Andy Worthington2013-06-19T06:42:35-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=andy-worthingtonCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Andy WorthingtonGood old fashioned elbow grease.Please Call for the Closure of Guantanamo By Signing the White House Petitiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12248182012-01-24T11:00:28-05:002012-03-25T05:12:01-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/
Remind President Obama of his promise. Sign the petition on the White House's "We the People" website urging him to honor his promise. 25,000 signatures are needed by February 6 to secure a response, so please sign up, and please spread the word.
What happened to President Obama's bold promise?
Three years ago, on January 22, 2009, President Obama issued an executive order promising to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay within a year, but he did not move swiftly to implement his promise, and Congress then stepped in with onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners or their transfer to the U.S. mainland for any reason, even to be tried or imprisoned.
Instead of being closed, Guantánamo still holds 171 men, even though 89 of these men were cleared for release more than two years ago by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force (PDF), which was established by the President after taking office.
Some of these cleared men, like the Uighurs (Muslims from China's Xinjiang province), remain in Guantánamo because they cannot be safely repatriated, even though the Bush administration conceded they had been seized by mistake, and even though a District Court judge granted their habeas corpus petitions in October 2008.
Others -- 28 in total -- are Yemenis, whose release was approved by the Task Force but prevented by the President after a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. Although these men had nothing to do with Mr. Abdulmutallab, their release is prevented solely on the basis of their nationality. We believe that this is wrong, and that continuing to hold these men makes a mockery of claims that the United States believes in fairness and justice.
30 other Yemenis are held in what the Task Force described as "conditional detention," a category of prisoner invented by the Task Force, and designed to prevent their release until, by some unknown mechanism, it is decided that the security situation in Yemen has improved sufficiently for them to be released.
We call on the President to release these 89 prisoners, and to bring to an end the unacceptable situation in which those cleared for release are indistinguishable from those recommended for trials or for ongoing detention, because of the unfair obstructions imposed to prevent them being freed.
Again, please sign the petition, and then tell others about it. Let's make 2012 the year that we close Guantánamo.
Also, please note that the petition can be signed by anyone, not just U.S. citizens. When registering from outside the U.S., just leave the "zip code" section blank. Good luck, and thanks for the support!
Note: This article is adapted from an article on the website of the newly established "Close Guantánamo" campaign. Please also see the mission statement, signed by significant retired military personnel, NGOs, lawyers and journalists, and sign up here to receive updates and action alerts.
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, author and filmmaker, specializing in Guantánamo and the "war on terror." He is on the steering committee of the "Close Guantánamo" campaign, with the attorneys Tom Wilner and Gary A. Isaac.]]>U.S. Mid-Term Elections: The Death of Hope and Changetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7787612010-11-04T08:42:09-04:002011-05-25T18:10:25-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/indefinite detention without charge or trial at Guantánamo and elsewhere, trials by Military Commission, and accountability for the Bush administration's torturers) and foreign policy (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) could tell by May 2009 that "hope" and "change" were dead in the water.
Whereas Barack Obama had never disguised his desire to step up the military occupation of Afghanistan, while scaling down operations in Iraq, he had promised -- or had seemed to promise -- a thorough repudiation of the detention policies at Guantánamo and Bagram, and the coercive interrogations and torture that had stalked their cells and interrogation rooms.
However, although he promised to close Guantánamo within a year and to uphold the absolute ban on torture in a series of executive orders issued on his second day in office, fine words were followed by months of inactivity, as a cautious Task Force of career officials from government departments and the intelligence agencies was convened to review the Guantánamo cases.
By May 2009, with Republicans seizing on the President's court-ordered release of a notorious series of "torture memos," issued by Justice Department lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2005, as a demonstration of his untrustworthiness on national security issues, a fundamental change occurred.
The reviled Military Commission trial system for Guantánamo prisoners, which Obama had suspended on his first day in office, was reintroduced, as was indefinite detention without charge or trial as an official policy, even though this was the heart of the Bush administration's program, and even though progressive supporters of the President had presumed that there were only two options for the remaining prisoners: federal court trials, or release.
This was followed by another deeply unsavory official policy -- resisting any more embarrassing disclosures about the Bush administration's torture program by inappropriately invoking sweeping "state secrets" privileges, as, for example, in the case of five men subjected to "extraordinary rendition" and torture, who sought to sue Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary that had operated as the CIA's torture travel agent.
Although Republicans in Congress -- and cowardly members of Obama's own party -- bear considerable blame for the descent into paralysis of those few parts of the President's bold promises that he had not already undermined voluntarily, the end result of the last 21 months of cowardice and compromise is that, on foreign policy and national security issues, there was little positive momentum that a shift of political power in the mid-term elections could actually erode.
That said, losing control of the House of Representatives guarantees that anything the administration might have still contemplated doing -- standing up to critics and insisting that, as announced a year ago, the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks will take place in federal court, or moving any of the Guantánamo prisoners to a prison on the U.S. mainland -- has no chance of happening at all, making the United States a slightly gloomier place than it was before the mid-term elections.
Moreover, given the deepening of Obama's paralysis that this signifies, it also makes it seem less, rather than more likely that the President and his party will be able to do anything meaningful to lure back the progressive base that helped secure victory in 2008, in time for the 2012 Presidential election, unless, by some miracle, someone decides to try to rein in the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex as an economic necessity (if for no other reason).
That, however, sounds too much like "hope" and "change," which, to reiterate, are dead in the water in America today.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (Pluto Press), and the co-director, with Polly Nash, of the documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here.
]]>Barbaric: 86-Year Sentence for Aafia Siddiquitag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7377382010-09-24T08:29:54-04:002011-05-25T17:50:22-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/sentenced to 86 years in prison.
Such a disproportionate sentence would be barbaric, even if Aafia Siddiqui had killed the soldiers she shot at, but as she missed entirely, and was herself shot twice in the abdomen, it simply doesn't make sense. Moreover, the sentencing overlooks claims by her lawyers that her fingerprints were not even on the gun that she allegedly fired, and, even more significantly, hints at a chilling cover-up, mentioned everywhere except at Dr. Siddiqui's trial earlier this year. Seen this way, her sudden reappearance in Ghazni in July 2008, the shooting incident, the trial and the conviction were designed to hide the fact that, for five years and four months, from March 2003, when she and her three children were reportedly kidnapped in Karachi, she was held in secret U.S. detention -- possibly in the US prison at Bagram, Afghanistan -- where she was subjected to horrendous abuse.
The truth about Aafia Siddiqui's story, as I have mentioned in previous articles here, here and here, is difficult to discern, but too many unanswered questions had already been brushed off before this vile sentence was delivered, which involve not only Dr. Siddiqui, but also two of her three children, Ahmed and Mariam, who only resurfaced last September, and in April this year. The whereabouts of her third child, Suleiman, who was just a baby when she first disappeared, has never been disclosed, and there are fears that he was killed when she was initially kidnapped.
As for Mariam, an article at the time of her reappearance stated that she "claim[ed] she was kept in a 'cold, dark room' for seven years," allegedly in Bagram, and in late August 2008, Michael G. Garcia, the attorney general of the southern region of New York, "confirmed in a letter to Siddiqui's sister, Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui, that her son, Ahmed, had been in the custody of the FBI since 2003 and that he was currently in the custody of the Karzai government in Afghanistan," even though the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, had previously claimed that Washington "had no information regarding the children." The article added that Ahmed was finally released to the custody of Siddiqui's family in Pakistan in September 2009, and later "gave a statement to police in Lahore that he had been held in a juvenile prison in Afghanistan for years."
Like everything in the story of Aafia Siddiqui, which remains, in many ways, the most opaque story in the whole of the "War on Terror," it is difficult to say what is true and what is not, but these accounts, as well as eyewitness accounts from other prisoners, including the British resident and former Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed, who has stated that he saw Aafia Siddiqui in Bagram, serve only to demonstrate that, not only is an 86-year sentence the most abominable miscarriage of justice, but also that it meshes perfectly with the notion that this whole sad story is an enormous cover-up. As I asked six months ago:
If Aafia Siddiqui was indeed held in secret US custody for over five years, was the story of the attempted shooting of the U.S. soldiers in July 2008 a cynical set-up, designed to ensure that she could be transferred to the U.S. and tried, convicted and imprisoned without the true story coming to light?
For someone once touted as a significant al-Qaeda operative, it is, to say the least, convenient that she has been sentenced to 86 years in prison on charges that -- beyond the prosecutors' claim that she was an al-Qaeda supporter and a danger to the U.S. -- completely ignored her alleged role in al-Qaeda. The entire court case also avoided the valid presumption that, if she was indeed regarded as an al-Qaeda operative, it would not be surprising if, like many dozens of other "high-value detainees," she suffered years of torture in U.S. custody, and then, somehow, had to be disposed of.
While some of these prisoners ended up in Guantánamo, and others were stealthily delivered on one-way trips to prisons in their home countries, Aafia Siddiqui ended up in New York, rendered -- there is no other word -- from Afghanistan. And although she urged her supporters in court to remain calm yesterday, telling them, "Don't get angry. Forgive Judge Berman," it may be that, in delivering what he referred to as an "appropriate" sentence of "significant incarceration," Judge Richard Berman may have done just what the CIA wanted.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (Pluto Press), and the co-director, with Polly Nash, of the documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here, where a version of this article was first published. ]]>By One Vote, U.S. Court OKs Torture and "Extraordinary Rendition"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7176122010-09-15T09:59:02-04:002011-05-25T17:40:20-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/PDF), in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU on behalf of five men subjected to "extraordinary rendition" and torture, is one such story. The men -- Binyam Mohamed, Ahmed Agiza, Abou Elkassim Britel, Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah and Bisher al-Rawi -- claim, with some justification, and with copious amounts of evidence in their possession, that their rendition, and their torture in a variety of countries, was facilitated by Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing whose role as "The CIA's Travel Agent" was first exposed, through statements made by a former Jeppesen employee, in an article by Jane Mayer for the New Yorker in October 2006.
In statements that were later submitted to the court, Sean Belcher, a former employee, said that the director of Jeppesen International Trip Planning Services, Bob Overby, had told him, "We do all the extraordinary rendition flights," which he also referred to as "the torture flights" or "spook flights." Belcher stated that "there were some employees who were not comfortable with that aspect of Jeppesen's business" because they knew "some of these flights end up" with the passengers being tortured, but added that Overby had explained, "that's just the way it is, we're doing them" because "the rendition flights paid very well."
Last Wednesday, however, when asked to rule on whether these five men should have their day in court, or whether the government should be allowed to dismiss their lawsuit by claiming that the exposure of any information relating to "extraordinary rendition" and torture threatened the national security of the United States, American justice contemplated looking at itself squarely in the mirror, telling truth to power, and allowing these men the opportunity to address what had happened to them in a court of law, but, at the last minute, flinched and turned away. By six votes to five, the Court decided that, in the interests of national security, the men's day in court would be denied.
As Judge Raymond C. Fisher stated in the majority opinion (in which he was joined by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, and Judges Richard C. Tallman, Johnnie B. Rawlinson, Consuelo M. Callahan and Carlos T. Bea):
This case requires us to address the difficult balance the state secrets doctrine strikes between fundamental principles of our liberty, including justice, transparency, accountability and national security. Although as judges we strive to honor all of these principles, there are times when exceptional circumstances create an irreconcilable conflict between them. On those rare occasions, we are bound to follow the Supreme Court's admonition that "even the most compelling necessity cannot overcome the claim of privilege if the court is ultimately satisfied that [state] secrets are at stake." After much deliberation, we reluctantly conclude this is such a case, and the plaintiffs' action must be dismissed.
This is an extraordinarily depressing result, because the Jeppesen case, which had been dismissed by the District Court in 2008, had then been won on appeal before three judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in April 2009. On that occasion the judges in question -- Judges Michael Daly Hawkins, Mary M. Schroeder and William C. Canby, Jr. -- had thoroughly demolished the government's claim -- first submitted by the Bush administration, and then, to the judges' great surprise, slavishly copied by President Obama's Justice Department -- that it could dismiss the case by invoking the "state secrets" doctrine.
Unlike last Wednesday, when the majority agreed with the government regarding the "state secrets" doctrine, the panel of judges in April 2009 had no hesitation, in reviewing what they described as the "relatively thin history" of the doctrine, in dismissing the government's reliance on two precedents because of their irrelevance to the Jeppesen case. One, Totten v. United States, involved a secret agreement between the government and a spy in the nineteenth century, and the other, United States v. Reynolds, from 1953, dealt with the prevention of "discovery of secret evidence when disclosure would threaten national security."
[The judges, in an opinion written by Judge Hawkins] did this first by pinpointing the "clear error" the District Court made when it initially dismissed the case, when the court declared, "inasmuch as the case involves 'allegations' about the conduct of the CIA, the privilege is invoked to protect information which is properly the subject of state secrets privilege," and also declared that "the very subject matter of this case is a state secret." In contrast, the Appeals Court judges insisted that "The subject matter ... is not a state secret, and the case should not have been dismissed at the outset."
Dismissing the government's arguments, they concluded that, although the government may be entitled to protect certain evidence in the interests of national security, it has no justification for suppressing judicial scrutiny of the case as a whole, particularly because some information relating to the case is already publicly available, and also because what the government is actually trying to do, with no legal precedent whatsoever, is to impose a blanket ban on all discussion of potential government wrongdoing.
In a particularly powerful passage, Judge Hawkins stated:
At base, the government argues ... that state secrets form the subject matter of a lawsuit, and therefore require dismissal, any time a complaint contains allegations, the truth or falsity of which has been classified as secret by a government official. The district court agreed, dismissing the case exclusively because it "involves allegations" about [secret] conduct by the CIA." This sweeping characterization of the "very subject matter" bar has no logical limit -- it would apply equally to suits by U.S. citizens, not just foreign nationals; and to secret conduct committed on U.S. soil, not just abroad. According to the government's theory, the Judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law (emphasis added).
I was also impressed by the following passage:
If the simple fact that information is classified were enough to bring evidence containing that evidence within the scope of the [state secrets] privilege, then the entire state secrets inquiry -- from determining which matters are secret to which disclosures pose a threat to national security -- would fall exclusively to the Executive branch, in plain contravention of the Supreme Court's admonition that "[j]udicial control over the evidence in a case cannot be abdicated to the caprice of executive officers" without "lead[ing] to intolerable abuses." ... A rule that categorically equated "classified" matters with "secret" matters would, for example, perversely encourage the President to classify politically embarrassing information simply to place it beyond the reach of judicial process.
Sixteen months on, it is clear from reviewing Judge Hawkins' opinion that nothing has fundamentally changed, and that therefore the majority that prevailed last week has simply repeated the "clear error" the District Court made when it initially dismissed the case, and has endorsed the President's right to "classify politically embarrassing information simply to place it beyond the reach of judicial process," albeit with more obvious hand-wringing.
If justice does still mean anything under the cowardly Obama administration, then the Jeppesen case will proceed to the Supreme Court, although, since Justice John Paul Stevens retired, there is no longer much hope for justice there either. Justice Stevens' replacement, Obama's former Solicitor General Elena Kagan, is contaminated by her involvement in national security arguments on behalf of her former boss, and will have to recuse herself from anything touching on the Bush administration's toxic legacy. As a result, the Supreme Court is likely to split 4-4 on issues like the Jeppesen case, handing victory back to the senior administration officials who so desperately crave blanket immunity for the Bush administration's torturers.
This is a profoundly depressing thought, especially as so many commentators have expressed their disgust at last week's ruling. In an editorial entitled, "Torture Is a Crime, Not a Secret," the New York Times lamented, "The decision diminishes any hope that this odious practice ["extraordinary rendition"] will finally receive the legal label it deserves: a violation of international law," and the Los Angeles Times declared, "The decision to short-circuit the trial process is more than a misreading of the law; it's an egregious miscarriage of justice. That's obvious from a perusal of the plaintiffs' complaint. One said that while he was imprisoned in Egypt, electrodes were attached to his earlobes, nipples and genitals. A second, held in Morocco, said he was beaten, denied food and threatened with sexual torture and castration. A third claimed that his Moroccan captors broke his bones and cut him with a scalpel all over his body, and poured hot, stinging liquid into his open wounds."
Moreover, on Monday, Scott Horton of Harper's Magazine not only pointed out that the facts of the case "were established beyond any reasonable doubt without the need to turn to classified information," but also reminded readers that, "Under the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which adopts the position that the U.S. Justice Department took in 1946, the crime of disappearance connected to torture is a crime against humanity, with no statute of limitations and no defense of superior orders applicable." Horton also reminded readers that, by signing the UN Convention Against Torture in 1987, the United States "made an unequivocal commitment to the international community to compensate those who are tortured by its agents" -- and also, it should be noted, to bring the perpetrators to justice.
In addition, Horton pointed out that, in February this year, the Court of Appeal in London, which "had already viewed the formidable evidence" in Binyam Mohamed's case, had brought to an end 18 months of Obama-style stonewalling by foreign secretary David Miliband regarding British knowledge of Mohamed's torture by U.S. agents, and had ordered the information to be publicly released, leading to a criminal investigation, which is ongoing, and, with a change of government, the announcement of a judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture -- something that many of Obama's supporters had hoped would happen in the U.S. As Horton explained, "The British court concluded, just as the Ninth Circuit was legally obligated to do, that state-secrecy claims could not be used to block discovery of evidence of crimes."
Horton also explained that, although the position taken by Eric Holder's Justice Department -- that it is "protecting state secrets essential to our security" -- is "risible, and half of the court saw through it," what is really at stake is the possibility that evidence produced in the U.S. could be used elsewhere. As he stated:
Twenty-three U.S. agents have already been convicted for their role in a rendition in Milan. Prosecutors in Spain have issued arrest warrants for a further 13 U.S. agents involved in a botched rendition case that touched on Spanish soil. Prosecutors in Germany have opened a criminal investigation into the use of Ramstein [Air Force Base] in connection with torture and illegal kidnappings. Prosecutors in Poland are pursuing a similar matter. And Prime Minister David Cameron was recently forced to brief President Obama on his decision to direct a formal inquiry which could lead to prosecutions tied directly to the subject matter of the Mohamed case. This is the remarkable background to the case decided by the Ninth Circuit, and remarkably not a single word about this appears anywhere in the opinion -- or even in most of the press accounts about it.
While we wait to see what -- if anything -- happens next, I'd like to leave you with some sensible words regarding the legitimate scope of the "state secrets" doctrine, as written by Judge Hawkins in the opening paragraphs of his dissenting opinion last week, in which he was again joined by Judges Schroeder and Canby, and also by Judges Sidney R. Thomas and Richard A. Paez:
The state secrets doctrine is a judicial construct without foundation in the Constitution, yet its application often trumps what we ordinarily consider to be due process of law. This case now presents a classic illustration. Plaintiffs have alleged facts, which must be taken as true for purposes of a motion to dismiss, that any reasonable person would agree to be gross violations of the norms of international law, remediable under the Alien Tort Statute. They have alleged in detail Jeppesen's complicity or recklessness in participating in these violations. The government intervened, and asserted that the suit would endanger state secrets. The majority opinion here accepts that threshold objection by the government, so Plaintiffs' attempt to prove their case in court is simply cut off. They are not even allowed to attempt to prove their case by the use of non-secret evidence in their own hands or in the hands of third parties.
It is true that, judicial construct though it is, the state secrets doctrine has become embedded in our controlling decisional law. Government claims of state secrets therefore must be entertained by the judiciary. But the doctrine is so dangerous as a means of hiding governmental misbehavior under the guise of national security, and so violative of common rights to due process, that courts should confine its application to the narrowest circumstances that still protect the government's essential secrets. When, as here, the doctrine is successfully invoked at the threshold of litigation, the claims of secret are necessarily broad and hypothetical. The result is a maximum interference with the due processes of the courts, on the most general claims of state secret privilege. It is far better to require the government to make its claims of state secrets with regard to specific items of evidence or groups of such items as their use is sought in the lawsuit. An official certification that evidence is truly a state secret will be more focused if the head of a department must certify that specific evidence sought in the course of litigation is truly a secret and cannot be revealed without danger to overriding, essential government interests. And when responsive pleading is complete and discovery under way, judgments as to whether secret material is essential to Plaintiffs' case or Jeppesen's defense can be made more accurately. [...]
This is an appeal from a Rule 12 dismissal, which means that the district court was required to assume that the well-pleaded allegations of the complaint are true, and that we "construe the complaint in the light most favorable to the plaintiff[s]." The majority minimizes the importance of these requirements by gratuitously attaching "allegedly" to nearly each sentence describing what Plaintiffs say happened to them, and by quickly dismissing the voluminous publicly available evidence supporting those allegations, including that Jeppesen knew what was going on when it arranged flights described by one of its own officials as "torture flights." Instead, the majority assumes that even if Plaintiffs' prima facie case and Jeppesen's defense did not depend on privileged evidence, dismissal is required "because there is no feasible way to litigate Jeppesen's alleged liability without creating an unjustifiable risk of divulging state secrets." But Jeppesen has yet to answer or even to otherwise plead, so we have no idea what those defenses or assertions might be. Making assumptions about the contours of future litigation involves mere speculation, and doing so flies straight in the face of long standing principles of Rule 12 law by extending the inquiry to what might be divulged in future litigation.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (Pluto Press), and the co-director, with Polly Nash, of the documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here, where a version of this article was first published.]]>UK Sought Rendition of British Nationals to Guantanamo; Tony Blair Directly Involvedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6473282010-07-15T09:59:09-04:002011-05-25T17:05:23-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/Guardian described yesterday as the "almost unprecedented" release of "security service reports of interviews with detainees in Guantánamo Bay and other overseas detention centers," the new British coalition government failed in its attempt to persuade the High Court to bring a temporary halt to a civil claim for damages filed by six former Guantánamo prisoners, unleashing, instead, a torrent of previously classified and deeply disturbing documents.
These reveal, shockingly, how the Labour government was happy for British nationals and residents seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan to be rendered to Guantánamo by the Bush administration, and how, in one case -- that of Martin Mubanga, seized in Zambia -- Tony Blair's office intervened to prevent attempts by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to have him returned to the UK, leading to his imprisonment in Guantánamo for two years and nine months.
In paving the way for its announced inquiry into British complicity in torture, the coalition government attempted, without success, to persuade the High Court that, as the Guardian put it, "proceedings should be delayed while attempts at mediation are made" before the inquiry begins. Critics had already expressed their fears that the calls for "mediation" were a smokescreen for compensation deals that would attempt to buy the former prisoners' silence, so that the inquiry could proceed in secret without too many embarrassments.
Instead, however, the government's intervention has precipitously kick-started the inquiry in a very public manner, after Tim Otty QC, counsel for five of the men, said that proceedings "should be allowed to continue because the documents that the government is beginning to disclose shed new light upon the role that the UK authorities played in the men's mistreatment," and the judge, Mr. Justice Silber, agreed.
One of the most shocking documents disclosed in the High Court proceedings was issued by the FCO on January 10, 2002, the day before Guantánamo opened. Entitled, "Afghanistan UK Detainees," it described the government's "preferred options" in dealing with British prisoners. "Transfer of United Kingdom nationals held to a United States base in Guantánamo is the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objectives, to ensure they are securely held," the document explained, adding that the "only alternative" was to either hold these men in British custody in Afghanistan, or to return them to the UK.
In another shocking revelation, it was revealed that, in the case of Martin Mubanga, released documents "raise a number of troubling questions as to the role of the former Prime Minister's office in frustrating the release of one of the claimants," as Tim Otty described it, adding, "In the period of March and April 2002, the Prime Minister's office apparently countermanded a desire on the part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to intervene on behalf on Mr. Mubanga."
Mubanga, a joint British-Zambian national, had traveled from Pakistan to Zambia, where his sister lived, in February 2002, but had then been seized by the Zambian security services, and according to the documents released in court, the Prime Minister's Office had intervened to ensure that he was not brought back to the UK. As a result, the FCO was put in a difficult position: if officials sought consular access, thereby acknowledging British responsibility for him, he would have been released to the UK authorities, directly contradicting the Prime Minister's orders, which, as the legal action charity Reprieve noted yesterday, involved Prime Minister Blair "order[ing] the FCO to violate its international law obligations under the Vienna Convention, which requires the UK to provide consular assistance to British nationals around the world."
At the time, an FCO document complained about "the schizophrenic way in which policy on this whole case was handled in London," which had led to the British High Commission in Lusaka being placed "in an impossible position," and in an email dated August 22, 2002, an FCO official, recognizing that "we broke our policy" because of direct interference from Tony Blair's office, stated, "we are going to be open to charges of concealed extradition."
According to Mubanga, after the British finished with him -- apparently having tried and failed to recruit him as a spy -- the U.S. agent who had been dealing with him told him, "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, as I think you're a decent guy, but in ten or 15 minutes we're going to the airport and they're taking you to Guantánamo Bay."
In court, Tim Otty highlighted Tony Blair's complicity in torture by pointing out that, by the spring of 2002, it was abundantly clear that there was a considerable risk that terror suspects in U.S. control would be subjected to rendition and torture. "Despite that," he told the court, "someone at Number 10 {Downing Street, the home and HQ of the British Prime Minister] saw fit to counter what the Foreign Office wished to do."
As the Guardian also explained yesterday, this was "not the only time the Prime Minister's Office intervened to thwart attempts by Foreign Office officials to obtain a degree of protection for British citizens." Minutes prepared for the Home Office Terrorism and Protection Unit after a meeting in April 2002 state that the U.S. authorities "had been informed that the British government might begin making public requests for legal access to British men held at Guantánamo." According to the minutes, "FCO had wanted to do this (and wanted to be seen to be doing it) but had been overruled by No. 10."
The released documents also highlight the leading role played by Jack Straw, then the foreign secretary, in shaping the policies that led to the interrogations of British prisoners in US custody in Afghanistan, prior to their transfer to Guantánamo. As the Guardian explained, in mid-January 2002, Straw sent a telegram to several British diplomatic missions around the world in which he "signaled his agreement" with the Guantánamo policy, "but made clear that he did not wish to see the British nationals moved from Afghanistan before they could be interrogated." In the telegram, he wrote:
A specialist team is currently in Afghanistan seeking to interview any detainees with a UK connection to obtain information on their terrorist activities and connections. We therefore hope that all those detainees they wish to interview will remain in Afghanistan and will not be among the first groups to be transferred to Guantánamo. A week's delay should suffice. UK nationals should be transferred as soon as possible thereafter.
Other interrogations revealed in the documents include those involving Omar Deghayes, seized from a house in Lahore in May 2002, who was treated disdainfully by the British agents who visited him, and an unidentified prisoner held in Kabul, under the heading, "Warriors 14/1," about whom the agents involved noted only, "Interview conditions: cold beaten up."
Extraordinarily, these documents are only the tip of a very murky iceberg, and it is unclear at present how many more will be publicly revealed. As has been previously reported, the government has identified up to 500,000 documents that may be relevant to the former prisoners' claim for damages, and, according to the Guardian, "says it has deployed 60 lawyers to scrutinize them, a process that it suggests could take until the end of the decade." In this first batch, "just 900 papers have been disclosed, and these have included batches of press cuttings and copies of government reports that were published several years ago," but as they also include these damning insights into the activities of Tony Blair, Jack Straw and the agents who interrogated British prisoners in appalling conditions, it is surely inconceivable that the government will now be able to conduct a secret inquiry into British complicity in torture, and must, instead, order a full and open inquiry.
This could take place under the Inquiries Act of 2005, like the Baha Mousa inquiry (into the murder, in British custody, of a hotel clerk in Iraq), which, as Reprieve noted when David Cameron announced the torture inquiry two weeks ago, was held under the Act and has been "a model of an inquiry functioning efficiently, including the hearing of secret evidence," and has allowed for document classification review proceedings that "are sophisticated and rightly allow the judge to balance the need for national security against the need for transparency."
The time for silence, and the time for secrecy are over. To clear the air, and to draw a line under this most lamentable period in Britain's recent history, we need an inquiry presided over by someone who is able to "balance the need for national security against the need for transparency." For too long now -- and with baleful results -- the need for national security has been allowed to override everything else, inflicting grave damage on our claims to be a civilized country, and leading to devastating effects for those caught up in a "War on Terror" with few checks and balances.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here, where this article was first published.
]]>More "Congressional Depravity" on Guantanamotag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5901312010-05-26T09:58:03-04:002011-05-25T16:35:20-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/House Kills Plan to Close Guantánamo," I described my despair at the House Armed Services Committee's unanimous refusal to provide $350 million (out of a war budget of $726 billion) so that President Obama can close Guantánamo by moving prisoners to a facility in Illinois.
As I explained in the article, I was not upset that the administration's plan to replicate Guantánamo in Illinois was being turned down, because I have nothing but contempt for President Obama's assertion that 48 of the remaining 181 prisoners can continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and simply moving them from Guantánamo to the U.S. mainland would only make matters worse. However, what distresses me about the Committee's refusal to back the President's plan is that its only purpose is to keep Guantánamo open forever.
However, my criticism of lawmakers does not stop with this decision, which is likely to receive formal House approval this week, and approval in the Senate soon after. In its summary of the funding bill that contained the prohibition on buying a new prison on the U.S. mainland, the House Armed Services Committee also laid down a set of demands regarding the release of prisoners, which encroaches further on the President's ability to release anyone from Guantánamo than was achieved last year, when lawmakers first rose up in revolt, passing legislation preventing any prisoner from being brought to the U.S. mainland except to face trials, and insisting that they be given two weeks' notice before any prisoner -- even those cleared by the courts after successful habeas corpus petitions -- could be released.
In this latest assault on the Executive and the judiciary, the House Armed Services Committee's summary requires the President to submit "a comprehensive disposition plan and risk assessment" for any future release (or transfer) of a prisoner, and allows Congress "120 days to review the disposition plan before it could be carried out." In addition, the two weeks' notice demanded by Congress before any prisoner is released is to be extended to a 30-day review period.
This has clearly been set up as a national security concern -- and is just as clearly influenced by the overreaction to the Christmas arrest of the would-be plane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had apparently trained in Yemen, with a handful of Saudis who had been released from Guantánamo by George W. Bush. Critics of Obama were silent regarding this particular fact, and were also silent when it was pointed out that the men in question had been released by President Bush as part of a diplomatic deal with the Saudi government, in spite of the recommendations of the intelligence services. However, having effortlessly transferred all the blame for Bush's mistakes onto Obama's shoulders, the Senate Armed Services Committee had no qualms about inserting into its summary of the bill a requirement for defense secretary Robert Gates to tell Congress that any release or transfer must meet "strict security criteria to thoroughly vet any foreign country to which a detainee may be transferred."
Perhaps this sounds reasonable. After all, when Obama came to power, he chose to work more closely with Congress, and not to insist that he could unilaterally do whatever he wanted because of the allegedly limitless powers available to the Commander-in-Chief in wartime, as President Bush had maintained. However, what it means in practice is that, if the administration wishes to release a prisoner who has been cleared by a U.S. court, after winning his habeas corpus petition, that prisoner can actually be held "in the status of 'Congressional prisoner,' a status for which there is no Constitutional authority," for a period of 30 days.
The quote above is from Lt. Col. David Frakt, who wrote these words last October, with reference to the 15-day period which, at the time, Congress had granted itself to review the cases of prisoners before release -- even those cleared by a U.S. court. At the time, Lt. Col. Frakt refused to mince his words about Congress' unconstitutional activities. As the military defense attorney for the Afghan prisoner Mohammed Jawad, who won his habeas petition last July, but was not released for another 22 days because "[t]he Department of Justice said they needed a week to prepare the notice and then he couldn't be released until 15 days after that," he included the quote above in a more detailed criticism of Congress, in which he stated:
I consider this Congressional notification requirement to be blatantly unconstitutional as a violation of the separation of powers. In Jawad's case, it meant that after the Executive Branch and the Judiciary had concluded there was no lawful basis for the military to detain Mohammed Jawad (after the Department of Justice ultimately conceded the habeas corpus petition), the military was required to continue to detain him at Guantánamo at the order of the legislature, Congress. As I explained in Federal District Court, this placed Jawad in the status of "Congressional prisoner," a status for which there is no Constitutional authority.
He added:
This provision, coupled with the refusal to authorize funds for detainees to be resettled in the United States -- even those determined to be innocent of any wrongdoing who should qualify for political asylum -- shows the extent of Congressional depravity on any issues related to detainees.
With the House Armed Services Committee now intent on doubling the amount of time that any prisoner -- even those cleared for release by a US court -- can be held as a result of this "Congressional depravity," I wrote again to Lt. Col. Frakt to ask for his opinion about this latest development, and received a reply by email in which he told me that "the unanimous vote on this committee report and the minimal level of publicity that it has generated" reflect two current aspects of US thinking, both of which are, to be blunt, depressing. The first, as Lt. Col. Frakt explained, is "a reversion in the mood of the country to the post 9-11 terrorist hysteria resulting from the failed Christmas Day and Times Square bombing attempts, and the fearmongering of politicians and the press surrounding these incidents." As he also explained, "With every seat in the House of Representatives up for election in November, the incumbent members of Congress are desperate not to give their opponents any potential ammunition to claim that they are soft on terrorists, or are 'bringing terrorists to American soil.'"
This is certainly true, and reflects badly on a political system in which mid-term elections ensure that, just a year after the Presidential Election, the lowest common denominator of political campaigning takes precedence over anything else, but Lt. Col. Frakt also pointed out that the second reason is President Obama's own inability -- or refusal -- to make the reversal and thorough repudiation of Bush-era "national security" policies central to his administration's aims. As he explained, "the difficulty the administration is having following through on the President's pledge to close Guantánamo, including opposition within his own party, reflects the President's near-total lack of leadership on this issue since his inaugural pledge to shut Guantánamo." He added:
Since his first week in office, he has made it clear, through his inaction, and other direct and indirect signals, that closing Guantánamo is not a priority of the Administration. Having finally won one significant legislative victory with the health care reform bill, he wants to keep the momentum going and try to tackle some other major initiatives such as an energy/environment bill, financial market reform, and immigration reform. All of these will take some bipartisan cooperation, and he probably rightfully fears that a divisive fight over Guantánamo will derail his domestic agenda. On the other hand, if he made it clear that he considered the closure of Guantánamo to be a national security imperative and part of his overall war strategy, it is hard to imagine Congress openly defying the Commander-in-Chief during wartime on a military matter.
Unfortunately, by refusing to demonstrate leadership on the issues, the President has indeed played into the hands of his opponents -- both in the Republican Party, and in his own party -- and, moreover, seems to have failed to gain any political advantage from doing so. The losers are not just the Democrats, who look set to suffer heavy losses in November, but also the prisoners at Guantánamo, who now seem more abandoned than at any time since the first few years of Guantánamo's existence. Or, as Lt. Col. Frakt described it, "Sadly, the detainees at Guantánamo, both the guilty and the innocent, continue to be mere pawns in a drawn-out political chess game with no clear end in sight."
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here, where this article was first published.
]]>House Kills Plan to Close Guantanamotag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5872942010-05-24T12:17:12-04:002011-05-25T16:35:20-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/his inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of a year for the prison's closure, now appear to have been killed off by lawmakers in Congress.
Although the House Armed Services Committee was happy to authorize, by 59 votes to 0, a budget of over $700 billion for war ($567 billion for "defense spending" and $159 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) for the fiscal year beginning in October, lawmakers unanimously saw through -- and turned down -- a fraction of this budget for what the administration had labeled a "transfer fund" -- money intended to close Guantánamo and buy a new prison in Illinois for prisoners designated for trials or for indefinite detention without charge or trial.
The administration had attempted to hide its intentions behind this vague wording, because senior officials were acutely aware of ferocious opposition in Congress to the closure of Guantánamo. Fueled by opportunistic Republicans and backed by cowardly Democrats, Congress had only been prevented at the last minute from passing an insane law last year, which would have prevented the administration from bringing any prisoner to the U.S. mainland for any reason (even to face a trial) and had only relented in October, allowing prisoners to be brought to the U.S. mainland for trials, but not for any other purpose.
Despite this, the House Armed Services Committee is now trying to withdraw from even this concession to the administration's aims, including, in a summary of the bill, a prohibition on using even the tiniest fraction of the war budget (around $350 million) to buy a new detention facility. As Spencer Ackerman explained in the Washington Independent:
According to the bill summary, the bill now requires Defense Secretary Robert Gates to give Congress a report that "adequately justifies any proposal to build or modify such a facility" if it wants to move forward with any post-Guantánamo detention plan. "The Committee firmly believes that the construction or modification of any facility in the U.S. to detain or imprison individuals currently being held at Guantánamo must be accompanied by a thorough and comprehensive plan that outlines the merits, costs, and risks associated with utilizing such a facility," the summary text read. "No such plan has been presented to date. The bill prohibits the use of any funds for this purpose."
This is a depressing example of how even a morally and ethically flawed attempt to close Guantánamo is unacceptable to both Republican and Democrat lawmakers, who have retreated to a position that the Bush administration, at its most extreme, would have been proud of.
For those of us who don't mind prisoners being brought to the U.S. mainland to face trials (35 in total, according to Obama's Guantánamo Task Force), but who are implacably opposed to the administration's contention that it can hold some prisoners indefinitely (48 of the remaining 181 prisoners), it is by no means a tragedy that the plan to replicate some of Guantánamo's most unpalatable innovations on American soil has been prevented.
In my more optimistic moments, it strikes me that, with the option of transferring prisoners to the U.S. mainland denied, the administration will -- if it remains committed to the closure of Guantánamo -- have to rethink its plans, and that one way of doing this would be to give up on its intention to hold 48 men indefinitely, which, to put it bluntly, is unconstitutional.
In truth, the claim that 48 men should be held indefinitely has always been something of a deception, because these men have outstanding habeas corpus petitions in the District Court in Washington D.C., where judges, rather than an unaccountable Task Force, are making their own decisions about whether they are, as President Obama explained in a major national security speech last May, a special category of prisoner who "cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people."
So far, the judges have ruled that just 14 men can continue to be held indefinitely, although it's noticeable that, in denying their habeas petitions, they have generally not concluded that they "pose a clear danger to the American people," but have, instead, found that they were minor players in the Taliban, or in al-Qaeda forces supporting the Taliban. However, according to the detention policies they are required to follow, the judges are not allowed to distinguish between the terrorists of al-Qaeda and the foot soldiers of the Taliban when it comes to consigning men, on an apparently sound legal basis, to endless incarceration.
This problem relates to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which 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). Combined with a Supreme Court ruling (in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in 2004) that "Congress has clearly and unmistakably authorized detention" of individuals covered by the AUMF, this is the rationale used by the administration to justify the prisoners' detention, and, although different judges have expressed different opinions about who these individuals are, they have broadly agreed that, to qualify as an "enemy combatant" -- or, in Obama's new world, an "alien unprivileged enemy belligerent" -- the government is required to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that these individuals supported al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban.
This lack of distinction between al-Qaeda and the Taliban is clearly ridiculous, as was noted last year by two judges, Judge James Robertson and Judge Thomas Hogan, who made a point of stating, when refusing to grant the habeas petitions of two Yemenis, Adham Mohammed Ali Awad and Musa'ab al-Madhwani, that they did not regard either man as an ongoing threat. Regarding Ali Awad, Judge Robertson noted, "It seems ludicrous to believe that he poses a security threat now," and in al-Madhwani's case, Judge Hogan stated that he "did not think Madhwani was dangerous," noted that he has been a "model prisoner" since his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002, and added, "There is nothing in the record now that he poses any greater threat than those detainees who have already been released."
Moreover, this inability to make a distinction between al-Qaeda and the Taliban -- or al-Qaeda forces supporting the Taliban in military operations in Afghanistan, rather than in activities related to terrorism -- is one that I have been railing against for some time now, for the simple reason that the former should be put forward for trials, whereas the latter -- if they should continue to be held at all -- should be held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions.
I don't see this happening anytime soon, of course, because no one even wants to talk about it, but when the House Armed Services Committee moves so decisively to prevent the closure of Guantánamo -- and every sign is that the House will approve their amendment this week, and the Senate Armed Services Committee will follow suit at the end of the month -- the closure of Guantánamo now requires a new kind of thinking.
To my mind, this should involve, first of all, more respect for the District Court's habeas rulings than has been shown to date. Over the last 20 months, judges have granted the habeas petitions of 35 prisoners, and along the way have done more to demolish claims that Guantánamo holds "the worst of the worst" than any other forum, exposing how much of the government's supposed evidence consists of unreliable statements made by the prisoners themselves or by their fellow prisoners, and also exposing how torture, coercion and the bribery of prisoners with better living conditions have played a major role in making these statements unreliable. Despite this, the administration has failed to take advantage of these rulings in its dealings with Congress, and has preferred to either appealthem, or to release those who have won their petitions with extremereluctance.
In addition, rethinking the closure of Guantánamo should involve highlighting the fact that 96 of the 181 men still held have been cleared for release, reviving plans for returning dozens of cleared men to Yemen (which were shelved in the most cowardly manner after it was revealed that the would-be Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had trained in Yemen), and -- although I expect hell to freeze over before this comes to pass -- renewing calls for cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture to be allowed to settle in the U.S., as was planned last year by White House Counsel Greg Craig, supported by Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, until Obama got cold feet.
This could best be achieved by allowing U.S. citizens access to the stories of cleared prisoners released in other countries who are living peaceful lives, and, if it's of any use, I'm happy to help on this front, as I've spent much of the last three months traveling around the UK with a former prisoner, Omar Deghayes, showing "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo" (a film I co-directed, in which Omar plays a major part), and can guarantee that giving people the opportunity to meet Omar (after they have seen his pained and eloquent testimony about his ordeal) is a perfect way to demonstrate that colossal mistakes were made -- and continue to be made -- at Guantánamo, that many innocent men were seized, and that many of these innocent men are still held.
And finally, to return to the confusion between al-Qaeda and the Taliban that is at the heart of Guantánamo's detention problem, rethinking the closure of Guantánamo should involve a recognition that the failure to distinguish between al-Qaeda terrorists and Taliban foot soldiers is unfairly consigning men to indefinite detention as terrorists when they should be held as prisoners of war. In addition, it should also provide an opportunity to reflect on the more fundamental question of whether, over eight years after most of the men who are still held at Guantánamo were first seized, the Authorization for Use of Military Force is a valid reason for detention at all, when the Geneva Conventions and the criminal justice system should suffice.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here, where this article was first published. ]]>Judge Rules Yemeni's Detention at Guantanamo Based Solely on Torturetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5491602010-04-23T08:09:32-04:002011-05-25T16:15:25-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/The Black Hole of Guantánamo," Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. granted the habeas corpus petition of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, a Yemeni who was seized crossing the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. In the absence of the judge's unclassified opinion explaining why he had ordered his release, I provided only a brief explanation of what was publicly known of his story, stating:
As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, Uthman, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, "said that he had traveled between Kabul and Khost teaching the Koran from March to December 2001." Although he "admitted that he had stayed at a Taliban house in Quetta, Pakistan, which was the normal entry point for volunteers who had come to fight with the Taliban," he stated that this was "only because he had been told that it was the only way for him to enter Afghanistan."
Judge Kennedy's opinion was released a month ago (PDF), but was then abruptly withdrawn, and, perhaps with unnecessary delicacy, I held off from analyzing it, waiting for it to be reissued, as I was uncertain how much would be redacted. When the revised opinion was finally released on April 21 (PDF), I realized that the name of a criminal investigator with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service had been removed, as had other named operatives, but that other key elements had not; specifically, the names of two other prisoners who alleged that Uthman "acted as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden." These two men are Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj and Sanad Yislam Ali al-Kazimi, and in the most important part of the opinion, Judge Kennedy stated:
The Court will not rely on the statements of Hajj or Kazimi because 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.
The torture of Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj
This, alarmingly, was something of an understatement. Al-Hajj (also identified as Abdu Ali Sharqawi, but more commonly known as Riyadh the Facilitator) was seized in a house raid in Pakistan in February 2002 and was then rendered to Jordan, one of at least 15 prisoners whose torture was outsourced to the Jordanian authorities between 2001 and 2004, where he was held for nearly two years before being transferred to the CIA's "Dark Prison" near Kabul, and then, via Bagram, to Guantánamo.
As Judge Kennedy explained, he told his lawyer, Kristin B. Wilhelm, that, "while held in Jordan, he 'was regularly beaten and threatened with electrocution and molestation,' and he eventually 'manufactured facts' and confessed to his interrogators' allegation 'in order to make the torture stop.'" In the "Dark Prison," he added, he was "kept in complete darkness and was subject to continuous loud music."
Al-Hajj's descriptions of the "Dark Prison" correspond with those of numerous other prisoners, including the British resident Binyam Mohamed, whose descriptions were included in my article, "A History of Music Torture in the 'War on Terror.'" However, what is missing from the analysis of his time in Jordan is a more sustained narrative of torture, false confessions and his torturers' regular contact with the CIA, which emerged in a letter given to Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch during a visit to Jordan in 2008, which had been written by al-Hajj during his detention, around October 2002. In this note, which was smuggled out of the prison, he explained that he "was held as a secret prisoner by the Jordanian intelligence service: unregistered, cut off from all communication and hidden during visits by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross," and gave the following "short summary of my sufferings," as reported by Mariner:
"They beat me up in a way that does not know mercy," Sharqawi wrote, referring to his Jordanian captors, "and they're still beating me. They threatened me with electricity, with snakes and dogs ... [They said] we'll make you see death." Sharqawi described his interrogations, explaining that the Jordanians were feeding his responses back to the CIA. "Every time that the interrogator asks me about a certain piece of information, and I talk," Sharqawi said, "he asks me if I told this to the Americans. And if I say no he jumps for joy, and he leaves me and goes to report it to his superiors, and they rejoice."
In Human Rights Watch's final report, "Double Jeopardy," the extent to which he was interrogated about other men -- using photos that, in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, were apparently described as "the family album" -- was revealed in the following passage, which not only explains the pressures that led to him providing a false allegation against Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman in Bagram, but also indicates how hundreds -- or thousands -- of other false allegations may have been extracted:
I was being interrogated all the time, in the evening and in the day. I was shown thousands of photos, and I really mean thousands, I am not exaggerating ... And in between all this you have the torture, the abuse, the cursing, humiliation. They had threatened me with being sexually abused and electrocuted. I was told that if I wanted to leave with permanent disability both mental and physical, that that could be arranged. They said they had all the facilities of Jordan to achieve that. I was told that I had to talk, I had to tell them everything.
The torture of Sanad al-Kazimi
The story of Sanad al-Kazimi's false confession is just as distressing. Seized in the United Arab Emirates in January 2003, he was subsequently handed over to U.S. forces, who rendered him to an unidentified secret CIA prison, and then to the "Dark Prison" and Bagram, and, as Judge Kennedy explained, he told his lawyer, Martha Rayner, that, "while [he] was detained outside the United States, his interrogators beat him; held him naked and shackled in a cold dark cell; dropped him into cold water while his hands and legs were bound; and sexually abused him. Kazimi told Rayner that eventually "[h]e made up his mind to say 'Yes' to anything the interrogators said to avoid further torture."
After this he was relocated to the "Dark Prison," where, he said, "he was always in darkness and ... was hooded, given injections, beaten, hit with electric cables, suspended from above, made to be naked, and subjected to continuous loud music. Kazimi reportedly tried to kill himself on three occasions. He told Rayner that he realized 'he could mitigate the torture by telling the interrogators what they wanted to hear.'"
At Bagram, he continued, "he was isolated, shackled, 'psychologically tortured and traumatized by guards' desecration of the Koran' and interrogated 'day and night, and very frequently.' [He] told Rayner that he 'tried very hard' to tell his interrogators in Bagram the same information he had told his previous interrogators 'so they would not hurt him.'"
This is damning enough, but back in August 2007, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker spoke to Ramzi Kassem, another of al-Kazimi's lawyers, who, as I explained in an article at the time, added further details, telling her that:
[Al-Kazimi] was "suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully ... It's so traumatic, he can barely speak of it. He breaks down in tears." He also said that al-Kazimi "claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables," and explained that he also told him that, while in the "Dark Prison," he "attempted suicide three times, by ramming his head into the walls": "He did it until he lost consciousness. Then they stitched him back up. So he did it again. The next time he woke up, he was chained, and they'd given him tranquillizers. He asked to go to the bathroom, and then he did it again." On this last occasion, Kassem added, he "was given more tranquillizers, and chained in a more confining manner."
The story of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman
These accounts, sadly, fit a pattern of torture and false confessions that only becomes clearer as time passes and more evidence is revealed, and they also confirm that the two men described above were amongst the 94 prisoners -- many still unaccounted for -- who were held in secret CIA prisons and subjected to particularly brutal treatment (PDF). Compared to them, Uthman's own story is easily overshadowed.
This is perhaps understandable, as nothing in the government's supposed evidence thoroughly refutes his own assertions that he was in Afghanistan as a missionary, because the entire case against him is based on allegations made by other prisoners (in addition to al-Hajj and al-Kazimi), or attempts to infer guilt by association on the part of the government that make him something of a cipher in his own case.
Throughout the rest of the judge's opinion, further attempts by the government to prove that Uthman was a bodyguard for bin Laden, that he trained in an al-Qaeda camp and was present at the battle of Tora Bora (where al-Qaeda and the Taliban fought the U.S. military and its Afghan proxies in November and December 2001) are bedeviled with identifications based on a photograph and a variety of kunyas (nicknames) that Judge Kennedy found unconvincing. The only allegations given any substantial weight are claims that an individual who "supported jihad" financed his trip, that he followed a route that was typically used by al-Qaeda recruits, and that he was seen in two guesthouses in Afghanistan that were reportedly associated with al-Qaeda.
Other prisoners drift in and out of this narrative -- Abdul Hakim Bukhari, a Saudi (released from Guantánamo in September 2007) who arrived in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks for jihad but was imprisoned as a spy, who unconvincingly alleged that Uthman "was a member of the Osama bin Laden ... security detail" before 9/11, when Bukhari wasn't in the country and could have had no such knowledge; and Richard Belmar, a British citizen (released in January 2005), who was seized in Pakistan in February 2002, and who, "when shown a picture of Uthman," stated that he "'may have been a lower amir,' or leader, 'in the Kandahar guest house,'" even though, as seems apparent, Belmar was not in Kandahar at the same time as Uthman.
The judge refused to disregard this statement entirely, but, to be honest, it is difficult to see why not, as its basis in reality appears to be as flimsy as everything else thrown at Uthman by the government in the hope that some of it would stick, and, moreover, Belmar stated on his release that, on one occasion in Bagram, "a handgun was forced into his mouth," and he explained, "It tasted cold, bitter. I thought, 'Yeah, this is getting serious, there's a good chance they will pull the trigger.'"
Elsewhere, the government resorted to trying out guilt by association, claiming that, because Uthman was seized in the vicinity of Tora Bora with approximately 30 other men, "a few of whom he knew from Yemen," who "were admitted -- or at least, alleged, al-Qaeda members, some of whom were likely coming from Tora Bora," the Court should draw an inference that Uthman's missionary story was a lie.
The truth, to be honest, is difficult to establish, as Judge Kennedy recognized. The group of approximately 30 men with whom Uthman was seized have long been referred to by the government as the "Dirty Thirty," and portrayed, as in Uthman's case, as bodyguards for bin Laden. Until this case came to court, it had been presumed that the bodyguard allegations came solely from Mohamed al-Qahtani, the supposed 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks, whose torture at Guantánamo is well-known (and was admitted by Pentagon official Susan Crawford in January 2009), but al-Qahtani is mysteriously absent from Uthman's case, as are alleged al-Qaeda member Ibrahim al-Qosi (currently facing a trial by Military Commission) and convicted al-Qaeda member Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who were also captured at this time.
It may dismay the government to have to concede that it is all but impossible to establish that everyone seized at this time was part of al-Qaeda, and that some of the men may have been missionaries or humanitarian aid workers, attempting to flee the chaos of post-invasion Afghanistan as part of general Arab exodus, but it is not beyond the bounds of reason that this is the case, as Judge Kennedy accepted in his conclusion, when he stated:
In sum, the Court gives credence to evidence that Uthman (1) studied at a school at which other men were recruited to fight for al-Qaeda; (2) received money for his trip to Afghanistan from an individual who supported jihad; (3) traveled to Afghanistan along a route also taken by al-Qaeda recruits; (4) was seen at two al-Qaeda guesthouses in Afghanistan; and (5) was with al-Qaeda members in the vicinity of Tora Bora after the battle that occurred there.
Even taken together, these facts do not convince the Court by a preponderance of the evidence that Uthman received and executed orders from al-Qaeda. Although this information is consistent with the proposition that Uthman was a part of al-Qaeda, it is not proof of that allegation. As explained, the record does not contain reliable evidence that Uthman was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden or fought for al-Qaeda. Certainly, none of the facts respondents have demonstrated are true are direct evidence of fighting or otherwise "receiv[ing] and execut[ing] orders" ... and they do not, even together, paint an incriminating enough picture to demonstrate that the inferences respondents ask the Court to make are more likely accurate than not. Associations with al-Qaeda members, or institutions to which al-Qaeda members have connections, are not alone enough to demonstrate that, more likely than not, Uthman was part of al-Qaeda.
In granting Uthman' habeas petition, Judge Kennedy added that, "at first blush," some of the government's evidence was "quite incriminating of Uthman and supportive of the position that he is lawfully detained," but that, on close examination, there was "reason not credit some of it at all and reason to conclude that what remains is not nearly as probative of respondent's position as they assert."
An alarming conclusion
This is indeed the case, but what is missing from Judge Kennedy's conclusion, but is glaringly obvious from his opinion as a whole, is that the shadows which never quite coalesce around the barely fleshed-out figure of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman are populated not by reliable witnesses, but by a procession of torture victims or other prisoners worn out by endless interrogation, who, when shown photographs, invented stories to get the torture to stop, or to get the interrogators off their back.
As a demonstration of how to produce false confessions to incriminate insignificant prisoners at Guantánamo, it would be harder to find a document that more perfectly expresses the brutal pointlessness of the "War on Terror" than this opinion, and when the bigger picture is examined -- Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj 's statement that, in Jordan, "I was shown thousands of photos, and I really mean thousands" -- the scale of this shocking witch-hunt is explicitly revealed.
Beyond Guantánamo, where habeas judges are not empowered to tread, who knows how many other men were seized because of false confessions made through the use of torture?
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here, and this article is part of a week-long project entitled, "Guantánamo Habeas Week."]]>Seven Years of War in Iraq: Still Based on Cheney's Torture and Liestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5077332010-03-21T23:32:41-04:002011-05-25T15:55:20-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/a brief U.S. tour in November, when I showed the new documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo" (directed by Polly Nash and myself) in New York, Washington D.C., and the Bay Area.
Some activists were still burnt out from campaigning for Barack Obama, others thought the new President had waved a magic wand and miraculously cured all America's ills, while others, to the right of common sense and decency, were beginning to mobilize in opposition to a president who, to be frank, should have been more of a disappointment to those who thought that "hope" and "change" might mean something than to those who supported the Bush administration's view of the world. Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, endorsed indefinite detention without charge or trial for prisoners at Guantánamo, and shielded Bush administration officials and lawyers from calls for their prosecution for turning America into a nation with secret prisons, an extraordinary rendition program, and a detention policy for terror suspects based on the use of torture.
Nevertheless, the Republicans' assault on decency, common sense and the law, in relation to terrorism, escalated in the wake of the failed Christmas Day plane bombing, with a high-level revolt against trying those accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks in federal courts, and a renewed onslaught on President Obama's already tattered plans to close Guantánamo. On the anniversary of the war, headlines were dominated not by anti-war protests, but by the disgusting behavior of the Tea Party activists, whose bitter, negative campaigning against Obama, which has always demonstrated a thinly-veiled racism, plumbed new depths when protestors hurled racist and homophobic abuse at members of Congress.
African-American Congressman Emanaul Cleaver (D-MO) was spat on by a Tea Party protester, Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), a protégé of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was called a "nigger," and gay Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) was called a "faggot." Congressman James E. Clyburn (D-SC), who helped lead sit-ins in South Carolina in the 1960s during the civil rights movement, told NBC News:
It was absolutely shocking to me. Last Monday, I stayed home to meet on the campus of Pomford University, where 50 years ago, as of last Monday, March 15th, I led the first demonstrations in South Carolina, the sit-ins. Quite frankly I heard some things today that I haven't heard since that day. I heard people saying things today I've not heard since March 15th, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus. This is incredible, shocking to me.
It is enough of a sign of madness that the Tea Party brigade, who oppose healthcare reform, have been sold a lie by the very corporations who mercilessly exploit them, essentially by stirring up fears of "communism" and "socialism" that Europeans and sensible Americans find bewildering and illogical, but it is no less dispiriting that their pointless hatred overshadowed countrywide calls for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The war in Afghanistan may originally have had some sort of acceptable rationale, but it was a lost cause almost as soon as it began, when America failed to win the crucial struggle for hearts and minds, killing thousands of Afghan civilians in bombing raids, imprisoning others in vile conditions in prisons at Kandahar and Bagram (where some died), and sending others to Guantánamo.
Another major reason for the failure in Afghanistan was the administration's intention -- instigated as early as November 2001 -- to move on to Iraq, and while the Chilcot Inquiry in Britain revisited the roots of the Iraq war in recent months, demonstrating, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was an illegal war decided as early as April 2002, when Prime Minister Tony Blair committed the UK to full participation, an often overlooked side-effect of this decision involved, in the most cynical manner, the exploitation of prisoners seized in the "War on Terror" to provide cover for the planned invasion.
In case anyone has forgotten, when Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the head of the Khaldan military training camp in Afghanistan, was captured at the end of 2001 and sent to Egypt to be tortured, he made a false confession that Saddam Hussein had offered to train two al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi later recanted his confession, but not until Secretary of State Colin Powell -- to his eternal shame -- had used the story in February 2003 in an attempt to persuade the UN to support the invasion of Iraq.
That attempt, of course, was successful, but it is no less shocking now than it was then that those who manipulated Powell -- Vice President Dick Cheney and his close circle of advisors -- used the CIA's post-9/11 torture program not to protect American from terrorists, but to launch an illegal war. As I also explained last April, with reference to an interview conducted by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker with Dan Coleman of the FBI, an old-school interrogator opposed to the use of torture, who was pulled off al-Libi's case when senior officials decided to send him to Egypt:
As Mayer explained, Coleman was "disgusted" when he heard about the false confession, telling her, "It was ridiculous for interrogators to think Libi would have known anything about Iraq. I could have told them that. He ran a training camp. He wouldn't have had anything to do with Iraq. Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links, but there weren't any. The reason they got bad information is that they beat it out of him. You never get good information from someone that way."
As I also explained:
This, I believe, provides an absolutely critical explanation of why the Bush administration's torture regime was not only morally repugnant, but also counter-productive, and it's particularly worth noting Coleman's comment that "Administration officials were always pushing us to come up with links, but there weren't any." However, I realize that the failure of torture to produce genuine evidence -- as opposed to intelligence that, though false, was at least "actionable" -- was exactly what was required by those, like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, "Scooter" Libby and other Iraq obsessives, who wished to betray America doubly, firstly by endorsing the use of torture in defiance of almost universal disapproval from government agencies and military lawyers, and secondly by using it not to prevent terrorist attacks, but to justify an illegal war.
This was a point that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, confirmed to me in an interview last year. Speaking about the Bush administration's focus on interrogating prisoners seized in the "War on Terror," Col. Wilkerson told me:
[T]hey wanted to put together a pattern, a map, a body of evidence, if you will, from all these people, that they thought was going to tell them more and more about al-Qaeda, and increasingly more and more about the connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad.
I even think that probably, in the summer of 2002, well before Powell gave his presentation at the UN in February 2003, their priority had shifted, as their expectation of another attack went down, and that happened, I think, rather rapidly. I've just stumbled on this. I thought before that it had persisted all the way through 2002, but I'm convinced now, from talking to hundreds of people, literally, that that's not the case, that their fear of another attack subsided rather rapidly after their attention turned to Iraq, and after Tommy Franks, in late November [2001] as I recall, was directed to begin planning for Iraq and to take his focus off Afghanistan.
I commend the actions of the anti-war protestors in Washington D.C. on Saturday who, as the Associated Press explained, "stopped at the offices of military contractor Halliburton -- where they tore apart an effigy of former Vice President and Halliburton Chief Executive Dick Cheney." But as this anniversary passes and Dick Cheney remains free to continue espousing his vile, self-serving rhetoric, the sad truth is that, seven years on, Cheney's crimes cannot be viewed in isolation. They must stand as an indictment of everyone, from the President down, via lawmakers, the media and the American people, who are prepared to accept this darkest of truths: that in 2002, the Vice President of the United States used an illegal torture program not to protect Americans from future terrorist attacks, but to launch an illegal war that, to date, has led to the loss of 4,386 American lives and the lives of at least 100,000 Iraqis, and possibly as many as a million.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (Pluto Press), and maintains a blog here.]]>Who Are the Four Prisoners Released from Guantanamo to Albania and Spain?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4768122010-02-25T13:22:04-05:002011-05-25T15:40:24-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/
The Spanish government, which declared last week that it would take up to five cleared prisoners from Guantánamo, announced that the first of these men arrived in Spain on Wednesday. The Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba told reporters that the man is Palestinian, but would not give his name, citing privacy concerns. According to the press agency dpa, Rubalcaba explained that he "would get a residence permit, the possibility to work and freedom of movement in Spain, though Guantánamo prisoners taken by European countries could not leave those countries." He added that Spain would only accept prisoners "with no criminal charges in the European Union, the United States or their countries of origin."
As well as accepting the Palestinian, the newspaper Periódico reported that other prisoners, "believed to include a Syrian and a Yemeni citizen," were "expected to arrive in Spain shortly," adding that they will be "placed in different locations under the care of NGOs," and will also be "placed under surveillance not only to protect the Spanish public, but also to protect the individuals from al-Qaeda reprisals over their possible revelations to U.S. intelligence services."
Cementing its role as America's closest ally when it comes to clearing up "the mess" that is Guantánamo (to quote President Obama's words from last May), the Albanian Ministry of Interior announced on Wednesday that it had accepted three cleared prisoners, who could not be repatriated because of the fears outlined above. Albania has now taken eleven cleared prisoners from Guantánamo, having accepted eight in 2006, when no other country in the world was prepared to do so (five Uighurs, an Algerian, an Egyptian and an ethnic Uzbek from the former Soviet Union).
Announcing the arrival of three prisoners in Albania, the Ministry of the Interior stated, "This transfer is a result of the engagement of the Albanian government in backing the Obama administration's policy to close the detention center in Guantánamo and transfer prisoners to friendly and safe third countries." In a press release, the U.S. Justice Department identified the three men as: Abdul Rauf Omar Mohammad Abu al-Qusin, a Libyan; Sharif Fati Ali al-Mishad, an Egyptian; and Saleh bin Hadi Asasi, a Tunisian.
Their stories, like those of the majority of the 584 prisoners released from Guantánamo, demonstrate, yet again, that, behind the blustering rhetoric of former Vice President Dick Cheney and his swarming acolytes, the majority of the men held at Guantánamo had no involvement with terrorism, and that a disturbingly large number of them were innocent men seized by mistake.
Of the three men rehoused in Albania, for example, one was a businessman, living in Europe, who had traveled to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid, one was a veteran of Afghanistan's war against the Soviet Union, who had married an Afghan woman, and was seized in a house in Lahore, Pakistan, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, and the other man, as was common in 2001, before the 9/11 attacks, had been persuaded to travel to Afghanistan to help the Taliban defeat their enemies, the Northern Alliance, in a long-running civil war that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism, and had not raised a finger against U.S. forces.
Sherif El-Mashad: An Egyptian businessman and humanitarian aid worker
Sharif al-Mishad (also identified as Sherif El-Mashad) is an Egyptian, born in 1976. A talented athlete and carpenter in his youth, he enrolled in a technical school to learn woodworking, cabinetmaking, painting, tiling, plumbing and roofing, and, after graduating, spent three years working in Sinai at some of Egypt's largest beach resorts. There, he began to learn Italian from the tourists, and in 1997, after his father died, decided to travel to Italy, to stay with his uncle, an Italian citizen who lived in Como, in the hope of finding better paid work to provide for the family.
Once he had secured a work permit, he worked in a restaurant and a bar, but soon found that his skills as a craftsman would pay better. After working as an apprentice with two painting companies, he obtained a license from the Chamber of Commerce in Como to work as an independent contractor, and set up his own company, "Sherif El-Mashad," running the business out of his home.
In the spring of 2001, he met a wealthy Kuwaiti businessman, who encouraged him to travel to Afghanistan to do charity work. As he explained to his lawyers, at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, he saw this as "a dual opportunity," allowing him not only to network with a well-connected businessman, but also to help those less fortunate than himself by distributing humanitarian aid -- food, clothes, and blankets. Providing an analogy to his lawyers, he explained that the plan was akin to "organizing a charity gala with a prospective business partner."
As a result of this meeting, El-Mashad booked a round-trip ticket, intending to stay in Afghanistan for a couple of months, before returning home to work. It was obvious that he had no intention of staying any longer, because, as his lawyers, explained, two days before he left Italy in July 2001, he had billed a customer almost €15,000 for painting services to be collected on his return.
His mother, who is the deputy principal of a school in Egypt, explained in 2006 how she had advised her son against traveling to Afghanistan. "I never wanted him to go on that trip", she said, "because I knew that the region was unstable and so many events were taking place there, but he was stubborn. He was very kind and grateful to his family, though." A week after his arrival, according to his mother, "he called his uncle, who lives in Italy, and told him that he arrived and asked him to reassure me."
After that, he effectively disappeared off the face of the earth, until his uncle called to say that he had received a postcard from Guantánamo (via the International Committee of the Red Cross), in which he wrote that "he had been visiting a friend in Afghanistan and subsequently enlisted in a 'rescue organization' that offered 'humanitarian aid to the Afghani people.'" Although he ended up staying in Afghanistan for longer than he intended, helping his friend, who, as he explained in Guantánamo, "passed out donations to help the Afghani people," they remained safe in Kabul until November 2001, when, with the Northern Alliance approaching, and rumors spreading that Arabs were no longer safe, they set off for the Iranian border, intending to return home. As he also explained, "I had a valid visa to Iran and a return ticket with an Iranian airline." However, when they discovered that the border crossing was closed, they realized that they would have to leave via Pakistan, but were detained by Pakistani soldiers after crossing the border and arriving in a small village. El-Mashad then spent three weeks in a Pakistani prison in Peshawar, and was then flown to the U.S. prison at Kandahar airport, where he spent several more months before being transferred to Guantánamo.
There seems to be no reason to dispute this story, and El-Mashad clearly explained it at length to his interrogators in Guantánamo, telling them how he traveled to Kabul, how he met up with the Kuwaiti businessman, how he "heard of the attacks in America while listening to the radio," how he and "all who were present with him were sorrowful and none of them were happy," and how he fled from Afghanistan and was seized.
However, once he was in U.S. custody, he became the victim of patently false allegations made by other prisoners, either through coercion or torture, or through the promise of preferential treatment, of the kind that are disturbingly familiar to those who have studied closely the rulings in the prisoners' habeas corpus petitions over the last year and a half.
One of these allegations was made by a prisoner who was rescued by U.S. forces from a prison in Afghanistan, and then transported to Guantánamo, even though he had been imprisoned as a spy by al-Qaeda and had been subjected to horrendous torture. This prisoner claimed that, in early 2000, El-Mashad "participated in torturing him through beatings and electric shocks", even though, as El-Mashad pointed out, he was in Italy in early 2000 and had the documents to prove it.
He also told his lawyers that, in the early days of his imprisonment, "I was first accused of aiding the Arabs in Bosnia. Then they changed the accusation that I was there just for training. In both cases, it's impossible that I was in Bosnia at the time of the war in 1991, simply because at that date I was 14 years old! From 1991-1997 (the duration of the Bosnian war) I was studying at my school and I never left my country to anywhere. I have the proving documents." He also explained that another set of false allegations came about because the U.S. authorities mistook him for a significant figure in al-Qaeda, which led to a number of other false allegations, including claims that he trained recruits in urban warfare at a military training camp. Another false allegation, made by an unnamed "source", was that he sold videotapes of the bombing, in 2000, of the USS Cole.
"Throughout my life, I was never involved in any banned or illegal activities by any means," he told Cori Crider of Reprieve in August 2008, during his first visit with a lawyer from the legal action charity, adding, "I don't have any file with any police office or any bad record with any authority." He also explained that Italian agents had visited him in Guantánamo and had confirmed that there was no case against him. "They told me they knew I was innocent and they would ask the United States to release me," he said, adding, "My case is very clear. I have physical evidence to defend myself against these charges."
Abdul Ra'ouf al-Qassim: A Libyan seized in Pakistan
Abdul Rauf al-Qusin (also identified as Abdul Ra'ouf al-Qassim, and named in court documents as Abu Abdul Raouf Zalita) is a Libyan, born in 1965, who was cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2006. A soldier in the Libyan army from 1983 to 1989, he had then deserted, traveling to Afghanistan "to immigrate and to start a new life," as he explained to his military review board in Guantánamo in May 2005. After fighting with the mujahideen until 1993, when the last remnants of the Soviet regime fell, he "traveled back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan" -- at one point studying at university in Quetta -- and also met and married an Afghan woman, Rahima, with whom he had a daughter, Khiria, who has spent the whole of her young life without her father.
Al-Qassim was captured in Lahore in May 2002, at the house of a Pakistani, after escaping from war-torn Afghanistan with his pregnant wife, but although it was clear that he had not taken up arms against the Americans, it was far less clear that he would not be regarded as a threat by the government of his home country. At his review in 2005, he explained (via a military officer assigned to him instead of a lawyer) that he had received military training at two Libyan camps in Afghanistan, but only because he was living there, and also admitted that he had joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group -- exiled opponents of the Gaddafi regime -- but only "out of desperation -- he was broke, had no place to go, was hungry, unemployed and had no way to support himself." He added that his family "did not receive monetary support from the [LIFG], but he received food, shelter and an allowance for clothes." He also agreed with previous statements he had made: that he "did not believe in violence," and that he "angrily defined [al-Qaeda's] leadership and members as 'savages' who twist the meaning of Islam, thereby hurting all Muslims."
Although al-Qassim stated that a Libyan delegation, who visited Guantánamo in 2004 (and were actually flown there by the CIA), told him that they "knew he was with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group only by name," that he was "obligated to be with them," and that they would "take care of him," he repeatedly told his Assisting Military Officer that he was "afraid of returning to Libya." His AMO reported, "He said he does not want to go to Libya because he feels he cannot trust them and because they put people in prison for no reason. He said he feels that if he returns to Libya, even after being released by the United States, he would be sent back to prison." Such was his concern that the Presiding Officer noted, "For the record, make sure that we put in our report that the Detainee is afraid of returning to Libya."
In spite of this, the U.S. government sought to repatriate al-Qassim, and his lawyers -- at the Center for Constitutional Rights -- fought a legal battle for over three years to prevent his forcible return. In a court filing in December 2008 (PDF), they noted his ongoing legal limbo:
The Government has cleared him for transfer from Guantánamo, and has twice attempted to repatriate him to Libya, the country from which he fled to Afghanistan more than a decade ago in order to avoid religious persecution. Petitioner has a credible fear that he will be subject to imprisonment, torture and possible summary execution if he is forcibly returned to Libya, and he has resisted all attempts to repatriate him to that country. He remains detained in Camp 6, an isolation facility, more than six years after his detention and nearly two years after the Government's first notice of intent to transfer him out of Guantánamo.
Saleh Sassi: An insignificant adventurer
The third man released in Albania, Saleh bin Hadi Asasi (more commonly known as Saleh Sassi, and also identified in Guantánamo as Sayf bin Abdallah) is a Tunisian, born in 1973, who, like the two men described above, was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and by President Obama's Task Force.
A welder and a skilled laborer, he moved to Italy in 1998, hoping to find work and a better life, and settled in Turin, where he secured a work permit and found employment in the construction industry. Apparently persuaded to travel to Afghanistan during a vacation from work, he reportedly spent some time at a mountain outpost north of Kabul, and was later wounded when a truck he was traveling in was shot at. Hospitalized, first in Kabul, and then in Khost, he was transported to the Pakistani border, where he was seized by the Pakistani authorities.
In Guantánamo, as his lawyers at Reprieve noted, he was often held "in brutal conditions." The vast majority of his imprisonment was spent in isolation, which caused him to suffer clinical depression. In discussions with his lawyers, he explained that his imprisonment was "a long and unending nightmare." He was also visited by teams of foreign interrogators -- both Italian and Tunisian. In late 2002, Tunisian agents came to Guantánamo and left no doubt about what awaited him if he were to be returned to Tunisia, which included "water torture in the barrel."
What now, and what next?
With the release of these four men, 188 prisoners remain in Guantánamo, but while the Albanian and Spanish governments are to be congratulated for offering homes for men who would otherwise rot in Guantánamo for the rest of their lives, the Italian government, which is only interested in taking prisoners who can be put on trial in Italy (as demonstrated with the transfer of two Tunisians in December) ought to be ashamed that it did not accept Sherif El-Mashad, who was so clearly seized by mistake, and who, with family in Italy and viable skills that he could use once more, has, essentially, been betrayed by the country which he once called home.
Above all, though, the greatest shame must settle on the United States, which still refuses to accept its own responsibility to provide new homes for cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated. The exact number of prisoners in this category is difficult to establish, because the Obama administration has not provided details of the nationalities of these prisoners (who now number 106). When the Task Force announced its final decisions about the prisoners last month, it was reported that around 60 of the 106 are Yemenis. These men will not be released until the Obama administration finds some spine, having capitulated to fearmongering about Yemen after the failed plane bomb at Christmas, and suspending all further releases to Yemen. Back in October, it was reported that three others are Saudis (who, in theory, could be returned tomorrow), which means that around 42 of the cleared prisoners are awaiting new homes.
Two of these, who have been offered a new home in Switzerland, are amongst the remaining seven Uighurs, another is an Uzbek who has been offered a new home in Latvia, and three others (plus one of the Yemenis) are, as mentioned above, expected to arrive in Spain shortly. However, that still leaves 36 men waiting for new homes, and it seems probable that the countries of Europe, which, before Wednesday, had taken 12 cleared prisoners (with Bermuda and Palau also taking another ten of the Uighurs), will run out of largesse before all 36 are rehoused, leaving the U.S. government -- and its people -- with a stark choice: hold them forever, or, as was planned last April (before Obama scuppered the proposal), bring some of them to live in the United States.
This is not only the right thing to do; it will also demonstrate to the American people -- and to its surplus of hysterical pundits and politicians -- that not everyone who was held at Guantánamo was a terrorist, bent on the destruction of the United States. Why is it, I wonder, that Europeans -- in Albania, Belgium, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland -- can understand that between 90 and 95 percent of the men held at Guantánamo had no connection to terrorism, and that many of these men are still imprisoned, awaiting an end to their long and lawless ordeal, but Americans cannot?
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here.]]>Swiss Take Two Guantanamo Uighurs, Solve Obama's Problemtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4490472010-02-04T09:24:03-05:002011-05-25T15:25:21-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/
The two men in question -- Arkin Mahmud, 45, and his brother Bahtiyar Mahnut, 32 -- were seized with 20 other Uighurs in December 2001. The U.S. authorities realized almost immediately that all of these men, who are Turkic Muslims from China's Xinjiang province, had only one enemy -- the Chinese government -- and had been seized (or bought) by mistake. However, although the majority of the men were cleared for release by 2005, the Bush administration accepted that it could not return them to China, because of fears that they would face torture or other ill-treatment, but then struggled to find another country that would take them instead.
Predictably, the Bush administration appealed, and in February 2010 the Obama administration, to its eternal shame, followed suit, backing a ruling by the Court of Appeals, which overturned the lower court ruling, and hurled the Uighurs back into limbo.
In June 2009, the State Department managed to find new homes for four of these men in Bermuda, and in November the Pacific island of Palau took another six. As a result, seven Uighurs remained in Guantánamo, but by taking the brothers, the Swiss government has not only dared to take on the might of the Chinese government, which threatens any country that dares to entertain the prospect of taking any of the men from Guantánamo, but has also helped President Obama out of what appeared to be an intractable problem.
In a statement, the Swiss Justice Ministry said, "Today the Federal Council decided to admit for humanitarian reasons two Uighurs with Chinese citizenship, who have been imprisoned in Guantánamo for years by the United States without being charged with a crime nor [convicted]." Brushing aside the threats that the Chinese government had made last month, when Chinese officials warned that Switzerland should avoid damaging "overall Sino-Swiss relations," the Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf added that Switzerland has a "stable, good relationship with China, and we want to keep it that way."
Not mentioned publicly was the fact that, until Jura accepted the men's asylum claims, one of them, Arkin Mahmud, appeared to stuck at Guantánamo, his only way out being to hope that the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the Uighurs' case last year, would overturn last February's appeals court ruling, and allow cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated into the United States.
The problem is that Palau had refused to take Arkin Mahmud, because, as the Washington Post noted in an editorial in October, he "suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement." As a result, Bahtiyar Mahnut turned down Palau's offer of a new home for himself, in order to stay with his brother, and, as the Post noted, "Unless another country accepts the brothers, they could remain in custody indefinitely -- a prospect that is unconscionable and that no doubt informed the justices' decision to hear the matter."
[T]he Supreme Court was faced with a tricky legal decision, because the justices will be considering whether, in defense of habeas corpus, and in reference to the unique position in which the Guantánamo prisoners are held, they are being asked to decide whether a judge has the power to order the release of prisoners into the U.S., when all the precedents, as the Court of Appeals made clear, establish that the admission of foreigners into the U.S. is a matter for the executive and legislative branches of government.
At the time, the Post reached a principled conclusion with profound implications for the government, arguing that the "moral and ethical imperatives" were "clear and compelling," and that the government should introduce "narrowly crafted legislation that would allow Mr. Mahmud and Mr. Mahnut into the United States, where they could remain together and Mr. Mahmud could get the medical help he needs."
This "narrowly crafted legislation" will not now be needed, but it remains to be seen if the imminent release of Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut will affect the Supreme Court's planned deliberations about the remaining five Uighurs.
The Supreme Court has scheduled argument for March 23 to decide whether to overturn the precedents regarding the admission of foreigners into the U.S., when, as in the cases of the Uighurs, these men are held in Guantánamo because it is not safe to repatriate them, and no other nation will take them.
The men's lawyers will argue, as they have consistently, that the Supreme Court ruling in June 2008, granting constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights to the prisoners, is meaningless if a judge cannot actually order prisoners to be released.
As the Associated Press explained on Wednesday, the government could now try to argue that the Supreme Court should drop the case, because the remaining Uighurs were apparently offered new homes in Palau but turned down the offer. Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel at The Constitution Project, told the AP that she feared this outcome. "I would not be surprised," she said, "if the administration says that the Uighurs themselves are at fault that they have not been resettled to Palau."
However, Sabin Willett, an attorney who has represented the Uighurs for many years, was more hopeful, telling the AP by email that he "expects the case to go forward." I tend to share Willett's optimism, but not, of course, if the remaining five men are miraculously resettled in some other country, perhaps just days before the March 23 deadline.
If there is one thing we have learned from the Obama administration, since the President shelved plans made last April by his counsel, Greg Craig, to bring the Uighurs to live in the U.S., it is that, regardless of whether senior officials may agree in private that resettling the Uighurs in the U.S. would be the right thing to do, they are not prepared to tackle their critics -- and the Bush administration's poisonous legacy -- head-on. Instead, senior officials prefer not only to avoid confrontation, but also, sadly, to avoid doing anything that would demonstrate to the American public that enormous mistakes were made at Guantánamo, and that the rhetoric of Dick Cheney and his thriving acolytes is disturbingly mistaken.
I can think of no finer way to demonstrate this than to allow the Uighurs to walk free on the streets of, say, Washington D.C., but it remains clear that this is not something that the administration will undertake willingly, and in the meantime, the people of Bermuda and Palau have been learning this instead, and are soon to be joined by the people of Switzerland.
President Obama is fortunate to have such kind allies, but he himself is the loser, the longer he refuses to tackle those who insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that everyone who was held at Guantánamo was a "terrorist," and that it is somehow appropriate to continue to deprive innocent men of their liberty in Guantánamo, rather than giving them new homes in the country that, through cruelty and incompetence, deprived them of so many years of their lives.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here.]]>An Afghan Nobody Faces Trial by Military Commissiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4149972010-01-07T14:23:24-05:002011-05-25T15:10:21-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/Associated Press reported that, in court filings, Justice Department lawyers stated that Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that a sixth Guantá namo prisoner -- an Afghan named Obaidullah -- will be put forward for trial by Military Commission. On November 13, when Holder announced that five prisoners -- including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- would face federal court trials for their alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, he also announced that five other men, previously charged in the Bush administration's Military Commissions, would be tried in a revamped version of the Commissions that the administration and Congress concocted over the summer.
Notwithstanding the weaknesses of the Military Commission trial system (some of which emerged in its first faltering outing last month), and the very real fear that it is being used by the Obama administration as a second-tier system of justice, the decision to charge Obaidullah is particularly dispiriting, as he is so clearly a peripheral character of such insignificance that putting him up for a war crimes trial risks ridicule.
As I explained in September 2008, when he became the 18th prisoner to be put forward for a trial by Military Commission, he was
charged with "conspiracy" and "providing material support to terrorism," based on the thinnest set of allegations to date: essentially, a single claim that, "[o]n or about 22 July 2002," he "stored and concealed anti-tank mines, other explosive devices, and related equipment"; that he "concealed on his person a notebook describing how to wire and detonate explosive devices"; and that he "knew or intended" that his "material support and resources were to be used in preparation for and in carrying out a terrorist attack."
As I also explained:
It doesn't take much reflection on these charges to realize that it is a depressingly clear example of the U.S. administration's disturbing, post-9/11 redefinition of "war crimes," which apparently allows the U.S. authorities to claim that they can equate minor acts of insurgency committed by a citizen of an occupied nation with terrorism.
This was not all. In his Combatant Status Review Tribunal and Administrative Review Boards at Guantánamo (the military review boards established to ascertain whether he had been correctly designated as an "enemy combatant," and whether he still posed a threat to the U.S.), he made it clear that he had made false allegations against himself and another Afghan prisoner still held -- a shopkeeper named Bostan Karim -- because of the abuse he had suffered, at the hands of U.S. forces, in a forward operating base in Khost and in the main U.S. prison in Afghanistan, at Bagram airbase.
The following exchange, from his ARB in 2005, when he explained that he had been "forced" to make false confessions about Karim while held in Bagram is particularly enlightening:
Board Member: Who forced you to say things? Detainee: Americans. Board Member: How did they force you? Detainee: The first time when they captured me and brought me to Khost they put a knife to my throat and said if you don't tell us the truth and you lie to us we are going to slaughter you. Board Member: Were they wearing uniforms? Detainee: Yes ... They tied my hands and put a heavy bag of sand on my hands and made me walk all night in the Khost airport ... In Bagram they gave me more trouble and would not let me sleep. They were standing me on the wall and my hands were hanging above my head. There were a lot of things they made me say.
Back in September 2008, I concluded my article by asking, "So tell me, after reading this: does charging Obaidullah for 'war crimes' look like justice?"
With the news that Obaidullah is to be charged again, when he is not actually accused of harming a single American, and when he may, in fact, have been tortured, through sleep deprivation and "Palestinian hanging," to produce false confessions against himself and at least one other prisoner, leads me not only to repeat the question, but to actively call for the open mockery of Attorney General Eric Holder and the lawyers and bureaucrats in the Justice Department and the Pentagon who thought that reviving the charges against him was a good idea.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here.
]]>Who Are The Four Afghans Released From Guantanamo?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.4015152009-12-23T06:07:32-05:002011-05-25T15:00:22-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/a press release on December 20. I have previously reported the stories of the two Somalis who were released -- emphasizing how nothing about their cases demonstrated that they were "the worst of the worst" -- and will soon be reporting the stories of the six Yemenis transferred to the custody of the Yemeni government. For now, however, I'd like to turn to the four Afghans transferred to the custody of the Afghan government, because, in contrast to the fearmongering of opportunistic Republicans, who continue to claim that Guantánamo is full of terrorists, the stories of these four men demonstrate instead the incompetence of senior officials in the Bush administration, revealing how, instead of detaining men who had any connection to al-Qaeda, or those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, they filled Guantánamo with what Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of Guantánamo in 2002, described as "Mickey Mouse" prisoners.
Sharifullah, the U.S. ally who had guarded Hamid Karzai
The first of the four Afghans, Sharifullah, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, was seized by U.S. forces from an Afghan military compound with another man, Amir Jan Ghorzang (identified by the Pentagon as Said Amir Jan), who was released from Guantánamo in September 2007. Both men were accused of hoarding explosives for the Taliban and being involved in various plots, but insisted that they were loyal government soldiers. In Guantánamo, Sharifullah explained that he was one of the first recruits in the new Afghan army, trained by British officers, and added that he had then spent seven months as part of a group that was responsible for guarding President Karzai. When he was unable to get a promotion, however, he returned to Jalalabad, where he had just taken up a new position as an officer when he was seized.
Amir Jan Ghorzang was the more vociferous of the two in Guantánamo, lamenting the fact that the U.S. soldiers who had seized them had been duped by traitors who were taking money from both the U.S. military and al-Qaeda, and were passing off innocent men as members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. "I'm here because somebody got paid some dollars," he explained, adding that he had been imprisoned by the Taliban for five years, because of his opposition to them, and had also worked for Haji Qadir, a commander who fought with the Americans during the battle of Tora Bora, a showdown between al-Qaeda and U.S.-backed Afghan forces in December 2001.
The cases of both men -- as with many other men who had been working for the Karzai government, but had been betrayed by rivals -- revealed how little the US authorities were concerned with establishing the truth about their allegations, as it would have been easy to track down witnesses in Afghanistan who could have verified their stories (as reporters for McClatchy Newspapers did in 2008, when they interviewed Ghorzang). Nevertheless, he was, in the end, more fortunate than Sharifullah, whose continued presence in Guantánamo for two years and three months after his release was, frankly, inexplicable. As Ghorzang explained in the following exchange in Sharifullah's tribunal, when he was called as a witness:
Sharifullah: Do you know that I was involved to work in the new government? Was I honestly working and working for the new government? Ghorzang: You were working with the new government and he was involved with the Karzai government, in support of the Karzai government.
Mohammed Hashim: the fantasist put forward for a trial by Military Commission
The story of the second man, Mohammed Hashim, remains as bewildering now as it was when he was put forward for a trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo in May 2008, and I wrote an article entitled, "Afghan fantasist to face trial at Guantánamo," in which I stated that the decision "appear[ed] to plumb new depths of misapplied zeal." Hashim, who was about 26 years old at the time of his capture, was first seized by Afghan forces after he was found taking measurements near the home of Mullah Omar, the Taliban's reclusive leader, and asking locals about security arrangements. Subsequently released, he was then seized again and handed over (or sold) to U.S. forces.
If there was something about the circumstances of his initial capture that should have set alarm bells ringing, regarding his mental health, these were ignored when the U.S. authorities decided to charge him with "conducting reconnaissance missions against U.S. and coalition forces," and "participating in a rocket attack venture on at least one occasion against U.S. forces for al-Qaeda," and ignored the fact that, at his tribunal, his testimony revealed that he was (as I described it) "either one of the most fantastically well-connected terrorists in the very small pool of well-connected terrorists at Guantánamo, or, conversely, that he [was] a deranged fantasist. From the resounding silence that greeted his comments at his tribunal, I can only conclude that the tribunal members, like me, concluded that the latter interpretation was the more probable."
After explaining that he had spent five years with the Taliban, because he needed the money, Hashim proceeded to claim that:
he knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance, because a man that he knew, Mohammad Khan, "used to tell me all these stories and all the details about how they were going to fly airplanes into buildings. He didn't tell me the details, that it was New York, but he said they had 20 pilots and they were going to orchestrate the act." What rather detracted from the shock value of this comment was Hashim's absolutely inexplicable claim that his friend Khan, who had told him about the 9/11 plan, was with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban's opponents, who were also implacably opposed to al-Qaeda.
Hashim also claimed that he and another man had been responsible for facilitating Osama bin Laden's escape from Afghanistan, and that, afterwards, he had worked as a spy, and had heard about how the Syrian government had been sending weapons to Saddam Hussein, which had then been sent to Afghanistan via Iran. As I explained at the time, the cumulative effect of Hashim's statements was that it was "impossible not to conclude that [his] story was, if not the testimony of a fantasist, then a shrewd attempt to avoid brutal interrogations by providing his interrogators with whatever he thought they wanted to hear."
A darker truth, of course, may be that his rambling statement actually revealed the themes pursued relentlessly by the interrogators at Guantánamo: not only "what do you know about the 9/11 attacks?" and "when did you last see bin Laden?" but also, at the insistence of Vice President Dick Cheney, "what was the connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?" As we know from the interrogations of the CIA's most famous "ghost prisoner" Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who confessed under torture in Egypt that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which was later used as part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq, securing this sort of information was regarded as critical in the run-up to the invasion, even though the administration claimed that its embrace of torture (or, rather, the euphemistically named "enhanced interrogation techniques") was designed to prevent further terrorist attacks.
Abdul Hafiz: the wrong man with a satellite phone
The third man, Abdul Hafiz, who was 42 years old when he was seized in 2003 from his village near Kandahar, was accused in his tribunal of working for a Taliban militia group and of being involved in two killings in Kabul. It was also alleged that he was captured with a satellite phone linked to one of the killings, and that he "attempted to call an al-Qaeda member who is linked to the murder of an ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] worker."
In response, Hafiz, who described himself as "handicapped" and who repeatedly stated that he has problems with his memory, claimed that his name was Abdul Qawi, and that he had been confused with Abdul Hafiz, because Hafiz, for whom he had been working, had given him the phone at a checkpoint. As he stated, "He told me that he did not have any documents to have the phone with him. So he said, 'You can have my phone because you are handicapped and I don't think they will search you.'" He added that he did not even know how to use the phone.
Describing Hafiz as someone who supported the new government of Hamid Karzai and was "preaching in the village to bring the peace," he said, "I was working for him to bring peace ... He gave me the telephone in the morning and told me to keep it in my pocket. He told me to work and preach to the people not to fight. That war is not good. This is the reason that I lost my leg. Fighting is not good. War does not have good consequences."
He also explained, "I was just in my home when they captured me and brought me here. I didn't do anything," and expressed frustration at not being able to see classified documents containing evidence against him, saying, "In our culture, if someone is accused of something, they are shown the evidence." At his review in 2005, he presented the board with letters from his family -- all addressed to Abdul Qari, not Abdul Hafiz -- including one from his brother, which read, "My respectful brother, you didn't have any relationship with any political people. We were hoping that you would get released very, very soon. We do not understand why you're still detained there without a crime." He was clearly so desperate to be freed from Guantánamo and not to be "amongst these beasts and these people" (as he described his fellow prisoners at one point), that he even offered to present the board with a letter from his wife, even though "It is a big shame in our culture to read my wife's letter to you, but now I am in a very tough situation."
Mohamed Rahim: a spectacular case of mistaken identity
If the continued imprisonment of Abdul Hafiz (or Abdul Qari) appeared to be inexplicable, there was, on the surface at least, more of a case against Mohamed Rahim, the fourth prisoner released at the weekend, but this too collapses spectacularly under scrutiny. A resident of a village near Ghazni, Rahim was accused, in his tribunal, of being the chief of logistics for a company providing support directly to the Taliban government, of working for the Taliban Intelligence Office, and of controlling a large weapons cache for the Taliban. In response, he explained that he had been forced to work for the Taliban, and that, because he "was sick" and unable to fight, he was made to work in an administrative post. He denied the allegation that he worked for the Taliban Intelligence Office, calling it an "outrageous" accusation, and also denied controlling a weapons cache. "This doesn't make sense," he said. "I was captured in my house. I have no information on these weapons."
By the time of his next review, in 2005, numerous other allegations had been added, including a claim that he was "identifiable as a former companion of bin Laden during the jihad against the Russians," and another that he "was among a group protecting bin Laden at his last meeting at Tora Bora." It was also suggested that he "was entrusted by bin Laden to exfiltrate his guard forces from Afghanistan back to their countries of origin," and that "bin Laden and his companions spent the night in a house belonging to an Afghan acquaintance of the Detainee."
There was more in this vein, including a claim that he "attempted to export gems from Afghanistan to Germany in order to raise revenue to finance al-Qaeda," but what was completely overlooked by his review board -- and presumably, by those who were supposed to be capable of analyzing the intelligence relating to the Guantánamo prisoners -- is that when he stated, "I am a sick poor farmer with enemies," he was telling the truth for one particularly glaring reason, which only emerged in passing in his review, when his Designated Military Officer (a soldier assigned to him in place of a lawyer) pointed out that he was Hazara.
One of four main population groups in Afghanistan -- the others being Pashtuns, Tajiks and Uzbeks -- the Hazara, Shia Muslims who are at least partly of Mongol origin, were despised by the Sunni Taliban, who slaughtered them in their thousands. As a result, it is not only appropriate to conclude that the allegations against Rahim were invented by his enemies, but also to conclude that his enemies in Guantánamo came up with the outrageous claims that he was intimately associated with Osama bin Laden.
Release or imprisonment in Afghanistan?
With the exception of Mohamed Jawad, who was released in August after he won his habeas corpus petition, these men are the first Afghans released since January 2009, when Haji Bismullah, who worked for the government of Hamid Karzai as the chief of transportation in a region of Helmand province, was released. Of the 219 Afghans once held at Guantánamo, there are now just 21 remaining in the prison, but it is uncertain whether the four men just released will regain their freedom, or whether, in common with all the Afghan releases since August 2007 (except Jawad, whose case attracted international scrutiny), they will be imprisoned on arrival in Kabul, in a wing of the main prison, Pol-i-Charki, which was refurbished by the U.S. military, and which, although nominally under Afghan control, is reportedly overseen by Americans.
After all this time, and with such scandalous stories of ineptitude on the part of the United States, I would say that the least these men deserve is to be freed outright, and allowed to be reunited with their families.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here.]]>The Stories of the Two Somalis Freed From Guantanamotag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.3990002009-12-21T07:34:16-05:002011-05-25T15:00:22-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/Miami Herald broke the news on Saturday that 12 prisoners have been released from Guantánamo. The news followed hints in the Washington Post on Friday that six Yemenis and four Afghans were set to leave, but Rosenberg -- and the East African media -- reported that the men had already been freed and that two Somalis were also released. I'll be writing soon about the Afghans and the Yemenis, but for now I'd like to focus on the stories of the two Somalis: Mohammed Sulaymon Barre and Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad (identified as Ismael Arale).
Rosenberg reported that the two men "were processed by the Somaliland government and then released to rejoin their families in Hargeisa," the capital of "the breakaway region in northern Somalia that has its own autonomous government." She added, "The United States does not recognize the government in Somaliland and there were no official statements on how Arale and Barre arrived there. A local newspaper, the Somaliland Press, said they arrived aboard a jet provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross, suggesting that the United States had released the men to the Red Cross in a third country."
As President Obama attempts to close Guantánamo, with the administration recently announcing its intention of purchasing a prison in Illinois to hold some of the prisoners, the release of these two men -- as with the overwhelming majority of releases from Guantánamo -- yet again demonstrates how hysterical and unsubstantiated are Republican claims that Guantánamo is full of hardcore terrorists, as their stories demonstrate.
Seized in Pakistan: Mohammed Sulaymon Barre
Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, who was 37 years old at the time of his capture, was one of the first men to be seized in the "War on Terror." As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, he had been living in Pakistan as a UN-approved refugee since fleeing his homeland during its ruinous civil war in the early 1990s, and was seized at his home in Karachi on November 1, 2001 "by police and intelligence agents who had made two previous visits to check his papers, and who seem, therefore, to have seized him on this third occasion because they were looking for easy targets to hand over to the Americans."
As I also explained in The Guantánamo Files:
Barre worked from his home as the Karachi agent for the Dahabshiil Company, a Somali organization with branches around the world, which provides essential money transfer operations for the Somali diaspora. According to the Americans, Dahabshiil was "closely related to al-Barakat, a Somali financial company designated as a terrorism finance facilitator," [which had been added to a U.S. terrorism watch list and had its assets frozen]. Barre said that he knew nothing about this allegation, pointing out that his job only involved making small transactions on behalf of Somalis living in Pakistan.
In fact, as was noted in a report in 2004 [for a UN conference on Trade and Development], the enforced U.S.-led closure of money transfer operations with suspected links to terrorism was "disastrous for Somalia, a country with no recognized government and without a functioning state apparatus. After the international community largely washed its hands of the country following the disastrous peacekeeping foray in 1994, remittances became the inhabitants' lifeline. With no recognized private banking system, the remittance trade was dominated by a single firm (al-Barakat)." Crucially, the report added that, although the U.S. authorities closed down al-Barakat in 2001, labeling it "the quartermasters of terror," only four criminal prosecutions had been filed by 2003, "and none involved charges of aiding terrorists."
Nevertheless, the authorities at Guantánamo -- operating in a bubble of terror-related allegations that largely bore no relation to the realities of the outside world -- had no time for Barre's protestations of innocence. "I am convinced that your branch of the Dahabshiil company was used to transfer money for terrorism," the presiding officer of his tribunal at Guantánamo told Barre in 2005. "What I am trying to find out is if you think maybe there were some people that were using your company and using your branch to transfer money, or whether you were just totally not paying attention."
A year later, as the BBC reported in August 2006, al-Barakat had been removed from the U.S. watchlist of terrorist organizations. The report explained that al-Barakat had been included on the watchlist because U.S. intelligence analysts thought it had been used to finance the 9/11 hijackers, but the 9/11 Commission had investigated the claim and had found it baseless. In February 2009, in a report for the Washington Post, Peter Finn noted that, in the allegations against Barre at Guantánamo, Dahabshiil's alleged ties to al-Barakat had been dropped by 2006, although even then the taint of the allegation was not entirely removed.
In a letter to the Post, an attorney for Dahabshiil was obliged to point out that the firm has "never been the subject of any investigation in relation to alleged terrorist funding" and that it "has no involvement whatsoever with money laundering or the funding or of terrorist organizations and ... places the highest importance on money laundering compliance." As the Post noted ruefully, "Dahabshiil should have been given an opportunity to comment for the article."
Shorn of this central allegation, it is no wonder that, as Barre's lawyers explained in a court filing in connection with his habeas corpus petition, the allegations against him have "varied dramatically." In 2006, for example, presumably through a false allegation coerced from some other prisoner, the authorities claimed that he was not in Pakistan in 1994 and 1995 -- despite the existence of UN papers documenting his meetings in Pakistan in those years -- but was actually working in Osama bin Laden's compound in Khartoum, Sudan, an allegation so worthless that his lawyers described it as "implausible and unsubstantiated."
According to Emi MacLean of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Barre, most of his problems at Guantánamo stemmed from his opposition to the regime at prison, and his involvement in several hunger strikes. "If you were detained for seven years without charge and any fair process, you might be engaged in activities that would be considered disciplinary violations that are really protests for your detention," she said.
The truth, as Barre himself noted at his tribunal in 2005, was that "A lot of interrogators said to me that ... a lot of mistakes were made and they must be corrected. They told me many times that I am here by mistake." Sadly, this was not enough to prevent him from suffering in Guantánamo, and also in U.S. custody in Bagram before his transfer to Guantánamo in 2002, when, as he explained in his tribunal:
They interrogated me and one of the interrogators told me I was from al-Wafa [a Saudi charity that was also regarded with suspicion by the U.S. authorities] and I needed to confess to that. You have no choice. I told them it wasn't true. They pressured me. They whispered something then spoke to the guard. The guard came in, grabbed me by my neck and threw me. He took me in a bad way to isolation. All my blankets, except one, were taken from me. It was freezing cold. They didn't feed me lunch and sometimes they didn't feed me twice. At night it is very cold and if you don't eat dinner it gets colder. This torture lasted fifteen to twenty days. My feet and hands were swollen. I wasn't able to stand because I was in so much pain. I asked for treatment and an interrogator brought a nurse and asked if I wanted treatment. They told me they could cut my legs to stop the pain. They did this so I would confess to the accusations that I didn't do. Nothing happened. After the torture ended, I met another interrogator who told me injustice was done to me and I didn't have anything to do with this. He said he would do a report so I could go home. He told me I would be released. Suddenly, I was taken back to Kandahar and then to Cuba.
Seized in Djibouti: Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad
Unlike Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad was one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, one of just six men flown to the prison after the arrival of 14 "high-value detainees" in September 2006. Identified by the Pentagon as Abdullahi Sudi Arale, he arrived with little fanfare in June 2007, and, as I explained in an article in September 2007:
Possibly ... his arrival was little trumpeted because it involved the deliberately under-reported "War on al-Qaeda" in the Horn of Africa, and because the administration had very little information to offer about him. In almost questioning terms, Arale was described as a "suspected" member of "the al-Qaeda terrorist network in East Africa," who served as "a courier between East Africa al-Qaeda (EAAQ) and al-Qaeda in Pakistan."
In a press release, the DoD added that, after returning to Somalia from Pakistan in September 2006, he "held a leadership role in the EAAQ-affiliated Somali Council of Islamic Courts (CIC)," and noted, with distressing vagueness, that there was "significant information available" to indicate that Arale had been "assisting various EAAQ-affiliated extremists in acquiring weapons and explosives," that he had "facilitated terrorist travel by providing false documents for AQ and EAAQ-affiliates and foreign fighters traveling into Somalia," and that he had "played a significant role in the re-emergence of the CIC in Mogadishu." Unmentioned, of course, was the subtext of the situation in Somalia: the role of the CIC in returning some semblance of order to one of the world's least-governed countries, and the US government's use of Ethiopia as a proxy army in yet another secret, dirty war.
It took some time for the truth about the Pentagon's "distressing vagueness" to be explained, in part because the U.S. authorities released no further information about him, and, in two and a half years, do not appear to have conducted a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, to ascertain whether he was correctly designated as an "enemy combatant." However, when Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent dozens of Guantánamo prisoners, became involved, another narrative emerged, in which Muhammad not only had no connection to al-Qaeda, but was, in fact, "an English teacher and centrist political activist."
Born in Mogadishu in 1970, Muhammad had remained in the capital throughout the civil war of the 1990s until the security situation deteriorated to such an extent that he moved north to Somaliland, establishing the first English school in the new country, and working as a journalist. In 1998, he traveled to Pakistan, where he studied English Literature at the International Islamic University, and became, as Reprieve described it, "a respected leader of the Somali community in the country."
When his father died, he moved back to Mogadishu, "where the rule of the Union of Islamic Courts had brought relative stability to the war-torn capital," but at the end of 2006, when, backed by the U.S., the Ethiopian Army invaded, he moved north one more. Opposed to the Ethiopian invasion, he was asked, "as a respected member of the community ... to attend a conference in Eritrea aimed at organizing a political campaign" to ensure that the Ethiopians left.
It was while he was on his way to this conference that he was seized by local police in Djibouti, "apparently at the behest of the Americans." Handed over to the U.S. military, he was taken to Camp Lemonier, the US military base that played a key role in American interference in the Horn of Africa, where other prisoners have been held, possibly including an unknown number of "ghost prisoners." There, as Reprieve explained, "he was held in a shipping container and interrogated by Americans."
Compared to Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, Ismael Mahmoud Muhammad was fortunate that his wrongful imprisonment lasted for only two and a half years, but as the eighth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo approaches, the release of these two men -- neither of whom was cleared until the Obama administration's inter-agency Task Force began its deliberations this year -- demonstrates, yet again, that, when it comes to undoing the shameful legacy of Guantánamo, much work still remains to be done.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here.]]>Judge Orders Release from Guantanamo of Unwilling Yemeni Recruittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.3967892009-12-18T06:44:55-05:002011-05-25T15:00:22-04:00Andy Worthingtonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/I explained in a previous article, Judge Thomas Hogan refused the habeas corpus petition of Musa'ab al-Madhwani, a Yemeni who had been tortured in the CIA's "Dark Prison" near Kabul, and who was described by the judge as a "model prisoner" who was not dangerous. Judge Hogan made his ruling partly on the basis that al-Madhwani had received military training at the al-Farouq camp in Afghanistan, which was associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before the 9/11 attacks, but just two days later, Judge Ricardo Urbina (who ordered the release of the Uighurs last October) granted the habeas petition of another Yemeni, Saeed Hatim, who had also trained at al-Farouq, but who told his interrogators that he "did not like anything about the training."
The reasons for Judge Urbina's decision on Wednesday are not yet clear, as an unclassified version of his ruling has not yet been made available, but elements of Saeed Hatim's story are available from the Unclassified Summaries of Evidence for his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) at Guantánamo, part of a process conducted in 2004-05 to ascertain whether the prisoners had been correctly designated as "enemy combatants," who could be held without charge or trial, and his Administrative Review Boards (ARBs), held every year as part of a process to determine whether prisoners could be approved for release.
These were shamefully one-sided affairs, in which the authorities relied on classified evidence that was not disclosed to the prisoners, who were also prevented from having any legal representation. However, they often provide the only insight available into the prisoners' stories, and in the case of Saeed Hatim, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture, they provide what appears to be a relatively coherent narrative, although it may, of course, be revealed as a tissue of lies, produced as a result of threats and coercion, when Judge Urbina's ruling is made public.
In statements made by Hatim during his CSRT, or attributed to him by interrogators in submissions for his ARBs, which he did not attend, he apparently explained that he had "never held a job for more than six months" and "relied upon his father and older brother for financial support," and stated that he went to Afghanistan in spring 2001, because he had "heard there was a lot of justice in that part of the world," and also because, like several others who ended up in Guantánamo, he thought that he would find a way to fight in Chechnya. He "stated he became interested in Russia's war in Chechnya because he witnessed the oppression on the television." Explaining that he "was outraged about what the Russians were doing to the Chechens," he "decided to travel there to fight jihad alongside his Muslim brothers."
Hatim admitted attending al-Farouq, but said that he soon left the camp "because it was not what he expected." He explained that he "faked a fever telling the people he was ill and needed to seek medical care," and complained that "the trainers were always yelling at him, the food was terrible, and he was forced to sleep on the ground." He added that "he did not like anything about the training and wanted to quit on the first day."
Acknowledging that he was obliged to "put his decision to fight in Chechnya on the back burner for a while," but insisting that he "did not want to partake in the war in Afghanistan because it was a civil war in which Muslims were fighting other Muslims," he nevertheless reportedly ended up at "a place of re-supply for the front lines near Bagram," where, on at least one occasion, he apparently traveled to the front lines to deliver food to the Taliban soldiers fighting the Northern Alliance. He also apparently spent some time in a number of guest houses, which, in the U.S. authorities' opinion, were associated with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
He added, however, that once the U.S.-led invasion began, and Kabul was being bombed, he made his way to the eastern city of Jalalabad, where he took a cab to the Pakistani border, meeting up with an Afghan who escorted him to a Pakistani police station. From there, soon after, his long ordeal in US custody began.
I await Judge Urbina's ruling with some interest, primarily, as I mentioned above, to discover whether this account bears any resemblance to the story uncovered by the judge in what, despite the persistent fog of classified evidence that clouds so many of the Guantánamo cases, will undoubtedly be the first time that something close to an objective analysis of his case has been undertaken, after eight years in U.S. custody.
At present, however, Judge Urbina's ruling means little to Saeed Hatim, as the Obama administration has demonstrated that it is extremely unwilling to release any of the Yemenis who now make up nearly half of Guantánamo's population of 210 prisoners -- even those who have won their habeas petitions in the US courts. Just one Yemeni has been released since Barack Obama became President, even though, by my reckoning, Yemenis account for somewhere between 50 and 60 of the 115 prisoners who have been cleared for release by the inter-agency Task Force established by President Obama on his second day in office.
The administration's reluctance to release Yemenis was explained by officials in September, around the time that the only Yemeni to secure his release under Obama -- Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, who won his habeas petition in May, after a devastating dissection of the government's supposed evidence by Judge Gladys Kessler -- was finally released. On that occasion, the officials stated that "Even if Mr. Ahmed was not dangerous in 2002 ... Guantánamo itself might have radicalized him, exposing him to militants and embittering him against the United States."
The officials have valid fears about political instability in Yemen, and the existence of terrorist groups, even though the Yemeni authorities have stated that none of the 16 Yemenis returned from Guantánamo "have joined terrorist groups," but whatever their fears, they do not seem to have reflected that, if their rationale for not releasing any of the Yemenis from Guantánamo was extended to the U.S. prison system, it would mean that no prisoner would ever be released at the end of their sentence, because prison "might have radicalized" them, and also, of course, that it would lead to no prisoner ever being released from Guantánamo.
On that note, it is, I hope, time for this nonsense to end, and for Saeed Hatim, a demonstrably insignificant figure in the "War on Terror," to be returned to his homeland, along with all the other cleared prisoners. It's not difficult. Just find a large enough plane, fly them home, and drop them off. At the time of writing, I'm pleased to note that the Washington Post is reporting that, "according to sources with independent knowledge of the matter," six Yemenis, along with four Afghans, "will be transferred out of Guantánamo Bay in the near future," and that this transfer "could be a prelude to the release of dozens more detainees to Yemen." I certainly hope that this is the case; otherwise, we may as well all stop pretending that being cleared by a court, or by the administration's own Task Force, means anything at all.