joeanybodyblakbk.jpg

CLOSING GITMO

HOME
TRAVIS DRUMS
* INDEX *
THE BEGINING
THE BEGININGs
MY VIDEOS
TWITTERING
Joe goes to DC
THE POLICE
CLOSING GITMO
ARREST BUSH - IMPEACH BYBEE
pdxVENEZUELA
WAR RESISTING
Joe 2010
Joe 09
Joe 2008
Joe 2007
Joe 2006
Joe 2005
- My Blog - Zebra3Report
Camp Homebound
GAZA ATTACKED
JOE'S HERO'S
R.N.C. 2008
HOMELESS
PICTURES
FEMA CAMPS
NADER
IMPEACHMENT
FAVORITES
MEDIA / PRESS
ENVIRONMENT
PEACE PROJECT
PEACEMAKERS
911 TRUTH REPORT
TERROR & TORTURE
THE FRONT LINES
CIVIL RIGHTS
HUMAN RIGHTS
IMMIGRATION
WAR ROOM
PROTEST
REPUBLICANS
ELECTION FRAUD
2008 ELECTIONS
TAKE ACTION!
TECHNOLOGY
IRAQ BODY COUNT FLAGS
JERRY'S KIDS
MY PODCASTS
BENJOE ARCHIVE
shortcut
911 truth Index

last updated on:

The newer articles will be on top of this page

I  AM POSTING ALL AND EVERYTHING I RUN ACROSS ABOUT THE CLOSING OF THE
HELL HOLE GITMO.
There will be USA war/prison related information tucked in here as well, meaning it wont be exclusive Guantanamo related
~joe anybody

CLOSE DOWN ALL USA TORTURE HELL HOLES

Horizontal Divider 7

Published on Tuesday, October 12, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

October 6, 2010
 
NY Times article found here:

Judge Bars Major Witness From Terrorism Trial

A federal judge barred prosecutors on Wednesday from using a crucial witness in the first trial of a former Guantánamo detainee, adding to the fierce debate over whether the government can successfully prosecute terrorist detainees in civilian court.

The trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who faces charges in the 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa, has been seen as a test of President Obama’s goal of moving many other detainees, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, into federal court and, ultimately, closing Guantánamo.

In the months since Mr. Ghailani was brought to New York from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan has rejected defense requests to dismiss the case because of violations of Mr. Ghailani’s right to a speedy trial and because of accusations he was tortured.

But just as the trial was to begin on Wednesday, Judge Kaplan ruled that he would not allow the witness to testify. He noted that the government had acknowledged that it had identified and located the witness through interrogation of Mr. Ghailani when he was earlier held in a secret overseas jail run by the Central Intelligence Agency. His lawyers have said he was tortured there.

Judge Kaplan said he was “acutely aware of the perilous nature of the world in which we live.”

“But the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests,” he went on. “We must follow it not only when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction. To do less would diminish us and undermine the foundation upon which we stand.”

The judge delayed the trial’s opening until Tuesday, allowing the government to adjust its strategy or appeal the ruling. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the government would be examining the judge’s opinion and deciding how to react to it.

Speaking in Washington, Mr. Holder seemed to play down the ruling’s significance.

“We are talking about one ruling, in one case by one judge,” Mr. Holder said.

“I think the true test is, ultimately, how are these cases resolved? What happens?” he continued, adding, “Can they be successfully resolved from the government’s perspective?”

Mr. Holder said history had shown that hundreds of terrorism and related cases had been resolved through pleas or convictions in civilian court. “I think it’s too early to say that at this point the Ghailani matter is not going to be successful,” he said.

Mr. Ghailani’s trial on charges he conspired in the embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, was scheduled to begin on Wednesday. The attacks, orchestrated by Al Qaeda, killed 224 people.

After Mr. Ghailani was captured in 2004, he spent nearly five years in C.I.A. custody in so-called black sites and later at the military prison at Guantánamo.

Mr. Ghailani’s lawyers — Peter E. Quijano, Steve Zissou and Michael K. Bachrach — had argued that their client was tortured while in C.I.A. custody, and that any statements he made or evidence derived from those statements, including testimony from the witness whose existence he disclosed, was tainted and inadmissible.

After the hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Quijano praised the ruling, saying, “This case will be tried upon lawful evidence, not torture, not coercion.”

He said the Fifth Amendment had to apply to Mr. Ghailani as much as to any other defendant.

“It is the Constitution that won a great victory today,” Mr. Quijano said. “We applaud the court for its courage and support for the law.”

Prosecutors say the disputed witness, Hussein Abebe, sold Mr. Ghailani the TNT used to blow up the embassy in Dar es Salaam. They say that Mr. Abebe agreed voluntarily to testify against Mr. Ghailani, and that his decision to cooperate was linked only remotely to the interrogation.

Mr. Abebe had been characterized by prosecutors as a “giant witness for the government.” On Friday, a prosecutor, Michael Farbiarz, explained in court that without Mr. Abebe’s testimony about selling the TNT to Mr. Ghailani, “the government has no way of putting such evidence in front of the jury at all.”

But in a three-page order, Judge Kaplan said that “the government has failed to prove that Abebe’s testimony is sufficiently attenuated from Ghailani’s coerced statements to permit its receipt in evidence.”

The judge said he felt it was appropriate to emphasize that the trial was still proceeding, and that if Mr. Ghailani were convicted he faced the possibility of life imprisonment.

He added that Mr. Ghailani’s status of “enemy combatant” probably would permit his detention as something akin “to a prisoner of war until hostilities between the United States and Al Qaeda and the Taliban end, even if he were found not guilty.”

The judge said he would issue a fuller opinion later.

Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University who observed the hearings on Mr. Abebe and is a strong advocate for trying detainees in civilian court, characterized the order as a “step forward for the rule of law, and therefore it cannot be a setback for the government.”

“We now know that there are lines when it comes to torture, and this is one,” she added.

Judge Kaplan has not ruled on whether Mr. Ghailani was mistreated while in detention, but, in his decision, said he assumed for the purpose of his analysis that Mr. Ghailani was coerced during interrogation. The ruling excluding Mr. Abebe’s testimony will probably make the government’s case more complicated to prove and the trial longer.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Mr. Obama opposed the Guantánamo detention complex, calling it a recruiting symbol for terrorists. He initially ordered Guantánamo closed by January 2010, and later declared his intention to try terrorism suspects in federal court whenever feasible, igniting a debate over whether the civilian or the military system was better for such cases.

Critics of relying on the civilian system have said that defendants who have been held and interrogated as war criminals could be successfully prosecuted only by military tribunals or courts, with their less restrictive rules of evidence.

The judge did not elaborate on his observation that Mr. Ghailani could be detained in the military system if he were acquitted, but the comment spurred some debate among legal experts.

Ben Wizner, a senior lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the conventional wisdom about the Ghailani case was that the justice system works if he is convicted and fails if he is acquitted.

“But that’s not how we measure the effectiveness of a criminal justice system,” Mr. Wizner said. “The question is whether the government can present its case and whether the defendant can get a fair trial.”

Attorney General Holder, asked if the government was considering returning Mr. Ghailani to the military system and holding him indefinitely, replied, “We intend to proceed with this trial.”

Horizontal Divider 7

 
 
 Original -- NY Times Article:

October 5, 2010

Civil Justice, Military Injustice

Supporters of the tribunals at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who insist military justice, not the federal courts, is the best way to deal with terrorists, should pay close attention to Tuesday’s events in a United States District Court in Manhattan. Faisal Shahzad was sentenced to life imprisonment, five months and four days after he tried to blow up his car in Times Square.

When Mr. Shahzad was arrested, and later given a Miranda warning, the “tough on terrorists” crowd screamed about coddling and endangering the country’s security. They didn’t stop complaining, even after Mr. Shahzad cooperated with investigators and entered a guilty plea with a mandatory life sentence. All of this happened without the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department breaking laws or violating Constitutional protections.

Now let’s check in on Guantánamo Bay, where President George W. Bush opened an illegal detention camp, authorized torture and abuse, and then set up military tribunals engineered to produce guilty verdicts no matter how thin or tainted the evidence. When the courts declared the system illegal, Congress made it slightly better. President Obama improved it a bit more. But it is still not up to American standards, or to its task.

There are more than 170 inmates left in Guantánamo. Only 36 have been referred for prosecution, some very dangerous men. Forty-eight are in a long-term detention that is certainly illegal. Almost all the rest are in limbo while the Obama team tries to figure out what to do. The chances are dimming every day that prisoners like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, will ever be brought to justice.

The only inmate on trial in Guantánamo is Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was accused at age 15 of killing an American soldier in Afghanistan. He has been held in extralegal detention for more than eight years, and the military has been attempting to try him since 2005. The thin evidence against him is tainted by his credible allegations of abuse.

The Pentagon has further shamed American justice during the trial by imposing censorship that included temporarily banning four reporters from the courtroom because they published the name of a witness who had been identified in news reports and public documents.

This is the choice: Justice in long-established federal courts that Americans can be proud of and the rest of the world can respect. Or illegal detentions and unending, legally dubious military tribunals. It is an easy one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/opinion/06wed3.html?th&emc=th

Horizontal Divider 7

Introducing The Definitive List Of The Remaining Prisoners In Guantanamo

 
Over the next month, in an attempt to focus attention more closely on Guantánamo, and on the remaining prisoners who are held there, I’ll be publishing an eight-part series of articles (in conjunction with Cageprisoners, for whom I work as a Senior Researcher), telling, for the first time, the stories of the 176 men who are still held.

The series begins with the stories of 20 men described by the US authorities as part of the “Dirty Thirty,” seized crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, who are mostly regarded as having been bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, even though there is copious evidence that these allegations were produced by a number of prisoners who were tortured — including Mohammed al-Qahtani, for whom Guantánamo’s version of the CIA’s torture program was devised in the fall of 2002, and approved by then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The articles to follow, covering the rest of the prisoners still held, deal with those seized in particular locations: two cover prisoners seized in Afghanistan; two more tell the stories of prisoners seized crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001; two deal with prisoners seized in Pakistan; and the final article covers the “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, and other prisoners, seized in a variety of countries, who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and imprisonment in secret CIA prisons.

In reading these articles, I hope that readers will be able to discover the stories of the men behind the statistics of Guantánamo — and the still-repeated and thoroughly unfounded claims that the prison holds “the worst of the worst.” In the accounts, readers will encounter a variety of different individuals. Many of these men traveled to Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks to fight with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, and suddenly found themselves to be enemies of America in a “War on Terror,” and others were not even involved in any kind of military conflict, and were, instead, students, humanitarian aid workers, missionaries, or economic migrants, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

http://pubrecord.org/law/8256/introducing-definitive-remaining/comment-page-1/#comment-4348

gfiles.jpg

Horizontal Divider 7

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'

Two detainees are escorted to interrogation by U.S. military guards at Camp X-Ray in the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base , Cuba

Two detainees are escorted to interrogation by US military guards at Guantánamo Bay

Image :1 of 2

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”

He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

He added: “I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.”

Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.

He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr Hamad claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damages action against a list of American officials.

Defenders of Guantánamo said that detainees began to be released as early as September 2002, nine months after the first prisoners were sent to the jail at the US naval base in Cuba. By the time Mr Bush left office more than 530 detainees had been freed.

A spokesman for Mr Bush said of Colonel Wilkerson’s allegations: “We are not going to have any comment on that.” A former associate to Mr Rumsfeld said that Mr Wilkerson's assertions were completely untrue.

The associate said the former Defence Secretary had worked harder than anyone to get detainees released and worked assiduously to keep the prison population as small as possible. Mr Cheney’s office did not respond.

There are currently about 180 detainees left in the facility

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7092435.ece

Horizontal Divider 7

January 22 2010 GITMO - CONTINUES TO THRIVE
Late last night - on the eve of the date President Obama promised to restore justice to a busted Guantanamo detention system - a Justice Department-led task force released its outrageous recommendation to continue holding nearly 50 Guantanamo detainees indefinitely.1 We're stunned that the Department of Justice would act in such flagrant and direct violation of civil liberties, human rights, and a Supreme Court ruling in 2008 that confirmed Guantanamo detainees' rights to habeas corpus.2

However it's also the clearest proof we've seen yet that in order to truly resolve the heinous policies and practices taking place at Guantanamo, we're going to need to look to outside sources to challenge the status quo. Holding people without charge, trial or clear process for reviewing their case is unacceptable.

The White House and Congress must intervene and establish a new kind of task force - a commission of independent, bipartisan experts to examine, report, and come to their own informed conclusions about the policies and actions related to the detention, treatment, and transfer of Guantanamo detainees.

We've got to fight fire with fire - only an independent, bipartisan commission can help untangle the human rights mess created at Guantanamo.

Call on the White House and Congress to establish a new kind of independent, bipartisan task force to take a deeper look at the flawed policies at Guantanamo.

Horizontal Divider 7

Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Gitmo Torture Case Claiming Detainees Are Not "Persons"

Posted by , Center for Constitutional Rights at 4:00 PM on Dec 14, 2009

The following is a news release from the Center for Constitutional Rights.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/rights/144568/supreme_court_refuses_to_hear_gitmo_torture_case_claiming_detainees_are_not_%22persons%22_

Today, the United States Supreme Court refused to review a lower court's dismissal of a case brought by four British former detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse at Guantánamo. The British detainees spent more than two years in Guantanamo and were repatriated to the U.K. in 2004.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By refusing to hear the case, the Court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The lower court also dismissed the detainees' claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants." Finally, the circuit court found that, even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantanamo had any Constitutional rights.

Eric Lewis, a partner in Washington, D.C.’s Baach Robinson & Lewis, lead attorney for the detainees, said, "It is an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when the Supreme Court lets stand such an inhuman decision. The final word on whether these men had a right not to be tortured or a right to practice their religion free from abuse is that they did not. Future prospective torturers can now draw comfort from this decision. The lower court found that torture is all in a days' work for the Secretary of Defense and senior generals. That violates the President's stated policy, our treaty obligations and universal legal norms. Yet the Obama administration, in its rush to protect executive power, lost its moral compass and persuaded the Supreme Court to avoid a central moral challenge. Today our standing in the world has suffered a further great loss."

The four former detainees -- Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed, and Jamal Al-Harith -- were held from 2002 to 2004 at Guantánamo before being sent home to England without being charged with any offense. They filed their case in 2004 seeking damages from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and senior American military officers for violations of their constitutional rights and of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits infringement of religion by the U.S. government against any person. Their claims were dismissed in 2008 by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit when that court held that detainees have no rights under the Constitution and do not count as "persons" for purposes of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Last year, the Supreme Court granted the men’s first petition, vacated the Court of Appeals decision and ordered the D.C. Circuit to reconsider its ruling in light of the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Boumediene v. Bush, which held that Guantánamo is de facto U.S. territory and that detainees have a Constitutional right to habeas corpus.

On remand, the D.C. Circuit reiterated its view that the Constitution does not prohibit torture of detainees at Guantánamo and that detainees still are not “persons” protected from religious abuse. Finally, the Court of Appeals held that, in any event, the government officials involved are immune from liability because the right not to be tortured was not clearly established.  

A second petition filed with the Court on August 24, 2009 pointed out that the Court of Appeals decision stands in conflict with all of the Supreme Court’s recent precedent on Guantánamo and attacked the notion that the prohibitions against torture and religious abuse were not clearly established in 2002 when the petitioners were imprisoned.

Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Attorney Shayana Kadidal, co-counsel on the case, said, "We are disappointed that the Supreme Court has refused to hold Secretary Rumsfeld and the chain of civilian and military command accountable for torture at Guantánamo, and that the Obama administration sought to block torture victims from having their day in court. Where can these men seek justice now for the terrible things that were done to them? The entire world recognizes that torture and religious humiliation are never permissible tools for a government, yet our highest court seems to think otherwise."

CCR has led the legal battle over Guantanamo for the last seven years – sending the first ever habeas attorney to the base and sending the first attorney to meet with a former CIA "ghost detainee" there. CCR has been responsible for organizing and coordinating more than 500 pro bono lawyers across the country in order to represent the men at the base, ensuring that nearly all have the option of legal representation, and is representing detainees at Guantánamo before the Supreme Court  for the third time this term. In addition, CCR has been working to resettle the approximately 60 men who remain at Guantánamo because they cannot return to their country of origin for fear of persecution and torture.

Baach Robinson & Lewis, a Washington, D.C. litigation firm has been in the forefront of detainee litigation, working on behalf of both Guantanamo and Afghan detainees, since early 2004.

 

Murder at Guantanamo? The Mysterious, Unsolved Death of Mohammad Saleh al Hanashi

By Jeffrey S. Kaye, TruthOut.org

 

Posted November 25, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/144178/murder_at_guantanamo_the_mysterious%2C_unsolved_death_of_mohammad_saleh_al_hanashi?page=entire

With recent news reports centering on Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement that some Guantanamo detainees would be prosecuted in federal court and revamped, albeit flawed military commissions, important stories from previous months related to the prison facility continue to sink ever deeper into the swamp of our collective amnesia.

One example is the death that occurred at Guantanamo last June of Yemeni prisoner Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi. Al Hanashi's death was reported as an "apparent suicide," and about four weeks later, Mike Melia of The Associated Press reported that Yemeni officials claimed Al Hanashi died of "asphyxiation." The article vaguely notes that self-strangulation may have been the cause of death.

While self-strangulation is rare, it is possible. However, news reports point out that the prisoner was kept under 24/7 observation (possibly on video) in the Guantanamo prison psychiatric ward. Furthermore, psychiatric patients on this ward are said to be sedated. How could this "suicide" happen? The death is being investigated by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which doesn't inspire trust, as recent revelations have shown it to be capable of some extremely bad behavior on some of its investigations.

But the suicide story has about worn out, as a November 15 Huffington Post article by journalist Naomi Wolf -- who has followed the al Hanashi story -- reports that Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt has confirmed that "the status of the investigation into Mr al-Hanashi's death ... is now a Naval criminal investigation -- meaning that he is no longer considered a suicide but a victim of a murder or a negligent homicide."

On January 17, 2009, al Hanashi was summoned to meet with top Guantanamo commander, Rear Adm. David Thomas, and Army Col. Bruce Vargo, commander of the joint detention group. Afterwards, and with no explanation, al Hanashi never returned to the general prison population and ended up in the prison's psychiatric ward, where he was found dead some months later. No other details are known, though an AP story notes the following (emphasis added):

Attorney Elizabeth Gilson, who represents another detainee at the psychiatric ward, said she heard details about the suicide from her client but cannot divulge them because the information is classified. She described the force-feeding as "abusive and inhumane."

Several journalists, including Naomi Wolf, were on a tour of Guantanamo at the time of al Hanashi's death. They were not allowed to report on the death until after they had left the base.

Who was Mohammad Saleh al Hanashi?

Al Hanashi was no ordinary prisoner. He was a spokesman for the other prisoners, who had selected him last year to be their representative. Like the other four prisoners who have died of supposed suicide at Guantanamo, al Hanashi was a long-term hunger striker. While al Hanashi had been on hunger strike until at least last May, and his weight had fallen under 90 pounds, he was supposed to finally be getting a chance to meet with an attorney.

Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi was a Taliban supporter, who -- according to Guantanamo expert Andy Worthington -- "was one of around 50 prisoners at Guantanamo who had survived a massacre at Qala-i-Janghi, a fort in northern Afghanistan, at the end of November 2001, when, after the surrender of the city of Kunduz, several hundred foreign fighters surrendered to General Rashid Dostum, one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, in the mistaken belief that they would be allowed to return home." This was the same prison revolt and subsequent massacre by U.S., British and Northern Alliance forces where John Walker Lind was also captured and later tortured by U.S. operatives.

The Qala-i-Janghi uprising came only days before a mass prisoner exchange took place with CIA-supported warlord Dostum, which, as New York Times writer James Risen noted recently, resulted in the killing of perhaps as many 2,000 Taliban fighters, who had surrendered at Kunduz. Serious questions have been raised about U.S. involvement or knowledge of the mass killings. Physicians for Human Rights has initiated a campaign to expose the truth about the massacre, having documented the existence of mass graves at Dasht-e-Leili, as well as tampering with the grave sites. According to a U.S. State Department account, witnesses to the killings have been murdered.

General Dostum is a supporter of the Karzai government, and was back in Kabul earlier this month to claim a post in the government's cabinet. According to a McClatchy report, he had to return to Turkey (where he resides periodically in exile) when the U.S. complained about his presence to the Karzai government. The U.S. has been trying to convince both domestic and international critics of its Afghanistan policy that the Afghanistan government can clean up its act, even though President Karzai's claim to legitimacy rests on a phony election that saw over one million fake ballots (about one-quarter of the total votes case, according to a New York Times story). The other major candidate recently pulled out of a run-off election, claiming it couldn't be fairly run.

Al Hanashi's Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) record documents the fact of his November 2001 surrender, his imprisonment and wounding at Qala-i-Janghi, and the fact he was shipped off to Shabraghan Prison, where he spent the next four weeks or so recuperating in the prison hospital. Also in the hospital were survivors of the Northern Alliance transfer from Kunduz, victims of a war crime as thousands were "stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers" (New York Times story). Some of the survivors ended up in Shabraghan Prison, the wounded in its meager hospital facilities.

Did al Hanashi talk with survivors of the Dostum mass killings? Did he hear tales of U.S. Special Operations soldiers or officers involved? Was he killed to keep his silence? We don't know, but there are plenty of other reasons that U.S. authorities may have wanted al Hanashi silenced.

Former Guantanamo inmate, Binyam Mohamed, who knew al Hanashi, believes the 31-year-old Yemeni force-fed hunger striker didn't commit suicide. He told Naomi Wolf recently that reports that al Hanashi was "an upbeat person with no mental problems and would never have considered suicide." As Wolf noted in an article last September:

As their designated representative, al-Hanashi knew which prisoners had claimed to have been tortured or abused, and by whom.

Hence, another theory of possible homicide would be that al Hanashi knew too much about U.S. torture and abuse. A person with some knowledge of the situation at Guantanamo has told me that it's possible that al Hanashi was removed, or allowed to die, simply because he had been too independent, too rebellious and a potential leader inside the prison. Naomi Wolf explained in an article last September how a hunger striker might die from force-feeding.

It is worth considering how easy it would be to do away with a troublesome prisoner being force-fed by merely adjusting the calorie level. If it is too low, the prisoner will starve, but too high a level can also kill, since deliberate, liquid, overfeeding by tube, to which Guantanamo prisoners have reported being subjected, causes vomiting, diarrhea and deadly dehydration that can stop one's heart.

However, at the time of his death, al Hanashi was said to have already terminated his hunger strike.

Another odd coincidence surrounding his death concerns the transfer of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a "high-value" detainee, who has been at Guantanamo since September 2006, to a New York federal court, only a week after al Hanashi was found not breathing in Guantanamo's psych ward. Ghailani was facing charges concerning his alleged role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

The link between Ghailani and al Hanashi is significant for one reason only: According to Andy Worthington, Ghailani, who was tortured in the CIA's black prisons, fingered al Hanashi in 2005 as having been at "'the al-Farouq camp [the main training camp for Arabs, associated in the years before 9/11 with Osama bin Laden] in 1998-99 prior to moving on to the front lines in Kabul."

But according to al Hanashi and all other sources, al Hanashi came to Afghanistan only in early 2001. Hence, his possible testimony at a trial in New York City, establishing that Ghailani's admissions were false, and likely coerced by torture, may have been a hindrance to a government bent on convicting the supposed bomber. Interestingly, as Worthington points out, the other four embassy bombers were not kept in CIA black prisons or tortured, but convicted in a U.S. court for the bombings in May 2001. (Ghailani sits in Metropolitan Correctional Center, still awaiting trial.)

Al Hanashi's death, coming only weeks before he was, after seven long years imprisonment, to meet finally with an attorney, brings to mind the untimely death of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, also at first reported as a suicide, in a prison cell in Libya last May. Al-Libi, too, was supposed to meet soon with people from the outside, according to a report from Newsweek. As is the case with Al-Libi, the al Hanashi death has a strange feel to it. The ACLU has called for an independent investigation into detainee deaths at Guantanamo, including that of Mohammad Saleh al Hanashi.

Perhaps the most telling fact concerning al Hanashi's death is how silent and disinterested the mainstream media, and even some in the blogosphere, seems to be. A leader of the prisoners is reported as having strangled himself. Not long after becoming a spokesperson for the prisoners, al Hanashi is called to see the top officers at the prison, and is never seen again (outside of the psych ward) until he is found dead. By all accounts, he is kept in a part of the prison where there is constant surveillance. Other witnesses have tales to tell, but their stories are kept classified. His death is a possible convenience for any number of state actors, including prison officials, federal prosecutors and those portions of the Obama administration and military concerned with pressing the war in Afghanistan.

Many would like to look away from the crimes done in the name of U.S. "security" at Guantanamo and other "war on terror" prisons in the Bush/Cheney years, and believe that these things are of the past. But increasingly, Americans are waking up to the fact that something very wrong and bad is still occurring regularly at Guantanamo and perhaps other U.S. facilities. The U.S. administration will not even let members of Congress go and interview prisoners in Guantanamo. What do they have to fear?

What will the NCIS investigation reveal about the death of Mohammad Saleh al Hanashi? It's been six months since his death. We deserve some answers now.

 

Horizontal Divider 7

 
 
 

12:19 October 20th, 2009

Battle brewing over Guantanamo and its Chinese Muslim prisoners

Posted by: David Alexander

A big battle is brewing over the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Chinese Muslim inmates held there.

The Supreme Court announced Tuesday it would decide whether federal judges have the power to order the release of the ethnic Uighur prisoners into the United States.

The White House and Congress argue the inmates have never been admitted into the United States under U.S. immigration laws, and judges should not be making those sorts of decisions.

To underscore the point, the U.S. Congress Tuesday approved a spending bill that includes a measure effectively prohibiting Guantanamo prisoners from being released into the United States. The measure would admit them only to face trial.

President Barack Obama has pledged to close Guantanamo by Jan. 22, 2010, but meeting that goal has become increasingly difficult.

Few countries are willing to accept any of the approximately 220 inmates, and the United States continues to debate what to do with them.

The 13 Uighurs — a Turkic Muslim ethnic group from Xinjiang in western China — have been cleared of being suspected terrorists by U.S. authorities.

Many of them had traveled to Afghanistan for weapons training in order to fight the Chinese government before Sept. 11, 2001, and fled to Pakistan after the outbreak of hostilities.

They were captured and handed over to U.S. custody and have been held at Guantanamo Bay for nearly eight years.

Five of the original group of 22 Uighurs were transferred to Albania two years ago. Four more were sent to Bermuda in June.

Solicitor General Elena Kagan told the Supreme Court in a letter Sept. 23 that the south Pacific island of Palau had agreed to accept 12 of the remaining 13 Uighurs.

But only six of the 12 have agreed to resettle there.

 

Meanwhile, pressure is increasing on the White House to close Guantanamo.

Tom Andrews, a former Democratic congressman from Maine, announced the launch Tuesday of the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo.

He was joined by retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard and retired Brigadier General John Johns.

Attacks on closing the prison are “pure politics at its worst,” Andrews said.

The campaign unveiled a new advertisement to air on cable television and the Internet.

For more Reuters political news, click here.

http://blogs.reuters.com/frontrow/2009/10/20/battle-brewing-over-guantanamo-and-its-chinese-muslim-prisoners/

inside GITMO
rtr26pm9_comp2gitmo.jpg

Guard Tower at GITMO
rtr26pm1_compgitmo.jpg

Photo credit: Reuters/Deborah Gembara

(View inside common area of medium security prison at Guantanamo; guard tower at Camp X-Ray detention facility )

Horizontal Divider 7

A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions

9.30.09

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/09/30/a-truly-shocking-guantanamo-story-judge-confirms-that-an-innocent-man-was-tortured-to-make-false-confessions/

Fouad al-Rabiah

In four years of researching and writing about Guantánamo, I have become used to uncovering shocking information, but for sheer cynicism, I am struggling to think of anything that compares to the revelations contained in the unclassified ruling in the habeas corpus petition of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti prisoner whose release was ordered last week by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (PDF). In the ruling, to put it bluntly, it was revealed that the US government tortured an innocent man to extract false confessions and then threatened him until he obligingly repeated those lies as though they were the truth.

The background: lies hidden in plain sight for five years

To establish the background to this story, it is necessary for me to return to my initial response to the ruling a week last Friday, before these revelations had been made public, when, based on what I knew of the case from the publicly available documents, I explained that I was disappointed that the Obama administration had pursued a case against al-Rabiah, alleging that he was a fundraiser for Osama bin Laden and had run a supply depot for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains, for two particular reasons.

The first was because a CIA analyst had interviewed al-Rabiah at Guantánamo in the summer of 2002 and had concluded that he was an innocent man caught at the wrong time and in the wrong place; and the second was because, although al-Rabiah had said that he had met bin Laden and had been present in the Tora Bora mountains, he had provided an innocent explanation for both occurrences. He had, he said, been introduced to bin Laden on a trip to Afghanistan to investigate proposals for a humanitarian aid mission, and he had been at Tora Bora — and compelled to man a supply depot — because he was one of numerous civilians caught up with soldiers of al-Qaeda and the Taliban as he tried to flee the chaos of Afghanistan for Pakistan, and had been compelled to run the depot by a senior figure in al-Qaeda.

These appeared to be valid explanations, especially as al-Rabiah, a 42-year old father of four children, had no history of any involvement with militancy or terrorism, and had, instead, spent 20 years at a management desk job at Kuwait Airways, and had an ownership interest in some health clubs. Moreover, he had a history of legitimate refugee relief work, having taken a six-month approved leave of absence from work in 1994-95 to do relief work in Bosnia, having visited Kosovo with the Kuwaiti Red Crescent in 1998, and having made a trip to Bangladesh in 2000 to delivery kidney dialysis fluid to a hospital in the capital, Dhaka.

As a result, it appeared to me a week last Friday that Judge Kollar-Kotelly granted al-Rabiah’s habeas petition because neither his meeting with bin Laden nor his presence in Tora Bora indicated that he was either a member of, or had supported al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

However, now that Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling has been issued, I realize that the account given by al-Rabiah during his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004 — on which I based my account of his activities — was a tissue of lies, and that the truth, hidden for over six years, is that, like torture victims groomed for show trials throughout the centuries, he made up false stories under torture, and repeated them obediently, fearing further punishment and having been convinced that he would never leave Guantánamo by any other means.

An introduction to the torture revelations, and an endorsement of al-Rabiah’s explanations about his time in Afghanistan

District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-KotellyIn her ruling, Judge Kollar-Kotelly methodically dissected the government’s case to reveal the chilling truth. After noting, initially, that the “evidentiary record” was “surprisingly bare,” because the government “has withdrawn its reliance on most of the evidence and allegations that were once asserted against al-Rabiah, and now relies almost exclusively on al-Rabiah’s ‘confessions’ to certain conduct,” she added, with a palpable sense of disbelief:

Not only did al-Rabiah’s interrogators repeatedly conclude that these same confessions were not believable — which al-Rabiah’s counsel attributes to abuse and coercion, some of which is supported by the record — but it is also undisputed that al-Rabiah confessed to information that his interrogators obtained from either alleged eyewitnesses who are not credible and as to whom the Government has now largely withdrawn any reliance, or from sources that never even existed … If there exists a basis for al-Rabiah’s indefinite detention, it most certainly has not been presented to this Court.

In dealing with al-Rabiah’s background, and his reasons for traveling to Afghanistan, Judge Kollar-Kotelly was required to consider his own assertion that, after a preliminary ten-day visit in July 2001 to identify areas where humanitarian aid might be delivered, he returned in October 2001 “to complete a fact-finding mission related to Afghanistan’s refugee problems and the country’s non-existent medical infrastructure,” against the government’s claim that he was “‘not an aspiring aid worker caught up in the front lines of the United States war against al-Qaeda’ but instead was someone who traveled to Afghanistan in October 2001 as a ‘devotee of Osama bin Laden who ran to bin Laden’s side after September 11th.’”

Concluding that “The evidence in the record strongly supports al-Rabiah’s explanation,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly noted that he had officially requested leave prior to his departure, and quoted from two letters sent to his family. In the first, on October 18, 2001, he explained that “for ten days he assisted with the delivery of supplies to refugees and that he was able to take video ‘reflecting the tragedy of the refugees,’ but that he was unable to leave Afghanistan through Iran (the route he took to enter the country) because the borders had been closed.” As a result, he “wrote in his letter that he and an unspecified number of other persons decided ‘to drive four trucks to Pakistan making our way to Peshawar,’” and he also asked his brother to notify his boss at Kuwait Airlines that he was having difficulties returning to Kuwait on time.

After noting that “The evidence in the record establishes that al-Rabiah did, in fact, travel across Afghanistan towards Peshawar, ultimately getting captured (unarmed) by villagers outside of Jalalabad … on approximately December 25, 2001” (with Maher al-Quwari, a Palestinian who also ended up in Guantánamo), Judge Kollar-Kotelly quoted from a second letter sent to his family, in which — ironically, in light of what was to come — he wrote that he was “detained by the American troops and thanks to God they are good example[s] of humanitarian behavior.” He added that he was “detained pending verification of [his] identity and personality,” and that the “investigation and verification procedures may last for a long time due to the great number of detained Arabs and other persons” who had been fleeing the situation in Afghanistan, which “turned upside down between one day and night and every Arab citizen has become a suspect.”

Discrediting the government’s unreliable witnesses

Moving on to the government’s key allegations — about Osama bin Laden and Tora Bora — Judge Kollar-Kotelly dismissed the allegations regarding al-Rabiah’s supposed activities in Tora Bora, which were made by another prisoner who claimed that he “was told that al-Rabiah was in charge of supplies at Tora Bora,” by noting that, “Although his allegations are filled with inconsistencies and implausibilities, the Government continues to rely on him as an eyewitness.” She also noted that, although the witness had identified al-Rabiah as the man under discussion, from his kunya (nickname), Abu Abdullah al-Kuwaiti, the government had conceded that another Abu Abdullah al-Kuwaiti, an actual al-Qaeda operative named Hadi El-Enazi, was present in Tora Bora, and also noted that an interrogator had expressed doubt about the supposed eyewitness at the time (much of the ruling is redacted, but this seemed to involve a claim that al-Rabiah’s oldest son was with him in Afghanistan, when this was demonstrably not the case).

Judge Kollar-Kotelly also dismissed two other sets of allegations by the supposed eyewitness. Noting further “inconsistencies and impossibilities” in his accounts, she stated that “the Court has little difficulty concluding that [his] allegations are not credible,” and explained that, to reach this conclusion, she had also drawn on statements provided by al-Rabiah’s lawyers, which further undermined his reliability, “based on, among other things, undisputed inconsistencies associated with his allegations against other detainees,” and his medical records, which obviously indicated mental health problems (although the description was redacted). “At a minimum,” she added, “the Government would have had to corroborate [his] allegations with credible and reliable evidence, which it has not done.”

Osama bin Laden, it then transpired, appeared in allegations made by a second prisoner, who “alleged that al-Rabiah attended a feast hosted by Osama bin Laden,” where he “presented bin Laden with a suitcase full of money.” This source also alleged that al-Rabiah “served in various fighting capacities in the Tora Bora mountains,” and that he “funneled money to mujahadeen in Bosnia in 1995.”

After noting that the government had dropped “almost all” of these allegations, except for the one relating to Bosnia, Judge Kollar-Kotelly stated, witheringly, “the only consistency with respect to [these] allegations is that they repeatedly change over time.” For particular condemnation, she singled out one claim that the feast had taken place in August 2001 (when al-Rabiah was in Kuwait, before his return to Afghanistan in October 2001), amongst other more outlandish claims, including an absurd allegation that al-Rabiah had trained the 9/11 hijackers.

As with the first supposed eyewitness, Judge Kollar-Kotelly noted that there were “multiple exhibits in the record demonstrating [his] unreliability as a witness” (although, sadly, the exact number of prisoners against whom he had made verifiably false allegations was redacted), and concluded that, although the many “inconsistencies and impossibilities” in his statements “raise, at a minimum, a serious question about [his] mental capacity to accurately make allegations against al-Rabiah,” the government “did not address them at the Merits Hearing” in August.

After dismissing a third supposed eyewitness, because he had withdrawn his allegation (which was redacted) several months after making it, Judge Kollar-Kotelly dismissed a fourth, even though it was “undisputed” that al-Rabiah actually had contact with him in Afghanistan. Despite redactions, it seems that this man was Maher al-Quwari, and that his statement involved second-hand hearsay about al-Rabiah being seen with a gun. While this was sufficiently weak for the judge not to accept it without further corroboration, she also made a point of discounting it because the supposed witness only “made this allegation while he was undergoing a cell relocation program at Guantánamo called the ‘frequent flier program,’ which prevented a detainee such as [redacted] from resting due to frequent cell movements.”

While the description of a “cell relocation program” sounds relatively benign, Judge Kollar-Kotelly made a point of noting that it was, in fact, a program of sleep deprivation, adding that, “According to a report published by the Senate Armed Services Committee concerning the treatment of detainees in United States custody, sleep deprivation was not a technique that was authorized by the Army Field Manual.” Although she also noted that “sleep deprivation became authorized at Guantánamo by the Secretary of Defense on April 16, 2003, the guidance issued by the Commander of USSOUTHCOM on June 2, 2003 prohibited the use of sleep deprivation for more than ‘four days in succession,’” whereas the supposed witness’s “allegation against al-Rabiah was made after one week of sleep deprivation in the program, and he did not repeat this allegation either before or after the program.”

False confessions obtained through torture

Despite ruling out all of the government’s supposed eyewitnesses, and noting that the government had withdrawn “most of its reliance on these witnesses” by the time of the Merits Hearing, Judge Kollar-Kotelly added that “it is very significant that al-Rabiah’s interrogators apparently believed these allegations at the time they were made, and therefore sought to have al-Rabiah confess to them” — despite the well-chronicled unreliability of the first two supposed witnesses, the withdrawing of the statement made by the third, and the fact, easily perceived by the judge, that the fourth made his statement only after being subjected to sleep deprivation that exceeded established guidelines and that was, therefore, not only unreliable, but also abusive.

The judge also noted the significance of the evidence in the record indicating that al-Rabiah “subsequently confided in interrogators [redacted] that he was being pressured to falsely confess to the allegations discussed above,” and also the significance of the fact that, although “al-Rabiah’s interrogators ultimately extracted confessions from him,” they “never believed his confessions based on the comments they included in their interrogation reports.”

After noting — again with a palpable sense of incredulity — that “These are the confessions that the Government now asks the Court to accept as evidence in this case,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly proceeded to demolish them all, breaking them down into three periods: the first, when “there were no allegations directed toward al-Rabiah and al-Rabiah provided no confessions”; the second, when the supposed eyewitnesses “made their now-discredited allegations and al-Rabiah was told of the allegations against him, but al-Rabiah nevertheless made no confessions”; and the third (which, shockingly, continued “until the present”), when “al-Rabiah confessed to the now-discredited allegations against him, as well as to other ‘evidence’ that interrogators told him they possessed, when, in fact, such evidence did not exist.”

In the first phase, Judge Kollar-Kotelly noted that there was no indication “that interrogators believed al-Rabiah had engaged in any conduct that made him lawfully detainable,” and explained that, “To the contrary, the evidence in the record during this period consists mainly of an assessment made by an intelligence analyst that al-Rabiah should not have been detained.” As discussed in my previous article, this analyst was “a senior CIA intelligence analyst, who, almost uniquely, was also an Arabic expert,” but although I wrote that “it amaze[d] me that no one in the Justice Department, under President Obama, investigated the CIA analyst’s report,” the truth, as revealed in the unclassified ruling, is even bleaker.

It transpires that Justice Department officials had read the report, but tried to discredit the analyst’s verdict, “arguing that it represented the opinion of only one analyst,” ignoring his well-chronicled expertise, and obliging the judge to point out that, “according to the Government’s own evidence, ‘[i]ntelligence analysts undergo rigorous tradecraft training [and] employ specific analytical tools to assist them in sorting and organizing various pieces of information,” and are also “trained to recognize and mitigate biases, not only in the information presented to them, but their own cognitive biases as well.”

In the second phase, despite extensive redactions to the ruling, it is clear that al-Rabiah was repeatedly interrogated, although he “express[ed] frustration to FBI agents that he was repeatedly asked, among other questions, whether he had ever seen Osama bin Laden, and remark[ed] that his answer was ‘no’ and would continue to remain ‘no.’” What happened next, in a “new three-pronged approach,” is unknown, as the details are severely redacted, but it “did not result in any confessions. Al-Rabiah repeatedly denied the allegations against him.”

After this, apparently following some kind of advice given to the lead interrogator (by an unknown party whose identity and suggestions were redacted), the interrogators “began using more aggressive interrogation tactics.” Again, the details are redacted, but enough information is available from passages that were not redacted earlier in the ruling to indicate that these “tactics” included sleep deprivation (the “frequent flier program”), which, as I explained in my previous article, led three British men released in March 2004 — the so-called “Tipton Three,” whose story was dramatized in the film “The Road To Guantánamo” — to explain that al-Rabiah was moved every two hours, over an unspecified period of time (but one that clearly exceeded the four-day recommendation by a substantial margin), leaving him “suffering from serious depression, losing weight in a substantial way, and very stressed because of the constant moves, deprived of sleep and seriously worried about the consequences for his children.”

Possibly in reference to the use of sleep deprivation (although it could also have been another “enhanced interrogation technique”), Judge Kollar-Kotelly explained that, “Once it became authorized, it could not be used on a detainee until ‘the SOUTHCOM Commander ma[de] a determination of “military necessity” and notif[ied] the Secretary [of Defense] in advance’ of its use,” and also made a point of noting that “the Government was unable to produce any evidence that [the interrogator] obtained authorization to use the [redacted] technique with al-Rabiah despite requests by the Court at the Merits Hearing for such evidence.”

Although the other techniques are not described, they undoubtedly included some or all of the following — prolonged isolation, the use of extreme heat and cold, short-shackling in painful stress positions, forced nudity, forced grooming, religious and sexual humiliation, and the use of loud music and noise — because this whole package of techniques, including sleep deprivation, was approved for use at the highest levels of the Bush administration, as a Senate Committee explained in the detailed report in April this year that was cited by the judge (PDF). The program was based on reverse engineering techniques taught in US military schools (the SERE program — Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) to train recruits to resist interrogation if captured by enemy forces.

These techniques were acknowledged to be illegal and, moreover, were intended to produce false confessions, but this did not prevent senior Bush officials from pushing for their implementation, and, in al-Rabiah’s case, they duly led to his conversion from an innocent man who refused to falsely confess to allegations produced by unreliable witnesses into a modern-day version of the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, the seventeenth century “witches” of Salem and elsewhere, the victims of Stalin’s show trials, or the captured US pilots on whom the North Koreans had practiced the techniques adopted by the SERE schools: a broken man prepared not only to falsely confess to any lies put before him, but also prepared to learn these confessions and repeat them as his masters saw fit.

As the ruling makes clear, between redactions, “The following day marked a turning point in al-Rabiah’s interrogations,” and “From that point forward, al-Rabiah confessed to the allegations that interrogators described to him.” Despite the extensive redactions, the following passage from the ruling makes clear the full horror of his confessions:

Al-Rabiah’s confessions all follow the same pattern: Interrogators first explain to al-Rabiah the “evidence” they have in their possession (and that, at the time, they likely believed to be true). Al-Rabiah then requests time to pray (or to think more about the evidence) before making a “full” confession. Finally, after a period of time, al-Rabiah provides a fill confession to the evidence through elaborate and incredible explanations that the interrogators themselves do not believe. This pattern began with his confession that he met with Osama bin Laden, continued with his confession that he undertook a leadership role in Tora Bora, and repeated itself multiple other times with respect to “evidence” that the Government has not even attempted to rely on as reliable or credible.

In the following pages of the ruling, which are again fill of redactions, it is nevertheless possible to glimpse the progress of this game that was not only grim and cynical, but also potentially deadly (because, as a prisoner put forward for a trial by Military Commission, it was always possible that the government would have pressed for the death sentence had al-Rabiah been convicted).

For page after page the distressing truth peeks out: al-Rabiah “did not know what to admit” when his interrogators explained that his “full confession did not incorporate a description concerning a suitcase full of money that he allegedly gave bin Laden”; they “began to question the truthfulness of his confessions almost immediately”; they “began ‘grilling’ al-Rabiah concerning [redacted]”; al-Rabiah “was interrogated [redacted] during which he made a full confession regarding his activities at Tora Bora”; interrogators “pressed for additional details concerning Tora Bora”; they “became increasingly convinced that his confessions [redacted]”; they “concluded in one interrogation report [redacted]”; “One week later, his interrogator concluded [redacted]”; “After several additional interrogation sessions, al-Rabiah’s interrogators concluded simply [redacted].”

Readers can fill in the gaps through the judge’s response to the redacted passages. “Incredibly,” she wrote, “these are the confessions that the Government has asked the Court to accept as truthful in this case.”

Al-Rabiah explains his cooperation with the interrogators; threats and punishment described

Judge Kollar-Kotelly then dismissed further allegations, which again, were mostly redacted but included the following ironic gem: “The Government has not even attempted to explain how someone with no known connection to al-Wafa [a Saudi charity regarded, during Guantánamo’s “witch-hunt” phase, with particular suspicion] and who had never even been to Afghanistan longer than a few weeks could ascend to such an honored position, and no credible explanation is contained in the record.”

She then moved on to al-Rabiah’s own explanations of how he came to make false confessions, noting that he had stated that, shortly after his arrival at Guantánamo, “a senior [redacted] interrogator came to me and said, ‘There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.”

This is deeply disturbing, of course, as it indicates that at least one senior interrogator recognized that the Bush administration’s refusal to recognize that there were innocent men at Guantánamo — and it has been clear for many years that hundreds of innocent men were held, who had no connection whatsoever to any form of militancy, let alone terrorism — had set in motion a system in which, whether voluntarily or not, all the innocent men at Guantánamo were expected to make false confessions, either so that they could continue to be labeled as “enemy combatants” on release, to maintain the illusion that Guantánamo was full of “the worst of the worst,” or, as in al-Rabiah’s case, so that they could be tricked and transformed into terrorist sympathizers and facilitators.

For some (and it has been confirmed by a former interrogator that at least 100 prisoners in Guantánamo were subjected to SERE-derived “enhanced interrogation”), confessions clearly came easily, and without the use of abuse or torture, but for others, including al-Rabiah, “pressure” was involved. Judge Kollar-Kotelly drew on a declaration from March this year, in which he explained that his confessions arose out of “scenarios offered … by [his] interrogators … which [he] believed to be the story they wanted [him] to tell and which [he] felt pressured to adopt” (emphasis added). As he also explained:

[M]y interrogators told me they knew I had met with Osama bin Laden, that other detainees had said I met with Osama bin Laden, that there was nothing wrong with simply meeting Osama bin Laden, and that I should admit meeting him so I could be sent home … In about August 2004, shortly before my CSRT hearing [the tribunal at which al-Rabiah repeated his approved confessions in detail], my interrogators told me the CSRT was just a show that would allow the United States to “save face.” My interrogators told me no one leaves Guantánamo innocent, and told me I would be sent home to Kuwait if I “admitted” some of the false things I had said in my interrogations. The interrogators also told me that I would never go home again if I denied these things, because the United States government would never admit I had been wrongly held.

In a key passage, he spelled out what being “pressured” meant. As the judge explained, he stated that “he made his confessions to reduce the abuse meted out by his interrogators ‘to obtain confessions that suited what [they] thought they knew or what they wanted [him] to say.’ He maintained his confessions over time because ‘the interrogators would continue to abuse me anytime I attempted to repudiate any of these false allegations.’” As she also noted:

There is substantial evidence in the record supporting al-Rabiah’s claims. The record is replete with examples of al-Rabiah’s interrogators emphasizing a stark dichotomy — if he confessed to the allegations against him, his case would be turned over to [redacted] so that he could return to Kuwait; if he did not confess, he would not return to Kuwait, and his life would become increasingly miserable.

Through the veil of redactions, it is clear that al-Rabiah attempted, on more than one occasion, to withdraw his confessions, but that his interrogators threatened to withdraw something (food? comfort items?) as a result, and Judge Kollar-Kotelly also noted that punishment, as well as the threat of punishment, was meted out to him. “The record,” she wrote, “also supports al-Rabiah’s claims that he was punished for recanting.” Examples provided by the judge were redacted, but the following passage, in which she discussed further abuse as a result of the interrogators’ frustrations regarding al-Rabiah’s inability to invent a coherent false narrative, was not. She wrote:

The record contains evidence that al-Rabiah’s interrogators became increasingly frustrated because his confessions contained numerous inconsistencies or implausibilities. As a result, al-Rabiah’s interrogators began using abusive techniques that violated the Army Field Manual and the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The first of these techniques included threats of rendition to places where al-Rabiah would either be tortured and/or would never be found.

These threats were made on at least four occasions, and, as the judge explained, “were also reinforced by placing al-Rabiah into the frequent flier program,” discussed above. It is also apparent that the threats continued throughout this period, as the judge also noted that “al-Rabiah’s interrogators continued to threaten him [redacted].”

After making a point that, as explained in the Army Field Manual, “prohibited techniques [are] not necessary to gain the cooperation of interrogation sources,” and, in fact, that the use of these methods is likely to “yield unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly added that, “Underscoring the impropriety of these techniques is the fact that [redacted], al-Rabiah’s lead interrogator, was disciplined for making similar threats during the same period toward a Guantánamo detainee who was also one of the alleged eyewitnesses against al-Rabiah … for which he was disciplined” (the details, predictably, were redacted).

Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s devastating conclusions

Judge Kollar-Kotelly added, pointedly, “These abusive techniques did not result in any additional confessions from al-Rabiah, although he continued to parrot his previous confessions with varying degrees of consistency,” and then reached her devastating conclusion:

The Court agrees with the assessment of al-Rabiah’s interrogators, as well as al-Rabiah’s counsel in this case, that al-Rabiah’s confessions are not credible. Even beyond the countless inconsistencies associated with his confessions that interrogators identified throughout his years of detention, the confessions are also entirely incredible. The evidence in the record reflects that, in 2001, al-Rabiah was a 43 year old who was overweight, suffered from health problems, and had no known history of terrorist activities or links to terrorist activities. He had no military experience except for two weeks of compulsory basic training in Kuwait, after which he received a medical exemption. He had never traveled to Afghanistan prior to 2001. Given these facts, it defied logic that in October 2001, after completing a two-week leave form at Kuwait Airlines where he had worked for twenty years, al-Rabiah traveled to Tora Bora and began telling senior al-Qaeda leaders how they should organize their supplies in a six square mile mountain complex that he had never previously seen and that was occupied by people whom he had never met, while at the same time acting as a supply logistician and mediator of disputes that arose among various fighting factions.

It remained only for Judge Kollar-Kotelly to replay some of the more obvious discrepancies in al-Rabiah’s “confessions” to demolish the government’s claims that they should be accepted as “reliable and credible,” and to refute the government’s argument that, “even if al-Rabiah’s confessions in 2003 were the product of abuse or coercion … the taint … would have dissipated” by the time of his CSRT in 2004, when he provided the painstakingly detailed and superficially plausible false confession that was the only publicly available account of his activities until Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling was released.

Taking exception to the government’s argument “for both factual and legal reasons,” the judge took particular note of the role played by al-Rabiah’s lead interrogator, “who extracted al-Rabiah’s confessions and punished his recantations,” noting that he “continued to make ‘appearances’ at al-Rabiah’s interrogations at least as late as [redacted] — after al-Rabiah’s testimony in his CSRT proceedings.” She also explained, “Such ‘appearances’ appear to have been terrifying events for al-Rabiah given the description included in a [redacted] interrogation report” (the details of which were, again, redacted).

On a legal basis, she dismissed the government’s argument by explaining that, although “it is certainly true in the criminal context that coerced confessions do not necessarily render subsequent confessions inadmissible because the coercion can be found to have dissipated,” there needs to be evidence of “a ‘clean break’ between the coercion and the later confessions,” which is simply not available in al-Rabiah’s case. “If anything,” she concluded, “the evidence suggests that there was not a ‘clean break’ between the coercion and his later statements because there is evidence that [redacted] continued to appear at al-Rabiah’s interrogation sessions through at least September 2004” (the date redacted in the paragraph above).

As a final stab at the government, she mentioned a statement made by al-Rabiah in May 2005, and submitted to his first annual Administrative Review Board (the military panels that reviewed the bases for prisoners’ ongoing detention), which had not surfaced until the Merits Hearing, in which al-Rabiah attempted to set the record straight, “recant[ing] all of his previous confessions with the sole exception of one admission that he saw [but did not meet] Osama bin Laden during his July 2001 trip to Afghanistan.”

After dealing with a few more ingenious but flawed claims by the government, it remained only for Judge Kollar-Kotelly to recap the whole sorry saga, and to deliver the final words to restore Fouad al-Rabiah’s liberty:

During the merits Hearing, the Government expressly relied on “Occam’s Razor,” a scientific and philosophic rule suggesting that the simplest of competing explanations is preferred to the more complex … The Government’s simple explanation for the evidence in this case is that al-Rabiah made confessions that the Court should accept as true. The simple response is that the Court does not accept confessions that even the Government’s own interrogators did not believe. The writ of habeas corpus shall issue.

Final words

Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling will, hopefully, be recalled in years to come as one of the most significant examples of a judge attempting to redress some of the most egregious injustices perpetrated in Guantánamo’s long, dark history. The shocking sub-text to this story is that al-Rabiah is not the only prisoner to have been brutalized into making false confessions, and then being required to repeat them. Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi put forward for a trial by Military Commission, made similar claims in a statement posted here, and, as I mentioned above, it is also clear that SERE-derived “enhanced interrogation techniques” were applied to at least 100 prisoners in Guantánamo between 2002 and 2004, above and beyond those like Mohammed al-Qahtani and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, whose stories are well-known. Many of these men — all the Europeans, other Arabs who had the misfortune to speak good English or to have visited the United States — have been released, their false confessions (like those made by the “Tipton Three” after months of abuse, before their lawyers proved one of them was working in a shop in England when he was supposedly videotaped at a training camp) filed away, used to justify their lifelong label as “enemy combatants,” but not leading, as with Fouad al-Rabiah, to a court appearance where the supposed evidence will ever be tested.

Al-Rabiah was fortunate to meet a judge with an inquiring and diligent mind, and an acute awareness of the many problems with the gathering and interpretation of information at Guantánamo, but others have not yet had an opportunity to do the same, and although further habeas petitions are forthcoming, and others are scheduled to face either trials by Military Commission or federal court trials, where similar patterns of false allegations followed by torture and false confessions may be detected, it troubles me that the 50 or so prisoners identified by officials last week as being candidates for indefinite detention — described by the New York Times as those who “are a continuing danger to national security but who cannot be brought to trial for various reasons, like evidence tainted by harsh interrogations” — may also have been caught up in a cynical cycle of false allegations, torture and false confessions.

As David Cynamon, one of Fouad al-Rabiah’s attorneys, explained to me in an email exchange:

To date, the debate about torture in the US has been skewed by the fact that the admitted victims of torture are also admitted al-Qaeda leaders, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This gives the Cheneys and Wall Street Journal types the argument that torture was justified to get valuable information from these hardened terrorists. I know this argument is wrong, but it’s being made, with some effect. But what happens when you declare the Geneva Conventions “quaint,” and lift all limits, is that pretty quickly the abusive interrogation techniques are not being limited to the KSMs but are being applied to innocent prisoners like Fouad al-Rabiah, who have no valuable intelligence because they have no connection with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Instead, they are tortured in support of a cynical and misguided dictum that there can be no innocent men in Guantánamo.

It is hard to believe that the US could ever have sunk so low. And that the new Administration is keeping us down there. The Obama Department of Justice, with Attorney General Holder piously proclaiming that this Administration repudiates torture, and follows the rule of law, in fact is following the Bush playbook to the letter. In this case, the DoJ defended the abusive and coercive interrogation techniques used against Fouad. Thank God, though, that we have an independent judiciary. The importance of the writ of habeas corpus and independent judges has never been more clear.

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

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

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

Horizontal Divider 7

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A Yemeni detainee at Guantanamo Bay has died of an "apparent suicide," U.S. military officials said.

The Joint Task Force that runs the U.S. prison in Cuba said guards found 31-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih unresponsive and not breathing in his cell Monday night.

In a Tuesday statement, the military said the detainee was pronounced dead by a doctor after "extensive lifesaving measures had been exhausted."

The Yemeni prisoner, known as Al-Hanashi has been held without charge at Guantanamo since February 2002. Military records show he was about 31. His is the fourth apparent suicide at Guantanamo.

The U.S. military says the remains will be autopsied by a pathologist from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

Horizontal Divider 7

5.25.09

Global Insight: Obama’s Guantánamo dilemma

By Edward Luce

Published: May 25 2009 18:04 | Last updated: May 25 2009 18:04

By giving his most detailed speech so far on terrorist detainees on Thursday, Barack Obama was hoping to persuade others to drop the subject.

Unfortunately for Mr Obama, who wants to direct the conversation to more forward-looking topics, such as healthcare reform and a possible Arab-Israeli peace process, the turmoil surrounding treatment of alleged terrorists is likely to persist.

That is partly because he has adopted a messy position himself. On the one hand Mr Obama has said he will close the Guantánamo detention centre by next January. On the other, his administration continues to use George W. Bush’s definition of the “war on terror” to detain the most dangerous ones indefinitely – just not on Cuban soil, or American, if Congress continues to get its way.

Mr Obama is unlikely to get much help from his Democratic colleagues. From the left, he faces a growing cry of betrayal. His decision to “look forward, not back” means that the Bush lawyers who drafted the memos reclassifying torture as legal are unlikely to be prosecuted.

Nor does Mr Obama want to set up a “truth commission” to investigate post 9/11 torture. Such a move might put the politics on ice for a few months. Then it would return squared. Mr Obama would be faced with a dilemma: choose again to “look forward” and be branded a traitor to the high ideals on which he campaigned; or prosecute those found culpable and risk igniting a real backlash against his presidency.

It is worth remembering that half the American people believe “waterboarding” is justified, according to polls – a far higher number than those who do not. A small majority also believe it is wrong to close Guantánamo. These are not diehard conservatives. Many are Democrats.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Mr Obama is getting little help from centrist colleagues. Last week, almost all Democrats joined their Republican counterparts in the Senate to vote down an $80m (€57m, £50m) appropriation to pay for the closure of Gitmo. They argued that it was wrong to close the facility before a policy had been devised to rehouse its 240 detainees.

This is understandable. Mr Obama made an error in announcing the closure before he had devised a new policy. But their real motive was more prosaic. Democrats don’t want alleged terrorists to set foot on American soil. And they will not permit reason to get in the way of a good argument.

No prisoner has ever escaped a federal “supermax” prison. Even if it were a possibility, it would surely be less frightening to have a terrorist suspect escape into your community than a convicted paedophile or psychopath. The latter two would know how to blend in. More importantly, America will have little chance of persuading other countries to take some of the Gitmo detainees if it refuses to take any itself.

All of which makes Dick Cheney’s increasingly bitter interventions fairly useful for Mr Obama. Leaving aside the suspicion that his real target is Mr Bush, who put an end to most “enhanced interrogation techniques” in 2004, Mr Cheney’s stridency has served to blunt much of the disillusion felt by Mr Obama’s liberal friends.

It also focuses attention on the fact that the shrinking Republican party is letting Mr Cheney stand in as its leader. Since Mr Cheney has had much to do with why it is shrinking, this can hardly be a bad thing for Mr Obama. Mr Cheney has asked for information about the results of the interrogations to be declassified. Mr Obama should comply.

That way we could establish the accuracy of allegations, by two intelligence officers, that Mr Cheney and others pushed for the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah in the forlorn hope of turning up evidence linking al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.

The timing fits the build-up to the Iraq war. The first was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. The second 83 times in August 2002.

“They were legal, justified, essential and entirely the right thing to do,” Mr Cheney said.

Mr Obama should let the facts speak for themselves. Did these two waterboardees tell interrogators what they wanted to hear? And what was that precisely? If Mr Obama cannot change the conversation, then he should send it back to where it belongs.

Horizontal Divider 7

Obama Pushes To

Close

Guantanamo Bay Prison 

And Ending Bush

"Season Of Fear"

May 22 2009 Obama / GITMO

Calling the last 8 years a "season of fear", President Obama continued to push ahead with his plans to shut down Guantanamo Bay prison which has been holding hundreds of terror suspects without trial for many years.

 

The President made his speech in a building that houses copies of the constitution and the bill of rights. The President referenced those documents in his speech saying "We can not keep this country safe unless we enlist our most fundamental values"

 

Here is a recap of our (THEUPTAKE.org)  twitter feed on the speech:

"Our values have been our best national security asset". Enemies surrender to us in battles because they know they will treated well

"We have been the nation that shuts down torture chambers" Our govt. made some hasty decisions based on fear rather than foresight. Trimmed facts- set aside principles as "luxuries"

Obama: "Ad hoc" ways to fight terrorism was neither legal or effective. Obama: I banned the use of "enhanced techniques" of interrogation. - Not effective! (HUGE APPLAUSE)

Obama: Waterboarding undermines the rule of law and increases the will of our enemies to fight us, risks the lives of our troops.

Obama: Waterboarding did not advance our war against terrorism, it undermined it.

Obama: on closing Gitmo: we had a total of 3 convictions of terrorist in 7 years. Meanwhile 500+ detainees were released by Bush.

Obama: Gitmo forced us to defend positions that undermined the rule of law.

Obama: Gitmo likely created more terrorists than it every contained. Cost of keeping it open are more than closing it.

Obama: Gitmo is a "misguided experiment" , a "mess" the Obama admin has to clean up.

Obama: we are not going to release anyone from Gitmo if it endangers our security.

Obama: whenever possible we will try terrorists in our federal courts. Obama: Terrorists have been tried and convicted in our federal courts. Detainees from Gitmo will face the same.

Obama: Detainees that violate the rules of war will be tried by military commissions. This is the appropriate venue

Obama: This is not a reversal on my part. I've said I support military commissions with reforms. those are the reforms we are now making.

Obama: 21 Gitmo detainees ordered released by the courts. We will abide by those rulings.

Obama: We have approved transfer of 50 Gitmo detainees to their native country for detention.

Obama: Those remaining Gitmo detainees who are dangerous to our country and can't be prosecuted, they will not be released.

Obama: However, any prolong detention of Gitmo prisoners must be justified and legal. Should not be decision of any one man.

Obama: "You can imagine the direct mail pieces" from a cong. vote on closing Gitmo. Doing what is right more important than posturing

Obama: Democracy depends on transparency. Some information must be shielded to protect our troops and National Security.

Obama: We seek the to do what's right over the long term, not what's politically expedient.

Obama: Not going to refight the last 8 years. Let's focus on the future. Media enables the finger pointing blame game. 

Obama: "if we can not stand with our core values, then we are not keeping faith with the documents (constitution) enshrined in this hall"

 

Horizontal Divider 7

 
GITMO CLOSING
 INFORMATION

newtinlog0.jpg

Horizontal Divider 7

 
WASHINGTON, April 19 2009 (Reuters) - CIA interrogators used the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, 183 times and 83 times on another al Qaeda suspect, The New York Times said on Sunday.

The Times said a 2005 Justice Department memorandum showed that Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner questioned in the CIA's overseas detention program in August 2002, was waterboarded 83 times, although a former CIA officer had told news media he had been subjected to only 35 seconds underwater before talking.

President Barack Obama has banned the use of waterboarding, overturning a Bush administration policy that it did not constitute torture.

The Justice Department memo said the simulated drowning technique was used on Mohammed 183 times in March 2003. The Times said some copies of the memos appeared to have the number of waterboardings redacted while others did not.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating the CIA interrogation program, which under President George W. Bush also included slamming prisoners into walls, shackling them in uncomfortable positions and depriving them of sleep.

Bush administration officials had claimed such methods were needed to get information but the repeated use of the waterboard on Zubaydah and Mohammed were sure to raise questions about its effectiveness. (Writing by Bill Trott; editing by Chris Wilson)

Horizontal Divider 7

The New York Times
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.



March 29, 2009

Spanish Court Weighs

 Inquiry on Torture for 6 Bush-Era Officials

LONDON — A high-level Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation against six former Bush administration officials, including former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, on whether they violated international law by providing a legalistic framework to justify the use of torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an official close to the case said.

The case was sent to the prosecutor’s office for review by Baltasar Garzón, the crusading investigative judge who ordered the arrest of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The official said that it was “highly probable” that the case would go forward and that it could lead to arrest warrants.

The move represents a step toward ascertaining the legal accountability of top Bush administration officials for allegations of torture and mistreatment of prisoners in the campaign against terrorism. But some American experts said that even if warrants were issued their significance could be more symbolic than practical, and that it was a near certainty that the warrants would not lead to arrests if the officials did not leave the United States.

The complaint under review also names John C. Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who wrote secret legal opinions saying the president had the authority to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, and Douglas J. Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy.

The move was not entirely unexpected, as several human rights groups have been asking judges in different countries to indict Bush administration officials. One group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, had asked a German prosecutor for such an indictment, but the prosecutor declined.

Judge Garzón, however, has built an international reputation by bringing high-profile cases against human rights violators as well as international terrorist networks like Al Qaeda. The arrest warrant for General Pinochet led to his detention in Britain, although he never faced a trial. The judge has also been outspoken about the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

Spain can claim jurisdiction in the case because five citizens or residents of Spain who were prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have said they were tortured there. The five had been indicted in Spain but their cases were dismissed after the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that evidence obtained under torture was not admissible.

The 98-page complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, is based on the Geneva Conventions and the 1984 Convention Against Torture, which is binding on 145 countries, including Spain and the United States. Countries that are party to the torture convention have the authority to investigate torture cases, especially when a citizen has been abused.

The complaint was prepared by Spanish lawyers, who also relied on legal experts in the United States and Europe, and filed by a Spanish human rights group, the Association for the Dignity of Prisoners.

The National Court in Madrid, which specializes in international crimes, assigned the case to Judge Garzón. His acceptance of the case and referral of it to the prosecutor made it likely that a criminal investigation would follow, the official said.

Even so, arrest warrants, if they are issued, could still be months away.

Gonzalo Boye, the Madrid lawyer who filed the complaint, said that the six Americans cited had had well-documented roles in approving illegal interrogation techniques, redefining torture and abandoning the definition set by the 1984 Torture Convention.

Secret memorandums by Mr. Yoo and other top administration lawyers helped clear the way for aggressive policies like waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, which the C.I.A. director, the attorney general and other American officials have said amount to torture.

The other Americans named in the complaint were William J. Haynes II, former general counsel for the Department of Defense; Jay S. Bybee, Mr. Yoo’s former boss at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and David S. Addington, who was the chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mr. Yoo declined to comment on Saturday, saying that he had not seen or heard of the petition.

Mr. Feith, who was the top policy official at the Pentagon when the prison at Guantánamo was established, said he did not make the decision on interrogation methods and was baffled by the allegations. “I didn’t even argue for the thing I understand they’re objecting to,” he said.

The other former officials either could not be reached Saturday or did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Their defenders have said their legal analyses and policy-making on interrogation practices, conducted under great pressure after the 2001 terrorist attacks, are now being unfairly second-guessed after many years without a terrorist attack on the United States.

But Mr. Boye said that lawyers should be held accountable for the effects of their work. Noting that the association he represents includes many lawyers, he said: “This is a case from lawyers against lawyers. Our profession does not allow us to misuse our legal knowledge to create a pseudo-legal frame to justify, stimulate and cover up torture.”

He said that Spanish citizens were tortured and that Spain, as a signatory of the Torture Convention, was obliged to pursue such a case.

Prosecutions and convictions under the Torture Convention have been rare.

Reed Brody, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch who has specialized in this issue, said that even though torture was widely practiced, there were numerous obstacles, including “a lack of political will, the problem of gathering evidence in a foreign country and the failure of countries to pass the necessary laws.”

This year for the first time, the United States used a law that allows for the prosecution in the United States of torture in other countries. On Jan. 10, a Miami court sentenced Chuckie Taylor, the son of the former Liberian president, to 97 years in a federal prison for torture, even though the crimes were committed in Liberia.

Last October, when the Miami court handed down the conviction, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey applauded the ruling and said: “This is the first case in the United States to charge an individual with criminal torture. I hope this case will serve as a model to future prosecutions of this type.”

The United States, however, would be expected to ignore an extradition request for former officials, although other investigations within the United States have been proposed. Calls for the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation have so far been resisted by the Obama administration, but for more than four years, the Justice Department ethics office has been conducting its own investigation into the work of Mr. Yoo and some of his colleagues.

While the officials named in the complaint have not addressed these specific accusations, Mr. Yoo defended his work in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal on March 7, warning that the Obama administration risked harming national security if it punished lawyers like himself.

“If the administration chooses to seriously pursue those officials who were charged with preparing for the unthinkable, today’s intelligence and military officials will no doubt hesitate to fully prepare for those contingencies in the future,” Mr. Yoo wrote.

Scott Shane and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.


Horizontal Divider 7

Justice Department Ends "Enemy Combatant" Definition For Gitmo Detainees

NEDRA PICKLER | March 13, 2009  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/13/justice-department-ends-e_n_174806.html

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday that it is abandoning one of President George W. Bush's key phrases in the war on terrorism: enemy combatant The Justice Department said in legal filings that it will no longer use the term to justify holding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

But that's won't change much for the detainees at the U.S. naval base in Cuba _ Obama still asserts the military's authority to hold them. But his Justice Department says that authority comes from Congress and the international laws of war, not from the president's own wartime power as Bush had argued.

In another court filing Thursday, the Obama administration tried to protect top Bush administration military officials from lawsuits brought by prisoners who say they were tortured while being held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Obama administration's position on use of the phrase "enemy combatants" came in response to a deadline by U.S. District Judge John Bates, who is overseeing lawsuits of detainees challenging their detention. Bates asked the administration to give its definition of whom the United States may hold as an "enemy combatant."

The filing back's Bush's stance on the authority to hold detainees, even if they were not captured on the battlefield in the course of hostilities. In their lawsuits, detainees have argued that only those who directly participated in hostilities should be held.

"The argument should be rejected," the Justice Department said in its filing. "Law-of-war principles do not limit the United States' detention authority to this limited category of individuals. A contrary conclusion would improperly reward an enemy that violates the laws of war by operating as a loose network and camouflaging its forces as civilians."

Retired Army Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a former Guantanamo official who has since become critical of the legal process, said it's a change in nothing but semantics.

"There's absolutely no change in the definition," Abraham said in a telephone interview. "To say this is a kinder more benevolent sense of justice is absolutely false. ... I think the only thing they've done is try to separate themselves from the energy of the debate" by eliminating Bush's phrasing.

 

Attorney General Eric Holder also submitted a declaration to the court outlining President Barack Obama's efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility within a year and determine where to place the 240 people held there. He said there could be "further refinements" to the administration's position as that process goes on.

"Promptly determining the appropriate disposition of those detained at Guantanamo Bay is a high priority for the president," Holder wrote.

The Justice Department says prisoners can only be detained if their support for al-Qaida, the Taliban or "associated forces" was "substantial." But it does not define the terms.

"The particular facts and circumstances justifying detention will vary from case to case, and may require the identification and analysis of various analogues from traditional international armed conflicts," the government lawyers wrote. "Accordingly, the contours of the `substantial support' and `associated forces' bases of detention will need to be further developed in their application to concrete facts in individual cases."

On the topic of former administration officials, the Justice Department argued in a filing with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that holding military officials liable for their treatment of prisoners could cause them to make future decisions based on fear of litigation rather than appropriate military policy.

The suit before the appeals court was brought by four British citizens _ Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal Al-Harith _ who were sent back to Great Britain in 2004. The defendants in the case include former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and retired Gen. Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The men say they were beaten, shackled in painful stress positions and threatened by dogs during their time at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. They also say they were harassed while practicing their religion, including forced shaving of their beards, banning or interrupting their prayers, denying them copies of the Koran and prayer mats and throwing a copy of the Koran in a toilet.

They contend in their lawsuit that the treatment violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which provides that the "government shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion."

The appeals court ruled against them early last year, saying because the men were foreigners held outside the United States, they do not fall within the definition of a "person" protected by the act.

But later in the year, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees have some rights under the Constitution. So the Supreme Court instructed the appeals court to reconsider the lawsuit in light of their decision.

Eric Lewis, attorney for the four, said Friday that military officials should be subject to liability when they order torture.

"The upshot of the Justice Department's position is that there is no right of detainees not to be tortured and that officials who order torture should be protected," Lewis said.

Last month in another court filing, the Justice Department sided with the Bush White House by arguing that detainees at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.

 

Horizontal Divider 7

92 missing CIA tapes

Federal authorities confirmed on 2 March that 92 videotapes showing the interrogation of detainees at secret prisons were destroyed in 2005 by the CIA. Reporters Without Borders asks that the new Obama administration lead an investigation into this infringement of the American people’s constitutional rights and punish those who are responsible.

“The sheer number of videotapes destroyed by the CIA confirms that the agency systematically tried to hide from the public the illegal interrogation techniques used by the previous administration. The public has the right to know what the government is doing and be confident that those in power are upholding the democratic values upon which this country is based,” the worldwide press freedom organization said.

“We hope that the secrecy and lack of transparency that prevailed during the beginning of this decade will be replaced with freer access to information and clear visibility of current governmental practices. The government must thoroughly investigate this breach of access to information and hold accountable those responsible. American society cannot hold back as it investigates these grave violations committed under the presidency of George W. Bush in the name of the ’war on terror.’ This investigation into the former administration’s actions will be debated by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 4 March. The credibility of the United States’ stance on human rights hangs in the balance over this,” added the organization.

Full Story

 

Horizontal Divider 7

The New York Times
 
Original  Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/21/us/21gitmo.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig

 
 
February 21, 2009

Guantánamo Meets Geneva Rules, Study Finds

A Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center concludes that the prison complies with the humanitarian requirements of the Geneva conventions, but it makes many recommendations for increasing human contact among the prisoners, according to two government officials who have read portions of it.

The review, requested by President Obama on the second day of his administration, is due to be delivered to the White House this weekend.

The request, made as part of a plan to close the center within a year, was widely seen as an effort by the new administration to defuse the power of allegations during the Bush administration that there were widespread abuses at Guantánamo, and that many detainees were suffering severe psychological effects after years of isolation.

The review, conducted by Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, the vice chief of naval operations, describes a series of steps that could be taken to allow detainees to speak to one another more often and to engage in group activities, the government officials said. For years, critics of the prison have said that many detainees spend as many as 23 hours a day within the confines of cement cells and were only permitted recreation alone in fenced-off outdoor pens.

The report, which Admiral Walsh is scheduled to discuss publicly at the Pentagon next week, is being presented to a White House that some government officials have described as caught off guard by the extreme emotions and political cross-currents provoked by Guantánamo. Some critics said that the report’s conclusions are likely to intensify the debate about the prison, and put the Obama White House for the first time in the position of defending it.

Included in the report are recommendations to increase social contact among the 16 prisoners described by the Bush administration as “high value detainees,” the men once held in secret overseas prisons by the Central Intelligence Agency. Among them are the accused architects of many major terrorist attacks, including those of Sept. 11, 2001.

According to one official, the report notes that some detainees have great difficulty communicating from cell to cell, a contention that many detainees’ lawyers have also made. Though many detainees at Guantánamo are held in their cells alone, the Pentagon has long insisted that none of the men are held in solitary confinement. Military officials instead have said the prisoners are held in “single-occupancy cells.”

A Pentagon official who has seen the report said that a military team with Admiral Walsh conducted a detailed review of many specific allegations of abuse that critics have made about the prison, and that the team concluded that the Pentagon was in compliance with the requirements of the Geneva conventions. The review included some of the most contentious issues, including the forced feeding of hunger-striking detainees and claims that a large number of the prisoners are suffering from psychosis as a result of conditions in the detention center.

The White House did not immediately respond on Friday to a request for comment.

It has been clear that some Pentagon officials have continued to press the case that the Bush administration’s approach to handling detainee issues — and the Guantánamo Bay prison itself — should not be abandoned. The report is likely to continue that behind-the-scenes struggle.

One Pentagon official, speaking anonymously because no one had been authorized to discuss the report publicly, said it showed that the Bush administration created a humane detention camp that has been unfairly characterized by critics. Speaking of the remaining 245 detainees there, this official said the report underscored that if the men are moved, they may “go from a humane environment to a less humane environment.”

Critics of the Guantánamo Bay detention center, which is located on the grounds of an American naval base at the eastern end of Cuba, have been preparing for Admiral Walsh’s report. They said they were concerned that the new administration would use it to avoid major alterations to Guantánamo during the year President Obama has said it may take to close the prison.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer for Guantánamo detainees at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that she and other lawyers found that conditions have remained bleak there even after the start of the new administration.

Ms. Gutierrez said that a report by the rights center, to be released next week, concludes that two major prison buildings at the detention camp, known as Camp 5 and Camp 6, should be closed immediately. She said prisoners there continue to be held in what she called isolation for as long as 24 hours a day, that psychological difficulties are treated as disciplinary infractions, and that many cells in the two concrete buildings are windowless.

Although reporters have been permitted on Pentagon-led tours of many part of the prison, the Pentagon has barred interviews with detainees.

Ms. Gutierrez said detention camp officials have recently increased detainees’ opportunities for recreation and social interaction. She said detainees’ lawyers have been concerned that some of those moves were in anticipation of visits now being made by senior members of the new administration. The attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., is due to visit on Monday.

“This is really running the risk that the review is just a big whitewash,” Ms. Gutierrez added, “and we expect more of the new administration.”

Horizontal Divider 7

The Guantánamo Testimonials Project

studyhumanrights.jpg

 
Pursuant to its mission, the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (CSHRA) launched, in Fall 2005, a long term research project to assess the effects of the U.S. war on terror on human rights in the Americas.

Whether invoked as the rationale for the "extraordinary rendition" of Canadian citizen Maher Arar to Syria or as the basis for the suppression of indigenous movements in South America, the war on terror has had significant effects on human rights in the Americas. But nowhere have these effects been greater than at the detention facilities of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Consequently, it seemed appropriate to begin our project by looking into the human rights situation at these facilities.

We begin our endeavor with The Guantánamo Testimonials Project. The goals of this project are to gather testimonies of prisoner abuse in Guantánamo, to organize them in meaningful ways, to make them widely available online, and to preserve them there in perpetuity.

The strength of these testimonies is considerable.

Based on them, a number of distinguished individuals and organizations have called for the closure of Guantánamo.

At CSHRA we take no position as to whether the Guantánamo prisoners are guilty or innocent. Yet we recognize that these individuals are, in either case, entitled to a set of fundamental rights (a) as individuals held during an armed conflict, (b) as prisoners in general, and (c) as ordinary human beings.

Horizontal Divider 7

Obama, Guantánamo and the “War on Terror”

11/01/2009 protest at Market and Powell Streets in San Francisco, USA

Former Guantánamo prisoners including Moazzam Begg and Chris Arendt, a former guard, are completing a UK speaking tour to “mark seven years of unlawful detention, abuse and torture”. The tour, organised by Cage Prisoners started in London on 11th January 2009, exactly seven years after the first transfers to the prison torture camp at Guantánamo Bay at date which was marked in London by a weekend of actions and in the US by a National Day of Protest: Close Guantanamo and End U.S. Torture Policies Everywhere. Sami al-Haj, a former Guantánamo prisoner and Al Jazeera journalist was due to be one of the speakers on the UK tour but instead he joined a Free Gaza boat which was fired on and didn’t make it. By the Sheffield meeting, held on the date of Obama’s inauguration, he had been replaced by Omar Deghayes another former Guantánamo prisoner. In Liverpool the meeting “was held on the same day as the US president signed an order to close Guantanamo. Moazzam Begg was not impressed, and commented that Barack Obama spoke about ‘outlawing torture’ as though he himself had just decided to make it illegal: “It has ALWAYS been illegal, at least in any civilised country”" Further reports can be found on the tour blog.

Tour Reports: London [ audio ] | Bristol | Sheffield [ audio: 1 | 2 ] | Liverpool | Guantánamo Voices Tour Blog

Protests: 11th January 2009: [ San Francisco | Washington DC | London ] 100 Days to to Close Guantánamo: [ Worcester ]

Campaigns: Cageprisoners | The National Guantánamo Coalition (UK) | 100 Days to Close Guantánamo and End Torture | The Campaign against Criminalising Communities | Scotland Against Criminalising Communities (SACC) | Reprieve

Background: Andy Worthington on Antiwar Radio: Obama, Guantánamo and Torture (audio) | Guantánamo - Obama could do better | Binyam’s Story: From Ladbroke Grove to GTMO | The Rendition Monolgues | Moazzam Begg and Andy Worthington on Human Rights in The War on Terror


Horizontal Divider 7

Hafizullah Shahbaz Khiel's son Attiqullah, age 10,
1fcfc375-aabc-42db-bffe-b0887023077d_hmedium.jpg
shows documents proclaiming his father's innocence

February 7 2009
_______________
_______________
_______________

Guantanamo prisoner freed, arrested again

 

His story shows difficulties of

fighting terrorists, closing detention center

 

 

Hafizullah Shahbaz Khiel's son Attiqullah, 10, shows documents proclaiming his father's innocence at his uncle's house on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan.

 View related photos

 

 

 

updated 4:00 p.m. PT, Sat., Feb. 7, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan - It was 2 a.m. when a rocket launcher sent a grenade slamming into the front gate of Hafizullah Shahbaz Khiel's walled compound. Screeching children and women ran into a small underground room. American and Afghan soldiers shouted: "Get over here, get over here. On the floor, heads down."

Hafizullah, a former Guantanamo prisoner, knew not to resist. And so, his family says, he was wrongly taken into custody by the United States — for the second time.

Hafizullah's story shows just how difficult it is for the U.S. to determine who is guilty and who is not in Afghanistan, where corruption rules and grudges are held for years, if not decades. It is a conundrum that the U.S. faces as it prepares to close Guantanamo and empty it of the 245 prisoners still there.

 The first time Hafizullah was seized, in 2002, he spent five years at Guantanamo. In legal documents, the U.S. cites a source saying he helped al-Qaida and planned to kill a government official. But Hafizullah says he was turned in by a corrupt police chief as revenge, and the Afghan government cleared him of all charges in December 2007.

Less than a year later, in September, the U.S. raided his home. This time he was accused of treating sick Taliban as a pharmacist. Afghan officials have signed documents attesting to his innocence, but he is still in custody at Bagram Air Base, along with about 600 other prisoners.

Some Afghans claim the U.S. is far too quick to arrest people without understanding the complexities of the culture.

"We are fed up," says Ishaq Gailani, a member of President Hamid Karzai's government. "Bagram is full of these people who are wrongly accused. They arrest everyone — a 15-year-old boy and a 61-year-old man. They arrest them because they run away from their helicopters...I would run away too if I saw them. They don't know who is the terrorist and who is not."

The Associated Press has pieced together Hafizullah's story from legal documents and interviews with a former governor of Paktia province, family members, neighbors, a former mujahedeen leader and former cellmates at Guantanamo.

He had been held by Taliban as well
Hafizullah was a village elder and a father of seven, from a family that goes back to generals and brigadiers in the army of Afghanistan's King Amanullah Khan at the turn of the 20th century.

In 1998 he languished in a Taliban jail for several months, beaten and accused of opposing the Taliban. Fearful of the religious militia, he relocated his pharmacy to his home. People in his rural district of Zormat called him doctor and came to him for treatment.

In the heady days that followed the Taliban's collapse in December 2001, Hafizullah was appointed a sub-governor. He was named to a provincewide shura, or council, designed to unite government supporters and neutralize the Taliban and hostile warlords.

"I know Hafizullah very well. I appointed him to the shura," says Raz Mohammed Dilili, governor of eastern Paktia province at the time. "He was respected by the people of his district of Zormat."

The council decided that anyone found opposing the government would have their homes burned down and would be fined about $50,000. It also invited those who had been with the Taliban to come to the government or pay a fine of about $20,000.

Hafizullah was tasked with keeping law and order in Zormat. That's where he ran afoul of Police Chief Abdullah Mujahed.

Dilili, the governor, describes Abdullah as a scoundrel who would have his men fire rockets at U.S. forces, then blame his enemies and turn them over to the Americans. Abdullah and Hafizullah already had a history of enmity after serving in different mujahedeen or warrior groups in the 1980s.

In 2002, Hafizullah traced a robbery of nearly $3,000 to the police chief, Abdullah, and his men, according to Dilili as well as family members. The cars involved in the robbery were parked in the police chief's compound, he found. He confronted Abdullah.

The next day, U.S. forces picked him up as a suspected Taliban.

Legal documents obtained by The Associated Press from the Department of Defense cite several accusations against Hafizullah from an unnamed source — among others, that he led 12 Taliban and al-Qaida men and planned to attack the Afghan government, and that he doubled the salary of anyone who killed an American. The documents further state that Hafizullah's telephone number and name were associated with a Taliban cell, and that his brother had a car dealership in Zormat where he kept weapons.

However, the same documents note that Hafizullah said he was a victim of revenge and did not know why he had been arrested. Hafizullah also said he was not an al-Qaida member and in fact had helped the Americans in the past by giving them information about al-Qaida.

For the next five years, he was known by his identification number: 1001.

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29071536/ (Page One)

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29071536/page/2/ (Page Two)

 

 

At Guantanamo, in Block 4, Hafizullah shared a cell with Hajji Ghalib for two years. The Associated Press found Ghalib, now released, to talk about Hafizullah. He lives in Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province.

"He never said anything bad about Karzai's government, but he was disappointed in them that they had supported corrupt people," says Ghalib.

Ghalib says his experience with Afghanistan's deeply corrupt police force is firsthand. After returning from Guantanamo, he went to the interior ministry with a letter of introduction from his former mujahedeen leader. Ghalib says they were ready to give him a job — for $600.

He didn't have the money, and is now unemployed.

Another former neighbor at Guantanamo with Hafizullah was Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the defiant Taliban ambassador after the attacks of Sept. 11.

"I didn't know him before Guantanamo. He was never a member of the Taliban," Zaeef says of Hafizullah from his Kabul home, at the end of a potholed street ankle-deep in mud and snow. "His beard was white, he was a very old man, he was very disappointed from the government and from the Americans too. He said, 'I don't know why I am here. I have no reason to be here. Someone was against me.'"

In a strange twist, Zaeef says he later saw Hafizullah's enemy — police chief Abdullah — in Guantanamo also. Abdullah was a member of the Northern Alliance, a ragtag army of mujahedeen turned warlords who were installed in power after the Taliban fell. The AP found him in Zormat, reluctant to talk.

Abdullah denied firing rockets on U.S. bases, but refused to discuss Hafizullah's case. An ethnic Tajik from the predominantly Pashtun province of Paktia, Abdullah told the AP he was a victim of tribal rivalries, turned over to the U.S. forces by rivals. He spent five years in Guantanamo.

Most detainees turned over to U.S.
It's typical for detainees to be turned in by others rather than caught by police, according to a 2006 report from New Jersey's Seton Hall University School of Law. The report found that only 5 percent of Guantanamo detainees were captured by U.S. forces, while 86 percent were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and handed to the U.S.

The U.S. military in Afghanistan refused to comment on either the first or the second detention.

"It has been a giant failure of intelligence. Most of the people the U.S. had were turned in for bounties and personal grudges," said Tina Foster, a U.S. lawyer representing several detainees both at Guantanamo and at Bagram. "The U.S. doesn't know who to trust and who to believe in Afghanistan, how to get good information."

Like hundreds of other prisoners, Hafizullah was caught in a four-year legal quagmire over whether they had the right to challenge the accusations that landed them in Guantanamo. He was released in 2008, just six months before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of prisoners' rights. So his lawyers never had the chance to take his case to court and clear his name.

Lawyer Peter Ryan with the Philadelphia law firm Dechert LLP suspects that is why Hafizullah is now in Bagram.

"Hafizullah's was a ridiculously weak case," Ryan says. "But the taint of that initial detention at Guantanamo has never been resolved. And when they arrested him this time, they must have found all his files and said, 'He must be a bad guy.'"

Upon Hafizullah's release in 2007, the Afghan government held him for three months and then cleared him of all charges. But in the September raid, Hafizullah and 13 others were arrested, including his brothers and three sons. The others were later released.

Hafizullah's U.S. lawyers are now challenging his detention at Bagram. Family members fear a decades-old feud involving a distant cousin, Fazle Rabi, may have been behind the nighttime raid on Hafizullah's home.

Zormat elders, leading clerics, the provincial governor, the National Reconciliation Bureau and two members of Parliament have signed documents attesting to Hafizullah's innocence. Armed with the documents, Hafizullah's brothers and young nephews are trying to get him released.

So far, they have had no luck, says Rafiullah Khiel, an English-speaking nephew who works in the finance ministry.

"No one is listening to our voice," he says

 

Slide show

 

  Inside Gitmo
A look at the controversial U.S.A.

run detention center in Cuba.

 

Horizontal Divider 7

Tuesday, 03 February 2009 11:20

http://www.pubrecord.org/nationworld/663.html?task=view

Defense Dept. Claims of Gitmo Prisoners Returning to Battlefield Debunked

By William Fisher

A prominent law professor is charging that the Defense Department is issuing questionable data on the number of Guantanamo detainees who have been released "and then returned to the battlefield" because the government "is now in a position where they have to find some bad guys -- even if they have to invent them by naming people who were never there."
 
Their ultimate aim, Professor Mark Denbeaux of the Seton Hall University law school told us, "is to foment fear among American voters and limit the freedom of the Obama Administration to release any of the detainees still imprisoned."
 
Denbeaux heads the law school’s Center for Policy and Research. The Center has issued a report which it says "rebuts and debunks" the most recent claim by the Department of Defense (DOD) that 61 "former Guantánamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight."

The report is one of a series produced by the Center’s faculty and law students. Professor Denbeaux says the Center has determined that "DOD has issued 'recidivism' numbers 43 times, and each time they have been wrong --this last time the most egregiously so."

He told us, "Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there."
 
He added, "They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning -- except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men."

Denbeaux charged that the Defense Department has issued numbers 43 times, and said these numbers conflict with each other. He noted that the government’s numbers are "seriously undercut by the DOD statement that 'they do not track' former detainees."
 
"Time and time again, the Department of Defense, the Executive Branch, and other government officials have claimed publicly that Guantánamo Bay detainees who have been released have "returned to the battlefield" where

they have then been re-captured or killed," Denbeaux declared.

The Seton Hall report attempts to correct what it characterizes as errors in the latest DOD report, which was issued
in mid-January. That report alleged that 61 detainees have returned to the battlefield.  The Seton Hall report notes that in each of its 43 attempts to provide the numbers of the recidivist detainees, the Department of Defense has given different sets of numbers that are contradictory and internally inconsistent with the Department's own data.
 
It says that DOD’s most recent press statement identifies no names, dates, places nor any conduct by released detainees.  "The raw numbers that are cited are unsupported, inconsistent with all other statements and appear to be presented to support the internal Department of Defense purposes," the report says.
                                  
Previous DOD reports have said the numbers of recidivist detainees have been "one, several, some, a couple, a few, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 12-24, 25, 29, and 30," the Seton Hall group contends.
 
But it adds that 82% of DOD’s publicly made claims "contain qualifying language," including terms such as: "at least"; "somewhere on the order of"; "approximately"; "around"; "just short of"; "we believe"; "estimated"; "roughly"; "more than"; "a couple"; "a few"; "some"; "several"; and "about."
 
Department of Defense statements about the number of recidivist detainees which do not identify the detainee, the act of recidivism, the place, or the time, are especially unreliable, Seton Hall’s report declares. It claims that in the two instances in which DOD provided written support –July 12 2007 and May 20 2008, their previous oral assertions were repudiated. For instance, the report says, in DOD’s July 12, 2007 press release, "the 30 recidivists reported by DOD in April 2007 is reduced to five."
 
DOD’s report of July 2007 identified seven prisoners by name, but the Seton Hall group says that "as many as two of those seven named were never in Guantanamo, and two of the remaining five were never killed or captured anywhere. Of the three remaining, one was killed in his apartment in Russia by Russian authorities. None of them is alleged to have left their homeland or attacked Americans on a battlefield or otherwise."
 
Meanwhile, Newsweek magazine is reporting that The Pentagon "is preparing to declassify portions of a secret report on Guantanamo detainees that could further complicate President Obama's plans to shut down the detention facility."
 
The publication says that the report "will provide fresh details about 62 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo and are believed by U.S. intelligence officials to have returned to terrorist activities."
 
One such example, involving a Saudi detainee named Said Ali Al-Shihri, who was released in 2007, has already received widespread media attention when Pentagon officials publicly asserted that he has recently reemerged as a deputy commander of Al Qaeda in Yemen, Newsweek reports..
Previously known publicly as Guantanamo detainee No. 372, Al-Shihri is alleged to have been involved in an

unsuccessful attack on the U.S. embassy in Yemen last September.
 
Newsweek says, "The decision to release additional case studies from the report is in effect a warning shot to the new president from officials at the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies who are skeptical about some of his plans. Some Pentagon officials, including ones sympathetic to Obama's goals, note the political outcry would be deafening should another example like Al-Shihri become public six months from now—and it turns out to be a Guantanamo detainee released under Obama's watch rather than by the Bush administration."
 
It adds, "The last thing Obama wants is for one of these guys [at Guantanamo] to get released and return to killing Americans."
 
According to Newsweek, some counter-terrorism experts have raised questions about the significance of the Pentagon's figures, noting that the number of so-called "recidivist" detainees represents only a small portion, about 12 per cent, of the approximately 520 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo since the detention facility was opened in January 2002. This compares with recidivism rates of as high as 67 percent in state prisons in the United States, according to Justice Department figures.
 
"There have also been concerns that Bush administration holdovers were deliberately playing up the cases in recent weeks in an effort to undercut Obama. One former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official noted to Newsweek that the Pentagon waited until the day after Obama
signed his executive order mandating the closure of Guantanamo to confirm
Al-Shihri's renewed Al Qaeda ties," Newsweek reports.
 
Approximately 240 detainees remain at Guantanamo. Human rights groups and defense lawyers contend there is little or no evidence of terrorist involvement against scores of them. This is also the opinion of some federal judges who in recent weeks have ordered the Pentagon to release some of them.
 
The Obama administration has given itself a year to shut down the facility, and is hoping that European countries including Portugal, Spain and Germany, will agree to take some of these detainees. The Bush Administration was able to  identify only two countries willing to take released detainees – Albania and Sweden.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and elsewhere for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration and now writes on a wide-range of issues, from human rights to foreign affairs, for numerous newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher and can be reached at wfisher206@aol.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  

Horizontal Divider 7

Obama Administration Threatened Britain To Suppress Torture Evidence

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/02/386039.shtml
The Obama administration has been caught in a fresh torture controversy after it emerged that America threatened to cease all intelligence ties with Britain if it revealed that a British suspect held at Guantanamo Bay had been tortured into confessing to being part of a dirty bomb plot.

"Two senior British judges have expressed their anger and surprise that President Barack Obama's Government has put pressure on Britain to suppress evidence of torture in US custody," reports the London Times.
"Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said they had been told that America had threatened to stop co-operating with Britain on intelligence matters if evidence were published suggesting that Binyam Mohammed, a British resident held at the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, had been tortured into confessing crimes."

In their ruling, the judges, acting on behalf of the Foreign Office & Commonwealth Office, scorned the hypocrisy behind the Obama administration's actions.

"We did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials . . . relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be," they stated.

"We had no reason . . . to anticipate there would be made a threat of the gravity of the kind made by the United States Government that it would reconsider its intelligence-sharing relationship, when all the considerations in relation to open justice pointed to us providing a limited but important summary of the reports."

Binyam Mohammed has been held at Guantanamo Bay since September 2004 after being kidnapped at the behest of U.S. authorities in Pakistan in 2002. He claims he was tortured and mistreated into confessing to being part of a dirty bomb plot. Reports written by U.S. intelligence officials apparently confirm Mohammed's claims.

The British judges declined to publish the reports after America's threat, but lambasted America for bullying Britain to conceal information that posed no threat to America's national security.
"Championing the rule of law, not suppressing it, is the cornerstone of a democracy," said the ruling.

"The suppression of reports of wrongdoing by officials (in circumstances which cannot in any way affect national security) would be inimical to the rule of law and the proper functioning of a democracy."

The controversy follows the revelation that Obama, despite his superficial moves against torture which have been given much attention by the establishment media, has in fact signed an executive order that will ensure a continuance of the practice of "rendition," the secret capture, transportation, and imprisonment of so called "enemy combatants" in countries renowned for carrying out torture.

Secret rendition "black sites" hit the headlines in late 2005 when U.S. and foreign intelligence officials blew the whistle on the CIA's practice of hiding and interrogating "al Qaeda" captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe.

The secret facility was revealed to be part of a covert CIA prison system, set up after 9/11, that at various times included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The Washington Post refused to name the European countries involved after pressure from senior U.S. officials.

Horror stories of brutality and psychological torture of detainees at the secret prisons emerged soon after.

Many on the political left were fast and loose with their praise for Obama after he made moves to shut down Guantanamo Bay, but the real torture black sites and the process by which suspects are kidnapped and taken to them will remain in place thanks to Obama's executive order.

Link to article:
 link to www.prisonplanet.com

Horizontal Divider 7

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's pledge of bipartisan cooperation with Congress will be tested as he tries to fulfill a campaign promise to close Guantanamo Bay and establish a new system for prosecuting suspected terrorists.

The undertaking is an ambitious one. Fraught with legal complexities, it gives Republicans ample opportunity to score political points if he doesn't get it right. There's also the liklihood of a run-in with his former rival, Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war who before running for president staked his career on overhauling the nation's detainee policies.

"We look forward to working with the president and his administration on these issues, keeping in mind that the first priority of the U.S. government is to guarantee the security of the American people," McCain, R-Ariz., said in a joint statement with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

The statement seemed aimed at putting Obama on notice that he must deal with Congress on the matter.

In his first week in office, Obama ordered Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba to be closed within a year, CIA secret prisons shuttered and abusive interrogations ended.

So far, Obama's team has given every indication it will engage lawmakers, including Republicans, on the issue. Graham and McCain were among several Republicans briefed last week by White House counsel Greg Craig and handed drafts of the executive orders.

But once the two sides begin delving into details, there will be ample room for dispute.

Among the unknowns is how many of the 245 detainees now at Guantanamo Bay will be prosecuted.

Administration officials said that, pending an internal review, federal and military courts may be used. But, the officials added, a version of the secretive military tribunals, as established under President George W. Bush with the help of McCain, remains an option, too.

Officials say the tribunals may be needed to prosecute suspected terrorists who are too dangerous to release but whose cases would otherwise fail, either because evidence was coerced or trying them in a less secretive court would expose classified information.

Obama could take a page from the Bush administration and try to revamp the system on his own, through executive order. But that approach failed for Bush, who angered members of his own party and wound up seeking congressional approval anyway after the Supreme Court in June 2006 ruled his tribunal system was unconstitutional.

Obama's other option is to seek legislation on the issue, potentially exposing his administration to a bruising fight with Republicans on how to handle the most dangerous of terrorism suspects.

A narrow majority of Americans supports shutting down Guantanamo Bay on a priority basis. But people are likely to become much less sympathetic to detainee rights if there is another terrorism attack inside the United States or if the new system is portrayed as too lenient on suspected al-Qaida members.

Republicans already are trying to portray Obama's review of detainee rights as soft on terrorism. House Republicans on Friday mobilized a "rapid response team" of lawmakers to speak out against the president's plans.

"The Guantanamo Bay prison is filled with the worst of the worst — terrorists and killers bent on murdering Americans and other friends of freedom around the world," said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio. "If it is closed, where will they go, will they be brought to the United States and how will they be secured?"

Democrats have suggested they expect to be important players in the debate.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the panel planned to hold back on legislation "for a time" to allow the administration to complete its own assessment. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would like "to at least have an advisory role" on the final plan.

In 2006, the question of detainee trials and interrogations enveloped Congress and exposed Republican infighting. McCain, Graham and now retired Sen. John Warner, R-Va., sharply challenged Bush's handling of detainees. In the end, the two sides emerged with complex legislation that outlined the inner workings of military tribunals and defined what constitutes a war crime, effectively banning specific interrogation techniques seen as too harsh.

Human rights groups and Democrats said the system still gave too much power to the president. But now, Republicans are worried Obama will swing too far in the other direction.

Graham, a colonel in the Air Force Reserves assigned to the service's Judge Advocate General School, said he is concerned that Obama will wind up giving civilian courts too heavy a hand in dealing with terrorists handled by the military and CIA.

"Federal judges in my opinion should not be making battlefield decisions. ... I don't want to lose sight of the fact that we are at war," he said.


 

Horizontal Divider 7

Made Any

"Anti-American Statements" Lately?

Congrats, You're a Terrorist!

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet

at 11:36 AM on January 26, 2009.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/rights/122723/

One of the great legacies of the Bush era is that his administration's routine politicization of national security stripped any lingering credibility that might have adhered to our intelligence agencies' habitually leaked reports and unsourced statements.

The latest night-sweats being hawked by the typical fear-mongers is that closing Gitmo will lead to a horde of frightening -- and dusky -- Islamototalitarians blowing themselves up in your local 7-11. That's a talking-point based on some information that is decidedly dodgy. CNN:

Security experts are questioning information released by the Pentagon last week, saying 61 former detainees from its detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may have returned to terrorist activities.

The report, released days before President Obama took office, says 18 former detainees are confirmed to have participated in attacks, and 43 are suspected to have been involved in attacks.

On Friday, a Pentagon spokesman defended the integrity of the report but would not directly answer questions about where the figures come from.

"We don't make these figures up. They're not done willy-nilly," spokesman Geoff Morrell said.

Who said they don't have a sense of humor at the DoD?

Pentagon officials have said they would not discuss how the statistics were derived because of security concerns that such information could give clues to how U.S. intelligence officers collect their data.

"Collect their data" sounding much better than "making shit up." Buried deep in the article, however, we get some insight into those dedicated public servants' "methodology":

[National security expert Peter] Bergen said some of those "suspected" to have returned to terrorism are so categorized because they publicly made anti-American statements, "something that's not surprising if you've been locked up in a U.S. prison camp for several years."

So, to recap: we went into Afghanistan with very few troops, and elevated a rag-tag army run by various Afghan war-lords to the status of "freedom fighters," then we offered them up to $5,000 a head for any members of "Al Qaeda" they turned over to American forces -- five large in one of the poorest countries in the world. Then we ignored our Afghani translators and allies when they told us who the die-hard Islamist fighters were and who were the poor shlumps -- the students, aid workers, tourists, traders, cab-drivers and others who were sold off for the cash bounties -- and just sent all the foreigners to Gitmo, where we denied them legal council for several years and kept them in isolation on a military base where our brave interrogators subjected them to various tortures.

And now, if those released make any "anti-American statements" in public -- the nerve, after all our hospitality! -- we characterize them as "returning to terrorism."

Of course, while we know from several independent studies that most of those in Gitmo were not, in fact, "hardened terrorists" captured "on the battlefield", I think it's safe to say that if you to me what my government has done to them, I might well be looking for some payback.

Which is why this is also worth highlighting:

Bergen ... notes that of the 18 people the Pentagon says are confirmed to have engaged in terrorism, only a handful of names have been released.

If one accepts that all 18 on the "confirmed" list have returned to the battlefield, that would be 4 percent of the detainees who have been released, Bergen said.

Bergen also noted Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics data that show the recidivism rate for U.S. state prisoners who have been released is more than 65 percent.

I'm sure some right-wing lunatic will use that little stat to argue that Gitmo is a model of rehabilitation, but in relaity it suggests that even if you subject an innocent goatherd to all sorts of heinous abuses, it's anything but a given that he'll end up being "radicalized" and bent on revenge.

For more detail on how prisoners were selected for Gitmo, see my interview with Andy here.

Horizontal Divider 7

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7843339.stm

GITMO Guard IVAW talks on BBC

Horizontal Divider 29

 

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/world_news_america/7761904.stm

Fear UP

Former military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld, quit his post after a crisis of conscience.

He believed that crucial evidence was being withheld from the defence lawyers.

In this exclusive interview he spoke to security correspondent Gordon Corera.

Horizontal Divider 29

By Randall Mikkelsen http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE50L72Y20090122

1.22.09

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Obama's move to close the Guantanamo prison within a year reopens the issue of how to try the accused September 11 plotters and other pending terrorism cases.

The Guantanamo war crimes commissions, put on hold by Obama's order, were established by Congress in 2006 and have been condemned as unjust by defense lawyers, some prosecutors, and many other countries.

Two men have been convicted in commission trials and one pleaded guilty. Two of these have already returned to their home countries.

Horizontal Divider 29

iraq tv3 nz

Horizontal Divider 29

Horizontal Divider 29

CLOSING GITMO
Democracy Now reports on 12.19.08

Pentagon Prepares to Shut Gitmo

The Pentagon has announced it’s preparing for an anticipated order to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison after Obama takes office next month. Officials have begun drawing up contingency plans, should Obama uphold his campaign promise to close the prison. Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union said, “This is an important first step toward turning the page on eight years of shameful policies that allowed torture and violations of domestic and international law.”

 Reuters Report on 12-10-08

Horizontal Divider 29

Horizontal Divider 29

Those Who Use Torture In My Country's Name "I Rebuke You"
~joe anybody

GO TO "My Torture Page"

Bookmark and Share

Contact Joe Anybody here: