with the CIA. Research for the present study also made clear that the aviation services provider Universal Trip Support Services filed multiple dummy flight plans for the N63MU in the period from 3 to 6 December 2002. In a report, the CIA Inspector General discussed the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Two United States sources with knowledge of the high-value detainees programme informed the experts that a passage revealing that “enhanced interrogation of al-Nashiri continued through 4 December 2002” and another, partially redacted, which stated that:

However, after being moved, al-Nashiri was thought to have been withholding information”, indicate that it was at this time that he was rendered to Poland. The passages are partially redacted because they explicitly state the facts of al-Nashiri’s rendition — details which remain classified as “Top Secret” [PDF, paras. 76 and 224].

117. Using a similar analysis of complex aeronautical data, including data strings, research was also able to demonstrate that a Boeing 737 aircraft, registered with the Federal Aviation Administration as N313P, flew to Romania in September 2003. The aircraft took off from Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. on Saturday 20 September 2003, and undertook a four-day flight “circuit”, during which it landed in and departed from six different foreign territories — the Czech Republic, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Morocco — as well as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Focus was also placed on a flight between the two listed European “black site” locations — namely from Szymany (Poland) to Bucharest — on the night of 22 September 2003, although it was conceivable that as many as five consecutive individual routes on this circuit — beginning in Tashkent, concluding in Guantanamo — may have involved transfers of detainees in the custody of the CIA. The experts were not able to identify any definitive evidence of a detainee transfer into Romania taking place prior to the flight circuit.

118. In its response to the questionnaire sent by the experts, Poland stated that:

On 11 March 2008, the district Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw instituted proceedings on the alleged existence of so-called secret CIA detention facilities in Poland as well as the illegal transport and detention of persons suspected of terrorism. On 1 April 2009, as result of the reorganization of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the investigation was referred to the Appellate Prosecutor Office in Warsaw. In the course of investigation, the prosecutors gathered evidence, which is considered classified or secret. In order to secure the proper course of proceedings, the prosecutors who conduct the investigation are bound by the confidentiality of the case. In this connection, it is impossible to present any information regarding the findings of the investigation. Once the proceedings are completed and its results and findings are made public the Government of Poland will present and submit all necessary or requested information to any international body.

While the experts appreciate the fact that an investigation has been opened into the existence of places of secret detention in Poland, they are concerned about the lack of transparency into the investigation. After 18 months, still nothing is known about the exact scope of the investigation. The experts expect that any such investigation would not be limited to the question of whether Polish officials had created an “extraterritorial zone” in Poland, but also whether officials were aware that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were applied there.

119. In its response to the questionnaire sent by the experts, Romania provided a copy of the report of the Committee of Enquiry of Parliament concerning the investigation of the statements on the existence of CIA imprisonment centres or of flights of aircraft hired by the CIA on the territory of Romania.

120. With regard to Europe, ABC News recently reported that Lithuanian officials had provided the CIA with a building where as many as eight terrorist suspects were held for more than a year, until late 2005, when they were moved because of public disclosure of the programme [also see this statement by Dick Marty]. More details emerged in November 2009 when ABC News reported that the facility was built inside an exclusive riding academy in Antaviliai. Research for the present study, including data strings relating to Lithuania, appears to confirm that Lithuania was integrated into the secret detention programme in 2004. Two flights from Afghanistan to Vilnius could be identified: the first, from Bagram, on 20 September 2004, the same day that 10 detainees previously held in secret detention, in a variety of countries, were flown to Guantanamo; the second, from Kabul, on 28 July 2005. The dummy flight plans filed for the flights into Vilnius customarily used airports of destination in different countries altogether, excluding any mention of a Lithuanian airport as an alternate or back-up landing point.

121. On 25 August 2009, the President of Lithuania announced that her Government would investigate allegations that Lithuania had hosted a secret detention facility. On 5 November 2009, the Lithuanian Parliament opened an investigation into the allegation of the existence of a CIA secret detention on Lithuanian territory. In its submission for the present study, the Government of Lithuania provided the then draft findings of this investigation, which in the meantime had been adopted by the full Parliament. In its findings, the Seimas Committee stated that the State Security Department (SSD) had received requests to “equip facilities in Lithuania suitable for holding detainees”. In relation to the first facility, the Committee found that “conditions were created for holding detainees in Lithuania”. The Committee could not conclude, however, that the premises were also used for that purpose. In relation to the second facility, the Committee found that:

The persons who gave testimony to the Committee deny any preconditions for and possibilities of holding and interrogating detainees … However, the layout of the building, its enclosed nature and protection of the perimeter as well as fragmented presence of the SSD staff in the premises allowed for the performance of actions by officers of the partners without the control of the SSD and use of the infrastructure at their discretion.

The report also found that there was no evidence that the SSD had informed the President, the Prime Minister or other political leaders of the purposes and contents of its cooperation with the CIA regarding these two premises.

122. While the experts welcome the work of the Seimas Committee as an important starting point in the quest for truth about the role played by Lithuania in the secret detention and rendition programme, they stress that its findings can in no way constitute the final word on the country’s role. On 14 January 2010, President Dalia Grybauskaite rightly urged Lithuanian prosecutors to launch a deeper investigation into secret CIA black sites held on the country’s territory without parliamentary approval.

123. The experts stress that all European Governments are obliged under the European Convention of Human Rights to investigate effectively allegations of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment [See for example Assenov et al v. Bulgaria, judgement of 28 October 1998]. Failure to investigate effectively might lead to a situation of grave impunity, besides being injurious to victims, their next of kin and society as a whole, and fosters chronic recidivism of the human rights violations involved. The experts also note that the European Court of Human Rights has applied the test of whether “the authorities reacted effectively to the complaints at the relevant time” [Labita v Italy, application no. 26772/95, judgement of 6 April 2000, para. 131]. A thorough investigation should be capable of leading to the identification and punishment of those responsible for any ill treatment; it “must be ‘effective’ in practice as well as in law, in particular in the sense that its exercise must not be unjustifiably hindered by the acts or the omissions of the authorities” [See Aksoy v. Turkey, judgement of December 1996, para 95; and Kaya v. Turkey, judgement of 19 February 1998, para 106]. Furthermore, according to the European Court, authorities must always make a serious attempt to find out what happened [See Timurtas v. Turkey, judgement of 13 June 2000, para. 88] and “should not rely on hasty or ill-founded conclusions to close their investigation or as the basis of their decisions” [Assenov v. Bulgaria, op. cit., para. 104].

124. According to two high-ranking Government officials at the time, revelations about the existence of detention facilities in Eastern Europe in late 2005 by the Washington Post and ABC News led the CIA to close its facilities in Lithuania and Romania and move the Al-Qaida detainees out of Europe. It is not known where these persons were transferred; they could have been moved into “war zone facilities” in Iraq and Afghanistan or to another black site, potentially in Africa. The experts were not able to find the exact destination of the 16 high-value detainees between December 2005 and their move to Guantanamo in September 2006. No other explanation has been provided for the whereabouts of the detainees before they were moved to Guantanamo in September 2006.

125. Other locations have been mentioned as the venues for secret detention facilities outside territories under United States control (or operated jointly with the United States military). The first is Guantanamo, which was mentioned by the United States officials who spoke to the Washington Post in 2005, when it was reported that the detention facility had existed “on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay”, but that “some time in 2004, the CIA decided it had to give [it] up … The CIA had planned to convert it into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military [but] pulled out when US courts began to exercise greater control over the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon extend the same type of supervision over their detainees”. More recently, former Guantanamo Bay guards have described “an unnamed and officially unacknowledged” compound located out of sight from the main road between two plateaus, about a mile north of Camp Delta, just outside Camp America’s perimeter with the access road chained off. The unacknowledged “camp no” is described as having had no guard towers and being surrounded with concertina wire, with one part of the compound having “the same appearance as the interrogation centers at other prison camps”. At this point, it is unclear whether this facility was run by the CIA or the Joint Special Operations Command. The experts are concerned about the possibility that three Guantanamo detainees (Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani) might have died during interrogations at this facility, instead of in their own cells, on 9 June 2006.

126. There have also been claims that the United States used two military bases in the Balkans for secret detention: Camp Bondsteel, in Kosovo, and Eagle Base, in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In November 2005, Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles told Le Monde that the United States military ran a Guantanamo-type detention centre in Camp Bondsteel. He said he had been “shocked” by conditions at the centre, which he witnessed in 2002, and which resembled “a smaller version of Guantanamo”. In December 2005, the United Nations Ombudsman in Kosovo, Marek Antoni Nowicki, also spoke about Camp Bondsteel, saying “there can be no doubt that for years there has been a prison in the Bondsteel base with no external civilian or judicial oversight. The prison looks like the pictures we have seen of Guantanamo Bay”. Mr. Nowicki said that he had visited Camp Bondsteel in late 2000 and early 2001, when it was the main detention centre for Kosovo Force (KFOR), the NATO-led peace-keeping force, but explained that he had had no access to the base since 2001. The United States base in Tuzla was allegedly used to “process” eight detainees, including Nihad Karsic and Almin Hardaus. Around 25 September 2001, Karsic and Hardaus were arrested at work and taken to Butmir Base, then to Eagle Base, Tuzla, where they allegedly were held in secret detention [PDF]. The men say that they were held in solitary confinement, stripped naked, forcibly kept awake, repeatedly beaten, verbally harassed, deprived of food and photographed.

127. Further developments were witnessed in 2009. In October, three of the experts sent a letter to the Governments of the United States, the United Kingdom [United Kingdom response included in A/HRC/13/39/Add.1], Pakistan and the Syrian Arab Republic regarding Mustafa Setmariam Nassar, aged 42, a Spanish citizen of Syrian origin and author of a number of books and other publications on Islam and jihad. They pointed to allegations received that, on an unknown date in October 2005, he had been apprehended in Pakistan by forces of the Pakistani intelligence on suspicion of having been involved in a number of terrorist attacks, including the 11 September 2001 attacks against the United States and the 11 March 2004 bombings in Madrid. He was detained in Pakistan for a certain period of time accused of involvement in both incidents. He was then handed over to authorities of the United States. While no official news of Mr. Nassar’s whereabouts has been received since his apprehension in October 2005, it is alleged that, in November 2005, he was held for some time at a military base facility under United States authority in Diego Garcia. It is now assumed that he is currently being held in secret detention in the Syrian Arab Republic. Official United States documents and web postings, as well as media reports, indicate that the United States authorities had been interested in Mr. Nassar before his disappearance in 2005. In June 2009, in response to a request made through Interpol by a Spanish judge for information relating to Mr. Nassar’s whereabouts, the FBI stated that Mr. Nassar was not in the United States at that time. The FBI did not, however, address whether Mr. Nassar was in United States custody elsewhere or whether it knew where he was then held. Following queries by non-governmental organizations regarding the whereabouts of Mr. Nassar, the CIA responded on 10 June 2009, stating that “the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request” and that, even if the CIA was in a position to answer the request, the records would be classified and protected from disclosure by United States laws. According to Reprieve, Mr. Nassar may have been transferred to Syrian custody. According to the Government of the United Kingdom, it has received assurances from the United States that it has not interrogated any terrorist suspect or terrorism-related detainee in Diego Garcia in any case since 11 September 2001, and that the allegations of a CIA holding facility on the island are false. The Government was therefore confident that the allegations that Mr. Nassar had been held on Diego Garcia were inaccurate.

128. Following the transfer of the 14 high-value detainees from CIA custody to Guantanamo, President Bush, in a delivered speech on 6 September 2006, announced the closure of the CIA’s “high-value detainee programme”. He stressed that, “as more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical — and having a CIA programme for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information”. Later in 2006 and in 2007 [PDF], he indicated that “the CIA interrogation and detention program” would continue. Subsequent events support this claim as the Department of Defense announced in 2007 and 2008 the transfer of high-value detainees from CIA custody to Guantanamo.

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

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

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison , Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA) (all May 2009) and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009), The Logic of the 9/11 Trials, The Madness of the Military Commissions (November 2009), UK Judges Compare Binyam Mohamed’s Torture To That Of Abu Zubaydah (November 2009), UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?” (January 2010), Binyam Mohamed: Evidence of Torture by US Agents Revealed in UK (February 2010), Torture Whitewash: How “Professional Misconduct” Became “Poor Judgment” in the OPR Report (February 2010), Judges Restore Damning Passage on MI5 to the Binyam Mohamed Torture Ruling (February 2010), What Torture Is, and Why It’s Illegal and Not “Poor Judgment” (March 2010), Abu Zubaydah’s Torture Diary (March 2010), Seven Years of War in Iraq: Still Based on Cheney’s Torture and Lies (March 2010), Protests worldwide on Aafia Siddiqui Day, Sunday March 28, 2010 (March 2010), Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), How Binyam Mohammed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part One): Torture and the “Black Prison” (June 2010), New Report Reveals How Bush Torture Program Involved Human Experimentation (June 2010). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

UN Human Rights Council Discusses Secret Detention Report

On June 3, largely unnoticed in the Western media, the UN Human Rights Council held an interactive dialogue to discuss the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” prepared by Martin Scheinin, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Shaheen Ali, the vice-chair of the Working Group on arbitrary detention, and Jeremy Sarkin, the chair of the Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances.

The study (A/HRC/13/42) was published on February 19, 2010, and is available here as a PDF. Over the course of this week, I’ll also be publishing section 4 of the report, dealing with US policies since the 9/11 attacks, in three separate sections. The first examines “The ‘high-value detainee’ programme and CIA secret detention facilities,” the second looks at “CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones,” and the third looks at “Proxy detention sites,” “Complicity in the practice of secret detention” and “Secret detention and the Obama administration.” An advance unedited version of the report was published on January 26, which I discussed in an article at the time, entitled, “UN Secret Detention Report Asks, ‘Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?’”

The report focused on 66 countries involved in the secret detention of terrorist suspects since 9/11. Many of these — including European countries, Canada, Australia, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Syria and Pakistan — were tied in with the activities of the United States, in the section of the report mentioned above, which collated information about US policies involving “extraordinary rendition” and secret prisons, focusing on the most up-to-date information about the 94 prisoners held in the CIA’s secret prisons (based on figures disclosed in one of the Office of Legal Counsel’s notorious ‘torture memos’ (PDF), written in May 2005 by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Bradbury, and made available by President Obama as part of a court case in April 2009), and the many dozens of others subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture in other countries, where they were sent by the CIA.

In addition, 25 other countries — including Algeria, China, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Libya, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe — were also included, in a section analyzing the nature and scope of secret detention practices around the world

In my article in January, I also explained that, in the report, the experts concluded that, “On a global scale, secret detention in connection with counter-terrorist policies remains a serious problem,” and that, “If resorted to in a widespread and systematic manner, secret detention might reach the threshold of a crime against humanity.” Moreover, as IPS explained on June 3, the report also notes that many countries, citing national security concerns, which are “often perceived or presented as unprecedented emergencies or threats,” resort to secret detention, even though “International law clearly prohibits secret detention, which violates a number of human rights and humanitarian law norms that may not be derogated [from] under any circumstances.”

In the months since the report was published, its progress towards discussion in the Human Rights Council was almost derailed in March, when Russia, a number of African countries and the Organization of the Islamic Conference objected to it, claiming that the experts “violated the [UN] code of conduct and acted outside [their] mandates.” These criticisms, which delayed the discussion of the report until June 3, prompted Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on Torture, to condemn them as “a totally political consideration” and to point out:

We are independent experts — the eyes and ears of the council — and we provided it with a report drawing their attention to a very serious worldwide problem based on a great deal of work over the past year. Secret detention is not just a minor human rights violation; it’s a crime, a major human rights violation … I am seriously concerned by the way states at the Human Rights Council are treating their own independent experts. The council should stop criticizing its own experts and start taking human rights seriously and collaborating with its independent experts to address major human rights violations by the states that are responsible.

As a result of this dissent, the discussion of the report two weeks ago was something of a triumph, although it remains to be seen whether the Human Rights Council will respond positively to the experts’ call for a resolution on secret detention, demanding “explicit legislation prohibiting secret and other unofficial detention, the mandatory keeping of detention records and independent inspection of all detention sites,” as well as the immediate closure of all secret detention facilities, and compensation for those subjected to secret detention.

Manfred Nowak told the Human Rights Council, “We think this is enough evidence that the council should take action,” and in the debate the experts stated that “secret detention should be explicitly prohibited along with all other forms of unofficial detention,” and noted, “In almost no recent cases have there been any judicial investigations into allegations of secret detentions and practically no one has been brought to justice.”

After the debate, Martin Scheinin, the Special Rapporteur on the Protection of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism, said it was “clear from the debate that the issue had not been brushed away despite months of delay,” as the Swiss website Expatica described it. Speaking to journalists, Scheinin said, “I don’t think the Human Rights Council can ignore the need for inquiries at domestic level, that will necessarily be part of the package.”

Despite the experts’ hopes, Deutsche Welle noted that a detailed questionnaire that experts sent to the UN’s 192 member countries was only answered by 44 of those countries, and, moreover, “Of these, not one admitted to the existence of secret prisons. The report’s authors depended on independent sources for their investigation and many countries denied them any kind of access to relevant materials or sources.”

The article also noted, “During the debate, China, Russia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Syria, Algeria and other African nations denied that any secret detention facilities existed on their territory.” Revisiting the complaints they made when the report was first published, “They accused the report’s authors of sloppy research, of overstepping their mandate and of compiling the report without being commissioned to do so by the UN Human Rights Council.” A sign of the kind of dissent that surfaced can be found in comments made by Syria’s representative, who, despite the country’s well-known human rights abuses in its prisons, stated, “We are concerned at the unprofessional way in which the report was written and presented. The report makes use of unverified allegations by non-credible parties and presents them as fact.”

Nevertheless, reflecting on the discussion, Martin Scheinin told IPS, “It went better than expected. The report has been very controversial and now there appears to be acknowledgement that the issue is serious enough not to be trivialized by procedural filibustery.” He added that a number of countries who were originally opposed to the report, like Egypt, “chose not to speak” at the meeting, rather than raising objections, although he acknowledged the complaints of Syria, Russia and Algeria (speaking on behalf of the African Group), and specific complaints raised by Canada, China, Ethiopia, and Nepal.

As Deutsche Welle also explained, however, “Only a few UN states, including Sweden, Canada and South Africa, gave their unreserved approval to the report during the debate of the Human Rights Council,” and although the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, made it clear that the dark days of John Bolton (President Bush’s ambassador, who had nothing but contempt for the UN) were long gone, her attempts to deflect attention from scrutiny of the US rendition and torture program, by mentioning President’s Obama promise to close Guantánamo, were weak for two reasons.

The first of these is because the President has, in fact, failed to close the prison, having missed his self-imposed deadline for doing so, and no new date has been set for its closure; and the second is that, as Deutsche Welle also noted, Susan Rice “made no comment on the Bagram facility, the main detention facility for persons detained by US forces in Afghanistan, or other formerly secret prisons in third countries where American officials sent prisoners who were then often subjected to harsh interrogation procedures or torture.”

Even so, the experts were obviously relieved that the US had not opposed the report. Shaheen Ali explained that the US ambassador to the Human Rights Council, Eileen Donahoe, “backed the study although she raised concerns about the methodology used in preparing it,” and Martin Scheinin added that, although, as “a matter of international law,” the Obama administration was “continuing to violate their human rights obligations by not closing” Guantánamo and by not holding trials for those held there, “on the domestic level and on the policy level, I understand the situation. The government is unable to do anything when the legislature prohibits part of the options available, namely taking a single person from Guantánamo to the mainland United States.” As a result, he said, he understood that the focus is on convincing third countries to offer homes to prisoners cleared for release, who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured in their home countries.

Without accountability for the crimes committed under the Bush administration, and explanations of what happened to the significant number of prisoners held in the secret prison network — beyond those who ended up at Guantánamo, who were released (in a few cases) or who, like Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, were repatriated and later killed — the experts’ call for secret detention to be brought to an end will lack the kind of impact that will make other countries think twice about aping US policies, or continuing with the kind of policies that inspired the Bush administration in the first place.

In the report, President Obama got off lightly given recent reports of dubious detention and interrogation practices in Afghanistan — even though, just the day before the discussion of the report in the Human Rights Council, Philip Alston, the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, issued a report on America’s “targeted killing” program using drones, and told the Council that it amounted to “a license to kill without accountability.” With reference to what he described as the “prolific” US use of “targeted killings,” which also echoed what happened with President Bush’s program of “extraordinary rendition,” secret detention and torture, Alston explained that the US was “setting a damaging example that other countries would follow,” as Middle East Online described it.

“I’m particularly concerned that the United States seems oblivious to this fact when it asserts an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe,” Alston told the Council, adding, “In a situation in which there is no disclosure of who has been killed, for what reason, and whether innocent civilians have died, the legal principle of international accountability is, by definition, comprehensively violated.”

Alston’s report helped to shine a light on the extent to which drone killings have replaced the messy business of “extraordinary rendition,” torture and secret prisons under the Obama administration, further undercutting Susan Rice’s protestations about President Obama’s record, and reinforcing how important the role of the United States is in shaping internationally acceptable standards for dealing with terrorism.

It is not enough for President Obama to maintain, as he has since before taking office, that his administration wants to “look forward and not backwards.” By doing so, he ensures that the crimes of the previous administration not only remain largely hidden (as the report demonstrates), but, more importantly, a message is sent out to the rest of the world that those at the highest levels of the US government who commit crimes that “might reach the threshold of a crime against humanity” continue to demonstrate, through their speeches and tours, that they are, to all intents and purposes, beyond the law.

And with the continuing exposure of his own forays into similar territory through the CIA’s “targeted killings” program, President Obama also needs to reflect on his own responsibility to uphold “the legal principle of international accountability” whose wreckage is so thoroughly exposed in the UN’s secret detention report.

Note: For member states’ responses during the discussion of the report on June 3, see this UN article here.

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

Murders at Guantánamo: The Cover-Up Continues

Composite image by TalkLeft Sometimes the truth is so sickening that no one in a position of authority — senior government officials, lawmakers, the mainstream media — wants to go anywhere near it.

This appears to be the case with the deaths of three men at Guantánamo on June 9, 2006. According to the official version of events, Salah Ahmed al-Salami (also identified as Ali Abdullah Ahmed), a 37-year old Yemeni, Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, a 30-year old Saudi, and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, a Saudi who was just 17 when he was seized in Afghanistan, died by hanging themselves, in what Guantánamo’s then-Commander, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, described as an act of “asymmetric warfare.”

Adm. Harris was, appropriately, censured for describing as an act of warfare the deaths of three men, held for over four years without charge or trial, but although his comments — and those of Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, who described the men’s deaths as a “good PR move” — were despicable, it was true that all three men had been implacably opposed to the regime at Guantánamo, and that each had expressed their opposition to it — and their solidarity with their fellow prisoners — through resistance, by enduring painful months of force-feeding as three of the prison’s most persistent hunger strikers, and by raising their fellow prisoners’ spirits as accomplished singers of nasheeds (Islamic songs).

Former prisoners cast doubt on the suicide story

In a statement issued just after the announcement of the deaths in June 2006, nine British ex-prisoners recalled the men’s indefatigable spirit, and cast doubt on the US military’s claims that they had committed suicide:

The prisoners in Guantánamo knew Manei al-Otaibi [Mani al-Utaybi] as someone who recited the Qur’an and poetry with a beautiful voice. He was of high moral character and was loved and respected amongst the prisoners, as was Yasser. They both came from wealthy backgrounds and had everything to live for.

They were often involved in protests and hunger strikes, which meant that they were always given “level four” statuses. That means the only items they would be allowed in the cell were a mat, and a blanket (only at night). They didn’t have toilet paper, let alone bed sheets that could be easily constructed into a noose, or even a pen and paper with which to write a suicide note.

A more detailed analysis was provided by one of the nine British ex-prisoners, Tarek Dergoul, who wrote:

I knew them personally, so I can judge well their frame of mind. Their iman (belief in God) was very strong, there was high morale and it comes as a complete shock to my system when it is said to me that they could have committed suicide. I was with them for a long period of time, and it never even came into our mind the thought of committing suicide. We were always far too busy constructing some form of hunger strike or non-cooperation strike, to even register the thought of suicide. It is quite simply ridiculous. When we were not in isolation for our continued protests we were in the regular blocks planning our next move.

Dergoul also provided further descriptions of two of the men and their state of mind, explaining that Yasser al-Zahrani and Manei al-Otaibi “would be the first amongst all others to stand up for our rights and the rights of others.”

He added that al-Zahrani was “a beautiful brother,” who had memorized the entire Qur’an, and “was softly spoken and had a very nice voice. He used to sing nasheeds for us and all the brothers loved him as he was always optimistic. He would sing morale-boosting nasheeds for the other detainees nearby to him. He was very well known to everyone in the camp.”

He also explained that al-Zahrani had “participated in all the hunger strikes and non-cooperation strikes,” which, he added, “include[d] not speaking in interrogation and also not standing for any immoral behavior (such as being sexually harassed or watching the Qur’an being desecrated).” Non-cooperation, he pointed out, “would result in punishment,” and al-Zahrani “ended up doing a lot of time in isolation simply due to the fact that he would never allow for an injustice to take place before him without being defiant for the sake of our rights,” but he “had so much determination, will-power and morale that it is ridiculous to think he could have taken his own life.”

Writing about Manei al-Otaibi, Dergoul described him as “another beautiful brother,” who was “extremely funny,” and explained that, like al-Zahrani, he “used to recite poetry — in fact this was the thing he was best known for — and he also used to sing nasheeds for us.” He added:

I stayed beside Manei for three weeks inside the regular blocks, and that is when he told me about his wealthy family and his previous life and how he used to get up to no good as people do when they are young. It was also during those three weeks that he taught me tajweed (the science of reciting the Qur’an correctly). By the end of that time we had shared with one another our inner most thoughts. I consider it an insult and I am sure that his family finds it equally offensive, to suggest that he would stoop to the level of taking his own life.

Admittedly, the men’s outlook on life could have changed in the two years following Tarek Dergoul’s release from Guantánamo, but Omar Deghayes, who was still in Guantánamo at the time of their deaths, recently backed up his analysis, describing them as poets with beautiful voices whose spirits were unbroken at the time of their deaths, although he did acknowledge that they had been subjected to severe mistreatment.

Seton Hall Law School demolishes the suicide story

If the profiles above suggest problems with the official suicide story, that is entirely appropriate, as development in the last two years — and particularly in the last six months — have demonstrated. The first of these was the publication, in August 2008, of the official report into the deaths, conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The report — actually, nothing more than a 934-word statement — was presumably intended to be buried under coverage of the Presidential election, and did nothing to address doubts about the official story, but over the next year a colossal archive of documents collected for the investigation was thoroughly analyzed by staff and students at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey.

On December 7, 2009, Seton Hall published a 136-page report, “Death in Camp Delta” (PDF), which comprehensively undermined the conclusion of the NCIS investigation. Some of the most important questions asked in the report were:

“[H]ow each of the detainees, much less all three, could have done the following: braided a noose by tearing up his sheets and/or clothing, made a mannequin of himself so it would appear to the guards he was asleep in his cell, hung sheets to block vision into the cell — a violation of Standard Operating Procedures, tied his feet together, tied his hands together, hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling, climbed up onto the sink, put the noose around his neck and released his weight to result in death by strangulation, hanged until dead and hung for at least two hours completely unnoticed by guards.”

“[H]ow three bodies could have hung in cells for at least two hours while the cells were under constant supervision, both by video camera and by guards continually walking the corridors guarding only 28 detainees.”

Why the authorities did not report that, “when the detainees’ bodies arrived at the clinic, it was determined that each had a rag obstructing his throat.”

Why the authorities did not report that the detainees “had been dead for more than two hours when they were discovered, nor that rigor mortis had set in by the time of discovery.”

How the supposed suicides “could have been coordinated by the three detainees, who had been on the same cell block fewer than 72 hours with occupied and unoccupied cells between them and constant supervision.”

Moreover, the researchers also discovered so many omissions and contradictions in the reports of the various personnel who were present on the night of the men’s deaths that it was impossible to construct a coherent narrative. It was also impossible not to conclude that, with so many holes in the official account, the investigation was, as Professor Mark Denbeaux explained in a press release, “a cover up,” and, in addition, one that raised “more compelling questions”: “Who knew of the cover up? Who approved of the cover up, and why? The government’s investigation is slipshod, and its conclusion leaves the most important questions about this tragedy unanswered.”

In the Seton Hall report, the omissions and contradictions focus on the fact that the only guards who were asked to make statements on the night “were advised that they were suspected of making false statements or failing to obey direct orders” (the statements have never been publicly released); on asking why other guards were “ordered not to provide sworn statements about what happened that night”; on asking why the government “seemed to be unable to determine who was on duty that night in Alpha Block” (where the deaths supposedly occurred); on asking “why the guards who brought the bodies to the medics did not tell the medics what had happened to cause the deaths and why the medics never asked how the deaths had occurred”; on why there is “no indication that the medics observed anything unusual on the cell block at the time that the detainees wee hanging dead in their cells”; and, finally, on “why the guards on duty in the cell block were not systematically interviewed about the events of the night, why the medics who visited the cell block before the hangings were not interviewed, [and] why the tower guards, who had the responsibility and ability to observe all activity in the camp, were not interviewed.”

In addition, the report also noted the NCIS’s failure to review “audio and video recordings which are systematically maintained; ‘Pass-On’ books prepared by each shift to describe occurrences on the block for the next shift; the Detainee Information Management System, which contains records of all activity for that night as the events occur; and Serious Incident reports, which are the reports used when there are suicide attempts.”

The authors were also particularly concerned that a prominent claim in the NCIS statement — “that on the night in question, another detainee (who did not later commit suicide) had walked through the cell block telling people ‘tonight’s the night’” — was not explained. “There is no indication,” they wrote, “of how this could have happened given camp security rules or, if it had taken place, why security was not tighter as a result.”

Harper’s Magazine reports soldiers’ testimony, suggests prisoners died in torture sessions

Just six weeks after the Seton Hall report was published, answers to some of these questions were provided in the most extraordinary manner. In an article for Harper’s Magazine, law professor Scott Horton revealed the story of Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, and a number of other soldiers — the tower guards mentioned in the Seton Hall report, who “had the responsibility and ability to observe all activity in the camp, [but] were not interviewed.”

Sgt. Hickman, who was on duty in a tower on the prison’s perimeter on the night the three men died, addressed some of the NCIS investigations’ omissions and contradictions by explaining that the reason that men had been dead for over two hours before their deaths were reported, that few reports were taken from the personnel on duty, and that rags were stuffed in the men’s throats was not because they had committed suicide, but because they had been taken from the cell block earlier that evening to a secret facility outside the main perimeter fence of Guantánamo — known to the soldiers as “Camp No” — where they had either been deliberately killed, or had a died as the result of particularly brutal torture sessions.

Sgt. Hickman, and several other witnesses under his supervision, told Scott Horton personally that they had not seen anyone moved to the clinic from Alpha Block, where the prisoners reportedly died, and when I spoke to Sgt. Hickman a few months ago, he confirmed that this was the case, telling me categorically that neither he, nor three men he was in charge of who were stationed no more than 40 feet away from the clinic, saw anyone moved from the block to the clinic. “They didn’t die in their cells,” he explained.

This was not all. Sgt. Hickman — and other witnesses — also explained that the false suicide story required a cover-up, and that this involved Col. Mike Bumgarner, the warden at Guantánamo, telling a meeting of between 40 and 60 men on the morning of June 10 that, although “‘you all know’ three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death,” the media would report that the three men “had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored.”

In no time at all, the deaths were reinvented as acts of “asymmetrical warfare,” and the whole sordid cover-up began in earnest.

Sgt. Hickman has no reason to lie. He joined the US military in 1983, at the age of 19, as a Marine, and spent time in military intelligence. Later, as a civilian, he worked as a private investigator, but after the 9/11 attacks, he re-enlisted in the Army National Guard and was deployed to Guantánamo in March 2006, where he “was selected as Guantánamo’s ‘NCO of the Quarter’ and was given a commendation medal.” When his tour of duty ended in March 2007 and he returned to the US, he was “promoted to staff sergeant and worked in Maryland as an Army recruiter.”

However, as he explained to Scott Horton, “he could not forget what he had seen at Guantánamo. When Barack Obama became president, [he] decided to act. ‘I thought that with a new administration and new ideas I could actually come forward,’ he said. ‘It was haunting me.’” And as he told me a few months ago, he felt “physically sick” after holding onto his story for three years.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned at the start of this article, some stories are so disturbing that no one in authority wants to go near them, and this is clearly the case with the deaths of Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani. Although the Harper’s article received widespread coverage around the world, it was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media in the US, with the New York Times and the Washington Post content to run an Associated Press story, without following up on it, and only Keith Olbermann of MSNBC covering the story on TV.

Part of the problem is that, although a Justice Department investigation was launched after Sgt. Hickman approached Mark Denbeaux and his son Josh last February, and the Denbeauxs took the case to the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, an initial flurry of interest rapidly waned, and Teresa McHenry, the head of the Criminal Division’s Domestic Security Section, who took charge of the investigation, notified Mark Denbeaux on November 2, 2009 that the investigation was being closed. Scott Horton described Denbeaux’s reaction as follows:

“It was a strange conversation,” Denbeaux recalled. McHenry explained that “the gist of Sergeant Hickman’s information could not be confirmed.” But when Denbeaux asked what that “gist” actually was, McHenry declined to say. She just reiterated that Hickman’s conclusions “appeared” to be unsupported. Denbeaux asked what conclusions exactly were unsupported. McHenry refused to say.

As Horton also noted, McHenry “ha[d] firsthand knowledge of the Justice Department’s role in auditing such techniques, having served at the Justice Department under Bush and having participated in the preparation of” at least one of a number of memoranda “approving and setting the conditions for the use of torture techniques” — commonly known as the “torture memos” — which “CIA agents and others could use to defend themselves against any subsequent criminal prosecution.”

Today, as we pause to remember the three men who died at Guantánamo four years ago, we should also reflect that, as with the two other supposed suicides at Guantánamo — of Abdul Rahman al-Amri, a Saudi, on May 30, 2007, and of Mohammed al-Hanashi, a Yemeni, on June 1, 2009 — nothing resembling an adequate explanation has yet been provided for their deaths, and Sgt. Joe Hickman, the man who has done the most to try to expose the truth about the deaths in June 2006, has apparently put his career on the line for nothing, sidelined for doing what was right. “Under the Constitution I swore to defend, we don’t do this,” he told me when we spoke a few months ago.

Why an independent inquiry is needed – and a call for Shaker Aamer to be released

Calls for a full investigation into all the deaths at Guantánamo may come to nothing, but they must be made, or we will demonstrate to those who hold the reins of accountability that the darker the allegations, the easier they are to hide.

In addition, the fallout from that horrendous night in Guantánamo is still affecting one other man, who was brutally tortured that same evening, but who, unlike Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, did not die.

That man is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who is still held, despite being cleared for release by a military review board in 2007. A passionate and fearless defender of the rights of the prisoners — also like the men who died — he may still be held because of what he knows.

Describing what happened to him — which involved choking, and the kind of violent punishment for dissent that Tarek Dergoul identified in the cases of Mani Shaman al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani — Shaker Aamer provided a statement to one of his lawyers, which was later filed as an affidavit with the District Court in Washington D.C.:

On June 9th, 2006, [Shaker Aamer] was beaten for two and a half hours straight. Seven naval military police participated in his beating. Mr. Aamer stated he had refused to provide a retina scan and fingerprints. He reported to me that he was strapped to a chair, fully restrained at the head, arms and legs. The MPs inflicted so much pain, Mr. Aamer said he thought he was going to die. The MPs pressed on pressure points all over his body: his temples, just under his jawline, in the hollow beneath his ears. They choked him. They bent his nose repeatedly so hard to the side he thought it would break. They pinched his thighs and feet constantly. They gouged his eyes. They held his eyes open and shined a mag-lite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat. They bent his fingers until he screamed. When he screamed, they cut off his airway, then put a mask on him so he could not cry out.

Note: To take action for Shaker Aamer, please feel free to cut and paste a letter to foreign secretary William Hague, available here, asking him to do all in his power to secure his return from Guantánamo to the UK, to be reunited with his family.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Common Dreams, Global Research, Eurasia Review, The World Can’t Wait, Uruknet, The Public Record and Later On (Leisure Guy).

For a sequence of articles dealing with the hunger strikes and deaths at Guantánamo, see Suicide at Guantánamo: the story of Abdul Rahman al-Amri (May 2007), Suicide at Guantánamo: a response to the US military’s allegations that Abdul Rahman al-Amri was a member of al-Qaeda (May 2007), Shaker Aamer, A South London Man in Guantánamo: The Children Speak (July 2007), Guantánamo: al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj fears that he will die (September 2007), The long suffering of Mohammed al-Amin, a Mauritanian teenager sent home from Guantánamo (October 2007), Guantánamo suicides: so who’s telling the truth? (October 2007), Innocents and Foot Soldiers: The Stories of the 14 Saudis Just Released From Guantánamo (Yousef al-Shehri and Murtadha Makram) (November 2007), A letter from Guantánamo (by Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj) (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), The forgotten anniversary of a Guantánamo suicide (May 2008), Binyam Mohamed embarks on hunger strike to protest Guantánamo charges (June 2008), Second anniversary of triple suicide at Guantánamo (June 2008), Guantánamo Suicide Report: Truth or Travesty? (August 2008), The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo (November 2008), Seven Years Of Guantánamo, And A Call For Justice At Bagram (January 2009), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), Obama’s “Humane” Guantánamo Is A Bitter Joke (February 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), Guantánamo’s Long-Term Hunger Striker Should Be Sent Home (March 2009), Guantánamo, Bagram and the “Dark Prison”: Binyam Mohamed talks to Moazzam Begg (March 2009), Forgotten: The Second Anniversary Of A Guantánamo Suicide (May 2009), Yemeni Prisoner Muhammad Salih Dies At Guantánamo (June 2009), Death At Guantánamo Hovers Over Obama’s Middle East Visit (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation (June 2009), Binyam Mohamed: Was Muhammad Salih’s Death In Guantánamo Suicide? (June 2009), Torture In Guantánamo: The Force-feeding Of Hunger Strikers (for ACLU, June 2009), Murders at Guantánamo: Scott Horton of Harper’s Exposes the Truth about the 2006 “Suicides” (January 2010), Torture in Afghanistan and Guantánamo: Shaker Aamer’s Lawyers Speak (February 2010), The Third Anniversary of a Death in Guantánamo (May 2010), Omar Deghayes and Terry Holdbrooks Discuss Guantánamo (Part Three): Deaths at the Prison (June 2010), Suicide or Murder at Guantánamo? (1st anniversary of Mohammed al-Hanashi’s death, June 2010).

Also see the following online chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 2 (Ahmed Kuman, Mohammed Haidel), Website Extras 3 (Abdullah al-Yafi, Abdul Rahman Shalabi), Website Extras 4 (Bakri al-Samiri, Murtadha Makram), Website Extras 5 (Ali Mohsen Salih, Ali Yahya al-Raimi, Abu Bakr Alahdal, Tarek Baada, Abdul al-Razzaq Salih).

Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo?

The recently released Final Report of President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force (PDF) was supposed to provide a cogent and definitive analysis of the status of the remaining 181 prisoners, given that it took eleven months to complete, and involved “more than 60 career professionals, including intelligence analysts, law enforcement agents, and attorneys, drawn from the Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other agencies within the intelligence community.”

Sadly, however, the end result — although valid in many ways — also revealed institutional caution, credulity regarding the contributions of the intelligence services, an inability to address fundamental problems with the legislation that authorized President Bush’s detention policies in the first place, and a willingness to bend to the demands of political expediency.

Why We Had High Hopes When Obama Came to Power

When Obama came into office pledging to close Guantánamo in a year, it seemed possible that, before the 12 months elapsed, the administration would begin federal court trials for around three dozen of the remaining prisoners, and would free the rest.

This was not as fanciful a notion as it may at first appear. Over the years, intelligence reports indicated that the number of prisoners involved in any meaningful way with al-Qaeda or other international terrorist groups was somewhere between 38 and just over 50. As I explained in an article in 2008:

Of the 749 detainees who were held at the prison during its first two and half years of existence, none, according to dozens of high-level military and intelligence sources interviewed by the New York Times in June 2004, “ranked as leaders or senior operatives of al-Qaeda,” and “only a relative handful — some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen — were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization’s inner workings.”

Ten more reputedly significant detainees arrived at Guantánamo from [Bagram via] secret CIA prisons in September 2004, and another 14 “high-value detainees” … arrived in September 2006, but these arrivals — which, in themselves, revealed the existence of secret prisons that were even less accountable than Guantánamo — were hardly enough to convince any except the administration’s most fervent and unquestioning supporters that the whole extra-legal experiment was worthwhile.

With the addition of two more “high-value detainees,” who were flown into Guantánamo from secret prisons in 2007 and 2008 (along with four other less significant prisoners), this means that, of the 779 prisoners held in total, only around 5 percent resembled “the worst of the worst” that were so regularly and enduringly touted by the Bush administration, and I hoped that Obama would recognize this, and would use it to push back against his predictable Republican critics.

In addition, when it came to releasing prisoners, those of us who hoped for the best back in January 2009 realized that 59 prisoners had already been approved for release (or transfer) by military review boards under President Bush, but had not been released by the time he left office. As a result, we hoped that dozens of prisoners would be released in the first few months of Obama’s presidency.

We were even optimistic that a workable solution could be found for the dozens of other prisoners whose repatriation was out of the question because they faced the risk of torture of in their home countries — including Algeria, China, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan — or because, like a handful of Palestinians, they were essentially stateless refugees. When we saw how much goodwill there was towards President Obama around the world, we believed that it would be relatively easy to secure the assistance of other countries in offering homes to these men, so long as the United States made the first move, offering some of the men new homes on the US mainland.

Obvious candidates for resettlement in the US were the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, who had been sold to US forces by Pakistani villagers after fleeing from a ramshackle settlement in the Afghan mountains, where they had ended up after unsuccessfully attempting to travel to Turkey in search of employment, or because they nursed futile hopes of rising up against the Chinese government. It had been obvious to almost everyone, from the moment they arrived in US custody, that they had no connection to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and in October 2008 they had been the first men to win their habeas corpus petitions, after the Supreme Court granted the Guantánamo prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas rights three months earlier.

How Our Hopes Were Dashed

In the end, however, although the Task Force recommended trials for 36 of the prisoners (well within the scope of the previously reported intelligence estimates), and approved 126 for release (out of the 240 prisoners whose cases they studied), its members also demonstrated the caution, credulity, confusion and political expediency that I mentioned at the start of this article.

The most distressing example of caution and credulity concerned what the Task Force called “the disposition” of 48 other prisoners, who, in their opinion, should continue to be held indefinitely because “prosecution is not feasible in either federal court or a military commission.” The irony — that indefinite detention was exactly what President Bush had established in the first place — was not lost on the members, who made a point of attempting to stifle criticism as follows:

[T]he principal obstacles to prosecution in the cases deemed infeasible by the Task Force typically did not stem from concerns over protecting sensitive sources or methods from disclosure, or concerns that the evidence against the detainees was tainted. While such concerns were present in some cases, most detainees were deemed infeasible for prosecution based on more fundamental evidentiary and jurisdictional limitations tied to the demands of a criminal forum.

According to the Task Force, these “fundamental evidentiary and jurisdictional limitations” related to the circumstances of the prisoners’ capture, and perceived problems in prosecuting them either in federal courts or in military commissions.

The Problems with the Evidence

On the first point, the Task Force explained that, because “[t]he focus at the time of their capture was the gathering of intelligence and their removal from the fight,” they “were not the subjects of formal criminal investigations, and the evidence was neither gathered nor preserved with an eye toward prosecuting them.” This made the circumstances of their capture — largely at the hands of the US military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments were widespread — sound less chaotic than it actually was, and it also disguised the kind of treatment to which they were subjected during “the gathering of intelligence.”

With this in mind, it is no more reassuring to read the Task Force’s assessment of the quality of the intelligence services’ reports used to establish the significance of these 48 prisoners. The Task Force attempted to explain that “the intelligence about them may be accurate and reliable,” but “for various reasons may not be admissible evidence or sufficient to satisfy a criminal burden of proof in either a military commission or federal court.”

The “various reasons” were not explained, but reading between the lines, what this rather bland but conditional statement demonstrates, with its prominent use of the word “may,” is that the intelligence relied upon as evidence will probably not stand up to any kind of genuinely objective scrutiny, and the reasons for this are inadvertently revealed in the final line of the paragraph dealing with the “evidentiary limitations.”

“One common problem,” the Task Force wrote, “is that, for many of the detainees, there are no witnesses who are available to testify in any proceedings against them.” Here the use of the possible witnesses’ availability is something of a smokescreen, disguising a blunter truth: that the intelligence, and whatever witness availability there might be, are both tainted by the circumstances under which “the gathering of intelligence” took place — the coercive interrogations, and in some cases the torture, of the prisoners themselves, or of their fellow prisoners.

With 50 rulings now delivered in the District Court in Washington D.C. on the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions (36 of which have been won by the prisoners), these problems have been highlighted again and again by judges, with an objectivity that eluded the Task Force — as, for example, in the cases of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti put forward by President Bush for a trial by military commission, who was freed after a judge ruled that the entire case against him rested on a false narrative that he had come up with after torture and threats, and, to cite just two more examples, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni seized in a student guest house in Pakistan, and Mohammed El-Gharani, a Chadian national, who was just 14 when he was seized in a raid on a mosque in Pakistan. In both cases, they were freed after judges ruled that the government’s witnesses — the men’s fellow prisoners — were irredeemably unreliable, and were, if not subjected to violence, then bribed to produce false statements.

It is, therefore, rather disingenuous of the Task Force to claim that “the principal obstacle to prosecution” for these 48 men “typically did not come from … concerns that the evidence against the detainee[s] was tainted,” when, to be frank, the record is replete with examples proving the opposite.

Moreover, a review of some of the cases that the Task Force deemed appropriate for indefinite detention is even more alarming. Although the Task Force identified roughly 10 percent of the prisoners (24 in total) as “Leaders, operatives, and facilitators involved in terrorist plots against US targets” (including six of the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006), the 20 percent identified as “Others with significant organizational roles within al-Qaeda or associated terrorist organizations” (48 prisoners in total) included “individuals responsible for overseeing or providing logistical support to al-Qaeda’s training operations in Afghanistan; facilitators who helped moved money and personnel for al-Qaeda; a cadre of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards, who held a unique position of trust within al-Qaeda; and well- trained operatives who were being groomed by al-Qaeda leaders for future terrorist operations.”

The most worrying inclusion here is of bin Laden’s “cadre” of bodyguards, for reasons that have long been apparent. The men in question, identified in Guantánamo as the “Dirty Thirty,” are 30 men seized as they attempted to cross the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, and although some were involved with al-Qaeda and had been fighting US forces (or, to be more accurate, their Afghan proxies) in the Tora Bora mountains, the bodyguard allegations were first picked up on in 2006 as false allegations produced by the notorious torture victim Mohammed al-Qahtani.

In addition, in a recent habeas case, similarly baseless allegations were revealed to have originated with two other prisoners held in secret prisons before their delivery to Bagram, where their confessions were extracted. In the cases of these two men, Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj and Sanad Yislam Ali al-Kazimi, their statements were excluded by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr., because, as he explained, “there is unrebutted evidence in the record that, at the time of the interrogations at which they made the statements, both men had recently been tortured.”

Just as significantly, the false allegations were directed at Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, supposedly one of the “Dirty Thirty,” whose habeas petition was granted by Judge Kennedy on February 24 this year (a month after the Task Force report was published). In his unclassified opinion, Judge Kennedy ruled that the government had failed, by a preponderance of the evidence, to establish that Uthman “received and executed orders from al-Qaeda.”

The Problems with Holding Soldiers in Guantánamo

Beyond the problems with the evidence, the Task Force also identified “jurisdictional limitations.” These related to problems when, for example, a prisoner’s ties to al-Qaeda had apparently been established — through “attend[ing] a training camp,” for example, or “play[ing] some role in the hierarchy of the organization” — but “the Task Force did not find evidence that the detainee participated in a specific terrorist plot.”

Despite the fact that “the federal material support statutes have been used to convict persons who have merely provided services to a terrorist organization,” the Task Force bridled at this option, fearing that the statutes would prevent the filing of charges relating to activities preceding the 9/11 attacks, worrying about the eight-year statute of limitations for these offenses, and also worrying that the maximum sentence for material support — 15 years — was not punitive enough.

Missing from these discussions, however, was an additional problem that has arisen during the rulings on the prisoners’ habeas petitions; namely, that the majority of the prisoners who have lost their habeas petitions, and who might face some of these material support charges, are, typically, low-level Taliban recruits who were involved, in one way or another, with the Taliban’s conflict with the Northern Alliance before the 9/11 attacks, and who clearly had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism — beyond, perhaps, having heard the odd pep talk by Osama bin Laden at a training camp.

Instead of debating just two options — trials or indefinite detention — the Task Force should, I believe, have suggested a third option: holding the men as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, and not as the dangerously unique type of prisoner whose detention is justified by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). The founding document of the “War on Terror,” passed by Congress just days after the 9/11 attacks, the AUMF authorized — and still authorizes — the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001” (or those who harbored them).

The imprisonment of men detained under the AUMF was approved by the Supreme Court in 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in which it was asserted that “Congress has clearly and unmistakably authorized detention” of individuals covered by the AUMF, and it is this combination of factors that is used by Obama, as it was by Bush, to justify the imprisonment of the Guantánamo prisoners.

However, as the habeas cases have shown — and the Task Force’s problems reinforce — all that has been created for the majority of the men held in Guantánamo is an alternative to the Geneva Conventions (which, crucially, authorize detention until the end of hostilities), that draws everyone involved in it into legal knots, and, moreover, only provides ammunition to those who maintain that Guantánamo is full of terrorists, when the truth, plainly, is that it contains only a small proportion of terrorists, and a much larger number of soldiers.

The Problems with Political Expediency

The final problem with the report feeds into a larger problem on the administration’s part, relating, as I mentioned above, to the perils of political expediency. In analyzing the cases of the 97 Yemenis at Guantánamo during the course of the report, the Task Force advised that five be prosecuted and 26 be held indefinitely, but approved the other 66 for release. Seven of these men were freed last year, but Obama bowed to political pressure and halted all further releases to Yemen in January, just weeks before the report was published, in response to a wave of hysteria that greeted the discovery that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas Day plane bomber from Nigeria, had trained in Yemen.

The Task Force had already designated 30 of the 66 cleared Yemenis in a category of their own, as “pos[ing] a lower threat than the group of detainees designated for continued detention under the AUMF,” and had recommended that they “should not be transferred to Yemen in the near future,” and should be held in “conditional” detention — another novelty — until “the security situation improves.”

However, following the President’s “moratorium on transfers” to Yemen, the Task Force unanimously agreed with the President’s decision, despite the fact that there was no reason to suppose that Yemenis held in Guantánamo for eight years had — or would have — any connection to a recent al-Qaeda offshoot in Yemen, which apparently involved a handful of Saudi ex-prisoners (not Yemenis), whose release in 2006 and 2007 had, moreover, been authorized by President Bush, in spite of the advice of the intelligence services.

Sadly, this example of political expediency is just one of many on the part of Obama administration in the last year that have dashed the high hopes held by many of us in January 2009. Other examples include Obama vetoing White House Counsel Greg Craig’s plan to bring some Uighurs to live in the US last spring, his decision to revive the reviled military commissions trial system (which he suspended on his first day in office), and his support of indefinite detention without charge or trial, which he announced in a major national security speech last May, when most of George W. Bush’s cards, which Obama had taken off the table, were put back on again.

In conclusion, the Guantánamo Review Task Force’s Final Report is not a complete disaster, but its misinterpretations and omissions are deeply troubling, and indicate that closing Guantánamo remains considerably more difficult that it needs to be — or than it should have been. This is sad news indeed for those still held, whether regarded as significant or not, who are still waiting for something resembling justice to be delivered after nearly eight and a half years.

As published exclusively on Truthout. Cross-posted on Dandelion Salad and Uruknet.

A Voice from Iraq: Former Guantánamo Prisoner Speaks

In a fascinating interview with Mohammed Furat, the Iraqi editor of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR), an Iraqi and former Guantánamo prisoner (one of the three Iraqis released from Guantánamo in January 2009), told his story.

His account is fascinating on his own terms, as it provides an insight into how vulnerable refugees from other countries could end up in Guantánamo, but it is also of great interest because, to the best of my knowledge, it is the first ever interview with a prisoner released from Guantánamo to Iraq, and although the man in question — who uses the pseudonym Hussein Latif — is clearly struggling to make a living in Baghdad, it is reassuring that he is a free man, and was only imprisoned on his return for “several months,” as those of us who have been studying Guantánamo closely feared that the men returned from Guantánamo to Iraq might languish in Iraqi jails for years (or forever), unnoticed by the outside world.

I leave it to readers to see if they can ascertain, from the accounts of the three Iraqis released from Guantánamo in January 2009, which of the three is “Hussein Latif,” who, as the credits to the original article explain, was cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2006.

From Iraq to Guantánamo: The Accidental Prisoner

An Iraqi’s tale of an odyssey through war zones, trying to reach the West but ending up in Guantánamo.

As a young man in Iraq, I longed to live in the West. Yet when I finally came within reach of the free world, it was no longer as a free man.

The quest to escape my homeland ended with my imprisonment by the United States military at Guantánamo Bay. I spent eight years there, followed by several months in jail in Baghdad when I was repatriated, before I was finally freed.

Today, I live at liberty in the country I spent my youth trying to flee. As I drive around my home city, Baghdad, I ask myself whether I have been treated fairly. Perhaps I was wrong to try and leave my family behind in the first place.

I grew up with reckless desires and whimsical dreams. I wanted to live in Europe, and to date a beautiful, blonde woman; I wanted a job and a car. My family was poor and I wanted to help them buy a house.

My experiences have taught me to be patient. I have learnt that an Iraqi wandering abroad is like a ball flung around in different directions, from one misfortune to another.

I was born in 1974 in southern Baghdad. When I was six years old, my uncle was executed for links to a banned Shia religious party, the Dawa. The party was founded in Iran and its members were regarded as traitors by the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, which was suspicious of Shia Arabs and spent much of the 1980s at war with Iran.

My uncle’s execution plunged my family into a state of fear. The security forces searched our home. My father seemed to be lost in a vast, black sea, perplexed about how we were to survive, and worried for his own safety.

At the age of 12, I started working part-time. At first, I helped mechanics fix cars. Later, I took to the streets, selling cold water, cigarettes and juice to support my family.

After finishing technical school, I was conscripted into the army. Military intelligence had been briefed about my uncle, and I was constantly intimidated, interrogated and insulted. Faced with this hell, I decided to desert and join the opposition.

It was 1995, and Iraq was under international sanctions as a result of its invasion of Kuwait. I set off for the semi-autonomous Kurdish north, where opponents of Saddam could operate relatively freely.

However, I was arrested en route when the security forces stopped me and discovered I was carrying a copy of my uncle’s death sentence. I had hoped to use the document to prove my credentials as a dissident once I reached the offices of the United Nations or an opposition party.

I was tried as a deserter and sentenced to death by firing squad. My family sold their most valuable possessions to bribe the judge, and the sentence was reduced to a year’s imprisonment.

Back in the military, life was even harder, as I was now stigmatised as a deserter. My family borrowed money from relatives to obtain a forged document that said I had been demobilised. I used this to procure an Iraqi passport, and in 1998, I crossed the border into Jordan.

My search for work took me to Libya, Syria and eventually to Turkey — the gateway to Europe.

The Turkish authorities arrested me and sent me to northern Iraq. After another failed attempt at crossing through Turkey, I changed tack and set off eastwards through Iran. I thought that, with luck, I would be able to get to Russia, or perhaps travel by sea from India to Australia.

I lived as a vagabond in Iran and Pakistan, sleeping rough and scavenging for food. My family lost touch with me.

Eventually, a friend suggested I go to Afghanistan for work. I’d never heard of Afghanistan, but I didn’t think twice about going. I had found it impossible to find employment in Pakistan, where Iraqis seemed to be viewed with distrust.

The border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan was a sight to behold — a lone policeman, sitting on a chair with a stick in one hand and a hashish cigarette in the other.

In August 2001, I made my way to Kabul along with a group of other homeless Arabs. We were given shelter by some men who appeared to be very religious. They hired me as a driver to ferry their fighters around.

The work was unpaid and it felt as if I was a captive. I was regarded with great suspicion by my employers, perhaps because of my Shia origins. They were very different to me — I could not understand why they did not shave, while they didn’t understand why I hadn’t grown a beard.

Soon after I came to Afghanistan in 2001, the radio broadcast news of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York.

The Arabs handed me over to a group of Afghans, who promptly sold me on to the American military.

I was initially relieved to see the Americans, as I felt they would believe my story and grant me asylum.

Instead, they sent me to Guantánamo Bay.

Many of my fellow prisoners there were hard-line Sunnis who regarded Shia Muslims as apostates. They threatened me because of my faith, throwing food at me and cursing Iraq loudly, because most of its population is Shia.

I spent a lot of time in solitary confinement because of the way other prisoners behaved towards me. I also developed a friendly relationship with some of the guards. A Turkish-American officer gave me books, and a female soldier shared her cigarettes.

Over the years, I taught myself good English. During a military hearing held by the Americans, I asked for the official interpreter to be dismissed because I knew he was not translating what I was saying accurately.

One evening, I was playing cards with some American guards when the extremists started shouting abuse at me from their cells. I did not share their religious vocabulary, so I responded in the only way I could — by blowing a raspberry at them. Everyone started laughing, the American soldiers and the prisoners.

I guess I am easily amused. Even when I was being interrogated by the Americans, I kept recalling images from an Egyptian comedy film about a witness who knows nothing.

Since I am Shia, I think it is ridiculous that I was imprisoned by the Americans together with Sunni extremists. I still don’t know whether to laugh or cry about the years I spent there.

The rules in Guantánamo were strict, but as long as you obeyed them, you did not get into trouble. On the streets of Baghdad today, no one knows what the rules are any more. There is danger everywhere.

I no longer have wild fantasies about the future. I am a realist now. But my family is still poor, and they still don’t own a home. I still dream of the day when I will not have the landlord at my door asking for the rent.

Guantanamo, Iraq, Iraqis in Guantanamo, Life after Guantanamo
10.6.10
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Guantánamo Uighurs Thank Bermuda; Supporters Ask UK to Give Them Passports

As I have explained in two recent articles, a global scramble by the Obama administration to find new homes for 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) who were, or are held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, has had mixed results. The men won their habeas corpus petitions in a US court in October 2008, but five are still held in Guantánamo, having refused an offer of resettlement from Palau and another unidentified country. These men have just lost a court case in the US, in which they sought release into the United States, and are now back in legal limbo.

In contrast, six men freed in Palau on October 31 last year are well, and happy to be free, but are also hoping that an appeal to the Australian government by Palau’s President will secure them a permanent home in Australia, where there will be more opportunities for them — and where there is also a large Uighur community.

Today, however, the four Uighurs who were freed in Bermuda last June marked the first anniversary of their release from Guantánamo in a more upbeat manner, sending a message of thanks to the Bermudian people and speaking about how they are enjoying their new lives. This was reported in the Bermuda Sun, and I’m pleased to be able to pass on the good news.

In a sign that any worries about the men have dissipated in the last year — worries that, it should be noted, were largely fanned by political opponents of Premier Ewart Brown, who arranged for their release — the Bermuda Sun described them explicitly as “innocent men wrongly imprisoned for seven years,” and explained that they are “still relishing their freedom 12 months after being let go.”

“It has been a wonderful year,” Khalil Mamut told senior reporter James Whittaker, who described him as “the best English speaker of the four and the group’s unofficial spokesman.” Mamut added, “A year ago we were in Guantánamo Bay but this year, praise be to God, we are here. We have a lot of friends — some Muslims, some Christians — and they treat us as if we are Bermudian.”

Salahidin Abdulahad added, “In our country Muslims cannot practice their religion, cannot pray together otherwise the Government oppresses them. Here we can meet with other Muslims and practice our religion in peace.”

Describing how, “with their long shorts and wrap-around shades, they do not stand out from the crowd,” Whittaker proceeded to explain how “the simple pleasures of being free” were still astonishing to the men, but also pointed out how descriptions of their life, which includes “swimming in the Atlantic, riding to work on scooters and their jobs on a majestic ocean-side golf course,” will “sound familiar to locals and expatriates alike.”

“We work hard, we pray, we rest,” Khalil Mamut told him. “We play a friendly soccer game on Sundays at Port Royal and after we like to swim in the ocean. Sometimes we have friends over for a barbecue.”

Even so, adjusting to their new life has not always been easy. As Whittaker explained, “They are still struggling to learn the language and adjust to a culture so markedly different from their own.” Salahidin Abdulahad told him, “We are still unfamiliar with the culture of Bermuda. We still need help and support. We are adapting but it is difficult. We grew up in a big country, we moved around a lot — now we move only from Dockyard to St. George’s.”

However, as Whittaker also explained, the men “hope to be able to travel beyond these shores soon” and are “awaiting news on whether they will be granted travel documents.” One of the four, Abdullah Abdulqadir, has a sister in Montreal, and hopes to be able to visit the nieces and nephews he has never met, but who, in the last year, he has been speaking to several times a week via Skype. “At first I was like a stranger,” he told Whittaker, but “now they call me uncle. If I am talking to their parents they come and they want to talk to their uncle.”

In the long-term, the men “hope to stay in Bermuda and start families of their own,” as James Whittaker put it. Khalil Mamut explained, “None of us have girlfriends, but in the future, who knows? We are all older than 30 and to have a family is very important to us.” For now, however, they are, as Whittaker described it, “just grateful to be free and in Bermuda.” Khalil Mamut told him, “We are so happy that Bermuda gave a helping hand to us and we ask God to give a peaceful life.”

A letter to the people of Bermuda

As well as publishing this anniversary article, the Bermuda Sun also published the following “poignant letter to Bermuda’s residents and Government thanking them for welcoming them to the island last year,” which was written by Khalil Mamut.

In the name of Allah, on behalf of my brothers and I, we would like to thank Premier Dr. Ewart Brown, the Bermuda Government and the people of Bermuda. You opened your homes and hearts to us and we are humbled by your hospitality.

We grew up in a different land and culture but you embraced us with your humanity and kindness and made us feel at home. We are thankful for the opportunity you gave us for a new beginning.

We are looking forward to your continual support in order for us to adapt and integrate more to your culture.

We are very blessed to be embraced by people in the community — Muslims, Christians and others.

Peace be with you all.

The political fallout – and a question of British passports

In a final article, James Whittaker also examined the political fallout from Premier Brown’s “secret deal with the US” to bring the Uighurs to Bermuda, which, as he explained, “sparked a political firestorm,” with critics arguing that Bermuda’s reputation “would forever be tarnished by an association with terrorism” and that “relations with the UK [Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory] would be seriously damaged,” while Brown’s supporters regarded it as “a bold, humanitarian gesture that would strengthen relations with the US.”

After noting that there appears to have been no noticeable effect on Bermuda’s relations with the US, despite supportive words from President Obama and Hillary Clinton, Whittaker pointed out that, in contrast, “the damage to Bermuda’s reputation seems to have been overstated by Dr. Brown’s critics,” and that, although the UK “was angry for a while,” a royal visit and a change of government “has put the incident largely in the past.”

On the domestic front, Whittaker pointed out that “PLP insiders [in Brown’s party, the Progressive Labour Party] say his failure to consult his colleagues over the Uighurs critically weakened support from key parliamentary figures,” but he survived a vote of no confidence last year, and, as Senator Walton Brown, one of his supporters, explained, “We have secured significant goodwill with the US and no adverse action whatsoever from the UK,” and the “real issue” is that “four individuals who were never charged with any crime are now free.”

Perhaps the only outstanding questions concern the men’s official status. While awaiting travel documents, as mentioned above, they are also aware that negotiations are underway in an attempt to convince the British government to give them passports, although in April, as Whittaker explained, the Governor, Sir Richard Gozney, suggested that this was “unlikely to happen soon.”

However, although Sen. Brown said that the delay “was a result of ill-feeling from the UK” regarding the way the decision to accept the Uighurs was taken, he insisted that “time is a great healer” and told Whittaker that he was “confident the UK will ultimately do the right thing and grant the men the chance to travel” and even “to reside in Britain if they chose to do so.”

“They are settled in Bermuda, they are hard working individuals,” Sen. Brown said of the Uighurs. “I’m sure they miss their families like anyone would, but their living conditions are significantly better today than they were 18 months ago. By any moral standards we have done the right thing. All that remains is for the UK to grant them travel documents and allow them to be truly free.”

The Uighurs in Britain? Now that really would be something — although I suspect that they may prefer life in Bermuda!

To conclude on a more serious note, however, the way in which the Uighurs have been accepted in Bermuda shows what would have happened in America, if President Obama had found the courage to follow through, last spring, on a plan formulated by Greg Craig, the White House Counsel, to bring a number of the Uighurs to live in the United States.

The fact that Obama quashed Craig’s plan in the face of Republican opposition still counts as his single biggest failure with regard to Guantánamo. As can be seen from the escalation of fearmongering about Guantánamo in Republican circles — and in large parts of his own party — it has been disastrous in terms of demonstrating to the American people that Guantánamo was not full of terrorists, and that innocent men were held, as well as making it more difficult for the State Department — and Obama’s special envoy Daniel Fried — to find new homes for other men who, like the Uighurs, cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will face torture on their return.

Guantanamo, Life after Guantanamo, Uighurs in Guantanamo
9.6.10
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Suicide or Murder at Guantánamo?

Mohammed al-Hanashi (aka Muhammad Salih) after his death On June 2 last year, the Pentagon announced that a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Hanashi (also known as Muhammad Salih) had died, reportedly by committing suicide. He was the fifth reported suicide at Guantánamo, following three deaths on June 9, 2006 and another on May 30, 2007, and he was the sixth man to die at the prison, following the death, by cancer, of an Afghan prisoner, Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, on December 26, 2007.

All of these deaths were, in one way or another, suspicious, except for Hekmati, a 68-year old Afghan, whose story, instead, hinted at medical neglect, and also revealed, on close examination, the callous cruelty of the regime at Guantánamo. A quiet hero of the anti-Taliban resistance, who had helped free three important anti-Taliban leaders from a Taliban jail, he had discovered at Guantánamo that no one in authority was interested in ascertaining whether or not there was any truth to his story, and he went to his grave without having been able to clear his name.

This ought to be a source of undying shame for those who failed to investigate his story — and who may well have not acted decisively to prevent the spread of his cancer — but, unlike the other five men, his death does not carry with it the suspicion that he was deliberately killed, whereas all the others do. Last week, I recalled the Saudi prisoner Abdul Rahman al-Amri, on the third anniversary of his death, and was unable to come up with an adequate explanation for why he would take his own life.

A devout man, who had traveled to Afghanistan to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance, he was deeply troubled by the kinds of sexual humiliation to which he and other prisoners were subjected, and this could, perhaps, have tipped him over the edge, but he was also a long-term hunger striker, and may, therefore, have been in such a weakened state at the time of his death that a round of particularly aggressive questioning may have been enough to kill him.

In addition, the deaths of the three men on June 9, 2006 — all long-term hunger strikers, like Abdul Rahman al-Amri — have long been contentious, and became more so in January this year when, in a compelling article in Harper’s Magazine, Scott Horton drew on eye-witness accounts by former soldiers, including Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, to paint a vivid and genuinely disturbing picture of how the alleged suicides of the three men in question — Salah Ahmed al-Salami, Mani Shaman al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani — were announced shortly after a vehicle had returned from a secret prison outside the prison’s main perimeter fence, where prisoners were reportedly tortured, and how there was, according to the soldiers, an official cover-up on an alarming scale.

I’ll be returning to Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman’s story in the near future, but in the meantime I want to shift the focus onto Mohammed al-Hanashi, to mark the first anniversary of his death, to ask why questions raised at the time have not been answered, and to bring readers up to date on further questions asked in the last year by the author and journalist Naomi Wolf and the psychologist and blogger Jeff Kaye.

Shortly after his death, the released British resident Binyam Mohamed, who knew al-Hanashi in Guantánamo, provided an explanation of the circumstances of his death that was deeply shocking. In an article for the Miami Herald, he stated that he and al-Hanashi, who, at the time, weighed just 104 pounds (and at one point had weighed just 86 pounds), had both been on a hunger strike at the start of 2009, which had involved them being force-fed daily, strapped to restraint chairs while tubes were pushed up their noses and into their stomachs.

The man described by Binyam Mohamed was someone who stood up to the unjust regime at Guantánamo and “was always being put into segregation because of his determined insistence in pointing out the realities of what had happened to us all.” Mohamed continued:

The fact is, US authorities didn’t like him talking about words and practices they were only too familiar with: kidnap, rendition, torture, degradation, false imprisonment and injustice. But, while [al-Hanashi] opposed the policies and treatment in Guantánamo, he didn’t have problems with the guards. He was always very sociable and tried to help resolve issues between the guards and prisoners. He was patient and encouraged others to be the same. He never viewed suicide as a means to end his despair.

However, as Binyam Mohamed explained, when the officer in charge of Camp 5 (a maximum-security block) sought out a volunteer “to represent the prisoners on camp issues such as hunger strikes and other contentious issues,” al-Hanashi agreed. On January 17, 2009, he was taken to meet with the Joint Task Force commander, Adm. David Thomas, and the Joint Detention Group commander, Col. Bruce Vargo, but he never returned to his cell. “[T]wo weeks later,” Mohamed wrote, “we learned that he was moved to what we called the ‘psych’ unit — the behavioral-health unit (BHU).” He added:

There has yet to be any explanation as to why he was sent there or even what was the cause of death. The BHU was built as a secure unit to prevent, among other things, potential suicide attempts. Everything that someone could use to hurt himself has been removed from the cell, and a guard watches each prisoner 24 hours a day, in person and on videotape. In light of this, I am amazed that the US government has the audacity to describe [al-Hanashi’s] death categorically as an “apparent suicide.”

Instead, Binyam Mohamed explained that he thought al-Hanashi’s death was “a murder, or unlawful killing, whichever way you look at it,” and wondered whether “he was killed by US personnel — intentionally or otherwise” or whether his long years of hunger striking “led to some type of organ failure that caused his death.”

Last August, following up on the story, the author and journalist Naomi Wolf, who had been present at Guantánamo on the day al-Hanashi died (as part of a group of journalists covering pre-trial hearings in the trial by military commission of Omar Khadr), revealed that she had been deeply troubled by his death, and the “terse announcement” by the press office of his “apparent suicide.”

Her unease heightened when, on her trip back to the States, she “happened to be seated next to a military physician who had been flown in to do the autopsy on al-Hanashi.” “When would there be an investigation of the death?” she asked, receiving the reply, “That was the investigation.” As she described it, “The military had investigated the military.” She added:

This “apparent suicide” seemed immediately suspicious to me. I had just toured those cells: it is literally impossible to kill yourself in them. Their interiors resemble the inside of a smooth plastic jar; there are no hard edges; hooks fold down; there is no bedding that one can use to strangle oneself. Can you bang your head against the wall until you die, theoretically, I asked the doctor? “They check on prisoners every three minutes,” he said. You’d have to be fast.

Wolf also noted that the story “smelled even worse after a bit of digging.” After discovering that al-Hanashi had volunteered to represent the prisoners in Camp 5, she noted that this would have meant that he “knew which prisoners had claimed to have been tortured or abused, and by whom.” She also raised doubts about whether it was possible for a prisoner to kill themselves in the psychiatric ward, asking Cortney Busch of Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity whose lawyers represent dozens of Guantánamo prisoners, who explained, as Binyam Mohamed had, that “there is video running on prisoners in the psychiatric ward at all times, and there is a guard posted there continually, too.”

Shorn of these options, Wolf noted that al-Hanashi could have been killed during the force-feeding process, reflecting on “how easy it would be to do away with a troublesome prisoner being force-fed by merely adjusting the calorie level. If it is too low, the prisoner will starve, but too high a level can also kill, since deliberate liquid overfeeding by tube, to which Guantánamo prisoners have reported being subjected, causes vomiting, diarrhea, and deadly dehydration that can stop one’s heart.”

In an attempt to discover exactly what happened to Mohammed al-Hanashi, Wolf spent several months putting pressure on Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, the head spokesman for the Guantánamo press office, but never received a satisfactory answer, even though she pointed out that “[a]n investigation by the military of the death of its own prisoners violates the Geneva Conventions, which demand that illness, transfer, and death of prisoners be registered independently with a neutral authority (such as the ICRC), and that deaths be investigated independently.” As she explained, “If governments let no outside entity investigate the circumstances of such deaths, what will keep them from ‘disappearing’ whomever they take into custody, for whatever reason?”

In Yemen, where al-Hanashi’s body was repatriated, the government “announced only what the US had — that al-Hanashi had died from ‘asphyxiation.’” Wolf added, “When I noted to DeWalt that self-strangulation was impossible, he said he would get back to me when the inquiry — now including a Naval criminal investigation — was completed.”

Wolf never heard back from DeWalt, but in November Jeff Kaye took up the story. Although he noted that self-strangulation was “rare,” but “possible,” he had other reasons for doubting the official story. The first is that al-Hanashi, who was seized in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, survived a massacre in a fort in Mazar-e-Sharif and subsequent imprisonment in a brutal Northern Alliance jail in Sheberghan, where he would have met survivors of another massacre, involving mass asphyxiation in containers, and may, therefore, have “hear[d] tales of US Special Operations soldiers or officers involved.”

The second, which drew on my work, involves the fact that, in his tribunal at Guantánamo, the Pentagon inadvertently revealed that a false allegation made against him — regarding his presence in Afghanistan before he was even in the country — had been made by Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a “high-value detainee,” held in secret CIA prisons for over two years before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006. In every other instance, the names of the “high-value detainees” were redacted from the transcripts, but in al-Hanashi’s case, Ghailani’s name slipped through the censor’s net.

Last May, Ghailani was transferred to New York to face a federal court trial for his alleged involvement in the 1998 African embassy bombings, and, as Jeff Kaye pointed out, al-Hanashi’s “possible testimony at a trial in New York City, establishing that Ghailani’s admissions were false, and likely coerced by torture, may have been a hindrance to a government bent on convicting the supposed bomber.”

Whether it was his knowledge of massacres in Afghanistan, his eligibility as a damaging witness in the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, or his knowledge of dark secrets in Guantánamo, it seems probable that, one way or another, Mohammed al-Hanashi knew too much, and what makes this suspicion even more alarming is the fact that he died just weeks after he was finally assigned a lawyer.

A review of the cases of all the alleged suicides reveals not only that all the men were long-term hunger strikers, but also that none of them had spoken to attorneys before their deaths, and that therefore any incriminating knowledge they may have had went to their graves with them. This may only be coincidental, but it is worth noting that, after the deaths in June 2006, the Pentagon initially reported that none of the three men had legal representation, but that, within days, officials were obliged to acknowledge that, in fact, two of the men did have legal representation.

In the case of the first man, Salah Ahmed al-Salami (also identified as Ali Abdullah Ahmed) it was also revealed that, at the time of his death, his lawyers had not been cleared to visit him, and in the case of the second man, Mani al-Utaybi, his lawyers had not been able to see him. Speaking at the time, his legal team complained that they had waited over nine months for the Pentagon to grant them clearance to see their client, and that, in the meantime, they had not been allowed to correspond with him at all, because of confusion over the spelling of his name. They also explained that, during a visit to Guantánamo just weeks before his death, they had been told that he wouldn’t see them, and that they had, therefore, been unable to tell him that he had been cleared for release.

This has always struck me as a particularly bleak commentary on Guantánamo — that no one told Mani al-Uyaybi that he had been cleared for release before his death — but in the bigger picture of the five unexplained deaths the most important thing is for these men not to be forgotten, and for calls to be made — loudly and regularly — for an independent inquiry into how they died.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on Campaign for Liberty, Prison Planet, Zakiraah, Truth is Contagious and Uruknet.

Quarterly Fundraising Appeal: Please Support my Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Every three months I appeal for financial support to help me continue my research into Guantánamo and related issues (including secret prisons and the British anti-terror laws), and the articles that I write on a daily basis. If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. All contributions are welcome. Readers can pay from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page).

It is just over three years since I began writing articles about Guantánamo, after completing the manuscript for my book The Guantánamo Files, and this is my 882nd post (see here for chronological links to all my articles). As I noted last week, my first article (on May 31, 2007), about the alleged death by suicide of a Saudi prisoner in Guantánamo, Abdul Rahman al-Amri, was viewed by 106 people, but I’m delighted to report that last month I received nearly 250,000 page visits, confirming my belief, which has been unwavering since I began researching Guantánamo on a full-time basis in March 2006, that there is an appetite for the truth about Guantánamo and the “War on Terror” — namely, the cruelty, the incompetence, the crimes of senior government officials and the human cost for the victims — that is not being adequately addressed in the mainstream media.

Three years ago, I received no financial support whatsoever for my work. I’m glad to report that this situation has now changed, and that I am paid regularly for the articles I write for Truthout, the Future of Freedom Foundation and Cageprisoners, but much of the work I do is still unpaid — including many of the 100 or so articles I have written over the last three months, and also the promotion for the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash), which I have screened throughout the UK — mostly with former prisoner Omar Deghayes — on 22 occasions since my last fundraising appeal in March. The tour, like so much of my work, has had no financial backing, so any assistance is appreciated.

In the last three months, I have maintained the key elements of my work — reporting on the release of prisoners from Guantánamo (just seven in this period), on the proposed trials for prisoners (consisting of pre-trial hearings for the trial by Military Commission of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just a child when he was first seized by US forces), and, in particular, on the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions.

In a major series on the habeas cases, I produced a definitive list of the 50 cases to date (of which 36 — 72 percent — have been won by the prisoners), and published six detailed articles analyzing the judges’ unclassified opinions, in which, as I explained, they “revealed the alarming flimsiness of most of the material presented by the government as evidence,” exposing how “the government has been relying, to an extraordinary extent, on confessions extracted through the torture or coercion of the prisoners themselves, or through the torture, coercion or bribery of other prisoners, either in Guantánamo, the CIA’s secret prisons, or proxy prisons run on behalf of the CIA in other countries.” I also explained how disappointed I was with the mainstream media’s general lack of interest in the prisoners’ court victories, because, as I put it, “the rulings are, to be frank, the single most important collection of documents analyzing the failures of the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ detention policies — and Obama’s refusal, or inability to thoroughly repudiate them.”

As part of this project, I also embarked on a campaign to point out how the basis for the ongoing detention of the prisoners whose habeas petitions were denied is, for the most part, grossly unfair, as the men in question are generally low-level Taliban recruits who should have been held as prisoners of war, according to the Geneva Conventions, rather than being consigned, on an apparently legal basis, to indefinite detention in a prison associated with terrorism. I will keep hammering away at this point, not just because of its significance, but also because it ties in with the inability of lawmakers to recognize the truth about Guantánamo.

Instead of helping President Obama to close Guantánamo, lawmakers have, in recent months, ramped up their vile and unconstitutional rhetoric regarding “terror suspects,” both at Guantánamo and elsewhere, exploiting the fear of terrorism, which has been played almost incessantly since the 9/11 attacks, for political gain. This is lowest common denominator politics of the worst kind, but it has been remarkably successful, as it has cowed President Obama, and has ensured that, nearly eight and a half years after Guantánamo opened, the seemingly unending torment of men who are still held, for the most part, without charge or trial, and with no contact with their families, shows no sign of ending anytime soon, and has almost entirely slipped off the mainstream radar.

For this reason, my work is, sadly, more important than ever, and I pledge to continue to expose the truth, to continue to try to bring to life the stories of the men held in Guantánamo, and to campaign for the remaining 181 prisoners to be tried in federal courts or released. I will also continue to expose stories from the US prisons (including a secret prison) at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, and to monitor and put pressure on the new coalition government in the UK to repeal its own draconian anti-terror laws, to fully investigate British complicity in torture, and to secure the return of Shaker Aamer, the remaining British resident in Guantánamo.

I hope that you’ll stay with me as I do so (further articles on the alleged suicides of Guantánamo prisoners, and on the UN’s secret detention report are imminent), and that you’ll continue to spread the word. As ever, I’m more than happy for readers to share links on Facebook, to retweet articles and to Digg them, and to cross-post articles, so long as all internal links are preserved.

My thanks to all of you for your support.

Andy Worthington
London
June 7, 2010