Andy Worthington's Blog, page 74

The Man They Don’t Know: Saeed Bakhouche, an Algerian, Faces a Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo

On Tuesday May 24, Saeed Bakhouche, a 45-year old Algerian who has been held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay since June 2002, became the 40th prisoner to face a Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo.

Like many Guantánamo prisoners, Bakhouche has also been known by another name – in his case, Abdel Razak Ali, a name he gave when he was captured – but to the best of my knowledge he is the only prisoner whose classified military file, compiled in 2008 and released by WikiLeaks in 2011, has a photo that purports to be him, but is not him at all. No one seems to know who it is, but it is not Saeed Bakhouche.

Moreover, his attorney, Candace Gorman, told me that a different photo – again, not of her client – was displayed outside his cell for a year and a half, a mistake that had disturbing ramifications, because this was the same photo shown to other prisoners during interrogations, leading to a situation whereby information about someone else was added his file as though it related to him.

The fact that the US authorities have, historically, not known who Saeed Bakhouche is, does not, however, appear to have been conveyed to the members of his PRB, which involves representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Set up in 2013, the boards are reviewing the cases of 46 men previously described, by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office, as “too dangerous to release,” although that has turned out to have been outrageous hyperbole. Of the 40 men whose cases have so far been reviewed, eleven are awaiting decisions, just seven have had their ongoing imprisonment approved, while 22 have had their release recommended — and nine of those have, to date, been freed.

20 of those whose release has been recommended by PRBs were originally described as “too dangerous to release” by the task force, while two others are amongst 18 other men put forward for PRBs who were initially recommended for prosecution by the task force until the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed. This was in 2012-13, when appeals court judges in Washington, D.C. — in the D.C. Circuit Court, well-known for its preponderance of conservative judges — nevertheless dismissed two of the only convictions secured in Guantánamo’s troubled military commission trial system, on the inarguable basis that the war crimes in question — providing material support for terrorism and conspiracy — had actually been invented by Congress.

A cursory glance at Saeed Bakhouche’s case suggests that he would have been a candidate for prosecution, as he was seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002 that secured the capture of Abu Zubaydah, regarded as a “high-value detainee,” for whom the CIA’s brutal and ineffective post-9/11 torture program was first developed. Crucially, the Bush administration’s claims that he was a significant figure in Al-Qaeda — no. 3 in the organization, after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri — have been thoroughly discredited in the years since, and in 2009 the Justice Department conceded that he was not a member of Al-Qaeda, and probably had not known in advance about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Instead, Abu Zubaydah was the gatekeeper of a independent training camp in Afghanistan, Khaldan, which was not affiliated with Al-Qaeda, and which was closed by its emir, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, after Osama bin Laden sought to bring it under Al-Qaeda’s control. The evidence suggests that, after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Abu Zubaydah, as would be expected from someone with a great experience of logistics, was responsible for helping men, women and children – civilians as well as soldiers – to escape from the chaos of Afghanistan, and to wait in Pakistan until arrangements could be made for them to return home.

However, at the same time that the wildly exaggerated claims of Abu Zubaydah’s importance were dropped, the Justice Department, evidently desperate to cling to some reason for having tortured him, came up with a new claim — that he had been the head of a militia force that was aligned with Al-Qaeda.

January 2011: Saeed Bakhouche’s habeas corpus petition is turned down

Saeed Bakhouche was caught up in this unlikely scenario when his habeas corpus petition was turned down by District Judge Richard Leon in January 2011. As I explained at the time, in an article entitled, “Algerian in Guantánamo Loses Habeas Petition for Being in a Guest House with Abu Zubaydah”:

Ali [Bakhouche] arrived at Guantánamo in June 2002, after being subjected to abuse in Pakistani custody and in US custody in Afghanistan, and has, presumably, always been thought of as being part of a group associated with Abu Zubyadah, even though there are verifiable problems with this presumption.

The first is that, when four of the other men seized in the raid were put forward for a trial by Military Commission in June 2008, he was not included; the second is that, in November 2008, another Algerian seized in the house, Labed Ahmed, was freed, after the Bush administration accepted his explanation that he had been delivered to the house by mistake, but had nevertheless been allowed to stay; and the third is because the government’s reliance on claims that Abu Zubaydah was a significant terrorist have been thoroughly discredited.

The four men put forward for military commission trials in June 2008 were Noor Uthman Muhammed (from Sudan), who eventually accepted a plea deal in a military commission trial, and was released in December 2013, Ghassan al-Sharbi and Jabran al-Qahtani, both Saudis, and Sufyian Barhoumi, another Algerian. The latter three are also facing PRBs. No date has yet been set for al-Sharbi, but al-Qahtani’s PRB took place on May 19, which I wrote about here, and I will soon be writing about Barhomi’s PRB, which took place on May 26.

Back in January 2011, the government ambushed Saeed Bakhouche by claiming it had a diary written by one of Abu Zubaydah’s associates — a man whose whereabouts and true identity were unknown, so he could not be questioned in any way — which, the government alleged, not only confirmed the existence of the militia, but also indicated that it included Bakhouche, under a previously unknown alias, Usama al Jaza’iri.

This was not the only example of the government playing games with Bakhouche. As I also explained in my article:

[O]n December 24, [2010,] the government withdrew a key allegation on which, until that date, it had been relying, having discovered that it contained “potentially exculpatory information that the Government had not turned over to detainee counsel because it was classified at a higher classification level than detainee counsel was authorized to view.”

That statement, made by another Guantánamo prisoner who was not even seized with Zubaydah and Ali, but was captured in a house raid in Karachi six months later, apparently related to a claim by the prisoner in question that he had seen Ali in Afghanistan, and its removal not only emphasizes the general unreliability of the government’s supposed evidence, but also indicates how difficult it is for prisoners’ defense teams to be sure that they have been given given access to all the exculpatory material they need to defend their clients.

In any other circumstance, the withdrawal of a key piece of evidence would have led to a new hearing, but with Guantánamo the normal rules do not apply, and while Abdul Razak Ali clearly has grounds to appeal, it seems unlikely that he will be able to dislodge the lies and misconceptions about Abu Zubaydah that have become accepted in the D.C. Circuit Court, or to challenge the dubious nature of statements made by his fellow prisoners, or that he will be able to succeed in reminding judges about the clear precedent for releasing a man who had nothing to do with Abu Zubaydah, as was established in the case of Labed Ahmed.

December 2013: The D.C. Circuit Court turns down Saeed Bakhouche’s appeal

Nearly three years after Saeed Bakhouche’s habeas corpus petition was turned down, his appeal was, predictably, turned down by the D.C. Circuit, which, in a series of rulings from 2009 up to the fall of 2011, had, for ideological reasons, thoroughly undermined the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2008, that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights. The court eventually gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners by ruling that any information presented by the government that purported to be evidence had to be regarded as presumptively accurate, unless the prisoners and their lawyers could establish a clear case that it wasn’t – a tall order for men held at Guantánamo with little, if any means of seeking out exculpatory evidence in their cases.

In “The Mirror of Guantánamo,” an important article for the New York Times shortly after this ruling, Linda Greenhouse examined the largely unnoticed importance of Bakhouche’s failed appeal, running though the history of the legal basis for detention in the “war on terror,” and also examining “the burden of proof the government has to shoulder in proving that the detainee fits the definition.” As she noted, “Both parts have been hotly contested, but the Ali case strongly suggests that the contest is over.”

Examining the legal basis for detention, Greenhouse began with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, passed just days after the 9/11 attacks, which allowed the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” As Greenhouse noted, “While Congress spoke of force, and not detention, the Supreme Court in 2004 held that the power to detain those who were ‘part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners’ in Afghanistan was an inherent part of the power to use military force there that Congress had granted.”

The detention powers were subsequently tweaked slightly, by George W. Bush’s Pentagon, the Obama administration — which indicated that the support necessary for detention had to be “substantial” and not “insignificant,” and which also made clear that “the definition applied anywhere in the world and was ‘not limited to persons captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan’ or to those ‘directly participating in hostilities’” — and by Congress, in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

Turning to the burden of proof, Greenhouse noted, “These different iterations, each building subtly on what had gone before, have left plenty of room for judicial interpretation. The D.C. Circuit, with exclusive jurisdiction over the Guantánamo habeas cases, has jumped into the gaps. It has endorsed the government’s view that evidence should be viewed holistically, as a composite, even if individual pieces are missing or might have a benign explanation.”

She added, “The Ali case exemplified this approach. For example, when he was captured, Mr. Ali was staying at a guesthouse with Abu Zubaydah,” who she then wrongly described as “an Osama bin Laden ally who is now one of the highest of high-value detainees at Guantánamo.”

Continuing, she wrote:

Mr. Ali had been at the four-bedroom house for 18 days, and was studying English. The Zubaydah forces were known to teach English to terrorists in training, and others who were later determined to be enemy combatants had been captured at the same or similar houses.

The D.C. Circuit rejected the argument by Mr. Ali’s lawyers that it was applying a standard of “guilt by guesthouse.” The court said that “determining whether an individual is part of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or an associated force almost always requires drawing inferences from circumstantial evidence, such as that individual’s personal associations.” Mr. Ali, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s opinion concluded, “more likely than not was part of Abu Zubaydah’s force.”

Greenhouse also noted the strenuous objections made by one member of the D.C. Circuit, Judge Harry T. Edwards, formerly the court’s chief judge, who was part of the panel for Bakhouche’s appeal. In June 2013, as I discussed here, Judge Edwards had complained about how his fellow judges had turned down the habeas corpus petition of a Yemeni prisoner, Abdul al-Qader Ahmed Hussain, seized in another house raid on the same day as the raid on Abu Zubaydah’s house.

As she described it:

The other two judges on the panel, Karen LeCraft Henderson and Thomas B. Griffith, said it was appropriate to draw inferences from the facts the government presented about Mr. Hussain’s travels, affiliations and multiple stays in mosques owned by a Qaeda-affiliated Islamic missionary group, Jama’at al-Tablighi, known as J.T. [and which, it should be noted, is in fact a missionary organization with millions of members worldwide]. These facts, the two judges said, supported the conclusion that Mr. Hussain, a teenager at the time of his capture, was “a part of Al Qaeda or the Taliban when he was captured.”

Judge Edwards objected, quoting from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, that “there is not one iota of evidence that Hussain ‘planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons.’” The government failed to carry its ostensible preponderance-of-the-evidence burden, Judge Edwards said. “I am disquieted by our jurisprudence,’ he added. “The time has come for the president and Congress to give serious consideration to a different approach for the handling of Guantánamo detainee cases.”

Turning to Judge Edwards’ contributions to Saeed Bakhouche’s appeal, Linda Greenhouse wrote:

While agreeing with the result, which he said was compelled by the circuit’s precedents, he again wrote a separate opinion. He said that the “personal associations” test the majority applied was “well beyond” the detention definition prescribed by Congress in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force and the more recent amendment. “It seems bizarre, to say the least,” Judge Edwards said, “that someone like Ali [Bakhouche], who has never been charged with or found guilty of a criminal act and who has never ‘planned, authorized, committed or aided any terrorist attacks,’ is now marked for a life sentence.” He said the circuit had “stretched the meaning” of the congressional enactments “so far beyond the terms of these statutory authorizations that habeas corpus proceedings like the one afforded Ali are functionally useless.”

This was an extremely powerful criticism of the Circuit Court’s overreach, but it yielded neither a climbdown by the court, nor any sign that the Supreme Court was perturbed by how its Boumediene ruling, granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, had been gutted of all meaning by a lower court, as has been apparent every time requests have been made for the Supreme Court to intervene — see my article from June 2012, “The Supreme Court Abandons the Guantánamo Prisoners,” for example, and another article from September 2012, “Obama, the Courts and Congress Are All Responsible for the Latest Death at Guantánamo.”

Saeed Bakhouche’s Periodic Review Board

In the government’s unclassified summary for Saeed Bakhouche’s PRB, which described him as Said Bin Brahim Bin Umran Bakush, aka Abdul al-Rizak, it was stated that he “was a trusted associate of prominent al-Qa’ida facilitator Abu Zubaydah (GZ-10016) and al-Qa’ida trainer lbn al-Shaykh al-Libi (LY-212).” Neither description is accurate, because, as noted above, neither Zubaydah nor al-Libi were members of Al-Qaeda, and the Khaldan camp, led by al-Libi, and for which Abu Zubaydah was a facilitator, was an independent camp that Osama bin Laden had wanted shut down after al-Libi refused to allow it to come under al-Qaeda’s control.

In a report on Bakhouche’s PRB, Courthouse News mistakenly stated that “US forces say they captured Bakush at a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002, along with … Abu Zubaydah and … lbn al-Shaykh al-Libi,” but in fact al-Libi had already been captured, fleeing Afghanistan in November or December 2001, and while Abu Zubaydah’s post-capture odyssey was one of the bleakest in the “war on terror,” as he was sent first to Thailand and then Poland to be tortured in CIA “black sites,” al-Libi’s treatment was no better. Sent by the CIA to Egypt, he made a false allegation, under torture, that Saddam Hussein had been meeting with senior Al-Qaeda figures to discuss providing them with chemical and biological weapons, a lie that was used to justfy the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Al-Libi himself was shunted around various “black sites” before being returned to Col. Gaddafi’s Libya, where — conveniently for everyone involved — he died, allegedly by committing suicide, in May 2009.

The government’s unclassified summary for Bakhouche’s PRB continued by stating, “We assess that in the late 1990s, [he] traveled to Afghanistan, where he attended basic and advanced training and later served as an instructor at an extremist camp” — a reference to Khaldan. The summary added that Bakhouche “was captured at a safehouse with Zubaydah in March 2002, where safehouse members were training for future attacks, including against US interests.” It has never been verified independently if there is any truth in these claims. Bakhouche’s classified military files, released by WikiLeaks in 2011, contained more detailed allegations — suggesting that he was “arrested at a Faisalabad safe house as a member of GZ-0016’s [Abu Zubaydah’s] Martyr’s Brigade, a fighting unit that was preparing to conduct an IED insurgency campaign against US and Coalition forces in Afghanistan and ultimately carry out attacks against targets in the US” — but, as I noted above, in my discussions of Bakhouche’s habeas corpus petition, claims made about the existence of this militia, identified as the Martyr’s Brigade, are not necessarily reliable.

Turning to Bakhouche’s behavior in Guantánamo, the US authorities noted that he “has committed a low number of disciplinary infractions compared to other detainees and the majority of his infractions have been failures to comply with Guantánamo guard force orders,” adding that he “has assaulted or attempted to assault guard forces or other detainees on occasions, including a February 2015 incident in which he struck another detainee.”

It was also noted that Bakhouche “has never admitted to any involvement in extremist activities,” and that, because of this, and because he “has provided conflicting information to interrogators,” the authorities “lack insight into what motivated his activities before detention and whether he would pursue extremist activity after detention.” However, noticeably, he “has not expressed or demonstrated any sympathy or support for al-Qa’ida, its global jihadist ideology, or radical Islamic views,” and “has not had any contact with anyone outside of Guantánamo,” apart from with his legal counsel.”

The authorities also noted that he “has not shown a strong interest in his release, but when asked, said it would be okay if he went to a Western country.” This reticence may be because of his fears about being repatriated, which, in turn, may be what made him lie about his name and nationality after his capture, although this is not reflected in the authorities’ description, which is as follows: “After lying about his nationality for two years, [he] noted that he did not want to return to Algeria because he feared authorities would immediately arrest him.”

The summary also noted that “Algeria has advanced CT [counter-terrorism] capabilities and is committed to working with the US on terrorism and sharing information with the US. AQIM [Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb] and ISIL’s official branch in Algeria have been forced into remote areas of the country by counterterrorism pressure, but remain capable of conducting attacks.” Crucially, the summary added, “We have no reporting that either terrorist group has attracted any of the Guantánamo detainees that were transferred to Algeria.”

And finally, in terms of post-release work intentions — something the review boards are looking for, in addition to remorse and a lack of violent, anti-American rhetoric and threats — the summary noted that Bakhouche “indicated to interrogators that he has held a variety of menial jobs, and could return to such employment if resettled.”

Below I’m cross-posting the opening statement made by Bakhouche’s personal representatives, who are military personnel appointed to help the prisoners prepare for their PRBs. They told the board members that he “has been a quiet, compliant detainee earning the respect of his fellow detainees and detention facility staff,” and that he hopes to find work as a long-haul truck driver after his release — although, expanding on the mention of jobs in his summary, they added that he has also worked as a waiter, a welder, a fruit picker and a baker.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 10 May 2016 [actually 24 May 2016]

Said Bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush, ISN 685

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. We are the Personal Representatives (PR) for ISN 685, Mr. Said Bakush. We will be assisting Mr. Bakush with his case this morning.

Said has been overjoyed and eager to participate in the Periodic Review process since we first met with him 16 March 2016. When we explained why we were meeting with Said, he mentioned his fellow detainees had talked about their initial meetings with PRs. This filled him with cautious optimism about his own forthcoming meeting with his PRs. Said has maintained a positive attitude throughout all of our meetings.

Throughout our meetings, Said has expressed his desire to be transferred from Guantánamo Bay. He is open to transfer to any country, which will be helpful considering Said also speaks a regional dialect of French from Northern Africa, as well as Arabic. He is willing to participate in any rehabilitation or reintegration program as well.

Said looks forward to life after his transfer from Guantánamo Bay, meeting a woman to be his future wife, and starting a family together with her. He also hopes at some point in the future to return to his birthplace to reconnect with his siblings’ families and other relatives. Said did not have one career path prior to his detention.

Though his formal education ended at third grade, he worked many seasonal part-time jobs ranging from restaurant server, construction welder, vineyard harvester, and baking regional traditional breads and desserts. Said also served a two-year enlistment in the Algerian military upon reaching adulthood.

During his time here at Guantánamo, Said realized, once transferred, he could start a thriving career in driving long-haul trucks and operating / managing a small trucking business delivering food and products to other regional businesses and restaurants. This plan will build upon truck driving training he learned as an enlisted soldier in the Algeria military. His prior part-time job experiences give him an advantage in terms of understanding what seasonal products to prioritize at his future trucking business and will help him to find employment regardless of where he is transferred.

Said has been a quiet, compliant detainee earning the respect of his fellow detainees and detention facility staff. By being exposed to so many people of various cultural and religious backgrounds here at GTMO, Said has had many opportunities to better understand and appreciate their beliefs and customs. This exposure to other nations’ people, cultures and religious faiths will serve him well wherever he is transferred.

We are confident that Said’ s desire to pursue a peaceful way of life if transferred from Guantánamo Bay is genuine and that he does not harbor negativity towards anyone. We remain convinced that Said does not pose a significant threat to security of the United States or any of its interests.

Thank you for your time and attention and we look forward to answering any questions you may have during this Board.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Obama Officials Confirm That Nearly 24 Guantánamo Prisoners Will Be Freed By the End of July

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Last week there was confirmation that the Obama administration is still intent on working towards the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay before President Obama leaves office, when officials told Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian that there is an “expectation” within the administration that 22 or 23 prisoners will be released by the end of July “to about half a dozen countries.”

80 men are currently held, so the release of these men will reduce the prison’s population to 57 or 58 prisoners, the lowest it has been since the first few weeks of its existence back in 2002.

As the Guardian explained, however, the officials who informed them about the planned releases spoke on condition of anonymity, because “not all of the foreign destination countries are ready to be identified.” In addition, “some of the transfer approvals have yet to receive certification by Ashton Carter, the defense secretary, as required by law, ahead of a notification to Congress.”

The releases will largely fulfill a promise made in January by Lee Wolosky, the State Department’s envoy for the closure of Guantánamo, who said at the time that the government would release all the prisoners approved for release “by this summer.”

Currently, 28 of the remaining 80 prisoners have been approved for release – 15 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed shortly after taking office in January 2009, and 13 by Periodic Review Boards, another high-level process, established in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners not already approved for release by the task force, or facing trials (and just ten men are in this latter category).

The remaining 42 men are all eligible for Periodic Review Boards, which the administration has promised to complete before Obama leaves office. 35 are awaiting their reviews, or the results of their reviews, while just seven men have had their ongoing imprisonment approved by the boards.

Since they began in November 2013, the PRBs – which are akin to parole boards — have approved a total of 22 men for release. This is a success rate for the prisoners of 76%, and demonstrates that the task force was severely mistaken when, in 2010, it described 46 of the men who were later made eligible for PRBs as “too dangerous to release,” while acknowledging that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial — meaning that the so-called evidence was profoundly unreliable, largely produced through interrogations involving torture or other forms of abuse, or through prisoners being bribed with better living conditions.

18 other men were recommended for military commission trials by the task force, but they too were added to the list of prisoners eligible for PRBs when the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed in 2012-13, after appeals court judges dismissed some of the few convictions secured in the much-criticized trial system, correctly ruling that the war crimes for which the men had been convicted – primarily, providing material support for terrorism and conspiracy – had been invented as war crimes by Congress.

It is impossible to estimate how many of the remaining PRBs will end with prisoners being approved for release, but it would seem reasonable to suggest that perhaps another 20 or so men will be recommended for release, leaving somewhere between 30 and 35 prisoners as what, in Spencer Ackerman’s words, “administration officials tend to call an ‘irreducible minimum.’”

Finally closing the prison, however, as President Obama promised when he first took office seven years and four months ago, remains elusive, because of a Congressional ban, included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act every year since 2011, on bringing prisoners to the US mainland for any reason. As Spencer Ackerman described it, the ban “has made the parole-and-transfer process the likeliest mechanism through which Obama can come close to accomplishing his long-thwarted goal of closing down Guantánamo.”

For next year’s NDAA, as I reported recently, the Senate Armed Services Committee has proposed that some prisoners should be able to make federal court plea deals and be imprisoned in other countries, and that seriously ill prisoners should be allowed to visit the US mainland for operations, but it remains to be seen if the proposals will be passed.

Already, however, the House of Representatives, which passed its version of the bill on May 18, restricts the release of prisoners like never before by, as the Guardian described it, “preventing the administration from transferring any detainee to a country subject to a state department travel warning — based on a standard far lower than a risk of terrorism or insurgency.” That list, as the Guardian noted, “currently includes all of Europe.”

As the Guardian also explained, “The White House has threatened to veto the defense bill, citing the Guantánamo provisions, among other reasons. Yet such veto threats have become an annual ritual. Every defense bill since 2011 that Obama ultimately signed included Guantánamo detainee restrictions.”

As a result, it may be that an executive order is the only route through which President Obama can fulfill his promise before he leaves office, or it may be that, after eight years, the president will have to admit defeat and hand over the prison’s closure to his successor – if that successor is a similar-minded Democrat, and not one of the Republican challengers who all seems to be in favor of keeping Guantánamo open, although that tough talk may, of course, change if they actually get elected and have to face sustained criticism, as happened with President Bush in his second term.

And even if President Obama – or his successor – succeeds in bringing several dozen prisoners to the US mainland, there will then be legal challenges if men continue to be held without charge or trial, because of the long-standing failure of the US to treat men seized in wartime since 9/11 according to the Geneva Conventions, and because, we believe, if they are not put on trial they will have new opportunities to challenge the basis of their detention under the US Constitution, which does not endorse indefinite detention without charge or trial, however much government officials pretend that there is such a thing as an “irreducible minimum” of prisoners who can continue to be held without either being given a trial or formally held until the end of hostilities.

First, though, let us hope that these 22 or 23 men are released within the next two months, and that steps continue to be taken to reduce the population of Guantánamo as much as possible.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Alleged Al-Qaida Bomb-Maker Faces Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo

Last Thursday, Jabran al-Qahtani, a Saudi national, became the 39th prisoner to face a Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo.

Set up in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners who were not facing trials (just ten men) or the rather larger group of men who had already been approved for release by the high-level inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, the PRBs involve representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, since January 2014, they have approved 22 men for release and have defended the ongoing imprisonment of just seven men, a success rate for the prisoners of 76%.

The results are a damning verdict on the task force’s decision to describe 46 men facing PRBs as “too dangerous to release,” even though the task force members also acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial; in other words, it was not evidence, but unreliable information extracted from prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere in the “war on terror” — including the CIA’s “black sites” — through the use of torture, other forms of abuse or bribery (with better living conditions, for example). It has also become apparent that another reason some prisoners were described as “too dangerous to release” was because the authorities regarded them as having a threatening attitude towards the US, even though it is, to my mind, understandable that some men confronted with long years of abusive and generally lawless detention might react with anti-social behavior and threats.

The PRBs are also reviewing the cases of 18 men recommended for prosecution by the task force until the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed in 2012-13, when appeals court judges in Washington, D.C. — in what was generally considered a predominantly conservative court — threw out some of the few convictions secured in Guantánamo’s military commissions, on the rather embarrassing basis that the war crimes for which the men had been convicted — primarily, providing material support for terrorism and conspiracy — had been invented by Congress.

Jabran al-Qahtani, a graduate in electrical engineering from King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, is one of the prisoners who had initially been recommended for prosecution, under George W. Bush. In June 2008, he was put forward for a trial by military commission with two other men facing PRBs — Ghassan al-Sharbi (who has no date yet set for his PRB) and Sufyian Barhoumi, whose PRB took place on May 26, and which I’Il be writing about next week — and Noor Uthman Muhammed, a Sudanese prisoner who accepted a plea deal in his military commissions trial and was sent home in December 2013.

These three — and a handful of other men — were seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, at which Abu Zubaydah was also seized. The first victim of the CIA’s torture program, Abu Zubaydah was initially and mistakenly regarded as a significant member of Al-Qaeda, and was subjected to horrendous torture, even though it eventually became apparent that he was not a member of Al-Qaeda at all and had, instead, been the gatekeeper for an independent training camp that was not aligned with Al-Qaeda.

As a result, it may well be that there is little basis for the US’s historical claims that the men seized in Abu Zubaydah’s house were actively involved with terrorism, as the house may, primarily, have been functioning as part of a network of houses used for moving people — civilians and soldiers — out of Afghanistan, after the US-led invasion.

When al-Qahtani was charged, I wrote the following about him:

[He has] had little to say about the allegations against him: that he traveled to Afghanistan after 9/11 “with the intent to fight the Northern Alliance and the American forces, whom he expected would soon be fighting in Afghanistan,” and that he was part of a group at Abu Zubaydah’s house who were provided with money to buy the components to make remote-controlled explosive devices. He refused to take part in his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, and spoke very little in April 2006, during the pre-trial hearing for his first, aborted Military Commission, when he was concerned only to refuse the services of his military lawyer.

As with the other three men, the charges against him were dropped in October 2008. New charges were filed in January 2009, but were once again dismissed in January 2013, and it was just a few months later that the Periodic Review Boards were set up.

In its unclassified summary of al-Qahtani’s case for his PRB, the US authorities described him as “a self-radicalized electrical engineer who traveled from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan in October 2001 to fight against US forces in Afghanistan.” It was also noted that he “received abbreviated weapons training at an al-Qa’ida camp in Afghanistan,” and the emphasis must surely be on “abbreviated,” because, post-9/11, all the camps closed following the US-led invasion on October 6, 2011 – and the summary continued by suggesting that he was then “selected by a senior al-Qa’ida military commander to receive explosives detonator training in Faisalabad, Pakistan,” where “he learned to construct circuit boards for radio-remote controlled improvised explosive devices with the intention of teaching bomb making techniques to operatives attacking US and Coalition forces in Afghanistan.”

It was also noted that he was “captured by Pakistani authorities,” just “five months after leaving Saudi Arabia,” at the safehouse of Abu Zubaydah, who was described, mistakenly, as a “senior al-Qa’ida facilitator.”

Turning to Guantánamo, it was noted that al-Qahtani “has been mostly compliant with guard force personnel” at the prison, “but has not cooperated with interrogators.” It was also noted that, “[e]arly in his detention, he expressed his support for the Taliban and repeatedly stated that he intended to rejoin the extremist fight against the US and its allies,” according to Joint Task Force-Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) in a report in January 2009, but that he “has not been forthright about his expertise in electronics or his time in Afghanistan, and made conflicting statements about the extent of his affiliation with al-Qa’ida before discontinuing his participation with interrogators in late 2002.”

The authorities also noted that his electrical engineering degree “could provide him with credentials for employment if he is released,’ but that “[h]is education and training also make [him] a skilled bomb maker, however, whose electronics expertise would be in high demand by terrorist organizations.” The authorities assessed that, if he were to return to Saudi Arabia, he could “seek out prior associates who could provide him a path to reengage in hostilities and extremism, if he chose to do so,” although it seems unlikely that the Saudi authorities will not be very closely monitoring all released prisoners.

Below I’m posting the opening statements made by al-Qahtani’s personal representative, a member of the military appointed to help him prepare for his PRB, and an extensive submission by his civilian attorney, Judson Lobdell (of the San Francisco branch of Morrison & Foerster LLP), who stressed in particuar how al-Qahtani regretted his actions of 14-15 years ago, describing how he “has come to deeply regret what he did while he was young, ignorant, and swept away by a movement he did not understand.”

Prisoners expressing remorse is an important part of the review board’s deliberations, which are akin to parole boards, but it remains to be seen whether the review board members will accept the scale of his regret, when set against the authorities’ concerns about his perceived lack of forthrightness “about his expertise in electronics or his time in Afghanistan,” and his “conflicting statements about the extent of his affiliation with al-Qa’ida.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 19 May 2016

Jabran Al Qahtani, ISN 696

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. I am the Personal Representative for ISN 696, Mr. Jabran Saad al Qahtani. I will be assisting Mr. Qahtani with his case this morning, along with the assistance of his Private Counsel.

Jabran has been overjoyed and eager to participate in the Periodic Review process since I first met with him in mid-April 2016. He has maintained his positive attitude throughout all of our meetings and has always been gracious and respectful towards me.

Mr. Qahtani has expressed his desire to return home to reunite with his family. However, he is open to transfer to any country, but would prefer an Arabic-speaking country, if possible. He is willing to participate in any rehabilitation or reintegration program as well. He looks forward to life after his transfer from Guantánamo Bay and reconnecting with his large family. As the youngest son of his parents, he hopes that at some point his many sisters and brothers could visit him and he could get to know the youngest members of his close-knit family who were born during his detention.

Jabran has been a compliant detainee with a relatively low number of infractions since his arrival at Guantánamo Bay and has taken advantage of the communal living opportunity here at the detention facility. He earned an electrical engineering degree from King Saud University and comes from a large close-knit family of educators, government workers, and small business owners. Additionally, over the past 14 years, Jabran has attended art, computer skills, and English courses offered at the camp. By being exposed to so many people of various cultural and religious backgrounds here at GTMO, Jabran has had many opportunities to better understand and appreciate their beliefs and customs. These adaptive skills, along with his formal education in Saudi Arabia and coursework completed at Guantánamo Bay, will serve him well wherever he is transferred.

I am confident that Jabran’s desire to pursue a better way of life if transferred from Guantánamo Bay is genuine and that he bears no ill will towards anyone. I remain convinced that Jabran does not pose a significant threat to security of the United States or any of its allies.

Thank you for your time and attention and I look forward to answering any questions you may have during this Board.

Statement of Mr. Judson Lobdell

Written Submission in Support of Jabran Said Wazar al Qahtani (ISN 696)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This submission is to support the release of Jabran Said Wazar al Qahtani (ISN 696). Mr. al Qahtani has been confined at Guantánamo Bay for the past fifteen years as a result of actions that he took when he was twenty four years old. He is now thirty nine and has come to deeply regret what he did while he was young, ignorant, and swept away by a movement he did not understand.

Mr. al Qahtani realizes that he cannot recapture the years he lost or the other consequences of his actions. But he is committed to starting his life afresh, focusing on what he has come over time to recognize are most important to him: building a family and contributing to his community through work and service.

MR. AL QAHTANI POSES NO THREAT TO THE SECURITY OF THE UNITED STATES

The Background to Mr. al Qahtani’s Actions

Jabran Said Wazar al Qahtani is the eighth child of Sa’id Wazur al Qahtani. He has 13 brothers and eight sisters. His father built a successful real estate business in Riyadh.

As a boy, Mr. al Qahtani was raised in a family where an education was highly prized. Math, science, and engineering came naturally to many of Mr. al Qahtani’s older brothers, who achieved early success. Two of Mr. al Qahtani’s brothers are chemical engineers, one is an electrical engineer, one is a petroleum engineer, one is a computer scientist, and two are college professors. None of his siblings has had any involvement in extremist movements.

Mr. al Qahtani greatly admired the success and achievement of his father and his older brothers. Although studies did not come as easily to him as some his older brothers, Mr. al Qahtani was able, through long hours of study as a boy and a young man, to earn an electrical engineering degree specializing in high voltage from King Saud University in Riyadh. This led him to accept a position at the Saudi Arabian Electric Company in Riyadh. Around that time, Mr. al Qahtani met Nawal. They married and began to plan a family of their own.

In 2001, however, Mr. al Qahtani got caught up in a wave of enthusiasm for defending Islam against what he heard described as a “crusade” by the United States and its allies. His understanding of battle at that time came from story books. He had no training or experience with combat or military affairs.

In what he has come to recognize as the greatest mistake of his young life, Mr. al Qahtani left Saudi Arabia for Afghanistan in 2001 and, after a series of misadventures, ended up in a training camp north of Kabul. The camp lasted for ten days. While it included weapons instruction, most of that consisted of classroom lectures. He spent much of his time digging a bunker and ducking fire from the Northern Alliance. He never fired a shot in anger.

After the ten days were over, Mr. al Qahtani retreated into hiding for approximately twenty days. He ended up in a safe house in Faisalabad, where he was captured by Pakistani soldiers. Plans to exploit Mr. al Qahtani’s knowledge of engineering by training him to train others on the making of triggering devices came to nothing. Nobody was ever harmed by a device made directly or indirectly by Mr. al Qahtani.

Mr. al Qahtani was the furthest thing from a hardened Mujahadeen. In the words of one of those captured with Mr. al Qahtani in Faisalibad: “His background and actions weren’t that of a fundamentalist. He liked to joke, have fun.”

Mr. al Qahtani’s attempts to puff himself up as tough and dangerous following his capture — for example, calling himself a “terrorist” — were nothing more than a misguided attempt to fit into the extreme society of his fellow Guantánamo Bay detainees.

Mr. al Qahtani’s Family are Committed to Supporting His Plans to Start a Family and Live a Quiet Life

Mr. al Qahtani comes from a well-respected Saudi Arabian family that, despite his mistakes, is willing to support his reintegration into modern society.

None of Mr. al Qahtani’s brothers is involved in extremist activities. They were all dismayed by Mr. al Qahtani’s actions and would have tried to stop him had they known his intentions in 2001-2002.

Mr. al Qahtani’s family statements, enclosed with this submission, evince a loving family ready to support Mr. al Qahtani:

Mr. al Qahtani’s brother has collected letters from all available members of his family. He says that Mr. al Qahtani’s release would return the “smile and happiness” to every member of his family.
His other brother hopes that Mr. al Qahtani’s life is stabilized “with marriage, suitable work, and [a] house to be a productive individual serving his home and his society.”
His brother-in-law says that his entire family was shocked when he left home but hopes that the Board gives Mr. al Qahtani an opportunity to join his family once again.
Another brother describes him as, among many other things, “gregarious,” “humorous,” “moderate,” “patient,” and “loved by others.”
Another brother says that Mr. al Qahtani’ s leaving home was “terrible” and that he hopes to help Mr. al Qahtani “proceed his life which will be the new better beginning to him.”
An additional brother remarks fondly on how Mr. al Qahtani taught his younger siblings school lessons and hopes that his family can help Mr. al Qahtani start a family of his own soon.
His sisters and his father’s second wife express excitement for his release and note that his family plans to help provide him a home and financial support upon his release.

Mr. al Qahtani plans to reintegrate into society by finding a wife, a job, and starting a family. These are not the plans of a potential recidivist, but rather the plans of a man ready to live the rest of his life quietly.

Mr. al Qahtani’s Behavior in Custody has Improved

The statements from Mr. al Qahtani’s fellow inmates and teachers reflect the maturing of his character. Mr. al Qahtani has taken a number of classes at Guantánamo, including English, life skills, and Photoshop courses, and his instructors in those courses speak highly of his studious nature and willingness to work with others. Similarly, while Mr. al Qahtani was formerly stand-offish at Guantánamo, he has slowly opened up to other inmates and has become social once again. Their statements evince his development while in Guantánamo Bay and his readiness to reintegrate into modem society.

THE BOARD SHOULD RELEASE MR. AL QAHTANI

Mr. al Qahtani poses no threat to the security of the United States. He deeply regrets his decision to leave home in 2002 and realizes that it was based on an immature, storybook notion of the world that has no basis in reality.

Mr. al Qahtani’s training as an electrical engineer should not stand in the way of his release. Mr. al Qahtani is not a bomb-maker. Indeed, he has never been alleged to have been a bomb-maker, only a young man who, because of his education, was picked out to receive training in that area. There is no reason to believe that formal electrical engineering training Mr. al Qahtani received twenty years ago would provide him with relevant specialized knowledge of bomb-making.

Regardless, Mr. al Qahtani has absolutely no desire to be a bomb maker. He wishes to live a quiet life, raise a family, get a job, and earn respect in his community.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo for Yemeni Subjected to Long-Term Sleep Deprivation in Prison’s Early Years

Last Tuesday, Mohammad Rajah Sadiq Abu Ghanim (aka Mohammed Ghanim), a Yemeni born in 1975, became the 38th prisoner to face a Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo. These involve representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and were set up in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners who had not already been approved for release by the high-level inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, or were not facing trials. Just ten men are in this latter category.

Those eligible for the PRBs were 46 men described as “too dangerous to release” by the task force, which also, however, acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial; in other words, that is was not evidence, but unsubstantiated claims made by prisoners subjected to torture, abuse or bribery (with better living conditions), or that they were regarded as having dangerously anti-American attitudes (despite the fact that their appalling treatment may have inspired such sentiments).

18 others had been recommended for trial by the task force, until the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed when appeal court judges overturned some of the handful of convictions secured in the military commission trial system, pointing out that the war crimes for which the men had been convicted had actually been invented by Congress.

Mohammad Abu Ghanim is one of the men initially described as “too dangerous to release,” and will be hoping to join the 20 others in that category who have been recommended for release by PRBs. Two men originally recommended for prosecution have also been recommended for release, while just seven men have so far had their ongoing imprisonment upheld. This is a 76% success rate for the prisoners, and a rather damning indictment of the scaremongering involved in the task force describing men as “too dangerous to release,” when that has now been disproved on 20 separate occasions.

In a profile of Mohammad Ghanim in September 2010, I noted, “In Guantánamo, Ghanim was accused of having ‘participated in jihad activities’ in Bosnia and of taking part in the Yemeni civil war, and of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. In response, he has apparently stated that he fought only with the Taliban.”

The bin Laden bodyguard allegation is unreliable, in part because, even though it was made by a number of high-profile prisoners, they were all subjected to torture, and in part because, although Ghanim is one of 30 men seized in December 2001 crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, who were all described as bin Laden bodyguards and known as “the Dirty Thirty,” most of them were young Yemenis, who had not been in Afghanistan for long, and would not have been trusted with such important positions.

I also described the torture and abuse to which Ghanim had been subjected in Guantánamo:

In a report from a former prisoner published by Cageprisoners, it was stated that Ghanim was subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation in Guantánamo, as part of what was euphemistically termed “the frequent flier program,” and was also denied medical treatment: “Every two hours he would get moved from cell to cell, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, sometimes cell to cell, sometimes block to block, over a period of eight months. He was deprived of sleep because of this and he was also deprived of medical attention. He had lost a lot of weight. He had a painful medical problem, haemorrhoids, and that treatment was refused unless he cooperated. He said he would cooperate and had an operation. However, the operation was not performed correctly and he still had problems. He would not cooperate. [H]e was [then] put in Romeo Block where the prisoners would be made to stand naked. It was then left to the discretion of the interrogators whether a prisoner was allowed clothes or not.”

The US authorities’ unclassified summary for Ghanim’s PRB repeats the claims — first made publicly available in 2011 by WikiLeaks, when the formerly classified military files on the prisoners were released, after they were passed to WikiLeaks by Pfc. Bradley Manning — that he “is an experienced militant who probably acted as a guard for Usama Bin Ladin in Afghanistan,” adding, “He forged relationships with future al-Qa’ida members while fighting for jihadist causes during the 1990s and probably participated in plots against government and Western interests in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. He also associated with several USS Cole plotters and probably left Yemen for Afghanistan around the time of the bombing in October 2000, although we have no evidence that he had a role in the operation.”

Some of these allegations — about his connections with terrorists in Yemen — seem more troubling, although the claim that he was “fighting for jihadist causes during the 1990s” is clearly exaggerated. As the 1990s began, Ghanim was 15 years old, and there seems to be no basis for suggesting that he did anything more than visit Bosnia in 1994, when he was 19, leaving the year after when the Dayton Peace Accords were signed.

As well as repeating the bin Laden bodyguard allegation, the authorities also noted that, in Afghanistan, “he fought for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, worked for an al-Qa’ida-associated charity, [and] possibly trained to become an al-Qa’ida instructor,” although it is not possible to discern how much truth there is to these additional allegations.

In Guantánamo, the authorities stated, he “has committed an average number of infractions compared to other detainees,” but “has improved his behavior since mid-2013, probably because he wanted to improve his chances for transfer.” The authorities also noted, “The majority of his infractions have been non-violent and relatively minor; however, he has also participated in mass disturbances and non-violent demonstrations in response to quality of life issues or perceived injustices committed by the guard force.”

It was also noted that Ghanim “has demonstrated varying levels of cooperation during his interviews, and his cooperation has improved when he felt that the debriefer has treated him with respect,” which is surely a vindication of rapport-building rather than abuse as a way to secure reliable information.

The authorities also stated, “He has been reluctant to discuss other detainees, except to report on their impending hunger strikes or possible uprisings” — which is generally a sign of a strong-willed prisoner, who has managed not to get drawn into making false allegations against his fellow prisoners — and added that he “appears to have some influence among other detainees and has served as an intermediary between some detainees, which may have helped raise his status in prison.”

In conclusion, the summary noted that Ghanim “has avoided explicitly aligning himself with violent extremism,” attributing this to him “probably judging that this may improve his chances for transfer.” It was also that he “has expressed hatred towards the United States on occasion,” although it was acknowledged — for the first time, I think — that this was “probably out of frustration with his detention and debriefers’ line of questioning.”

It was also noted that a former prisoner with whom he has corresponded “is suspected of reengaging in terrorism,” and that “several of his family members and childhood friends associate with AQAP [Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] members who could facilitate [his] introduction to the group or other extremist activity if he chose to reengage.” On the former point, I find it unfair that correspondence with a former prisoner “suspected of reengaging in terrorism” is regarded as a sign of sympathy with anti-US sentiment, when it is unclear that any such sympathy exists. In addition, the latter point is largely irrelevant, as, if he were to be approved for release, he would not be repatriated. This is because the entire US establishment is unwilling to repatriate any Yemenis, and third countries must be found that are prepared to offer them new homes.

Below I’m posting the opening statement made by Ghanem’s personal representatives (military personnel appointed to help them prepare for their PRBs), in which they explained that he “fosters no ill-will toward the United States and is no longer a threat to America,” and also referred to his compliant behaviour at Guantánamo. No opening statement was provided by an attorney, and it remains to be seen if Ghanim himself not only demonstrated compliance at Guantánamo, but also remorse for his previous actions, which seems very much to be what the boards — whose closest analogy is a parole board — seem to be looking out for in particular.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 17 May 2016

Mohammad Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim, ISN 044

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. As Mohammad Rajah Sadiq Abu Ghanim, ISN 044, Personal Representatives, we would like to thank the Board for allowing us the opportunity to present Mohammad’s case and reveal how he is no longer a continuing significant threat to the United States.

From day one, Mohammad has actively participated in every meeting that we scheduled with him. He was always eager to provide any information that was asked of him, as well as provide any clarity to any situation that was not fathomable to us. During our meetings, Mohammad has expressed his desire to return home and to reunite with his family. He is aware that he may not be going back to Yemen, but he is willing to settle wherever the board determines for him. He is enthusiastically looking forward to the opportunity to have a wife and children of his own someday.

Since his detention in Guantanamo, Mohammad has been respectful to the guard force, and he has diligently tried to keep his fellow detainees from harming themselves and each other. He has been a compliant detainee and has taken advantage of the many opportunities presented to him to learn about American culture. He likes to read books written by American authors as well as watching several American television shows. He has become a person who is considerate and tolerant of others. Additionally, his time here has given him the opportunity to meet Americans and be exposed to American values and culture. This has given him an appreciation of the good things that America and Americans can accomplish.

Mohammad fosters no ill-will toward the United States and is no longer a threat to America; he is ready to answer any questions the Board may have for him at this time.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Insignificant Afghan Finally Approved for Release from Guantánamo

Good news from Guantánamo, as another prisoner, Obaidullah, an Afghan, is approved for release by a Periodic Review Board. Decisions have now been taken in the cases of 29 prisoners, with 22 recommended for release, and just seven recommended for ongoing imprisonment. This is a success rate for the prisoners of 76%, which is hugely significant, because, back in 2010, they were either recommended for prosecution or were described as “too dangerous to release” by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which President Obama established, shortly after taking office in 2009, to review the cases of all the prisoners held when he became president. 18 men were in the former category, and 46 in the latter.

The decision also means that, of the 80 men still held, 28 have been approved for release — 15 by the task force in 2010, and 13 by the PRBs (nine of those approved for release by PRBs have already been freed). 35 others are awaiting PRBs, or are awaiting decisions, and just ten men are facing trials — or have already had trials.

Obaidullah, who was just 19 years old when he was seized at his home in Afghanistan in July 2002, is one of the prisoners who had initially been recommended for prosecution — and is the second former prosecution candidate to be recommended for release by a PRB (three others have been recommended for ongoing imprisonment). He had been put forward for a trial by military commission in September 2008, charged with providing material support for terrorism and conspiracy, based on claims that he “stored and concealed anti-tank mines, other explosive devices, and related equipment”; that he “concealed on his person a notebook describing how to wire and detonate explosive devices”; and that he “knew or intended” that his “material support and resources were to be used in preparation for and in carrying out a terrorist attack.”

At the time, I described these allegations as “the thinnest set of allegations to date” in the commissions, in an article entitled, “Guantánamo trials: another insignificant Afghan charged,” in which I also mentioned how Obaidullah had spoken, in an earlier review at Guantánamo, of his torture by US forces in Afghanistan — how, in Khost, US soldiers “put a knife to my throat and said if you don’t tell us the truth and you lie to us we are going to slaughter you,” how they “tied my hands and put a heavy bag of sand on my hands and made me walk all night in the Khost airport,” and how, In Bagram, “they gave me more trouble and would not let me sleep. They were standing me on the wall and my hands were hanging above my head. There were a lot of things they made me say.”

As I also pointed out, when Charlie Savage of the New York Times wrote about Lt. Cmdr. Pandis’s investigation back in 2012, he noted, “It is an accident of timing that Mr. Obaidullah is at Guantánamo. One American official who was formerly involved in decisions about Afghanistan detainees said that such a ‘run of the mill’ suspect would not have been moved to Cuba had he been captured a few years later; he probably would have been turned over to the Afghan justice system, or released if village elders took responsibility for him.” The last Afghans transferred to the general population in Guantánamo were sent in November 2003, and it is certainly true to note that the majority of alleged Afghan insurgents seized and held at Bagram from December 2003 onwards were returned to their families many years ago.

It is also worth noting, I believe, that, when Obaidullah was first charged, I wrote, “It doesn’t take much reflection on these charges to realize that it is a depressingly clear example of the US administration’s disturbing, post-9/11 redefinition of ‘war crimes,’ which apparently allows the US authorities to claim that they can equate minor acts of insurgency committed by a citizen of an occupied nation with terrorism.”

In October 2010, Obaidullah also had his habeas corpus petition ruled on by a US judge, who turned it down, but, as the Associated Press noted this week, “The government dismissed the [military commission] charges in 2011 and his lawyers have been pressing for his release ever since.” This was even before the charges in the military commissions were largely discredited, when, in 2012 and 2013, appeals court judges ruled that providing material support for terrorism and conspiracy were not war crimes triable by a military commission.

Also in 2011, an investigator with the defense team for his military commission, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard Pandis, “visited Afghanistan, establishing a coherent narrative in which Obaidullah was innocent,” as I explained in an article in 2011, and as I described it in my recent article discussing Obaidullah’s PRB last month. I added:

To cite just one example unearthed during the investigation, the fact that dried blood was found in the back seat of his car — which the US authorities attributed to him carrying wounded insurgents — actually came about because, “two nights before the raid, Mr. Obaidullah’s wife had given birth in the car while on the way to the hospital.” The defense team added that he “had not volunteered that explanation about the blood” because of “a cultural taboo about discussing childbirth.”

The board members issued their final determination on May 19, confirming, that, “by consensus,” they had “determined that continued law of war detention of the detainee does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

The board members explained that that had “some concern with the [Odaidullah]’s failure to demonstrate sufficient candor related to events prior to detention,” but “found that the risk [he] presents can be adequately mitigated” in light of the following: that he “has not expressed any intent to re-engage in terrorist activities [and] has not espoused any anti-US sentiment that would indicate he views the US as his enemy,” that “neither [he] nor his family have any ties to extremists outside of Guantánamo,” and that he “has been mostly compliant while at Guantánamo.”

The board members added that they had “also considered the multiple letters of support for [Obaidullah], to include the willingness to provide [him] financial and integration support upon transfer, [his] efforts to take advantage of education opportunities while at Guantánamo, and [his] positive and constructive leadership in detention, to include mediating concerns raised between other detainees and between detainees and the guard staff.”

It was recommended that he be transferred “preferably to a country with an integration program, strong monitoring program, and an ability to keep [him] productively engaged,” and I hope a case can be made for him be returned to his family in Afghanistan, where, I believe, he deserves to be after his nearly 14-year ordeal.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Plea Deals in Federal Court Mooted for Guantánamo Prisoners in Next Year’s National Defense Authorization Act

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Last week there was an interesting development in relation to President Obama’s hopes of closing Guantánamo, when the Senate Armed Services Committee announced that it had included a provision in its version of next years’s National Defense Authorization Act, which, as Charlie Savage reported for the New York Times, would allow Guantánamo prisoners to “plead guilty to criminal charges in civilian court via video teleconference,” and would also allow them to be “transferred to other countries to serve their sentences.”

Last November, a number of lawyers sent a letter to the Justice Department, which the New York Times discussed here, in which they “express[ed] interest in exploring plea deals by video teleconference — but only in civilian court, not military commissions.”

Lawyers for six prisoners said that they “may wish” to negotiate plea deals — Abu Zubaydah, the “high-value detainee” for whom the CIA’s torture program was developed, Abu Faraj al-Libi, another “high-value detainee,” Sanad al-Kazimi, a Yemeni who recently went before a Periodic Review Board, Abd al-Rahim Ghulam Rabbani, a Pakistani, Abdul Latif Nasser, the last Moroccan in the prison, and Soufian Barhoumi (aka Sufyian Barhoumi), an Algerian whose PRB is taking place on May 24. As Savage described it, the letter also “said several others are interested, and that Majid Khan, who has pleaded guilty in the [military] commissions system but has not been sentenced, would like to plead again, in civilian court.”

Katya Jestin and Anthony Barkow, lawyers for Majid Khan, noted, “A reduction of this size to the detainee population at Guantánamo would significantly aid the administration’s efforts to close the prison and may help facilitate the disposition of other detainees.”

In November, writing about Abu Zubaydah, Charlie Savage described how he “was initially portrayed after his 2002 capture as a senior Al-Qaeda leader, but his importance and role were later downgraded.” He also explained how Joe Margulies, one of his lawyers, “confirmed his interest in a plea deal but declined to say what length of sentence he would accept.” Margulies said, “We are happy to engage in negotiations with any prosecutor who would entertain a fair negotiation based on his genuine, not mythologized, culpability.”

Speaking about last week’s announcement by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Wells Dixon, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, “Allowing a detainee to plead guilty and cooperate with the US government is a no-brainer. This provision should draw broad bipartisan support. It is an important step toward cleaning up the mess that exists at Guantánamo, and reducing the so-called irreducible minimum who remain in limbo.”

Examining the plea deal proposal, Charlie Savage also noted that federal courts offer advantages for prisoners “seeking a defined sentence and an exit from the wartime prison,” explaining that prisoners “who participated in a terrorist group but were not linked to any specific attack could plead guilty to several offenses under domestic criminal law, including conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism” — extremely important after appeals court judges ruled, in memorable and influential rulings in 2012 and 2013, that the offenses mentioned above cannot be tried in military commission trials because they are not war crimes.

As Charlie Savage also noted, unlike military commissions, federal courts “can count previous time in custody toward any sentence.”

The bill put forward by the Senate Armed Services Committee now goes to the full Senate, where it may secure Republican support, if the comments of Sen. Lindsey Graham, a longtime opponent of Guantánamo’s closure, are anything to go by. The Republican Senator for South Carolina, who is a member of the committee, said, as Charlie Savage described it, that “he supported an ‘all-of-the-above approach’ that would give the government a ‘criminal disposition path’ for rank-and-file detainees — especially if it did not involve bringing them to a courthouse on domestic soil, something he said could make the courthouse a target.” Sen. Graham emphasized, however,  that he still thought it “made more sense” to use military commissions for what Savage described as “contested trials of high-value terrorists.”

Unfortunately, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s bill does nothing to allow President Obama to close Guantánamo before he leaves office — not just implicitly, because the plea deal plan wouldn’t kick in until next year, but also explicitly, because it “would largely extend an existing ban” on bringing prisoners to the US mainland, despite President Obama asking Congress to lift that ban, as part of a plan for closing the prison, unveiled early this year, which also involves an intention to bring to the US mainland a small number of prisoners the government wants neither to put on trial nor release.

However, the bill does, for the first time, “allow the temporary transfer” of prisoners to the US mainland “for emergency medical treatment,” because the prisoners are getting older and more ill, and Guantánamo itself “has only limited medical equipment and capabilities.”

80 men are still held at Guantánamo. Ten have been charged — or already  convicted — in the military commission trial system, and 28 have been recommended for transfer. Charlie Savage noted that the administration’s inter-agency process approved transfer deals for 14 of the 28 men approved for release “several weeks ago,” according to officials, although he added that defense secretary Ashton Carter “has not yet notified Congress,” which he must do at least 30 days before any prisoner leaves.

While the prospect of Guantánamo’s population being reduced to 66 is heartening news indeed, this still leaves 42 men facing Periodic Review Boards, and perhaps, in some cases, the plea deals proposed by the Senate committee. I hope that Congress will agree to the proposal, but it would be better, of course, if lawmakers accepted President Obama’s plan and allowed him to close the prison before he leaves office.

Note: For further discussion of the NDAA proposals, see Steve Vladeck’s analysis for Just Security, and Lyle Denniston’s analysis for Constitution Daily.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Yemeni Tribal Chief, Businessman, Intelligence Officer and Torture Victim Seeks Release from Guantánamo Via Periodic Review Board

Last week, a 48-year old Yemeni citizen held at Guantánamo, Abd al-Salam al-Hela (aka Abd al-Salam al-Hilah or Abdul al-Salam al-Hilal), became the 37th prisoner to have his case considered by a Periodic Review Board. This high-level, US review process, which involves representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, began in November 2013.

In the two and half years since, the PRBs have been reviewing the cases of two groups of men: 46 men originally described by a previous review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force (which President Obama set up when he first took office in 2009), as “too dangerous to release,” and 18 others initially put forward for trials until the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed, in 2012 and 2013, after appeals court judges ruled that the war crimes being prosecuted had been invented by Congress.

For the 46 men described as “too dangerous to release,” the task force also acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, which set alarm bells ringing for anyone paying close attention, because, if insufficient evidence exists to put someone on trial, then it is not evidence at all. At Guantánamo — and elsewhere in the “war on terror” — the reasons for this emerged under minimal scrutiny from anyone paying attention. Instead of being evidence, information was extracted from prisoners through the use of torture or other forms of abuse, or through being bribed with the promise of better living conditions, which, as a result, is demonstrably unreliable.

What the task force also meant, it has transpired since the PRBs began, is that having a negative attitude towards the US also counted as a reason for being regarded as “too dangerous to release,” and the PRBs, which are best viewed as being akin to parole boards, are therefore seeking to establish that the men whose cases they are studying are capable of expressing remorse about what they did (or are alleged to have done), and are willing to spend time and effort seeking to establish that they do not pose a threat if released.

21 men have so far been approved for release, and just seven have had their ongoing imprisonment recommended, while nine others are awaiting decisions. This is a success rate for the prisoners of 75%, which convincingly demonstrates that the task force’s “too dangerous to release” description was exaggerated and inappropriate. Abd al-Salam al-Hela is one of the 46 men regarded as “too dangerous to release” by Obama’s task force in 2010, when, interestingly, he was one of 13 men that the task force additionally recommended for possible transfer to imprisonment in the US.

The case of Abd al-Salam al-Hela

I first wrote about Abd al-Salam al-Hela’s case in 2006-07, for my book The Guantánamo Files, in the chapter entitled, “‘Extraordinary rendition,’ ‘ghost’ prisoners and secret prisons,” and I recall thinking at the time how extraordinary it was that a prominent businessman, who also worked for the Yemeni government on intelligence matters that related, in particular, to former mujahideen, had been kidnapped in Egypt, tortured in secret prisons and sent to Guantánamo.

Had it been a US citizen and businessmen, involved in intelligence, who was captured by an enemy and held incommunicado, it is unthinkable that the US government would have put up with such a cavalcade of lawlessness, but in the “war on terror,” of course, the normal rules were jettisoned, and al-Hela was seized at a time when the CIA seemed to be giddy with power, abducting people and rendering them to be tortured on the shallowest of bases — to give just a few examples, Abu Omar, a cleric kidnapped in broad daylight on street in Milan in February 2003 and flown to Egypt for torture, Khaled el-Masri, a case of mistaken identity, seized in Macedonia in December 2003 and sent to a “black site” in Afghanistan, and Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, a Pakistani also sent for torture in Egypt, in whose case the CIA had been called by Indonesian intelligence on the basis of a single overheard conversation in a bugged house.

In my book, I drew largely on a 2005 report by Human Rights Watch, and began with the 34-year old al-Hela’s arrival in Cairo in September 2002:

The manager of a pharmaceutical firm, he was also the Yemeni representative of Egypt’s biggest construction company, and had been invited to settle some financial disagreements, but within a week he was abducted by the Egyptian security services on behalf of the Americans. According to certain reports, an Egyptian militant in Yemen suggested that he had ties to al-Qaeda operatives, and it’s possible that, when this information was passed on to the Americans, the decision was made to capture him. What seems more likely, however, is that the al-Qaeda story was a ruse, and that the Americans — now sufficiently emboldened after abducting and rendering whoever they felt like for over a year — decided to abduct him for his intelligence value.

As well as being a businessman, al-Hela was a colonel in Yemeni intelligence, responsible for seeking asylum in other countries for the ‘Arab Afghans,’ including hundreds of former mujahideen who returned from Afghanistan to fight the Marxist rebels in south Yemen during the 1994 civil war, and some of the 30,000 other Yemenis who also went to Afghanistan over the previous 20 years. For the Americans, al-Hela had precious intelligence: he knew who had settled down and moved away from politics, who continued to be active, and who had left the country, and, as well as being familiar with members of the militant groups, he had a close relationship with Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Salih, and with numerous Arab and Western intelligence services.

After his abduction, al-Hela was interrogated in two hotels for a week, where he was subjected to ‘degrading treatment,’ and was then driven to an airport and handed over to masked American agents who stripped him, dressed him in blue overalls, chained his hands and feet, blindfolded him, and took him to the ‘Dark Prison,’ where, as well as being kept in permanent darkness, with ‘sharp metallic rock music’ playing 24 hours a day,’ he was ‘regularly stripped naked and interrogated,’ was ‘suspended from the ceiling for prolonged periods,’ and had one of his hands ‘cuffed to the wall at all times making it difficult for him to sleep or go to the toilet.’ He added that ‘the only time he saw light was when a bright strobe light was flashed in his eyes during interrogation, temporarily blinding him,’ and that he lost 30 kg in weight.

He was then transferred to another underground prison near Kabul called Malidu, a more modern facility where he was held for two and a half months and interrogated for 15 consecutive days, and was then taken to another secret prison, where he was held for 14 months, and where ‘his jailers told him he was being held at the behest of the US.’ Although he was also tortured in this unknown prison, he pointed out that ‘the psychological burden of being confined incommunicado was far worse than the physical abuse.’ He was then transferred to Bagram, where, he said, the conditions were ‘very, very bad,’ but did not wish to elaborate. While there, he managed to smuggle out a letter that was printed in a Yemeni newspaper, in which he pleaded for help and pointed out, acutely, ‘My only crime is that the Americans wanted information from me, but couldn’t find any, so I was left in Afghani prisons. My last interrogation was a year ago.’ He was transferred to Guantánamo on 17 September 2004, in the plane full of supposedly significant suspects mentioned above, and has been held in Camp 5, reserved for prisoners who are considered to be dangerous or to have intelligence value.

Al-Hela’s story also featured in an article in Harper’s Magazine in September 2006, by Eliza Griswold, who had traveled to Yemen with some of the prisoners’ lawyers. She began by noting that he was “a prominent businessman and tribal leader to some 10,000 people,” and wrote about a family visit at his home “with his three brothers, some community leaders, and a group of American lawyers from southern California.” A man named Hamoud, who “was acting as tribal leader in Abdulsalam’s stead,” said, “The Yemeni government has said they want him back, but the government is afraid of America.” Nodding towards the lawyers, he added, “We are hoping for something good from these American people.”

After lunch, al-Hela’s brothers explained what they knew. Griswold wrote, “Abdulsalam brokered large-scale construction deals, and several years ago he arranged to help some Egyptian contractors build universities. When the Egyptians stiffed him, he flew to Cairo to sort it out. Within days he was detained by Egyptian intelligence officers. The family’s theory was that the cheating businessmen somehow framed their brother. More likely, though, Abdulsalam fits into that second category of detainees: those who are not necessarily suspected of wrongdoing but might have valuable intelligence. As a tribal leader, Abdulsalam had been instrumental in helping Arab Afghan fighters return home after the Yemeni civil war. This association with foreign fighters may have interested the American military, but no one can say for sure.”

At Guantánamo, his lawyer David Remes made notes of a meeting with al-Hela in July 2009 available after they had been through the Pentagon’s declassification process. They came at a difficult time — a month after the death, allegedly by committing suicide, of a Yemeni named Muhammad Salih, who had been a popular figure amongst the prisoners.

In the notes, al-Hela revealed his fears for his life, based on a pair of scissors he found, inexplicably, in his cell:

Because of the incidents that are happening one after another, not even mountains could withstand it. It is beyond the ability of humans to endure. I can’t find the right expression. I stopped shaking, being scared. This is not how I planned my life, but I can endure it because this is Allah’s plan for me. I’ve been here seven years. It would give a child gray hairs. On [July 6, 2009] at 11pm, I returned to my cell after rec time [recreation time]. Usually, right after I come back from rec, or before I go to sleep, I try to clean myself up. I also arrange my bed so I can go to sleep. When I began to arrange the bed, I found a sharp object, which I recognized as a big pair of scissors — 20-25 cms or 8-10 inches. It was very sharp, and each of the blades could be a very sharp knife. It’s impossible for such an object to be found with a prisoner at GTMO, especially in Camp 5, which is the most secure prison. Even the scissors in the first-aid kit are blunt and 4 inches and the tips are bent, so no prisoner could hurt himself if he managed to get it.

None of the other prisoners had ever seen anything like it in all their years at Guantánamo. I was tempted to call the guards, but it occurred to me that they may have placed the scissors there so I could kill myself; maybe they thought they could get rid of me because there’s no agreement with Yemen because of me. The other brothers say my name is always at the top of the issues, so we speculate that they were trying to set me up to kill myself in a moment of weakness, when any human would think of killing himself. Nothing is done by chance or stupidity here. They use psychological torture, which is worse than direct murder. More serious. The second possibility is that they planted this not just so they could say I had taken my own life but, if not that, and there is no agreement with Yemen, they’re killing the Yemenis one after another. Why do they want to kill me? What have I done? Don’t kill me in this low way — saying that I killed myself. Just execute me openly.

Abd al-Salam al-Hela has also suffered huge personal losses during his time at Guantánamo — his two young sons, who died when a grenade they were playing with exploded, and the deaths of his mother and father.

Abd al-Salam al-Hela’s PRB

In its unclassified summary for the PRB, the US authorities claimed that Abd al-Salam al-Hela “entered into extremist circles at a young age and rose to be a prominent extremist facilitator who leveraged his position within the Yemeni Political Security Organization (PSO) to provide refuge and logistical support to extremist groups,” adding that he “probably learned about terrorist plots against Yemeni and Western interests on multiple occasions through his extremist contacts.” It was also stated that, “[d]uring detention, [he] has admitted to many of these activities,” although it is difficult to know how reliable his admissions were, as much of his early detention was in circumstances that are not conducive to truth-telling. The authorities also noted that “[h]is reported pre-detention activities suggest that [he] was sympathetic to extremists and driven by a desire for personal position and financial gain.”

The authorities acknowledged that, “[s]ince his arrival at Guantánamo, [al-Hela] has committed a moderate number of infractions relative to other detainees,” adding that he “appears to calibrate his cooperation with Joint Task Force-Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO) personnel to extract his preferred living conditions.” It was also noted that he “has expressed a few, general aspirations for his time after Guantánamo, including wanting to help transfer additional Guantánamo detainees and open a business,” although these may not be enough for the review board members, who are keen to hear detailed plans for prisoners’ lives after Guantánamo.

The authorities also expressed concerns about al-Hela’s thoughts on terrorism, which may also not sit well with the review board members. It was stated that al-Hela “has provided few insights into his original motivations for supporting terrorists in Yemen or his current thinking,” and that he “has eschewed discussion about extremism and has instead focused his comments in interviews on politics and the security situation in Yemen” — although to my mind this latter point could be read as encouraging, as his concerns are with his home country and not with an international, or pan-Muslim approach to politics. That said, it is more worrying that the summary also noted that he “has expressed continued support for extremists and terrorist groups, including ISIL,” although no further details are provided to be able to assess what this supposed support actually entails.

It was also noted that he “has been in direct contact with two extremists outside of Guantánamo during his detention.” One of these alleged extremists is one of his brothers, although the authors of the summary, having described him as an extremist, then concede that they “cannot confirm” that he “still supports extremist activity.” Another is “a former Guantánamo detainee suspected of reengaging in terrorism,” although without further clarification I find it disturbing, as I have in other PRB cases, that correspondence with a former prisoner who has come under suspicion by the US can be regarded as evidence of sympathy with extremism without further scrutiny.

The summary concluded by speculating that al-Hela “probably would have multiple avenues to reengage in terrorism if he chose to do so because of these contacts, his expansive extremist connections from before his detention, and because his family resides in an area of Sanaa known for extremist activity,” but if his release were to be recommended, these concerns would be irrelevant, because the entire US establishment is in agreement that no Yemenis at Guantánamo can be repatriated, because of the security situation in their home country.

Below I’m cross-posting the opening statements of his personal representatives (military personnel appointed to help prisoners to prepare for their PRBs) and of his lawyer, David Remes. The representatives, who described him as Abedelsalam, delivered a powerful summary of his role as a tribal leader, political figure and successful businessman, and David Remes, noting how senior political figures have long been calling for his release, was also at pains to stress that his client “is through with government and politics,” and how he “has no ideology” and only “wants to restore his life with his wife and daughter.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 12 May 2016

Abd Al Salam Al Hilah, ISN 1463

Personal Representative Opening Statement

As Abedelsalam’s Personal Representatives, we would like to thank the Board for allowing us the opportunity to present his case and demonstrate how he is not a continuing significant threat to the United States, her people or her Allies.

First, Abedelsalam was a highly respected leader in his native country of Yemen, and he had a great deal of tribal, political and business influence. After the passing of his father, a tribal leader who had taught him the intricate lessons of leadership and influence, Abedelsalam became the leader of his family at the age of twelve years old. He raised his brothers and sisters with the help of his mother, which earned him considerable respect from his community.

Later, he developed his business and trade skills to such a degree that he was able to become not only financially stable, but prosperous. He got married to a loving and supportive wife, who bore him two beautiful daughters and two handsome sons. He is extremely proud of his family, who support him, and who he wishes to see again soon.

As he continued in his businesses and tribal affairs, he attracted the attention of the political parties in Yemen. Ultimately, he joined the General Congress Party (the largest political party in Yemen) at the request of the President of Yemen, hoping to bring together all of the parties. As a result, his tribe encouraged him to run for Parliament. He used his influence to help raise the economic standards of all the people in Yemen. He helped bring international companies to Yemen to build bridges, roads, airports, power plants, and increase the efforts of energy exploration.

With such great respect and influence, Abedelsalam was asked to help the government in cooperating with other tribes to root out any Afghan trained fighters and have them handed over to the government. This was a task that should have been recognized as aiding the West in its efforts to combat terrorism; however, when he visited another Middle Eastern country to arrange for $200 Million in financial commitments to Yemen, he was arrested and handed over to U.S. authorities and eventually interned at the detention facility in Guantanamo.

Abedelsalam has never had any intentions to harm the United States, her Allies or the people of the Western Democracies, and he is ready to answer any questions the Board may have for him at this time.

Periodic Review Board, May 12, 2016

Abdulsalam Abd Al-Salam Al-Hilah (ISN 1463)

Opening Statement of Private Counsel David H. Remes

Good morning. I am David Remes, private counsel for Abdulsalam Ali Abdulrahman Al-Hela (ISN 1463). I have represented Abdulsalam in his habeas corpus case for over a decade. I have met with him countless times, and I believe I know him well. I have also met with members of Abdulsalam’s family, including his brothers and his wife, on almost every one of my eleven trips to Yemen between 2005 and 2013. I have been to their homes and broken bread with them.

Abdulsalam al-Hela is a strong and justifiably proud man. The son of an influential sheikh, Abdulsalam became an influential sheikh in his own right. He also became a successful businessman and a figure of national prominence. President Ali Abdullah Saleh enlisted him to mediate disputes between the government and the tribes, and the tribes enlisted him to mediate disputes among themselves.

Abdulsalam was among those chosen by President Saleh to help manage the deportation of jihadists who had settled in Yemen after defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with assistance from the United States.

The letters of support that we have submitted for Abdulsalam prove the high esteem in which he is held in official and political circles in Yemen. I have discussed his case, on many occasions, with leaders of Yemen’s national legislature and senior government officials. The Deputy Leader of the Chamber, Hemiar Al-Ahmar, leads the Committee of notables who have been fighting for Abdulsalam’s release for many years. All speak out strongly in favor of his release and are emphatic that he poses no threat to anyone.

The Board should not conclude that Abdulsalam is a continuing significant threat to the United States based on activities or associations 15 to 25 years ago. He is nearing fifty and is through with government and politics. He has no ideology. He wants to restore his life with his wife and daughter. He was devastated by the death of his mother and the deaths of his two young sons, who were killed by a live hand grenade left in the area. Abdulsalam also wants to reestablish himself as a businessman, and he should have no trouble doing so. He used to conduct business throughout Europe; he speaks English; and he is cosmopolitan. Building an import-export business for products to be sold to Yemen is an obvious possibility.

Wherever he is resettled, Abdulsalam wants to build, not tear down. He will submit to rehabilitation and close supervision. Abdulsalam is not a continuing significant threat to the United States. I urge the Board to recommend his transfer.

Thank you.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Sole Kenyan at Guantánamo, Seized in 2007, Seeks Release Via Periodic Review Board

Last week (on May 10), the sole Kenyan held at Guantánamo, Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu (aka Mohammed Abdulmalik) became the 36th prisoner to have his case considered by a Periodic Review Board. A high-level review process that began in November 2013, the PRBs involve representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, in the two and half years since they were set up, they have been reviewing the cases of two groups of men: 46 men described by the Guantánamo Review Task Force (which President Obama set up when he first took office in 2009) as “too dangerous to release,” and 18 others initially put forward for trials until the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed, in 2012 and 2013, after appeals court judges ruled that the war crimes being prosecuted had been invented by Congress.

For the 46 men described as “too dangerous to release,” the task force also acknowledged that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, but what this means, of course, is that it is not evidence at all, but something far less trustworthy — information that was extracted from the prisoners themselves through the use of torture or other forms of abuse, or through being bribed with the promise of better living conditions.

Of the 36 cases reviewed up to and including Mohammed Abdulmalik, 21 men have so far been approved for release, and just seven have had their ongoing imprisonment recommended, a success rate of 75%, which rather demolishes the US claims about the men question being “too dangerous to release.” The eight others reviewed are awaiting decisions.

Mohammed Abdulmalik, born in 1973, was one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, on March 23, 2007, when he was described by the Pentagon as a “dangerous terror suspect,” who had “admitted to participation in the 2002 Paradise Hotel attack in Mombasa, Kenya, in which an explosive-filled SUV was crashed into the hotel lobby, killing 13 and injuring 80,” and had also “admitted to involvement in the attempted shootdown of an Israeli Boeing 757 civilian airliner carrying 271 passengers, near Mombasa.”

However, the authorities have never given him a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), which almost all the other prisoners have received, except for a few of the last arrivals. This means that we have never heard from him directly in the context of the administration of Guantánamo, and it also means that there does not seem to be a case against him, as a CSRT is required to be eligible for a trial by military commission.

His lawyers at Reprieve have always maintained that there is no case against him. In a profile on their website, they explained that he is a father-of-three, and that he “was transferred by his own government to [the] US secret prison system.”

As Reprieve proceeded to explain, Abdulmalik’s ordeal “began with an arrest by Kenyan police in a hotel café in Mombasa in February 2007. He was held by Kenya’s Anti-Terrorism Police Unit, during which time he was badly beaten and interrogated over alleged plans to attack a forthcoming marathon event in Mombasa.”

However, “[a]fter two weeks of detention the Kenyan authorities apparently found no evidence linking Abdulmalik to any criminal activity. But he was not set free. Instead, Kenyan authorities drove him to an airport and handed him, with no form of judicial process, to US military personnel.”

From Kenya he was flown to Djibouti, “where he was detained in a shipping container on a US military base and told by interrogators that he was about to embark on a ‘long, long journey,'” and was then flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at Bagram “in appalling conditions,” and at a second prison, and was then flown to Guantánamo.

In Kenya, Reprieve noted, there has been “justified anger amongst civil rights groups” about the government’s perceived betrayal of a Kenyan citizen, although in response, as Reprieve also noted, the Kenyan government has “tried to duck responsibility by denying that Abdulmalik is Kenyan.”

Describing this as “a laughable claim,” Reprieve explained that “[d]ozens of people, including his father and the midwife who delivered him – in Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria – stand witness to his Kenyan birth and heritage.”

The Kenyan government has also sought to deny its involvement in Abdulmalik’s transfer out of Kenya by US forces, by claiming that he was deported. However, the US Ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger, confirmed on Kenyan radio that Abdulmalik was “moved to Guantánamo Bay with the full consent of the Kenyan government … [as] part of collaboration between the two governments to fight global terrorism.”

Assessing his situation at Guantánamo, Reprieve noted that he was “no longer regularly interrogated,” and saw this as “perhaps a sign that the US government have realized that he is not the big fish they thought he was.”

In September 2012, the Daily Nation also covered his case, when his step-sister, Mwajuma Rajab Abdalla, said from her home in Mombasa, “We don’t know what has happened to him. We last heard from the government about him two years ago. Nobody is willing to help us.”

The 2012 article quoted extensively from Abdulmalik’s own testimony about his experiences, provided to his lawyers — how, after he was first seized, “[i]n the car, two of the policemen held pistols to each of [his] temples, and one of them choked [him] and then crushed his head under his boot. Another still held a pistol to his head. The policeman continued to choke [him] until one of his colleagues said: ‘Not so tight, we’ll kill the guy.’”

Held briefly in a variety of facilities in Kenya, “he saw three white men observing him from outside the interrogation room” in one prison — presumably, Americans — and, when taken to an airport, “saw, through the bottom of his blindfold, a huge plane with a US flag painted on its side.” Subsequently “stripped naked, put in a diaper and then dressed in a tracksuit,” he was flown to Camp Lemonier, a US military facility in Djibouti, where “he remained chained to the floor of the cargo plane, with his eyes, head and mouth covered.” In his testimony, he said that, at one point during the flight, US soldiers “took him to the door of the aircraft and threatened to throw him out.”

In Djibouti, “he was taken to a shipping container and put in an interrogation room with four people — two guards and two interrogators — who told him that he was connected to people from all over the world” involved in terrorism. It was here that he was also told that he was “suspected of planning to attack the World Cross-country Championships in Mombasa in 2007.”

He said a US interrogator told him, “You have two possible journeys: one back to your family, or another that is very, very long. If you don’t tell us what we want to hear, you will have a long, long journey; you will spend your life in a cage.”

On the flight to Afghanistan, Abdulmalik said, he felt “very alone, confused and scared,” and on arrival, at a time when Bagram was still in US hands and full of prisoners, he was “held in a wooden pen in the cage-like cells,” and was also “taken to another secret prison in Kabul, where Americans took his photographs, weighed him, and gave him a blue jumpsuit to wear.”

On arrival at Guantánamo, he said, he was held in solitary confinement for two months, and was only allowed to wear shorts. Then, as he described it, “the US government discovered that he was not the big fish that they thought he was and moved him to Camp IV … reserved for suspects the US believes present the lowest risk.”

In 2008, in a demonstration of how relentless and largely pointless intelligence-gathering was a major part of the fabric of Guantánamo and the “war on terror,” through the use of photo albums of the prisoners and of men wanted by the US, he told his lawyers, “Months ago, I asked for charges — I am not an enemy combatant! I begged for a process. They said, ‘No, no process’. Instead, they bring pictures of Somalis: you know him? You know him? You know him? Hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures. I don’t know those Somalis. But no court.”

Speaking of the CSRT that never happened, despite being promised by the Pentagon when his arrival at Guantánamo was first announced, Clara Gutteridge, then working with Reprieve, said, “There have] been no legal proceedings. If there is any evidence against him, he has said he is willing to face trial, even in Kenya, rather than be detained against his wish in Guantánamo.”

As the Kenyan newspaper then suggested, in a sharp analysis of US detention failures post-9/11, “Abdulmalik’s continued imprisonment probably highlights the extent to which the United States remains imprisoned by its past mistakes. While its approach to terrorism has evolved, the failure to charge him of any crimes shows how far Washington still has to go if it wishes to develop a rights-respecting national security policy. Guantánamo’s single most important distinguishing feature has been an indefinite military imprisonment without fair process.”

Mohammed Abdulmalik’s Periodic Review Board

In its unclassified summary prior to the PRB, the US government described Abdulmalik as having been “inspired by a radical imam to leave Kenya in 1996 to receive extremist training in Somalia, where he developed a close relationship with members of al-Qa’ida in East Africa (AQEA), to include high-level operational planners.” The government further alleged that he then “became an AQEA facilitator,” and reiterated its original claim that he “was closely involved in the preparation and execution of the November 2002 attacks in Mombasa, Kenya,” in which 13 people died. It was also reiterated that, “[i]n February 2007, Kenyan authorities arrested [Abdulmalik] for his involvement in the Mombasa attacks and transferred him to US custody a few weeks later.”

At Guantánamo, it was noted, he has been “a highly compliant detainee,” although intelligence analysts stated that, in debriefings, he “offered conflicting narratives about his activities prior to his arrest and would not provide much information of value about his AQEA associates or the group’s operations.” The summary added that, after a few months, “he expressed discomfort with providing the US with further information and became uncooperative with interrogators,” and, in mid-2010, “stopped coming to sessions altogether,” leaving gaps in the US’s knowledge of his activities from 1997-2002 and again from 2003-2006.

The authorities also noted that he “has not expressed continued support for extremist activity or anti-US sentiments, although he is critical of US foreign policy,” adding that he “considers himself a Quranic healer and holds conservative Islamic views that are likely to make transfer to and assimilation in non-Muslim countries difficult.” If transferred, the summary’s authors noted, “we expect that [he] will attempt to reunite with his wife and children who currently reside in Somalia.”

Below is the opening statement of his personal representatives (military personnel appointed to represent him in his PRB), who noted that he “has not made any negative or a derogatory remark toward U.S. policies nor has he expressed an interest in extremist activities of any kind,” and who also commended his interest in business and his previous work experience as “small business owner for a fishing and diving company,” which, they noted, “should provide him with skills and abilities to obtain employment regardless of where he is transferred.” They also noted his desire to be reunited with his family, his status as a compliant prisoner, and his role in Guantánamo as a cook for his fellow prisoners. No statement from his lawyers has been made publicly available.

An announcement of the board’s decision will probably be made within the next one to two months, and although it is, of course, impossible to know what the board members will decide, it continues to seem significant to me that he was never regarded as significant enough to be granted a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, and I would hope, therefore, that his release will be recommended.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing

Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, ISN 10025

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. We are the Personal Representatives for ISN 10025, Mr. Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu. We will be presenting Abdul Malik’s case this morning with the assistance of his Private Counsel.

Abdul Malik has always been willing to participate in the Periodic Review process since our first meeting in mid-March 2016. After initially explaining the reason for our meeting, he was visibly overjoyed to have this opportunity. He has remained positive at all of our meetings and has always demonstrated his gratefulness and his respect toward us.

During our meetings, Abdul Malik has conveyed his hope of reuniting with his family. Although he is willing to be transferred to any country, he would prefer a country that has a significant Arabic-speaking majority. He is also agreeable to participate in any rehabilitation or reintegration program that may be required. He longs to get on with his life after his transfer from Guantánamo Bay, and he is ready to reconnect with his wife and children. He looks forward to seeing his sisters and brothers and meeting some of the newest members of his family who were born during his time in detention. His experience as a small business owner for a fishing and diving company should provide him with skills and abilities to obtain employment regardless of where he is transferred. He has a strong mind for entrepreneurship. In fact, his thirst for business knowledge includes reading Dale Carnegie business management books.

Abdul Malik has been a compliant detainee and has gained a sense of achievement by being a camp cook for his fellow detainees. With the chance to meet and mingle with so many people of various cultural and religious backgrounds here at GTMO, Abdul Malik has also had an opportunity to be aware of and appreciate these other beliefs and customs which will serve him well to wherever he is transferred. Adbul Malik speaks and understands English very well.

We are convinced that Abdul Malik’s intention to pursue a better way of life if transferred from Guantánamo Bay is authentic and that he bears no animosity towards anyone. Of note, Abdul Malik has not made any negative or a derogatory remark toward U.S. policies nor has he expressed an interest in extremist activities of any kind.

Thank you for your time and attention, and we look forward to answering any questions you may have during this Board.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

The Tories’ Wretched Housing Bill is Passed; Another Step Towards the Death of Social Housing

Sadly, I never seem to run out of opportunities to berate the Tories for their cruelty and stupidity, and latest example came on Wednesday evening, when Parliament passed the Housing and Planning Bill, which will do nothing to ease Britain’s chronic housing crisis, and, in fact, contains several developments that will continue the Tories’ malignant obsession with destroying the provision of social housing. This can have only one end result — contributing further to the scale of the housing crisis, which is already unprecedented in my adult life.

During debates on the bill in the House of Lords, Baroness Hollis of Heigham described the “skeleton Bill” as the worst she had seen in 25 years. “This is a half-baked, half-scrutinised, quarter digested Bill that is not fit for purpose,” she said.

The housing crisis is particularly severe in London and the south east, where house prices have reached stratospheric levels that would be blackly hilarious were they not so chronically unfair and divisive. This insane housing bubble has been fuelled by banks and politicians keeping interest rates close to zero, so that house price inflation has become the main focus of the economy, by the relentless wooing of foreign investors by estate agents, banks and politicians acting as pimps (and whose actions, moreover, betray the British people), and by a persistent under-investment in housing.

As a result, not only is the dream of ever owning a home receding from the aspirations of an ever-increasing number of hard-working people, but rents — completely unregulated by the government, of course — have also spiralled out of control, leaving an ever-increasing number of people paying far too much of their income in mortgages or rents, while those fortunate enough to have got lucky in the housing casino — those, essentially, who bought property in the 20th century — are rewarded with an increase in the value of their homes that bears no relation to any sense of proportion or fairness.

As the new online newspaper The Canary described it, “to buy a terraced house in London you now need to earn £142,000 a year; rental prices continue to increase at a rate one percent higher than wages do, and homelessness has more than doubled since 2010 – with rough sleeping rising by a third in the past year alone, while funding to prevent this has been cut by 45%.” The Canary also pointed out that “1.5m households (yes, households – not people) are on council waiting lists for accommodation” and that “the ‘bedroom tax’ [a charge on what the government considers an extra room for those in social housing who receive benefits] still continues unimpeded with three-quarters of people affected cutting back on food to pay for it.”

The most responsible answer to this crisis would be a massive social homebuilding programme, addressing the chronic shortfall in the building of homes in the last three decades — essentially, since Margaret Thatcher began the rot by selling off council houses while refusing to let councils build any new homes with the takings, a position that no subsequent government has reversed. A massive social housing programme would, in turn, puncture the housing bubble, allowing prices to settle to rates that would actually be affordable for ordinary hard-working people.

Instead, however, the government is trying to paper over the crisis by offering incentives to those who are already wealthy enough to contemplate buying a house, while simultaneously attacking social housing on a number of fronts as a result of the Tories’ ideological obsession with destroying social housing.

The bill, largely forced through the House of Commons despite persistent opposition in the House of Lords, introduces the concept of “starter homes,” whereby, as the Guardian described it in an editorial in January, “all new homes priced at £450,000 in London, or £250,000 in the rest of England, will be classed as affordable. Buyers under 40 will enjoy a 20% discount paid for by the taxpayer; after five years they will be able to sell on the properties at full price and pocket that 20%.”

The Guardian also stated:

These are not “affordable’”homes. They are worth up to 17 times the national average wage. For the government claiming “there is no money left” then to find billions to hand over to developers to knock up such expensive homes is an outrage. At a stroke, ministers have redefined affordable so that in the capital it now means nearly half a million quid. As the Highbury Group of housing specialists points out, that will enable big building firms to ride roughshod over the needs of local communities and the demands of local councils, and just throw up the most expensive flats they can get away with.

This is terrible policy and stupid politics.

The ill-conceived extension of the “right to buy” to housing association tenants

Another absurd policy in the housing bill involves extending the “right to buy” to housing association tenants, which will have the effect of reducing the stock of social housing when it is desperately needed. To pay for this, the government intends to force councils to sell-off high-value properties when they become vacant, further reducing available social housing. So ill-thought out is this policy that, in an unusual move, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee heard evidence on the policy prior to implementation and published a damning report on April 29.

The group of cross-party MPs stated:

The policy of extending Right to Buy discounts to tenants of housing associations, funded by the sale of high-value council housing, has potentially significant impacts for both local authorities and tenants of social housing, especially in areas where house prices are high.

Despite the implications and complexity of this policy, the Department has not published a detailed impact assessment to inform Parliament’s consideration of its legislative proposals.

Many key policy details have not been clarified, with the Department offering only vague assurances as to how this policy will be funded, without producing any figures to demonstrate that additional funding from central or local government will not be required.

Other concerns remain, including the extent to which the new homes funded by this policy will be genuine replacements for those sold, and whether there will be sufficient controls to prevent abuse of the scheme given the significant discounts proposed for housing association tenants wishing to buy.

Meg Hillier, the Labour and Co-operative MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, and the chair of the PAC, issued a statement that pulled no punches in condemning the policy. In a key passage, she stated, “there are no costings or workings out. We are not talking about a ‘back of an envelope’ calculation — there is no envelope at all.”

Her full statement was as follows:

The Government should be embarrassed by the findings of this Report.

Extending Right to Buy will affect many thousands of people yet the Department has failed to provide basic information to support its stated aims. Instead we have heard vague assertions about what it will accomplish and how.

The approach to paying for this policy seems to be entirely speculative. On the basis of evidence heard by our Committee, there are no costings or workings out. We are not talking about a ‘back of an envelope’ calculation—there is no envelope at all.

Similarly scant regard appears to have been paid to the practical impact on social housing tenants, the long-term knock-on costs of the loss of social housing and potentially of a change in the mix of housing types.

We can form our own views about the Government’s motives for this but Parliament and the public are being asked to take a leap of faith about how this will stack up financially, and that is completely unacceptable.

The Department has not made a diligent and credible case for this policy. The PAC follows the tax pound and so far all we have are assertions that it will be fiscally neutral.

We urge the Government to address the very serious concerns highlighted by our Committee as a priority.

As is typical, the government’s response, as usual when it is criticised, is to ignore the criticism. As I have always maintained since this particular branch of the Tory Party took power in 2010, elected by a minority of voters, every policy seems specifically to have been dreamt up only when those involved were certain that anyone with any intelligence was not in the room.

The end of lifetime council tenancies and the disgraceful introduction of “pay to stay”

At the same time, the bill ends lifetime council tenancies, and introduces “pay to stay,” both efforts to insist that social tenancies must be means-tested rather than being available to all. New council tenancies are only supposed to last for a maximum of five years (although concessions introduced by the House of Lords have extended this), while the appallingly named “pay to stay” will see council tenants who, as a couple, earn the median income — the amount that 50% of people earn less than, and 50% earn more than — forced to pay something close to market rents, doubling, telling or even quadrupling what they pay in rent.

Apart from the problem of how this will be implemented, as legislation will be required to compel the Inland Revenue to provide details to tenants’ income to councils — and, in both cases, the blatant and stupid disregard for how many people’s incomes fluctuate significantly — it is a major disincentive to hard-working social tenants, thoroughly undermining the government’s claims to support hard-working families.

The threshold for this unprecedentedly massive and unjustifiable rent hike is just £40,000 a year in London, and £31,000 elsewhere, and yet, when the idea was first floated, disgraceful media outlets like Sky News described it as  a “Crackdown On ‘Rich’ Council House Tenants,” despite the fact that it is patently untrue to describe a couple on the median income as “rich,” and completely ignoring the injustice of, essentially, being mugged at one’s front door by George Osborne.

When the housing proposals were first floated, “pay to stay” was supposed to apply to housing association tenants as well, but the housing associations refused to play ball, and secured the right to only implement rent hikes on a voluntary basis, with most if not all, unwilling to engage with it at all. In years of discussions, ignored by the government, those involved in social housing have only ever expressed an interest in a “pay to stay” policy that begins at £60,000 a year, not £40,000 or £31,000 , and have generally spoken about how its introduction would need to be tapered.

Writing in February about what “pay to stay” will mean for council tenants, the Observer stated, “Tens of thousands of hard-working families will be forced to leave their council homes and find themselves unable to afford a local alternative as a result of government plans to restrict social housing to the poorest, according to research obtained by the Observer. The devastating figures – in a report commissioned by the Local Government Association – show that almost 60,000 households in England will be unable to afford to remain in their council properties from April next year.”

The report also found that “214,000 households across England will be hit by the policy and that in London most of the 27,000 households affected will be unable to afford to rent privately or buy in the same area.”

The crossbench peer Bob Kerslake, the “former head of the civil service and until last year the most senior mandarin working on housing policy,” as the Observer described it, “called on ministers to put the plan on hold,” so that pilot schemes could be implemented.

Kerslake led resistance to the housing bill in the House of Lords, where 13 amendments were passed, but almost all were wiped out in the Commons this week as the government pushed the bill through before the end of this particular Parliamentary session. Back in February, he told the Observer that, on “pay to stay,” he “would table amendments to place the scheme at the discretion of local authorities and ‘provide adequate protection for tenants on the amount of rent they have to pay compared to their income.'”

“When this was originally discussed in the coalition government,” he said, “it was intended to deal with the very small number of high earners on over £60,000. The current proposals will affect a lot more households with earnings of half that.

He added, “Pay to stay needs to be seen alongside the forced sale of council housing to fund right to buy for housing associations, the ending of permanent tenancies and the almost total end of funding for new social housing after 2018. Together, they threaten the future of social housing as we have known it.”

Further criticising the proposals, Peter Box, the LGA’s housing spokesman, said, “A couple with three children earning £15,000 each a year cannot be defined as high income. Pay to stay needs to be voluntary for councils, as it will be for housing associations. This flexibility is essential to allow us to protect social housing tenants and avoid the unintended consequence of hard-working families being penalised, people being disincentivised to work and earn more and key workers, such as nurses, teachers or social workers, having to move out of their local area.”

In addition, the Resolution Foundation “found that a household with two earners in Oxford which took on one hour more of paid work a week, tipping joint earnings over £30,000, would see the rent increase by more than £4,000 a year.” Laura Gardiner, senior economic analyst at the Resolution Foundation, said, “Enforcing near-market rents for council tenants earning over £30,000 risks creating strong disincentives to earn more. Families on the cusp of the £30,000 cliff edge could find that securing a pay rise or working a few extra hours leaves them thousands of pounds worse off as a result of far higher housing costs.”

Writing of the housing bill in the Guardian last week, Bob Kerslake described the House of Lords’ struggle with the House of Commons over the bill as “an unequal contest. The Lords can test, challenge and amend but in the end the government will prevail. This is particularly the case for proposals that were included in the Conservative party manifesto. Due to the introduction of English votes for English laws, for which this bill was the first test case, the government has a majority of more than 50 in the Commons.”

In his article, Bob Kerslake proceeded to explain what concessions had been secured, and to criticise the government for its dangerous and divisive ideology:

Nevertheless some important improvements have been made. Fixed-term council tenancies can now be up to 10 years rather than five, and longer if children are involved. Where higher value council houses are forced to be sold to fund housing association right-to-buy discounts, there will now be a commitment in the bill that these should be replaced one-for-one (and two-for-one in London). The starter homes offer has been modified to make it less of a quick windfall gain for those who are able to take advantage of it. Rent increases for those caught by the pay-to-stay plan – which would see higher earning council tenants charged higher rents – will be less steep.

But the fundamental concerns about the fairness of the bill still remain. One group of people, those with the wherewithal to buy, are being helped at the expense of those on lower incomes who are in greater need. Local authorities will now be required to include 20% of starter homes in all future planning applications, which will largely squeeze affordable rented housing out of planning agreements. The forced sale of higher value council houses, unless they can be replaced like-for-like, will reduce the stock of much needed family housing in areas of greatest demand. The homelessness charity Shelter has calculated that 23,500 local authority homes will need to be sold a year to fund right to buy, a third of all council houses that become vacant. We need to help those who want to buy, but this should not be instead of those whose only real option is social rent.

Perhaps the most worrying part of the bill is what it tells us about the government’s underlying view on the future of social housing. There has been much debate over the years about how social housing has changed from being a general source of housing for ordinary people on lower incomes, to being increasingly available only to those in most desperate need. Providing housing for a third of the population in the 1980s, it now houses less than half of that. With the changes in this bill, the numbers will fall further still and social housing will not just be residual, but temporary and contingent. Social housing tenants who progress in life will be expected to pay more rent and ultimately make way for others in greater need. Social houses will no longer be homes to settle down and plan a future in, but a temporary welfare benefit.

Previous Conservative governments boasted about the number of social rented houses they had built. Many Conservative controlled councils still feel the same way. Over the course of this bill though, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that for the leading figures in this government, publicly provided, social rented housing is now seen as toxic. This is something that I deeply regret.

In time, I believe the government will come to regret this also. It is simply not possible to deliver the new housing the country needs without building more houses of all types and tenures, including social housing.

I agree wholeheartedly with Bob Kerslake’s analysis, and hope to find ways — as a housing association tenant — to keep fighting for the provision of genuinely affordable social housing for all as one of the hallmarks of a civilised society, and as the only way out of a disgusting and disgraceful housing crisis brought about by years of greed and political short-sightedness. I hope you will join me.

For further information, see the analysis of the final bill by Architects for Social Housing, cross-posted below. A collective of “architects, urban designers, surveyors, engineers, planners, building industry consultants, academics, photographers, web designers, writers, housing campaigners and activists operating with developing ideas under set principles,” their primary conviction is that “infill, build-over and refurbishment are more sustainable solutions to London’s housing needs than the demolition of the city’s council estates, enabling, as it does, the continued existence of the communities they house.”

And Then There Were None

By Architects for Social Housing, May 11, 2016

On Tuesday 3 May, Brandon Lewis, the Minister for Housing and Planning responsible for driving the Government’s Housing and Planning Bill through Parliament, rejected 12 of the 13 amendments proposed by the House of Lords. Financial privilege, a convention that deters peers from voting against the Government’s Budget, was invoked in six of the amendments refused, relating to local authorities retaining a percentage of funds from the enforced sale of high-value council housing rather than it all going to central government, the income threshold at which a household will incur market rents, and the limits to the increase in that rate.

The Minister’s party backed him up, and the following day, Wednesday 4 May, after a warning from the Minister about the Government’s mandate, the House of Lords failed to insist on all but two of their amendments, 108, on carbon compliance for new homes, and 110, on sustainable drainage systems, and proposed five new amendments in lieu: 10B, on the provision of other forms of affordable housing besides Starter Homes; 47B, on local authorities retaining part of the proceeds from the sale of high value council homes to build replacement affordable housing, including, according to amendment 47C, homes for social rent; as well as 97B, on neighbourhood right of appeal against planning permission, and 109B, on affordable housing contributions to small scale developments.

These amendments were sent back to the Commons the following week, and on Monday 9 May they rejected them again, while conceding new amendments to energy performance and drainage. Tuesday they were back with the Lords, who withdrew new amendments 10B on Starter Homes, 97D on neighbourhood planning, 108 on carbon compliance and 110D on sustainable drainage, but narrowly insisted on proposed new amendment 47E on the proceeds of high value council housing. Today the Commons again, and for the last time, rejected amendment 47E, and later this afternoon, after a further warning from the Prime Minister, the Lords finally withdrew the last of their 13 amendments.

This week-long stalemate between the House of Commons and the House of Lords is known in Parliamentary parlance as ‘Ping Pong’; but rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic would be a more accurate description of its bearing on the outcome. If the two Houses had not reached consensus over the final text of the Bill before the State Opening of Parliament on 18 May, the Government could have invoked the Parliament Act and forced the Bill through in its original form, without any of the Lords amendments.

The Minister had hinted at this threat with his repeated reminders to the Lords that the Bill was part of the Government’s election manifesto and therefore has a democratic mandate. So now, after 6 months of debate – first through its two readings in the House of Commons, then a month in the Public Bill Committee, then again in the report to and final reading in the Commons, then for two readings in the House of Lords, a further month in Committee, another report to and final reading in the Lords, back again to the Commons, and then back and forth between Lords and Commons – the Housing and Planning Bill has not changed in any significant way since it was first read in the House of Commons on 13 October, 2015.

Against hopes if not expectations, the Right to Buy will be extended to housing associations, adding to the 40 per cent of council homes lost to Right to Buy that are now being rented out by private landlords. On the pretence of paying for this, local authorities will be forced to sell council homes that become vacant if they are deemed high value according to a threshold that is still to be determined by secondary legislation, but is thought to be around £400,000 for a 2-bedroom home in London, and will apply to nearly 113,000 council homes in England.

A total of 214,000 households earning over £40,000 in Greater London and £31,000 in England, rather than the originally proposed £30,000, will be forced to pay market rates to stay in their council homes, but these thresholds will now be based on the incomes of the main two household earners, not include child or housing benefits, and be raised in line with inflation, with a taper of 15p in every pound over the threshold rather than the proposed 20p.

Secure tenancies will not be passed from parent to child and new council tenancies will be for 2-5 years.

The obligation to build state-subsidised Starter Homes for sale at 80 per cent of market rate on 20 per cent of new housing developments will be an enforceable duty that supersedes any requirement to build affordable housing, including homes for social rent, under Section 106 agreements, but their resale after 5 years at full market price will now be regulated by a taper to be determined, once again, by secondary legislation. And planning permission in principle will be granted to any housing development on sites entered on a statutory register of brownfield land that will include existing local authority housing estates.

All we’re waiting for now is Royal Assent and this legislation is the new law of the land, to be implemented by central and local government, and enforceable by the cops and the courts. So much for Parliamentary democracy.

Note: Also see Defend Social Housing’s briefing from January.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

An Afghan and a Yemeni “Black Site” Prisoner Face Guantánamo Periodic Review Boards, as 21st Man Approved for Release

In President Obama’s last year in office, efforts are clearly being made to fulfill the promise he made to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay on his second day in office, back in January 2009. 27 men have been freed this year, leaving just 80 still held, the lowest number since the early months of the prison’s existence back in 2002.

27 of those 80 men have been approved for release — 15 since 2010, when the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force appointed by President Obama to review the cases of all the prisoners he inherited from George W. Bush delivered its final report, and 12 since January 2014, when another review process, the Periodic Review Boards, began delivering decisions about the majority of the men not already approved for release. Just ten of the 80 men still held are facing — or have faced — trials, and the rest are eligible for PRBs.

21 men have so far been approved for release by the PRBs, and nine of those men have been freed. Just seven men have had their ongoing imprisonment recommended — a success rate for the prisoners of 75%, which thoroughly undermines the task force’s claims, made back in 2010, that they were “too dangerous to release.” The task force also claimed that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, but the truth is that the “too dangerous to release” tag was overstated, relying on unreliable information extracted from the prisoners themselves, and produced as a result of torture, other forms of abuse, or bribery (with better living conditions), or on an unnecessarily cautious notion of the threat they posed, based on their attitudes while imprisoned at Guantánamo in defiance of all civilized norms.

In moving towards closing Guantánamo, the Obama administration has increased the speed at which the PRBs are taking place, to ensure that they are completed before the end of Obama’s presidency, and currently two PRBs are taking place every week.

Below, I discuss their hearings of the two men who had their cases reviewed last week, after a discussion of the 21st man to have his release recommended, on May 5 — Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad (ISN 131) aka Salem Ahmed Hadi, and initially described as Salem Ben Kend. A Yemeni, born in 1975, he first had his case reviewed by a PRB in April 2014 and his ongoing imprisonment recommended a month later, in large part because he had refused to turn up for his hearing. Since then, three purely administrative reviews of his case (file reviews) have taken place, when his detention was upheld, but on April 5 he received a second review (a full review), which he took part in, and as a result of which his release has been recommended. It is, therefore, probably only a matter of time before he is released and returned to his family in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

In determining, by consensus, “that continued law of war detention of the detainee does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” the board “noted the low threat level presented by the detainee in light of his lack of advanced training and any significant leadership role with the Taliban,” prior to his capture in Afghanistan in November 2001. A survivor of a notorious massacre by US, British and Northern Alliance forces, at the Qala-i-Janghi fort in northern Afghanistan, his classified military file, released by WikiLeaks in 2011, revealed that, in the massacre, he was “shot in the chest and legs.”

The board was also satisfied with his engagement with the process, compared to his refusal to take part two years ago, and the members stated that they had  “considered [his] increased cooperation with the PRB process, information regarding [his] family support and plans to assist [him],” as well as noting that he “was generally forthright regarding his associations, and that [he] expressed a willingness to participate in a rehabilitation program,” which is available in Saudi Arabia. Just three weeks ago, nine Yemenis with strong Saudi connections (who were either born there or grew up there) were released in Saudi Arabia to go through the rehabilitation program.

The board also noted that “both [bin Kanad] and his family lack links to extremists outside of Guantánamo,” and that he “has remained mostly compliant with the guard force at Guantánamo, with his last violent offense occurring in 2013.” He was also encouraged “to continue regularly attending classes and continue engaging with family members to prepare himself for transfer.”

Salem bin Kanad is the fourth prisoner to have a full review after initially being turned down for release. All four had their release approved, and two have been freed.

Below is the opening statement of his personal representatives (military personnel assigned to represent him in the PRB process) from his full review on April 5, in which, even in the absence of a civilian attorney representing him, they spoke approvingly of his engagement with the process, his good behavior at Guantánamo, his interest in studying, and his engagement with medical staff to address what are described as his “chronic health issues,” which, to the best of my knowledge, have not been remarked upon before. In 2008, in his military file later released by WikiLeaks, he was described as being “in overall good health.”

Periodic Review Board, 05 April 2016

Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad, ISN 131

Personal Representative Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the board. We are the Personal Representatives for ISN 131. Thank you for the opportunity to present Mr. Salem Ahmad Hadi Bin Kanad’s case.

For the past year, Salem has willingly participated in the Periodic Review Board process and has attended all meetings with his Personal Representatives. During this time, Salem has conducted himself in a professional manner throughout our engagements. We would characterize his personality as reserved, but warm.

In his approximately fourteen years at Guantánamo, he has demonstrated a history of compliant behavior and has not presented any significant force-protection problems while at Guantánamo. His good behavior is evidenced by the fact that he resides within a facility where only the most compliant detainees are authorized to live. In fact, his fellow detainees once elected him as the block leader and entrusted him with the responsibility of addressing detainee issues with the security guard force.

He has constructively engaged with the Joint Task Force Medical Staff in order to address and manage his chronic health issues. This team approach has greatly improved his physical condition and quality of life. Hence, he has resolutely pursued a daily exercise regimen of self care which includes cardiovascular activities.

He has taken advantage of the educational opportunities while detained at Guantánamo. These opportunities include English, Computer Science, and Life Skills classes where Salem looks forward to utilizing one day when he is reunited with his family members in Saudi Arabia. Salem would like to return to his home in Riyadh where he desperately wants to reunite with his father, brothers, and sisters.

All of his family members have pledged unwavering financial support, a place of residence, and assistance with his enrollment in a vocational school to further his education in English and Computer Science. He’s confident these studies, along with the sales experience he gained while working in his father’s auto detailing business will set him up well for a career in sales and marketing in order to be a supportive father to his daughters.

We are certain that Salem’ s desire to pursue a better way of life if transferred from Guantánamo is genuine and that he does not represent a continuing or significant threat to the United States of America. Salem is open to transfer to any country, but would prefer an Arabic speaking country if possible where he can be a productive member of society and live the rest of his life in peace.

Thank you for your time and attention. We are pleased to answer any questions you may have throughout these proceedings.

The PRB for Karim Bostan, an Afghan shopkeeper

Last Tuesday (May 3), an Afghan, Karim Bostan (ISN 975), who is 48 years old (and has sometimes been described by the US authorities as Bostan Karim), became the 34th prisoner to have his case considered. Back in October 2011, he had his habeas corpus petition turned down by a District Court judge, but only after appeals court judges had gutted habeas of all meaning, by insisting that everything the US government presented as evidence, however risible, should be regarded as accurate unless it could specifically be proven that it was not.

At the time, I pointed out how the cases of the Afghans demonstrated a particular peculiarity of Guantánamo — “the desire, on the part of successive US administrations, to hold, in a prison supposedly associated with terrorism, Afghans allegedly involved in minor acts of insurgency against the US occupation of their country.”

I proceeded to state:

In Bostan’s case, the evidence has always been thin, to put it charitably. A preacher and a shopkeeper, he was seized on a bus that traveled regularly between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was reportedly “apprehended because he matched the description of an al-Qaeda bomb cell leader and had a [satellite] phone,” which he had apparently been asked to hold by a fellow passenger, Abdullah Wazir (who was released from Guantánamo in December 2007). Other allegations were made by another Afghan, a young man named Obaidullah [reviewed by a PRB on April 19], who said in Guantánamo that he had made false allegations (and had also falsely incriminated Bostan), while he was being abused by US soldiers in Khost and Bagram.

As he explained: “The first time when they [US soldiers] captured me and brought me to Khost they put a knife to my throat and said if you don’t tell us the truth and you lie to us we are going to slaughter you … They tied my hands and put a heavy bag of sand on my hands and made me walk all night in the Khost airport … In Bagram they gave me more trouble and would not let me sleep. They were standing me on the wall and my hands were hanging above my head. There were a lot of things they made me say.”

Nevertheless, in its unclassified summary for Bostan’s PRB, the government described him as “probably the leader of an al-Qa’ida-associated improvised explosive device (IED) cell that targeted Coalition Forces in Khowst, Afghanistan,” who “probably planned, directed, or conducted multiple attacks against Coalition Forces,” and who “also was probably an al-Qa’ida member who took orders from al-Qa’ida leaders in Pakistan, particularly senior paramilitary commander Abu Layth al-Libi [aka Abu Laith al-Libi].” It was also noted that “[s]ome reporting” — presumably, even less reliable than the reports that produced the three uses of the word “probably” in the first set of allegations above — “indicates that he facilitated al-Qa’ida members’ and foreign fighters’ escape from Afghanistan into Pakistan following the onset of Operation Enduring Freedom.”

In contrast, it was noted, Bostan himself “has consistently denied affiliation with any terrorist or extremist group or involvement in any terrorist or extremist activities,” and “has been highly compliant with the guard staff at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility since his arrival in March 2003, according to Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO), committing a low number of infractions compared to other detainees.”

It was also noted that he “met somewhat regularly with interrogators until November 2012, probably because he believed he could convince them of his long-professed innocence and increase the likelihood that he would be transferred back to Afghanistan.” In addition, although mention was made of him “talking extensively about Jamaat Tablighi (JT),” the huge missionary organization with which he was involved, “he provided no information of value.” The personnel who compiled the summary also stated, “We assess that he ended his interrogations out of frustration about his continued detention.” That may be so, but, to be honest, it surprised me to hear about interrogations still continuing at Guantánamo, when, to be blunt, nothing of value could realistically be expected from people deprived of their liberty and removed from any field of operations for 14 years.

The summary also noted that Bostan “has not expressed any intent to re-engage in extremist activity or espoused any anti-US sentiment that would indicate he views the US as an enemy,” but it was claimed that “several members of [his] alleged IED cell, who are former detainees, have reengaged in extremist activity in Khowst, Afghanistan, including a nephew who is close to him, and could provide him opportunities to reengage should he choose to do so.” It should be noted that it has not been possible to verify the claims of recidivism attributed to the unnamed “former detainees” mentioned above.

Below, in contrast, are the opening statements of Bostan’s personal representatives, who described him as “a loving father and grandfather,” who “only wants to return home to enjoy his family in peace during the years he has left,” and his attorney, Paul Rashkind, an Assistant Federal Public Defender in the Southern District of Florida, who, as a Public Defender, was not able to attend in person. Rashkind reiterated the importance of family to his client, who he has represented for 11 years, and wanted to make it clear to the board that, “when he says today that he regrets the turmoil that caused his detention, and that he seeks nothing more than a quiet life with his family, I know his words are heartfelt and credible.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 03 May 2016

Karim Bostan, ISN 975

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Board. We are the Personal Representatives of Karim Bostan and will be assisting Mr. Bostan this morning with his case.

Mr. Bostan has been overjoyed and eager to participate in the Periodic Review Process since we first met with him in late February 2016. Once we explained why we were meeting with him he began to smile. He expressed his pleasure in attending future meetings with us.

Karim has been gracious and respectful during each scheduled meeting. During these meetings, we found out that Karim is a loving father and grandfather who dreams daily of returning home to reunite with his family. He has two daughters and four sons. Karim has yet to meet his youngest son as he was born after his detention. He has also never met his grandchildren.

Karim is one of the older detainees in Guantánamo Bay. He is over 48 years old and only wants to return home to enjoy his family in peace during the years he has left.

Karim has taken advantage of the educational opportunities here at the detention center and learned how to read and write in Pashto. Karim told us numerous times how he can’t wait to tell his family the importance of literacy in today’s world. He is very proud of his writing skills. Karim also owns a wedding rental store that his son-in-law now manages. Additionally Karim has learned the importance of daily exercise which has greatly improved his physical fitness. So much so that when he returns he plans to purchase a treadmill to continue his exercise regime.

We are confident that Karim’s desire to pursue a better way of life if transferred from Guantánamo Bay is genuine. Karim is willing to answer any questions you may have. He is open to transfer to any country, but would prefer to return to Afghanistan if possible.

We remain convinced that Karim does not pose a significant threat to the security of the United States or any of its allies.

Thank you for your time and attention. We look forward to answering any questions you may have during this Board.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 03 May 2016

Karim Bostan, ISN 975

Private Counsel Statement

Good morning. My name is Paul Rashkind. I am an Assistant Federal Public Defender in the Southern District of Florida. In 2005, I was appointed by a federal judge to represent Karim Bostan in court proceedings seeking his release. I have been privileged to represent Mr. Bostan for over a decade. Because I have been his only legal counsel during this time, I am also serving as Private Counsel in this Periodic Review Board proceeding.

Please do not consider my physical absence from this hearing of the Board as a sign of disrespect. The Office of the Federal Public Defender is funded by the U.S. Government. The rules governing Periodic Review Board proceedings require that Private Counsel serve “at no expense to the U.S. Government.” Because I cannot travel to this hearing, from Florida to Guantánamo Bay Naval Station, without expense to the U.S. Government, I am unable to attend this important hearing in person. I have, however, conferred with Mr. Bostan and his Personal Representatives to assist them in preparation for today’s proceeding.

***

Karim Bostan is a loving father and grandfather, a shopkeeper, and deeply reverent man. He embraces a dream to return to his home in Afghanistan, to live out his life with his children and grandchildren, and to assist in his family flower shop, a business he started and ran for many years.

To truly understand Mr. Bostan, one must consider the life he has lived. He was born over 48 years ago in a village of the Tanai tribe in Afghanistan. But he lived most of his formative years as a refugee in Pakistan, after being forced into exile during the Soviet Union’s invasion and occupation of his country. He lived his childhood and teenage years in refugee camps. His formal education was virtually nonexistent.

Mr. Bostan returned to Afghanistan in the early 1990’s, after the Soviet’s military and political occupation ended. He started a new life. He married and had a family — two daughters and four sons. Another daughter died in infancy. His children are a source of great pride. His eldest daughter, age 25, is now married and has three children of her own — Mr. Bostan’s grandchildren. He has only been able to visit with his grandchildren during video-calls arranged by the International Committee for the Red Cross. His eldest son is an excellent student who aspires to be a doctor. His younger children are also in school. He has never seen his youngest son, in person, because he was born shortly after Mr. Bostan’s detention.

When he returned to Afghanistan in 1993, Mr. Bostan started a business. He opened two modest flower shops in the Khost Bazaar. The shops rent and sell flowers, artificial flowers, decorations, and all the accoutrements for local weddings, including pots, pans, cooking supplies and freshly cooked meals. His shops became very popular and the business continues to be run by family members in his absence. The current proprietor is his son-in-law, the husband of his daughter and father of his grandchildren. His son-in-law visits with Mr. Bostan by video nearly every month, and he has told us that he and the family welcome Mr. Bostan’s repatriation.

Mr. Bostan has accepted his detention with a quiet grace. By all accounts, he has been a compliant detainee. He speaks only Pashto. Before he was detained, he had not learned to write, and could read very little. But he has devoted his time here to learning to write and read the Pashto language. He has taken classes, when available, and is very proud of his writing skills. As the Pashto-speaking population of detainees has been reduced, he and those who remain have formed a close community — to the extent permitted, they live communally, cooking and eating together.

I have visited with Mr. Bostan many times over the past decade. As one might expect, I have seen a range of emotions. One encounter has always stood out. It was shortly after we first met. Our Pashto interpreter, a young woman, was speaking with him in a private moment during a break between sessions. I could see tears in his eyes so I inquired. She explained that he told her she could be a daughter to him and seeing her reminded him how very much he missed his own family. She said his eyes welled with tears as he told her how much his family means to him and how difficult the years have been without them. This poignant moment offered more insight into Mr. Bostan than any interview or hearing might ever reveal. Far and away from a hearing room, I could see that family is, and has been, an important emotional bond for him. So, when he says today that he regrets the turmoil that caused his detention, and that he seeks nothing more than a quiet life with his family, I know his words are heartfelt and credible.

Mr. Bostan yearns for a life without the turbulence that has engulfed most of his years. He seeks to return to a simple life, with children and grandchildren, and the village he left behind. He looks forward to this opportunity to address the Board. And he prays that the Board will recommend his release, so he may rejoin his family as a proud father and grandparent.

The PRB for Sanad al-Kazimi, CIA “black site” prisoner

Last Thursday (May 5), a Yemeni, Sanad al-Kazimi (ISN 1453), who is 46 years old, became the 35th prisoner to have his case considered. Unlike Karim Bostan, one of 46 men facing PRBs who were mistakenly described as “too dangerous to release,” al-Kazimi is one of 18 prisoners initially recommended for prosecution, until the viability of the military commissions largely collapsed under scrutiny in the court of appeals in Washington, D.C.

As I described his story in an article in February 2009:

Sanad al-Kazimi … has had a particularly bleak time. Accused of training in Afghanistan in 2001, swearing bayat [an oath of loyalty] to Osama bin Laden, and then of being involved with al-Qaeda activities in the Gulf in 2002 after his escape from Afghanistan, he was seized in the United Arab Emirates in January 2003, handed over to US forces, and tortured in various facilities in Afghanistan, including the “Dark Prison” and Bagram, until his transfer to Guantánamo. He has explained that, in this period, he “endured horrific physical abuse”; specifically, that he was “subjected to sensory deprivation techniques, causing extreme disorientation and psychological stress, physical and sexual assault, threat of rape, and repeated plunging into pools of cold water while suspended in the air by a mechanical lift.”

More of his story is reported here, based partly on a report by Jane Mayer, who interviewed his [former] lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, but what has not been explained — if al-Kazimi is really so dangerous — is why he was not put forward for a trial by Military Commission. My hunch is that, although he was tortured as though he were a “high-value detainee” with knowledge of the workings of al-Qaeda, he was actually nothing of the sort, and was, at most, a peripheral character. Or it may even be, as he stated at his tribunal in Guantánamo, that, although he had sworn bayat to bin Laden; he “later swore against him, and was wondering why that second sworn statement was not put into this evidence.”

In addition, in 2010, a US judge refused to accept information submitted by the government in the habeas corpus petition of Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (whose PRB, incidentally, took place two weeks ago), because it came from two men who had been tortured — one of whom was Sanad al-Kazimi (the other was Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, whose PRB also took place recently — and whose request for release was turned down). Ruling on Uthman’s habeas corpus petition (which he granted, although the appeals court then overturned that ruling), District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. stated, “The Court will not rely on the statements of Hajj or Kazimi because there is unrebutted evidence in the record that, at the time of the interrogations at which they made the statements, both men had recently been tortured.”

Nevertheless, the authorities are clear that, as described in the unclassified summary for his PRB, al-Kazimi “was a member of al-Qa’ida who served about nine months as a bodyguard for Usama Bin Ladin in Afghanistan,” and who also “received basic training from al-Qa’ida and associated with some of its senior figures.” It was, however, acknowledged that he “was a somewhat disruptive and insubordinate figure within the ranks of al-Qa’ida, and left Afghanistan in late 2001 following the onset of Coalition operations there.”

In mid-2002, however, according to the summary, when he traveled to the United Arab Emirates, “he joined an al-Qa’ida cell led by senior operational planner Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri,” currently facing a military commission trial, and “was tasked to smuggle explosives into the UAE to use in an attack against US or British ships docked there.” It was conceded that there is “no information suggesting [he] delivered the explosives, but he provided other forms of logistical support before Nashiri abandoned the plot.” It was also noted that al-Kazimi “has denied that he intended to support the plot, claiming his only interest was in receiving money from Nashiri.”

Furthermore, the summary suggests — although with two uses of the word “probably,” indicating that the information may not be reliable — that al-Kazimi “also probably served as a financial facilitator for the Yemen-based al-Qa’ida branch,” and “probably was aware that the money he facilitated would be used to support terrorist attacks, but may not have had prior knowledge about the specifics of the attacks.”

Turning to his time at Guantánamo, the summary noted that he “has been highly non-compliant, committing repeated assaults against detention staff, although his number of infractions has decreased since mid-2014.” It was also noted that “[h]is cooperation has been inconsistent with interrogators, ranging from providing information of value to refusing to answer questions and attempting to assault the interrogators,” and that he “has provided contradictory information about his views on al-Qa’ida and terrorist activities to interrogators, boasting of his al-Qa’ida knowledge and insights while criticizing the group’s ideology.” In addition, it was noted that he has “voiced extremist and anti-US sentiments.”

Finally, it was noted that al-Kazimi “has repeatedly said that he intends to be reunited with his wife and children in an Arabic speaking country post-detention,” and the authorities added that his family “probably remains in southern Yemen, where his sons have possibly joined AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula],” which may or may bot be true, although the use of the word “possibly” does not inspire confidence.

Nevertheless, the combination of the above indicates an uphill struggle for al-Kazimi to persuade the board that he should be recommended for release, despite the best efforts of his personal representatives and his attorney James Cohen, whose opening statements I’m posting below. The representatives characterized him as “open, honest, polite, passionate and very enthusiastic,” and noted how he  has “shown a gentle side while describing how he cares for a cat and her kittens within the camp.” They also spoke of the importance to him of his family, and how “he does not want them to make the same mistakes he has made.” James Cohen spoke about how his wife and children “have provided letters and video clips expressing their love and support,” and noted how he has always “demonstrated a genuine interest” in his lawyers’ lives.

It is not known what al-Kazimi said to the board, but Courthouse News reported that, during the hearing, video of him at Guantánamo showed him “wearing a white shirt with sleeves down to his elbows. A pair of eyeglasses hung on a slim chain around his neck, which he slid on and off throughout the public portion of proceedings.” It was also noted that “he fidgeted, rubbing his eyes and touching his sizeable black beard.”

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 05 May 2016

Sanad Ali Yislam Al-Kazimi, ISN 1453

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the board. We are the Personal Representatives for ISN 1453. Thank you for the opportunity to present Mr. Sanad Ali Yislam al-Kazimi’s case.

From our first meeting in early March, Sanad has willingly participated in the Periodic Review Board process and has attended all meetings with his Personal Representatives. During this time, Sanad has been very forthcoming with his answers to all of our questions. We would characterize his personality as open, honest, polite, passionate and very enthusiastic. He has also shown a gentle side while describing how he cares for a cat and her kittens within the camp.

Sanad is very passionate about returning to his family and desperately wants to reunite with his wife and children. His love and pride for his wife and children is unmistakable and, despite the distance between them, he has taken a very active role in raising his sons and daughters. Missing his daughter’s wedding was very hard on him, he said it was the first time he cried. He has also told us how his children compete with their grades in order to impress him. Sanad has forbidden his sons to apply to the military or the police academy due to the instability in the country and the government and therefore the uncertainty of the future in either field. Instead, his older son has submitted his grades and applied for schooling in the field of oil science, while the younger one prefers a career in civil engineering. Sanad has encouraged their goals as he told us that every parent wants their kids to do better than them and he does not want them to make the same mistakes he has made. Both careers would also allow them to work anywhere, ensuring a much more stable future.

All of his family members have pledged unwavering financial and emotional support regardless of where he is transferred to. He has taken advantage of the educational opportunities while detained at Guantánamo, taking classes in English, Computer Science and Life Skills. His English is very good and with that, his studies here at GTMO, and his previous work experience we believe that he will be able to find good honest work wherever he may be transferred and will be able to provide a peaceful life for his family.

We are certain that Sanad’s desire to pursue a better way of life if transferred from Guantánamo is genuine and that he does not represent a continuing significant threat to the United States of America.

Sanad is open to transfer to any country, but would prefer an Arabic speaking country if possible. His only wish is to be a productive member of society and live the rest of his life in peace with his family.

Thank you for your time and attention. We are pleased to answer any questions you may have throughout these proceedings.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 05 May 2016

Sanad Ali Yislam Al-Kazimi, ISN 1453

Private Counsel Opening Statement

I am James Cohen, Private Counsel to Mr. Sanad al-Kazimi for the Periodic Review Board, and along with my colleague, Martha Rayner, I have represented Mr. al-Kazimi for over ten years. Professor Rayner and I are full time professors at Fordham University School of Law, where we teach in the school’s clinical education program.

I have met with Mr. al-Kazimi extensively over the past ten years and developed a far-reaching personal and professional relationship with him. This includes legal guidance and advocacy in a host of fora both domestic and international, personal support, and preparation for this hearing today.

Mr. al-Kazimi was captured in 2003 when he was thirty-three years old. He was already married with four children. His youngest was less than two years old and his oldest just seven at the time. Now, he is forty-six. His children’s ages range from fifteen to twenty-two years old. Mr. al-Kazimi’s family has kept in regular, consistent contact with him through International Committee of the Red Cross phone calls, even during this last year when the war in Yemen has uprooted them. He understands that repatriation to Yemen is not feasible at this time and will accept resettlement to whatever country the United States deems acceptable. He plans to find full-time employment and support himself wherever he is placed.

Throughout my time representing Mr. al-Kazimi, I have met and had several conversations with his family. In fact, our legal team has been in consistent contact with them over the past several weeks to prepare for this hearing. His wife and children have provided letters and video clips expressing their love and support. While his family is aware that he may not be able to return to his home country of Yemen, they have pledged to continue to provide this love and support and will strive to be reunited with him in his new home, wherever that may be.

In addition, prior members of Mr. al-Kazimi’s legal team have provided letters to the PRB detailing their positive experiences and knowledge from working with him. This includes law students, civilian employees of the military, and military officers.

At every meeting throughout our decade-long relationship, Mr. al-Kazimi has demonstrated a genuine interest in Martha’s and my life, our respective families’ well-being, and our health and travels. I, along with Fordham University School of Law’s clinical program, am committed to providing the support necessary to assist Mr. al-Kazimi to establish a peaceful and productive life upon resettlement.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.