Andy Worthington's Blog, page 76

Guantánamo Review for Obaidullah, an Afghan Whose Lawyers Established His Innocence Five Years Ago

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.

On Tuesday (April 19), Obaidullah (ISN 762), an Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo, became the 30th prisoner to face a Periodic Review Board, a review process set up in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners not already approved for release (by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009) or facing trials.

Just ten men are in this latter category, but, when the PRBs were established in 2013, 25 others recommended for prosecution by the task force were made eligible for the PRBs, after a number of appeals court rulings made prosecutions untenable, along with 46 others described by the task force as “too dangerous to release,” on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial; in other words, that the information used to justify their imprisonment was not evidence at all, but, to a large extent, information obtained through the use of torture or other forms of abuse, or through the bribery of prisoners — who were given “comfort items” in exchange for their cooperation.

Of the 30 cases reviewed to date, 20 have resulted in recommendations that the men in question be released, seven men have had their ongoing imprisonment recommended, and three decisions have not yet been taken. That’s a success rate of 74%, but only nine of the 20 approved for release have been freed, and 35 others are still awaiting their reviews, even though, when the PRB process was first established, via an executive order in 2011, President Obama promised that they would be completed within a year.

Of the 27 decisions taken, only three have involved prisoners formerly recommended for prosecution, with one approved for release (and freed), and two others recommended for ongoing imprisonment. One of the two pending recommendations is also for a man formerly recommended for prosecution, and Obaidullah is also in this category, although it has never seemed plausible to me that he should ever have been put forward for prosecution.

As I explained in my article, “Guantánamo trials: another insignificant Afghan charged,” written after he was put forward for a trial by military commission under President Bush in September 2008:

[He] was charged with “conspiracy” and “providing material support to terrorism,” based on the thinnest set of allegations to date”: essentially, a single claim that, “[o]n or about 22 July 2002,” he “stored and concealed anti-tank mines, other explosive devices, and related equipment”; that he “concealed on his person a notebook describing how to wire and detonate explosive devices”; and that he “knew or intended” that his “material support and resources were to be used in preparation for and in carrying out a terrorist attack.”

Despite the thinness of the allegations, and despite the fact that Obaidullah maintained his innocence, he then had his habeas corpus petition turned down, in October 2010, when Judge Richard Leon of the District Court in Washington, D.C. concluded, as I described it at the time, that “his account was full of evasions and inconstancies.”

Nevertheless, his lawyers refused to give up, and in 2011 a military investigator, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard Pandis, visited Afghanistan, establishing a coherent narrative in which Obaidullah was innocent. 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 U.S. 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.”

Moreover, even if he had been engaged in militarily opposing the US occupation, it is difficult to see why he was at Guantánamo. As Charlie Savage noted, reporting about Lt. Cmdr. Pandis’s investigation for the New York Times back in 2012, “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.”

Last April, the Los Angeles Times revisited Obaidullah’s story, in an article entitled, “Family fears that Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo will be forgotten.” In it, Ali M. Latifi spoke to his lawyers,  who said they had “exhausted all potential remedies” in court, after their investigation failed to re-open any doors.

His lawyers also explained that Obaidullah had “turned his energy to writing poetry inspired by his experiences, which include time as a refugee in a Pakistani camp during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, as a shopkeeper in Khowst under Taliban rule and as a prisoner at Guantánamo.”

In a 2011 poem, he wrote:

Singing nightingales are following the caravan

And with their childish and delicate tongues sing sweet melodies

They are disgusted with the murders and oppressions humankind commit

Obaidullah’s lawyers also explained how claims that he was an Al-Qaeda member were “far-fetched.” Maj. Derek A. Poteet, part of his defense team, said, “Anyone who knows anything about Al Qaeda knows they wouldn’t recruit a 19-year-old Afghan who lived at home. It’s an organization comprised primarily of Arabs.”

The lawyers also explained how, in 2013, Obaidullah “joined more than 160 detainees in a hunger strike, during which he lost 40 pounds in five months.” His brother, Fazel Karim, “said the strike helped draw worldwide attention to the treatment of Guantánamo detainees, who were banned from participating in communal prayers.” As Maj. Poteet put it, “He lost the right to practice his religion.”

Fazel Karim also explained how, as the Los Angeles Times described it, “Obaidullah’s mother — whose health has deteriorated during his detention — worries that her son may be forgotten.” As he said, “She is worried that her son will never return home and that those still in detention will just disappear.”

It was also noted that Obaidullah’s relatives “have appealed to Afghan officials, including former President Sibghatullah Mojadidi, but have repeatedly been told that the issue is a ‘US matter.'”

The Los Angeles Times also explained that Obaidullah’s daughter, Mariam, “has seen him only on a computer screen” after the authorities allowed the International Committee of the Red Cross to “set up periodic Skype meetings.” However, relatives said Mariam “longs for his physical presence.” As Fazel Karim put it, “She cries out in her dreams for her father.”

Nevertheless, the US authorities continue to cling to their assessment of Obaidullah. In the government’s Detainee Profile, it is claimed that he “received training in explosives from the Taliban and was part of an al-Qa’ida-associated improvised explosive device (IED) cell that targeted Coalition forces in Khowst, Afghanistan,” and that, “During the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom, [he] also may have provided logistics support to fighters aligned with al-Qa’ida.”

It was also stated that his IED cell “probably was led by Bostan Karim” (ISN 975), who is also facing a PRB, and had his habeas petition turned down in October 2011. According to the military, Obaidullah “had a close relationship” with him, and the cell was “under the ultimate control of al-Qa’ida senior paramilitary commander Abu Layth al-Libi.”

It was also claimed that, “[d]uring early interviews,” Obaidullah “admitted to working with Karim to acquire and plant anti-tank mines to target US and other Coalition Forces,” but those early interviews took place in Afghanistan, when he was being abused. It was also stated that Obaidullah “has provided no information of value since his initial interviews in late 2002 — especially after learning of Karim’s transfer to Guantánamo in March 2003.” He apparently “stated that he was very afraid of Karim and wanted an opportunity to resolve any issues between them surrounding Karim’s capture.”

It was also noted that he has been “mostly compliant” at Guantánamo, and “has committed less than 100 infractions since his arrival — a low number relative to other detainees — including infrequent hostility toward the guards and failure to follow rules or instructions.” However, for most of his time, he has been regarded as offering “evasive, implausible, and contradictory explanations to questions pertaining to terrorist activities.”

Crucially, for his PRB, it was also noted that, because he “has provided little information to interrogators,” the authorities “lack insight into his current mindset, which challenges both our understanding of what motivated his activities before detention and whether he would pursue extremist activity after detention.” It was noted that he “has not expressed any intent to re-engage in terrorist activities or espoused any anti-US sentiment that would indicate he views the US as his enemy,” and it was also stated that he “has indicated that he enjoys studying English and wants to be collocated with English speakers,” and that, in March 2015, he “stated that he reads English books to expand his vocabulary and Arabic books to improve his Arabic.” He has also said that “if he returned to Afghanistan, he would like to finish his education and then return to being a shopkeeper,” although the authorities sounded a note of caution because some former prisoners, described as members of his alleged IED cell, “have reengaged in extremist activity in Khowst, Afghanistan,” and “could provide him opportunities to reengage should he choose to do so.”

In response, his civilian lawyer, Anne Richardson, and his personal representatives (military personnel assigned to help him prepare for his PRB) delivered powerful descriptions of his suitability for release. His representatives noted his enthusiasm for the PRB and for learning, and discussed his supportive family in Afghanistan, and Anne Richardson expanded on these points, based on the seven years she has known him. With reference to his poetry, she noted that one of his translators, for poems submitted during the habeas process, “was the distinguished poet Abdul Bari Jahani, who is now the Minister of Culture and Education, [and] who is the most esteemed living poet in the Pashto language.” Mr. Jahani, she added, “has written a supporting letter regarding Obaidullah, urging this Board to recognize that he poses no threat.”

She also stressed how cooperative he has been, describing how he “is and has for many years been one of the most compliant detainees, ” who “served as Block leader [and] a translator for others who experienced conflict with the guards or other detainees.”

These statements are posted below, and I hope you have time to read them.

Periodic Review Board Hearing, 19 April 2016

Obaidullah, ISN 762

Personal Representative Opening Statement

Good morning ladies and gentlemen of the Board.

We are the Personal Representatives of ISN 762. We will be assisting Mr. Obaidullah this morning with his case, aided by his Counsel, Mrs. Anne Richardson.

In the past four months, Obaidullah has earnestly participated in the Periodic Review Process and has attended all meetings with his Personal Representatives and his Counsel.

Obaidullah has conducted himself in a professional and patient manner throughout all engagements with Counsel and his representatives. He has a proven history of compliant behavior while detained at Guantánamo. He has engaged with the Joint Task Force Medical Staff in order to deal with health issues.

This teamwork has greatly improved his quality of life. He has taken advantage of all the opportunities for education and personal enrichment while detained at Guantánamo. These opportunities include courses in English, Life Skills, computers.

Obaidullah is fortunate to have a very supportive family remaining in Afghanistan comprised of his spouse, daughter, mother, brother and sister. His family members and the town elders have pledged unwavering financial support, a place of residence, and assistance with employment during his transition to the utmost of their ability.

Subsequently, Obaidullah will discuss both his past and his desire for a better life for himself in the future. We are confident that Obaidullah’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 security of the United States of America. He is open to transfer to any country, but would prefer to return to Afghanistan if possible.

Thank you for your time and attention. We are pleased to answer any questions you have throughout this proceeding.

Periodic Review Board Hearing, 19 April 2016

Obaidullah, ISN 762

Private Counsel Opening Statement

Good morning. My name is Anne Richardson, and I am the Private Counsel for Obaidullah. I have been an attorney for over 25 years, and now work at a non-profit called Public Counsel in Los Angeles. I appreciate this opportunity to appear before you and to give you my observations regarding Obaidullah.

I first met Obaidullah in 2009, when I began to represent him in his habeas petition, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights. Since then, I have been down to Guantánamo about a dozen times to meet with him. I also regularly have telephone calls to stay in touch with him and keep his spirits up. Since about 2010, his English has been so excellent that we have not needed a translator unless we are discussing complex legal issues.

Obaidullah does not pose any threat to the United States. He was only approximately 19 when he was captured, from his own bed, in the middle of the night. He has a wife and a daughter, who was born just before he was captured, whom he desperately longs to see. His father died when he was very young, and his mother, brother and sister still live in the same village. Obaidullah’s brother Fazel has a very successful mobile phone shop and has already built a new house for his own wife and children that he hopes to share with Obaidullah and his family. His family has written supportive letters, stating that they will do everything in their power to help him make an adjustment once he is released from Guantánamo. While he would like to be transferred back home, where he can immediately start working with his brother Fazel, and live with his extended family, he is willing to go wherever the United States transfers him.

In all the years I have visited and spoken with him, Obaidullah has never expressed any ideological ideas about America or any other country. He has been unfailingly polite and courteous in asking after my family and those of the other habeas attorneys. I did not know if he would have a problem meeting with female attorneys, but he has always shaken my hand, and seen me as a full peer of any male attorney he also meets with. Far from being a religious extremist, he discussed with us childhood games he remembered from Afghanistan, and has written some moving poems, some of which we have submitted to this Board. In fact, one of his translators during the habeas process was the distinguished poet Abdul Bari Jahani, who is now the Minister of Culture and Education, who is the most esteemed living poet in the Pashto language. Mr. Jahani has written a supporting letter regarding Obaidullah, urging this Board to recognize that he poses no threat.

Obaidullah is and has for many years been one of the most compliant detainees. He served as Block leader, and even before that, he served as a translator for others who experienced conflict with the guards or other detainees. He has taken English classes, computer classes, art classes, and takes every opportunity to improve himself and improve his life once he is released from Guantánamo.

Obaidullah is no longer young, and wishes nothing more than just to be back with his family. He proudly tells us how smart his daughter is, and how important her schooling is to him. Although he is willing to undergo any program the US wishes to require, he does not need any rehabilitation.

At one time, he was charged in the military commission’s process. The charges were later dismissed. We have submitted letters from a large number of his current and former military attorneys and investigators, as well as his habeas attorneys, all of whom express the same conclusion — that he is not a danger to the United States or its interests. We also stand ready to assist him in his reintegration into life outside the prison, whether financially or emotionally, so convinced are we that he will be able to adjust and lead a lawful, humble life on the outside.

In conclusion, I urge this Board to find that Obaidullah is not a threat to the United States, and I trust that any lingering doubts this Board may have will be assuaged by meeting him yourselves.

Very Truly Yours,

Anne Richardson

Note: Please check my definitive Periodic Review Board list for the latest news about forthcoming reviews.

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.

David Cameron, Zac Goldsmith and Andrew Neil Owe Suliman Gani An Apology for Calling Him “Repellent” and an IS Supporter

[image error]What a disgrace the Tories are. With Zac Goldsmith consistently trailing Sadiq Khan in the polls, prior to the election of London’s Mayor on May 5, campaign managers — including PR guru Lynton Crosby, who specialises only in the kind of black propaganda that has dragged politics into the gutter for the last six years — decided to play the race card, accusing Khan, a Muslim, of sharing platforms with Muslim extremists, and singling out, for particular attention, Suliman Gani, a teacher and broadcaster, and formerly the imam of Tooting Islamic Centre.

This was an odd choice, as anyone who knows Suliman Gani can confirm, because he is no extremist, but, rather, a community leader who tries to build bridges between communities, and a tireless advocate for human rights. I have known him for many years through my work on Guantánamo and the campaign to free Shaker Aamer, and have always found him to be thoroughly decent. Although he is socially conservative, and opposed to gay marriage, which is not a position I take, it is one that many Tories do, but I have no reason to suspect that he views women as “subservient,” as alleged, or, crucially, to believe that he is at all supportive of terrorism.

So it came as a real shock when, last Thursday, speaking of individuals Sadiq Khan has shared a platform with, Zac Goldsmith said, “To share a platform nine times with Suliman Gani, one of the most repellent figures in this country, you don’t do it by accident.”

Suliman Gani was shocked. Everyone who knew him was shocked. One might expect the violence-seeking provocateur Anjem Choudary to merit a description as “one of the most repellent figures in this country” by a white political candidate playing the race card, but not Suliman Gani.

And oh, the humiliation when Gani posted a photo of Zac Goldsmith standing with him, taken at an event last November encouraging Muslims to stand for election as Tory councillors, which was organised by Dan Watkins, the Conservative Parliamentary Spokesman for Tooting, who had stood against Sadiq Khan (and lost) at last year’s General Election. Gani has also appeared with other prominent Tories, including Jane Ellison, Tania Mathias, David Davis and Andrew Mitchell during human rights campaigns.

Goldsmith was also caught out trying to accuse Sadiq Khan of supporting Tooting resident Babar Ahmad, who was extradited to the US on terrorism charges (and is now back home in the UK). As Dave Hill described it in the Guardian:

He accused Khan of poor judgment by campaigning on Ahmad’s behalf and said he had “never heard of Ahmad until quite recently.” But within hours, video footage from 2012 emerged of Goldsmith telling anti-extradition campaigners that Ahmad’s case had “caught people’s imagination” and that he’d “been bombarded with letters” about it.

And then, on Monday, Andrew Neil stepped into the fray, nakedly showing political bias at a televised Mayoral debate by targeting Khan for sharing a platform with Gani, who, he said, supported IS, a claim that he fervently denies.

Gani immediately took legal advice, and as the media took an interest I liaised with him and LBC’s Theo Usherwood, and accompanied him to LBC’s studios for an interview at which he sought an apology from Zac Goldsmith, and, to amplify the Tories’ discomfort, revealed that he had actually backed the Tory candidate Dan Watkins against Sadiq Khan in the General Election last May and “even supplied canvassers for his campaign,” as the Guardian described it, reporting that he also “said he felt he had been used by the Conservatives ‘as a scapegoat to discredit Sadiq Khan.'” On April 14, Gani had also tweeted this photo of himself with Watkins.

In the interview, which aired yesterday, Gani also “said he spoke to Goldsmith, who by that time had become the Tory mayoral candidate, outside the meeting, shook his hand and requested a meeting with him to discuss giving further help.” According to Gani, “Goldsmith was very polite and said it was: ‘No problem, and I should send him an email.'”

Before the interview aired, however, David Cameron got involved, repeating the claim that Suliman Gani supported IS during Prime Minister’s Question Time, to boos from the Labour benches, I’m glad to note, and denunciations from senior figures in the Labour Party. A spokesperson for Jeremy Corbyn said, “I think it demeans the office of the Prime Minister to repeat some of those allegations. Sadiq has been very strong on issues around terrorism.” Shadow Justice Minister Andy Slaughter stated, “Cameron sinks into the gutter in a desperate bid to prop up his failing candidate. Demeans his office. Shame on him.”

In response to the attacks, Gani tweeted, “PM David Cameron accused me of being an extremist and that I support IS! He did so during PMQT in the commons and therefore cannot be sued.” In a second tweet, he wrote, “I hope the Prime Minister will reflect and retract his comments. This is defamation at its highest level.”

As Dave Hill noted for the Guardian, “Gani also told Usherwood that his alleged support for Islamic State was based on a misconstrued remark made by someone else at a meeting where the ‘historical context’ of IS’s emergence was discussed.”

[image error]He added that it was “not clear if the meeting in question” was the one advertised in the poster for a discussion in January, “The Evils of Isis,” which I’ve also posted here. As he noted, however, “The title of the Mitcham event [is] of interest in view of the prime minister’s Commons allegation about Gani.” Perhaps the best way of looking at the way the Tories have mischaracterised Gani’s views is to understand that, although he is in favour of the establishment of an Islamic State, he is appalled by the brutality of Daesh, whose violence he regards as un-Islamic.

As Hill also noted, “Gani said he had ‘never promoted terrorism or violence,’ and went on to say that he had fallen out with Khan over the MP’s support for same sex marriage.”

In response to the PMQ debacle, Sadiq Khan said, “The Tories are running a nasty, dog-whistling campaign that is designed to divide London’s communities. I’m disappointed that the Prime Minister has today joined in.”

That certainly seems to be true, and while I hope the Tories pay at the polls for their dirty campaigning, I do also think that Suliman Gani deserves an apology from David Cameron, Zac Goldsmith and Andrew Neil. The Muslim community, and those who know him, have rallied around him, but damage has been done to his reputation that is completely underserved, and he seems, above all, to be collateral damage to the Tories in a disgraceful effort to swing some old white racists their way in the last weeks of the Mayoral campaign. Ironically, however, they seem instead to have alienated considerably more Muslim voters, many of whom were planning to vote for Zac Goldsmith until they saw the Tories in their true colours.

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.

Saifullah Paracha, 68-Year Old Pakistani Businessman, Has His Ongoing Imprisonment at Guantánamo Approved

Bad news from Guantánamo for Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman, a victim of kidnap, extraordinary rendition and torture, and, at 68, the prison’s oldest prisoner, as his ongoing imprisonment has been recommended by a Periodic Review Board, following a hearing on March 8, which I wrote about here. The PRB process 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, and it was established in 2013 to review the cases of all the prisoners not already approved for release by President Obama’s  high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed all the prisoners’ cases in 2009, or facing trials (and just ten of the remaining 89 prisoners are in this latter category).

With this decision, 27 prisoners have had their cases decided, with 20 men approved for release, and just seven having their ongoing imprisonment approved. However, most of those approved for release were mistakenly described as “too dangerous to release” by the task force, while Paracha is from a smaller group of men initially recommended for prosecution until the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed, and in that group his is the second application for release that has been turned down, with just one success to date.

I have never found the case against Paracha — that he worked with Al-Qaeda in a plot or plots relating to the US — to be convincing, as he lived and worked as a successful businessman in the US from 1970-86, appears to be socially liberal, and has been a model prisoner at Guantánamo, where he has helped numerous younger prisoners engage with the various review processes established over the years. When his PRB took place, the authorities described him as as “very compliant” with the prison guards, with “moderate views and acceptance of Western norms.”

As I described his story nearly ten years ago in my book The Guantánamo Files:

Saifullah Paracha, a 55-year old businessman and philanthropist from Karachi, was arrested after flying into Bangkok for a business trip on 5 July 2003 [in a US-led sting operation]. Rendered to Afghanistan, he spent 14 months in Bagram and was then flown to Guantánamo on 20 September 2004. A graduate in computer science from the New York Institute of Technology, he acknowledged that he had met Osama bin Laden twice, at meetings of businessmen and religious leaders in 1999 and 2000, but denied the allegations against him, which included making investments for al-Qaeda members, translating statements for bin Laden, joining in a plot to smuggle explosives into the US and recommending that nuclear weapons be used against US soldiers. These were indeed wild accusations for anyone familiar with his story. Deeply impressed by all things American, he had lived in the US in the 1980s, running several small businesses, and after returning to Pakistan had made a fortune running a clothes exporting business in partnership with a New York-based Jewish entrepreneur (an unthinkable association for someone who was actually involved with al-Qaeda).

His case is inextricably tied to that of his 23-year old son Uzair, the eldest of his four children, who was detained in New York, where he was marketing apartments to the Pakistani community, four months earlier. Arrested by FBI agents, Uzair was accused of working with [the “high-value detainees”] Ammar al-Baluchi and Majid Khan … to provide false documents to help Khan enter the US to carry out attacks on petrol stations, and was convicted in a US court in November 2005 – even though he said that he was coerced into making a false confession, and both Khan and al-Baluchi made statements that neither Uzair nor his father had ever knowingly aided al-Qaeda – and was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment in July 2006. His father remains in Guantánamo, where, although he has heart problems, he has refused to undertake an operation because he does not trust the prison’s surgeons.

I also wrote more about Saifullah and Uzair Paracha in an article in July 2007, entitled Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man.

Nevertheless, the US authorities still believe their version of events. For many years, Paracha was recommended for prosecution, including by the Guantánamo Review Task Force in 2009, and it was not until April 2013 that he was determined to be eligible, instead, for a Periodic Review Board.

in its Unclassified Summary of Final Determination, the Periodic Review Board decided, by consensus, that “continued law of war detention … remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

In making this determination, the review board “considered the detainee’s past involvement in terrorist activities, including contacts and activities with Usama Bin Laden, Kahlid [sic] Shaykh Muhammad and other senior aI-Qaeda members, facilitating financial transactions and travel, and developing media for al-Qaeda.”

The board also “noted the detainee’s refusal to take responsibility for his involvement with al-Qaeda, his inability and refusal to distinguish between legitimate and nefarious business contacts, his indifference toward the impact of his prior actions, and his lack of a plan to prevent exposure to avenues of reengagement.”

This wording is a pretty damning conclusion on the board’s part, although Paracha, of course, “cannot show ‘remorse’ for things he maintains he never did,” as his attorney, David Remes, explained to the board in March. On Thursday, after the board’s decision was announced, he said his client “will try to address the board’s concerns in his file review in October,” an administrative review that takes place six months after the initial PRB.

Below I’m posting Paracha’s own statement to the board, which was not publicly available when his review took place on March 8. In it, he said “that he was ‘duped’ into visiting Afghanistan and handling certain finances as part of charity work he did,” as the Miami Herald described it, and that he “said he met bin Laden in [his] role as chairman of a Karachi TV broadcasting studio, and sought an interview, which the studio never did get.”

In his statement, Paracha also refuted claims that he undertook research on chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) materials for al-Qaeda, as the US authorities claimed, and as Carol Rosenberg pointed out for the Miami Herald at the time of his PRB, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s torture program “casts doubt on CIA suspicions that the Parachas were trying to smuggle explosives into the United States, noting ‘the relative ease of acquiring explosive material in the United States.’”

Paracha also made a point of stating that he was not involved with al-Qaeda, noting, “I never worked with anybody to harm anyone in my life. My son Uzair and I were never involved for real.” He also refuted US claims that he was involved with the Pakistani extremist group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, stating, “please do not think there are any relations between us. I am very liberal and their leaders are ultra conservative and fundamentalist. It is so disgusting how their leaders move around with bodyguards, holding guns over their shoulders. They have been exploiting poor innocent young generation. I will never align with them.”

Finally, he mentioned the former prisoner Jarallah al-Marri, released in July 2008, but evidently regarded with some suspicion by the authorities, contextualizing how he came to know him in Guantánamo — during recreation time when they were both held in isolation — and why that does not indicate anything more substantial. I met Jarallah in January 2009, when he visited the UK to take part in a tour organized by Cageprisoners with former guard Chris Arendt, prior to the UK government refusing to allow him to enter the country for a second time in February 2009, and was given no reason for thinking that he was a danger to the US.

Paracha’s case obviously continues to divide opinion, and I have no idea if he will be able to make a better case for his release in the future, but I do find a lack of substance to claims of the danger he poses, compared to his obvious efforts within Guantánamo to steer younger and more impressionable prisoners away from radicalization by encouraging them to engage with all the review processes and interaction offered to them.

Periodic Review Board Initial Hearing, 08 Mar 2016

Saifullah Abdullah Paracha, ISN 1094

Detainee Statement

Honorable Board,

My name is Saifullah Paracha. I was captured in Bangkok, Thailand on July 06, 2003 and transferred to Afghanistan. On the first day of my interrogation, I voluntarily gave complete details about my meeting with Osama Bin Laden. Just for quick reference I briefly give you some details.

I was chairman of an NGO Council of Welfare Organization (WCO). I was duped by the trustees to visit Afghanistan and extend our charity work to poor Afghans. I felt extremely pathetic towards Afghans, therefore; I prepared a small booklet on Afghanistan and requested Pakistan to make investment in basic cottage industries and in farming to create jobs rather than donation. That report was published in the newspaper. Pakistan Rice Exporters Association requested me to lead a delegation of about 90 business men and others to Afghanistan. In Kandahar, before the Taliban’s Governor and Ministers, I made a humble presentation to the delegations to teach Afghans “to catch fish rather than feed them fish.”

After the presentation, a gentleman approached me and praised my efforts. He asked me questions about my background and told me his name was Maulana Mahar. He invited me to meet Osama Bin Laden (OBL). OBL had a very controversial personality; he had close alliance with US during U.S.S.R. invasion in 1978 into Afghanistan. OBL was very popular and respected among most Muslim community. He was known throughout the world while the western countries portrayed him as a devil. He was from a very rich and influential Saudi family. His father was close friends of the Saudi King.

I was among the 12-15 audience members who heard him speak of the Holy Qur’an in a light tone and about the Prophet Mohammad saying (Ahadees). He said nothing hateful or negative about the west or any other nation. I was a chairman of Universal Broadcasting, Karachi which was a television recording studio. I saw an opportunity and requested him to record a T.V. program in English and gave him my card. He said he would think about it and someone would contact me. After I came back I had an opportunity to meet Secretary House Affairs, Pakistan. The Pakistan and Taliban governments had diplomatic relations, similar to the U.S. and Canada. I also visited the Pakistani Ambassador in Afghanistan.

We had a large office (10,000 sq ft on the 8th floor), operating several businesses under my chairmanship and major stockholders. These businesses included International Merchandise (IMG), Universal Broadcasting , Abson Industries, Cliftonia-Real Estate Developers, and the Council of Welfare Organization. We had a large reception area with two young female receptionists and our own security guard. On the front wall ofwe had two crossed flags, “Pakistan and U.S.A.”

One day the receptionist called me to say a gentleman who has my card from Afghanistan wants to see me. Our security guard brought him to my office in the IMGs office. He introduced himself as “Meer”. Meer is a very large tribe in Sind, Pakistan. This man was from Nawanshahr, an agriculturist. He presented my business card and told me he received a message to see me about recording T.V. programs from Afghanistan. He also told me, he helps in media related matters.

Meer was dressed in causal western dress, spoke URDU Pakistani and English clearly, was clean shaven and showed no signs of extremist personality. After U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan, a Holy war declared against infidel communist by Muslims worldwide and Jihad (freedom fighting) became fashionable and lucrative to raise money. Politicians, government officials and religious leaders were exploiting young Muslims. A large percentage of young male Pakistanis are still glorified for Jihad and they are everywhere, soliciting cash and kind. It is impossible to avoid them if you are living in Pakistan.

I showed Meer our studio, editing room and clips of our religious interviews and current affair programs. I proposed to make a small recording studio anywhere in Afghanistan, sound proof and proper lighting arrangements. Universal Broadcasting will pay. They can select and buy all recording equipment. He observed our staff in the IMG office, as our staff was busy and he asked about it. I explained to him and gave him our brochure. It gave brief details of our buying houses. We shook hands. He saw the U.S. and Pakistan flags and I told him about my partner, Charles Anteby. He did not show any concern and said he was also in the United States. Another visit he asked me to open a foreign exchange account in our bank and he deposited a check of 5000.00 in a non-interest bearing account. I suggested to him to make investment for some profit and he responded maybe later. In Pakistan there is a law that if Pakistan Muslim deposits money in the saving account, the government takes out 2.5% (Zakat) and gives it to the poor, irrespective of interest rate every Lunar year. So, it is very common for people to make investment with friends and relations or trusted companies. My partner Charles Anteby can witness, we had taken about two million for IMG after 9/11 when business slow down.

According to the profile I have been penalized for financial deals and TV programs I proposed making but no programs were recorded. I am a citizen of Pakistan. I brought this issue to responsible Pakistan official. There are many western media organization, who recorded hateful interviews and telecasted on their channels with Osama Bin Laden. There are many bankers who had all kinds of financial transactions and are not punished.

I have no idea what CBRN material is, I am ready to testify under oath that what CBRN stands for, and further I want to confirm, I did not make and search for any objectionable material.

With reference to a statement that I have shown no remorse working with al Qaida, as I described earlier about Mujahedeen, who is who, it’s very difficult to identify. Poor, young men from remote areas are glorified about life here after 70 virgins, garden, etc. They are programmed from a very young age. Some build palaces on their graves. I feel bad about this. I never worked with anybody to harm anyone in my life. My son Uzair and I were never involved for real. This is hateful thinking. I have been physically and financially involved in welfare work and I will never do my business based on profit before people. My loyalty is in the Creator and his creatures.

With reference to my resettlement I consider my two countries Pakistan and U.S.A. Since the U.S. does not facilitate transfer to the U.S., the only option left is Pakistan where my family needs me and I have a lots of assets and liabilities to take care. My businesses have suffered dearly. I had over 350 employees and they lost their livelihood. I will help my children start their family life and revive my businesses. Some senior politicians have requested the U.S. government to repatriate me back to Pakistan; one of them is a minister in the government now.

With reference to the Taliban, I am enclosing my letter dated Jan 21, 2002, before my captivity. I wrote about Afghanistan and how to bring peace. Pakistan’s stability and peace is now directly linked with Afghanistan. My motive’s is how we can end the suffering and destruction of Afghanistan and Pakistan. If U.S. wants me to stay away from Taliban, I will follow religiously.

With reference to Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, please do not think there are any relations between us. I am very liberal and their leaders are ultra conservative and fundamentalist. It is so disgusting how their leaders move around with bodyguards, holding guns over their shoulders. They have been exploiting poor innocent young generation. I will never align with them. Universal Broadcasting is closed now and there is reason to associate with various leaders. I also have no resources or appetite to start such business again.

With reference to my profile dated Oct 27, 2015 and my relationship with fellow detainee Jarallah al-Marri. I was captured in early July 2003 in Thailand and kept in Bagram. In Sept 2004, I was brought to Guantanamo. From 2004 to November 2008, I was kept in isolation. I speak Urdu and English and most detainees speak Arabic. Some speak a little English. I hardly had human contact. In the beginning I was taken to an open air area just for one hour daily. After many months I was allowed for recreation for two hours with another inmate with very little communication of some English words. I think it was 2007 when [redacted] I met Jarallah as he was in a cell opposite to mine. We were allowed 2 hours daily for recreation.

My family writes me and will always support me. My daughter has sent me letters because they need me at home as the support for the family. My son does well in his education. My wife needs me and my support. I have told you everything.

God willing please let me go home.

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.

Two London Events for Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Best-Selling Author Imprisoned in Guantánamo

Please ask your MP to attend the Parliamentary briefing for Mohamedou Ould Slahi next Tuesday, April 19.

If you’re in London — or anywhere near — then I hope two events next week might be of interest to you, and even if you’re not, then I hope you’ll be interested in asking your MP to attend the first event, a Parliamentary briefing about Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, next Tuesday, April 19. Slahi has no UK connection, but his plight should be of interest to all MPs who care about the rule of law, as Guantánamo remains a place of shameful injustice, whose closure all decent people need to support.

Both events involve the campaign to free Mohamedou Ould Slahi, one of the best-known prisoners still held in Guantánamo. A notorious victim of torture by the US, he is also the author of the best-selling book, Guantánamo Diary, an extraordinary account of his rendition, imprisonment and torture, written in Guantánamo and published, with numerous redactions, after a long struggle with the US authorities, to widespread acclaim in January 2015.

On the evening of Tuesday April 19, there will be a Parliamentary briefing for Slahi, hosted by Tom Brake MP (Liberal Democrat, Carshalton and Wallington), featuring the actors Jude Law, Sanjeev Bhaskar and Toby Jones, Slahi’s brother Yahdih and his lawyer, Nancy Hollander.

The following evening, Yahdid Ould Slahi and Nancy Hollander will be discussing Slahi’s case at ThoughtWorks in Soho.

The full details of both events are below, including RSVP information, but if you aren’t fully aware of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s story, please first of all read my brief description from an article I wrote in February 2015, after his book was published:

A Mauritanian, born in 1970, Slahi was singled out for a specific torture program, approved by Donald Rumsfeld, in 2003. He had aroused US suspicions because he was related to Abu Hafs, the spiritual advisor to Al-Qaeda (who, lest we forget, opposed the 9/11 attacks), and because, while living in Germany in 1999, three would-be jihadists, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an alleged facilitator of the 9/11 attacks, had stayed for a night at his house.

However, although Slahi had trained and fought in Afghanistan in 1991-2, when, apparently, he had sworn allegiance to Al-Qaeda, that was the extent of his  involvement with terrorism or militant activity, as Judge James Robertson, a District Court judge, concluded in March 2010, when he granted Slahi’s habeas corpus petition.

The Obama administration appealed Judge Robertson’s ruling, and in November 2010 the court of appeals — the D.C. Circuit Court — backed the government, vacating Judge Robertson’s ruling, and sending it back to the lower court to reconsider.

That never happened, and Slahi ended up abandoned. The high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009 had recommended him for prosecution in its final report two months before his habeas corpus petition was granted, and this stood until April 2013, when he was determined to be eligible for a new review process, the Periodic Review Boards, along with 24 other men who had initially been recommended for prosecution by the task force, and 46 others who had been recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, on the profoundly dubious basis that they were too dangerous to release, but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

Slahi’s Periodic Review Board has now been scheduled — for June 2 — and it is to be hoped that the review board — which includes representatives of 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 — will approve his release, as with 20 of the 26 men who have been through the PRB process since it was established in November 2013, and who have had decisions taken. Four other men are awaiting the results of their PRBs, and 35 others are awaiting reviews.

Nevertheless, it is by no means apparent that Slahi’s PRB will approve his release, hence the need to maintain pressure on the Obama administration — and to push for support from diligent allies of the US, like the British Parliament.

I need hardly add that what is extraordinary about Slahi’s predicament is that it is impossible to imagine an American, held for 14 years without charge or trial — and tortured — by some other government, writing an account of his experiences, and eventually getting it published to widespread acclaim, with it topping several best-seller lists, without there being a huge uproar leading to his release, and yet Slahi has still not been freed.

Below are the full details of next weeks events:

Tuesday April 19, 2016, 6-7.30pm: Parliamentary briefing on the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Grimond Room, Portcullis House, Westminster, London SW1A 2LW

With Jude Law, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Toby Jones, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s brother Yahdih Ould Slahi, his lawyer Nancy Hollander, Jo Glanville, Director, English PEN and Jamie Byng, Publisher and Managing Director, Canongate Books. Moderated by Tom Brake MP.

Anyone can attend this event, although please allow time to clear security at Portcullis House. You can also let Bernard Sullivan know if you are coming, so that the organisers have some idea of how many are planning to attend.

Wednesday April 20, 2016, 6-8pm: Discussion about the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

ThoughtWorks, 76-78 Wardour Street, 1st Floor, Soho, London W1F 0TA

With Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s brother Yahdih Ould Slahi and his lawyer Nancy Hollander

There will be a buffet and drinks. If you would like to attend, please contact Suzie Gilbert.

Please also sign the ACLU’s Free Slahi petition to the US Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, which currently has just over 50,000 signatures, and see the ACLU’s Free Slahi page here.

And finally, I’m posting below an excerpt from Guantánamo Diary, published at the time of the book’s publication in the Guardian:

‘The torture squad was so well trained that they were performing almost perfect crimes’

The Guardian, January 18, 2015

I started to recite the Koran quietly, for prayer was forbidden. Once ________ said, “Why don’t you pray? Go ahead and pray!” I was like, How friendly! But as soon as I started to pray, ____ started to make fun of my religion, and so I settled for praying in my heart so I didn’t give ____ the opportunity to commit blasphemy. Making fun of somebody else’s religion is one of the most barbaric acts. President Bush described his holy war against the so-called terrorism as a war between the civilized and barbaric world. But his government committed more barbaric acts than the terrorists themselves. I can name tons of war crimes that Bush’s government is involved in.

This particular day was one of the roughest days in my interrogation before the day around the end of August that was my “Birthday Party” as _______ called it. _______ brought someone who was apparently a Marine; he wore a ________ _____________________________________________ __________________________________________.

_______ offered me a metal chair. “I told you, I’m gonna bring some people to help me interrogate you,” _______ said, sitting inches away in front of me. The guest sat almost sticking on my knee. _______ started to ask me some questions I don’t remember.

“Yes or no?” the guest shouted, loud beyond belief, in a show to scare me, and maybe to impress _______, who knows? I found his method very childish and silly.

I looked at him, smiled, and said, “Neither!” The guest threw the chair from beneath me violently. I fell on the chains. Oh, it hurt.

“Stand up, motherfucker,” they both shouted, almost synchronous. Then a session of torture and humiliation started. They started to ask me the questions again after they made me stand up, but it was too late, because I told them a million times, “Whenever you start to torture me, I’m not gonna say a single word.” And that was always accurate; for the rest of the day, they exclusively talked.

_______ turned the air conditioner all the way down to bring me to freezing. This method had been practiced in the camp at least since August 2002. I had seen people who were exposed to the frozen room day after day; by then, the list was long. The consequences of the cold room are devastating, such as ______tism, but they show up only at a later age because it takes time until they work their way through the bones. The torture squad was so well trained that they were performing almost perfect crimes, avoiding leaving any obvious evidence. Nothing was left to chance. They hit in predefined places. They practiced horrible methods, the aftermath of which would only manifest later. The interrogators turned the A/C all the way down trying to reach 0°, but obviously air conditioners are not designed to kill, so in the well insulated room the A/C fought its way to 49°F, which, if you are interested in math like me, is 9.4°C—in other words, very, very cold, especially for somebody who had to stay in it more than twelve hours, had no underwear and just a very thin uniform, and who comes from a hot country. Somebody from Saudi Arabia cannot take as much cold as somebody from Sweden; and vice versa, when it comes to hot weather. Interrogators took these factors in consideration and used them effectively.

You may ask, Where were the interrogators after installing the detainee in the frozen room? Actually, it’s a good question. First, the interrogators didn’t stay in the room; they would just come for the humiliation, degradation, discouragement, or other factor of torture, and after that they left the room and went to the monitoring room next door. Second, interrogators were adequately dressed; for instance ______ was dressed like somebody entering a meat locker. In spite of that, they didn’t stay long with the detainee. Third, there’s a big psychological difference when you are exposed to a cold place for purpose of torture, and when you just go there for fun and a challenge. And lastly, the interrogators kept moving in the room, which meant blood circulation, which meant keeping themselves warm while the detainee was _________ the whole time to the floor, standing for the most part. All I could do was move my feet and rub my hands. But the Marine guy stopped me from rubbing my hands by ordering a special chain that shackled my hands on my opposite hips. When I get nervous I always start to rub my hands together and write on my body, and that drove my interrogators crazy.

“What are you writing?” ___________ shouted. “Either you tell me or you stop the fuck doing that.” But I couldn’t stop; it was unintentional. The Marine guy started to throw chairs around, hit me with his forehead, and describe me with all kinds of adjectives I didn’t deserve, for no reason.

“You joined the wrong team, boy. You fought for a lost cause,” he said, alongside a bunch of trash talk degrading my family, my religion, and myself, not to mention all kinds of threats against my family to pay for “my crimes,” which goes against any common sense. I knew that he had no power, but

I knew that he was speaking on behalf of the most powerful country in the world, and obviously enjoyed the full support of his government. However, I would rather save you, Dear Reader, from quoting his garbage. The guy was nuts. He asked me about things I have no clue about, and names I never heard.

“I have been in __________,” he said, “and do you know who was our host? The President! We had a good time in the palace.” The Marine guy asked questions and answered them himself.*

When the man failed to impress me with all the talk and humiliation, and with the threat to arrest my family since the ______________ was an obedient servant of the U.S., he started to hurt me more. He brought ice-cold water and soaked me all over my body, with my clothes still on me. It was so awful; I kept shaking like a Parkinson’s patient. Technically I wasn’t able to talk anymore. The guy was stupid: he was literally executing me but in a slow way. _______ gestured to him to stop pouring water on me. Another detainee had told me a “good” interrogator suggested he eat in order to reduce the pain, but I refused to eat anything; I couldn’t open my mouth anyway.

The guy was very hot when _______ stopped him because ____ was afraid of the paperwork that would result in case of my death. So he found another technique, namely he brought a CD player with a booster and started to play some rap music. I didn’t really mind the music because it made me forget my pain. Actually, the music was a blessing in disguise; I was trying to make sense of the words. All I understood was that the music was about love. Can you believe it? Love! All I had experienced lately was hatred, or the consequences thereof.

“Listen to that, Motherfucker!” said the guest, while closing the door violently behind him. “You’re gonna get the same shit day after day, and guess what? It’s getting worse. What you’re seeing is only the beginning,” said _______. I kept praying and ignoring what they were doing.

“Oh, ALLAH help me…..Oh Allah have mercy on me” ____ kept mimicking my prayers, “ALLAH, ALLAH…. There is no Allah. He let you down!” I smiled at how ignorant ____ was, talking about the Lord like that. But the Lord is very patient, and doesn’t need to rush to punishment, because there is no escaping him.

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.

Emad Hassan’s Story: How Knowing a Town Called Al-Qa’idah Got Him 13 Years in Guantánamo

Last week, I published an article about the latest releases from Guantánamo — two Libyans, one of whom was Omar Mohammed Khalifh, a Libyan amputee seized in Pakistan in a house raid in 2002.

Khalifh had been approved for release last September by a Periodic Review Board — a process set up two and a half years ago to review the cases of all the men still held at Guantánamo who were not either facing trials (just ten men) or had not already been approved for release in 2010 by another review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force.

Until the PRB’s decision was announced, I thought Khalifh had been seized in a house raid in Karachi, Pakistan in February 2002, but the documentation for the PRB revealed that he had been seized in a house raid in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002, the day that Abu Zubaydah, a training camp facilitator mistakenly regarded as a senior member of Al-Qaeda, was seized in another house raid. I had thought that 15 men had been seized in the raid that, it now transpires, also included Khalifh, but I had always maintained that they had been seized by mistake, as a judge had also suggested in 2009,  and in fact 13 of them have now been released (and one other died in 2006), leaving, I believe, just two of the 16 still held.

One of the 16 was Emad Hassan, a Yemeni released in Oman last June, who had been a long-term hunger striker (and who I have written about extensively). Emad was the subject of an article last September in Newsweek, which I’m cross-posting below. I had intended to post it back in the fall, but was distracted by my involvement in a last-minute campaign for the release of British resident Shaker Aamer, the Fast For Shaker campaign that Joanne MacInnes and I, the co-founders of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, set up just a few weeks after the article was first published.

The article is based on the fact that, after Emad Hassan’s capture, he was asked if he had any connection to Al-Qaeda, and said yes, although he was referring not to the terrorist organisation, but to Al-Qa’idah, a town near where he grew up in Yemen. Nevertheless, this was enough for those masquerading as intelligence analysts to conclude that he was a threat to the US.

This kind of mistake is typical of the often inept gathering of information about the prisoners held at Guantánamo, and the author of the Newsweek article, Lauren Walker, did a good job in pointing out how unreliable so much of what purports to be evidence against the prisoners actually is. She notes that Emad Hassan’s lawyers, at Reprieve, “claim much of the U.S. government’s incriminating information comes from a small group of informants at Guantánamo who told interrogators what they wanted to hear. Many sold out their fellow detainees for small rewards. Some reportedly received PlayStations and pornography for their assistance. Others were mentally ill or say they were tortured.”

However, what is particularly interesting about her article is information provided by John Kiriakou, an ex-CIA officer, who, as she notes, “was later imprisoned for nearly two years for emailing a reporter the name of a fellow officer.” Kiriakou called the series of house raids on March 28, 2002, which he helped organize, “the largest raid in the CIA’s history.” As Walker puts it, “Fourteen houses were raided and 52 people were taken prisoner that night,” according to Kiriakou, who also explained that the house in which Emad Hassan was captured “was a last-minute addition. Each house was targeted because it had been in frequent electronic contact with an Al-Qaeda affiliate. But Hassan’s had just one short call on record. The day before the raid, an unnamed foreign government called to give the CIA a tip; an informant said it was an Al-Qaeda safe house.”

Kiriakou told Walker that, after the raids, “he lost track of the ‘lower-level guys,’ as he focused on Abu Zubaydah, although he also recalled “a series of errors in the lead-up to the raid,” based on “faulty intelligence” that, I suspect, was replicated in relation to the Issa House, where Hassan and the 15 other men were seized. As Walker put it, “One suspected safe house turned out to be shish kabob stand with a pay phone … Another was a girls school. The CIA-led team stormed in and arrested an old man and his two sons. The agency later discovered the men had allowed strangers to use their phone for 5 rupees per call.” As Kiriakou said, “Were there innocent Arabs in some of those houses? I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was yes.”

There’s much more in Lauren Walker’s article and I hope you have the opportunity to read it in its entirety — with its harrowing sections on Hassan’s eight-year hunger strike and recollections by his lawyers about his intelligence and his delight in reading. I was disappointed that, towards the end of the article, she mentioned that dozens of those still held “are considered too dangerous to be released, but there’s not enough evidence to charge them,” without qualifying that designation, as these are the men facing Periodic Review Boards, men like Omar Mohammed Khalifh, who falsely incriminated himself because he couldn’t stand the pressure exerted on him by the authorities, who were desperate for “confessions.” — and he, of course, is not unique. In 20 out of 26 cases so far decided by the PRBs, the board members have recommended them for release, and it seems likely, therefore, that many others considered too dangerous to be released by Obama’s task force, despite there being insufficient evidence to put them on trial, will also be recommended for release after their PRBs because, as with Khalifh, the “evidence” is actually fundamentally unreliable.

How a Botched Translation Landed Emad Hassan in Gitmo

By Lauren Walker, Newsweek, September 10, 2015

“Do you have any connection to Al-Qaeda?” the man asked.

It was the spring of 2002, and Emad Hassan was sitting in a chair in a small tent, hands cuffed behind his back. Standing in front of him were a young American soldier and his Arabic translator. The soldier barked at him in English, a language Hassan barely understood, and the translator repeated his words in broken Arabic.

For weeks, Hassan, a small, soft-spoken 22-year-old with dark skin and curly hair, had been held by the Americans in Afghanistan. Born and raised in Yemen, he traveled to Faisalabad, Pakistan, in the summer of 2001 to study the Koran at a small university. But one evening the following spring, Pakistani authorities burst into the house he shared with 14 other foreign students and brought them to a nearby prison. After two months of beatings and interrogation, the Pakistanis handed him over to the U.S. military.

Eventually, Hassan found himself in front of the young American in what he later learned was the U.S. military prison in Kandahar. Confused and afraid, his lawyers say, Hassan decided it was best to continue telling the truth. “Yes,” Hassan said, according to his lawyers, he had a connection to Al-Qaeda. He waited for the next question, but the soldier and the translator seemed satisfied. The interrogation was over. What was lost in translation, Hassan’s lawyers say: The soldier thought he was talking about Al-Qaeda, the deadly terrorist group. Hassan was actually referring to Al-Qa’idah, a village 115 miles from where he grew up in Yemen.

Weeks later, prison guards came into Hassan’s cell. They stripped him of his clothes and put him in a diaper. Then they blindfolded him, placed earmuffs over his head and marched him onto a plane. When the aircraft landed, he soon learned he was in the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. What had started as a comic misunderstanding became a surreal odyssey through the dark side of America’s war on terror.

‘The Worst of the Worst’

In his satirical novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, writer Alex Gilvarry tells the story of Boy Hernandez, a fashion designer mistaken for a terrorist. Like Hassan, Hernandez is sent to Guantánamo Bay. But while Gilvarry’s fictional journey has darkly humorous twists (Hernandez’s PR agent is named Ben Laden), there is nothing funny about the ordeal that prisoners — some of whom are allegedly innocent — have endured behind bars at the U.S. facility.

After the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government used parts of the longtime U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo to hold prisoners who Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called “the worst of the worst” in the fight against Al-Qaeda. Some detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, are widely considered hardened terrorists. In recent years, however, new information has undercut Rumsfeld’s claims and indicated that few Gitmo detainees were major players in the war against America.

But Rumsfeld’s words stuck, both in the minds of the public and the people who worked at the prison. “Especially in the early days, everyone was pissed,” says Brandon Neely, a guard when the first detainees arrived on January 11, 2002. “People knew people that died in the twin towers. We had friends in Afghanistan. We wanted to do what we could to get revenge.”

Years later, when Joseph Hickman arrived for guard duty in 2006, Rumsfeld’s view was still the norm among Gitmo staff. “They just pushed into our heads that they were the worst of the worst and that if you turned your back on them for one second they’d kill you,” says Hickman, the of author Murder at Camp Delta, which investigates the mysterious deaths of three Gitmo prisoners.

Both former guards say they witnessed Americans treating the prisoners cruelly, from beatings to public humiliation. But perhaps the most disturbing evidence comes from Guantánamo Diary — a wrenching memoir by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian inmate imprisoned there since 2002. Published in January after a long legal battle, the heavily redacted book portrays the staff at the U.S. facility as bungling, bureaucratic and brutal. In Slahi’s rendering, interrogators tasked with uncovering information to save American lives seem more concerned with covering up their mistakes, pleasing their bosses and confirming their own misplaced assumptions. The Pentagon declined to comment on the veracity of the book. But in a statement, Commander Gary Ross, a Defense Department spokesman, says, “The suggestion that DoD personnel, the overwhelming majority of whom serve honorably, are or ever were engaged in systemic mistreatment of detainees is false and does not withstand scrutiny.”

Newsweek was unable to speak to Hassan directly, and the U.S. government has offered little information about Guantánamo and prevented reporters from speaking to the 779 who have been imprisoned there. “It is our policy not to comment on the specific detainee status [or] details,” spokeswoman Army Colonel Lisa Garcia of Southern Command, which is responsible for military activities in Central and South America and the Caribbean, tells Newsweek, a line echoed by the Pentagon and State Department. But Hassan’s story — reassembled from public documents, transcripts of his conversations and interviews with former intelligence officials and Hassan’s legal team — offers a glimpse into the lives of dozens of men who say they’ve been accidentally ensnared in the war against Al-Qaeda like dolphins in a trawl line.

For years, the White House has been trying to close Gitmo, but critics in Congress are afraid that former detainees pose a threat to the U.S. and its allies. As of early September, 52 of the 116 prisoners who remain at the U.S. facility have been cleared to be set free, a tacit admission, critics say, that they should never have been imprisoned [note: 89 men are still held, 35 of whom have been approved for release]. A cause for delay, a State Department representative says, is finding countries that are willing and able to accept detainees. None have been charged with a crime. Some have spent years on hunger strike, force-fed by the prison’s medical staff, waiting in purgatory for a release they fear is never going to come. Others, such as Hassan, never completely gave up hope.

A $5,000 Bounty

The U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay looks oddly suburban. There’s a Pizza Hut and an Irish pub, a Blockbuster video and a gift shop selling “I Love Gitmo” lip balm. Walk a few minutes outside of the camp and the island looks like a Caribbean paradise: steep coral cliffs and iguanas lounging in the sun, red-purple sunsets and blue waves lapping at the shore.

Yet from the moment Hassan arrived there in June 2002, his experience was harsh, his lawyers say. The guards alternated between beating him, shackling him for hours, forcing him to strip and having him crawl around on the cold, metal floor. He was given a number — 680 — and sometimes housed in Romeo Block, a notorious part of Camp Delta, located on the easternmost edge of the camp. There, the guards often kept detainees naked for days and sometimes sexually harassed them in hope of making them confess, according to several detainee accounts. (Hassan’s lawyers at Reprieve, an international nongovernmental organization, say he doesn’t talk about this part of his imprisonment; it’s too upsetting for him.)

Those early days were grim for Hassan. “I was interrogated from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.,” he told his lawyers, finishing each session feeling exhausted and afraid. Once again, Hassan’s interrogators asked him about his ties to Al-Qaeda. This time, the Arabic translators were able to clear up the earlier misunderstanding, his lawyers say, but Hassan’s interrogators didn’t believe him. Though he was never charged with a crime, classified Defense Department notes obtained by WikiLeaks show the government thought Hassan was associated with a terror cell trying to attack American soldiers in Afghanistan. They claim he visited Al-Qaeda’s Al-Faruq training camp in Afghanistan and traveled to the mountainous region around Tora Bora, where they believe he fought U.S. forces pursuing Osama bin Laden. He then allegedly fled to a safe house across the border, where the Pakistanis captured him and handed him over to the U.S.

The government files link that capture with another ambush conducted in Faisalabad that night, which led to the apprehension of Abu Zubaydah, once thought to be a high-level Al-Qaeda recruiter. What the documents don’t make clear, however, is that these ambushes were part of a large, coordinated raid led by American authorities. “It was the largest raid in the CIA’s history,” says John Kiriakou, an ex-CIA officer and one of the mission’s co-leaders. (He was later imprisoned for nearly two years for emailing a reporter the name of a fellow officer.) Fourteen houses were raided and 52 people were taken prisoner that night, he recalls. At each location, Pakistani security forces burst in and made arrests, as a CIA and FBI representative waited outside. The CIA officer then took the men to a U.S. safe house for questioning while the FBI agent gathered evidence.

Hassan’s house, Kiriakou says, was a last-minute addition. Each house was targeted because it had been in frequent electronic contact with an Al-Qaeda affiliate. But Hassan’s had just one short call on record. The day before the raid, an unnamed foreign government called to give the CIA a tip; an informant said it was an Al-Qaeda safe house.

That night, Kiriakou and a Pakistani police officer drove past the large home, which is located in a middle-class neighborhood. They wanted to make sure they wouldn’t be ambushed the next day. “I can tell you that something bad is going on inside that house,” the Pakistani officer told Kiriakou. “It is 105 degrees today, and all of the windows and the shutters are closed — it has to be boiling in there. They have something to hide.”

The CIA remained in Faisalabad only long enough to see their captives off to their next location. Kiriakou concedes that he lost track of the “lower-level guys.” He was focused on the major players.

Yet he does recall a series of errors in the lead-up to the raid. The reason: faulty intelligence. One suspected safe house turned out to be shish kabob stand with a pay phone (the agency realized the mistake before it went in). Another was a girls school. The CIA-led team stormed in and arrested an old man and his two sons. The agency later discovered the men had allowed strangers to use their phone for 5 rupees per call. “Were there innocent Arabs in some of those houses?” Kiriakou says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was yes.”

Hassan and his lawyers say the U.S. government’s claims about his Al-Qaeda connections are false. The Pakistani forces who took Hassan from his student housing, his lawyers say, received $5,000 from the U.S. military. This was typical. According a 2006 analysis by the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University Law School, the vast majority of detainees at Guantánamo Bay were arrested by local groups eager to profit from the counterterrorism gold rush. “Get wealth and power beyond your dreams,” reads one flier mentioning the bounties. “This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.” Handing over Al-Qaeda suspects was lucrative for the government in Islamabad too. As former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf wrote in his 2008 memoir, In the Line of Fire: “We have captured 689 [enemy combatants] and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totaling millions of dollars.”

As for the terrorist training camps, Hassan says he had never been to Afghanistan before American forces took him there. His lawyers claim much of the U.S. government’s incriminating information comes from a small group of informants at Guantánamo who told interrogators what they wanted to hear. Many sold out their fellow detainees for small rewards. Some reportedly received PlayStations and pornography for their assistance. Others were mentally ill or say they were tortured, Hassan’s lawyers say. “It didn’t matter what the evidence was,” says Mark Fallon, former deputy commander of the Criminal Investigation Task Force, an organization created in 2002 to investigate detainees captured in the war on terror. “You could have 10 witnesses stating that the detainee was not at an Al-Qaeda training camp. [But] if one detainee said he kinda looked like someone that was there, if there was any suspicion that someone might have been involved, they would not have them released.”

Slahi, the author of Guantánamo Diary, offers a similar account. He says interrogators at Gitmo beat him, molested him and prevented him from sleeping. In the end, he says he offered a false confession and implicated people for crimes they didn’t commit — all to make the pain stop. His rewards included a television, the ability to write whenever he wanted and his own garden where he grew mint for tea.

Hassan, however, never informed on other inmates to make his life easier, his lawyers say. “Emad continued to carry the hope of getting out and going back to his family again because of his absolute belief that he has not committed a crime towards the U.S. or any other party,” says Sami Al-Hajj, an Al-Jazeera journalist and former Gitmo inmate, in a letter to Newsweek.

Instead, nearly two years into Hassan’s stay, he began leading intermittent hunger strikes among the other inmates. Doing so is considered a form of disobedience at Guantánamo. According to the Defense Department, Hassan has been assessed with at least 132 infractions during his time in the U.S. prison, including assault and throwing his feces at guards. These acts periodically earned Hassan time at what is now known as Camp 5. Here, prisoners are kept in solitary confinement and given orange jumpsuits, a prayer mat and a hole in the ground to use as a toilet. If the guards and others felt his behavior was improving, they’d move him back to a cell in what is now called Camp 6, a more comfortable place to live, where detainees receive white uniforms, blankets, books and the freedom to interact with other prisoners.

As Hassan was shuttled between these two camps, he appeared before a military tribunal and once again told the U.S. military it had made a mistake.

“The interrogators have asked you about your association with Al-Qaeda?” a tribunal member asked.

“Yes, I believe so,” Hassan said.

“Have you told them the same thing that you are telling us?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you believe you are here?”

Hassan laughed.

“How can you ask me this question?” he replied. “This question should be asked to you.”

Dr. Jekyll

The interrogations continued. But during Hassan’s early years at Guantánamo he didn’t have a way to dispute his detention. That is, until early 2005, when attorney Douglas Cox, then a lawyer for the firm Allen & Overy, arrived at the prison to meet him for the first time.

Months earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled against the Bush administration and decided it was unconstitutional to deny Gitmo inmates an attorney and the ability to challenge the basis of their detention in American courts. Cox told Hassan his family had hired him, but initially Hassan didn’t trust him; his experience behind bars made him wary of Americans. “After you have been burned by hot soup,” he told his lawyer, “you blow in your yogurt.”

Though Hassan was suspicious, Cox’s first impression was positive. “Emad is sharp … Discussing things with him was very easy,” Cox says. “For him, the biggest problem was simply whether it was good to pursue these cases. He was skeptical it was going to change anything [and] … he didn’t want to legitimize the process that kept him detained for that long.”

The two met again on August 30, 2005. But Hassan was on yet another hunger strike. He felt helpless and could no longer stomach the green beans and soggy chicken cutlets the guards brought to his cell. “I tried to persuade him to stop,” Cox says. “We were scared about long-term effects to his health.” But Hassan, like dozens of other inmates who say they were arbitrarily sent to Gitmo, refused. A week later, Cox learned the guards had begun force-feeding his client — a process a fellow hunger striker described as “like having a dagger shoved down your throat.” The military has said it humanely feeds and treats inmates who refuse to eat.

In the beginning, the guards took Hassan to a prison hospital, where the force-feeding was conducted once or twice a day. By 2007, when Hassan began what would become one of the longest hunger strikes at the facility, the protocol had changed. The guards would stand outside his cell and order him to lie facedown on the floor with his hands behind his back. They would enter, shackle his arms and legs, and put him in a chair that had extra restraints. Then a doctor or nurse would thread a lubricated tube through a nostril, down past Hassan’s throat and into his stomach. They would then tape the top end of the tube to Hassan’s forehead and attach it to a bag filled with a vitamin-fortified liquid, like Ensure. Hassan was force-fed more than 5,000 times, a process that Cox and Hassan’s current lawyers say became torturous: Hassan developed chronic pancreatitis, one of his nostrils swelled shut, and he frequently vomited and defecated blood, sometimes as the process was underway. His weight plummeted to just under 90 pounds.

Yet Hassan’s relationship with prison staff wasn’t all negative. “There were good guards working today,” Hassan once told his lawyers at Reprieve, who took over Hassan’s case after Cox left his firm. “I was talking to one of them. I said that we are not asking for much in our hunger strike — just our basic human rights.”

“680, we do care,” the guard said.

“Tell the higher-ups, then.”

“I did,” the guard replied. “They don’t listen to us either.”

When the guards are kind to inmates, Hassan says, they’re often punished, not rewarded by the prison. “When guards show us that they respect us, when they respect our humanity, we respect them,” he told his lawyers. “Unfortunately, these guards are in the minority.” Ross, the Pentagon spokesman, says “all credible allegations of abuse are thoroughly investigated, and appropriate disciplinary action is taken when those allegations are substantiated.” Former guard Joseph Hickman recalls an instance in which one guard reported another for detainee abuse. “The guard that reported received all kinds of threats,” says Hickman, “but a few weeks after, the guard he turned in got promoted.”

One doctor, whom Hassan called Dr. Jekyll, was widely feared among the inmates. “If you looked at him the wrong way, he would put you on discipline for seven days,” Hassan told his lawyers at Reprieve, referring to punishments that included beatings and sleep deprivation. “No one did as much harm as him. He believed that the tougher he acted, the faster he would be promoted.”

Yet many have objected to the prison’s policy, including a Navy nurse who was recently reassigned after threats of discharge for refusing to force-feed detainees. “There was a good nurse. You will have heard about him by now,” Hassan told his attorneys. “If you were sick, he would let a force-feeding go by, so you did not get sicker.” A medical officer, whom Hassan referred to as Dr. R, once sat on Hassan’s bed and cried over how the staff was treating him. “I joined the military so I could go to med school,” Hassan says the doctor told him. “And now I’ve ended up force-feeding brothers.”

Reading Harry Potter in Gitmo

On May 21, 2009, President Barack Obama stood in front of a podium at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., looking calm and confident in his black suit and dark tie. It was only four months into his first term. As he began his remarks, Obama explained why he was pushing to close Gitmo and creating a task force to review the cases of those trapped in legal limbo. “The record is clear,” he said. “Rather than keeping us safe, the prison at Guantánamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it.”

That year, Obama’s task force cleared Hassan for release — a process that requires six federal agencies to agree that a prisoner doesn’t pose a national security threat. “The fact that he … [was] cleared for release for more than five years,” says Clive [Stafford] Smith, one of Hassan’s lawyers from Reprieve, “is an admission that there … [was] no reason to hold him. There never was.” Yet Hassan remained behind bars. On December 25, 2009, a Nigerian trained in Yemen attempted to bomb a Detroit-bound airplane, prompting Obama to impose a blanket ban on transferring Yemenis out of Gitmo.

In May 2014, Alka Pradhan, another one of Hassan’s lawyers from Reprieve, met him in a small, air-conditioned metal shed across the road from Camp 5. The room was furnished with a table and chairs, along with a sink, a toilet and a cot. In the corner was a camera to allow guards to monitor the meeting. The last time Pradhan saw Hassan, he was growing a large Afro in preparation for a Skype video chat with his mother — an occasional privilege at the prison. “All the other guys in the camp were making fun of him,” Pradhan recalls. “But he was like, ‘Look, this is going to make my mother laugh.’”

This time, Pradhan says Hassan entered the room wearing cornrows and an oversized orange jumpsuit that hung from his tiny frame. The guards had shackled his arms and legs. When he sat down, Hassan smiled; Pradhan had brought him a care package from the Guantánamo Bay McDonald’s: pancakes, biscuits, juice and a meatless Egg McMuffin. Though he was still on hunger strike, Hassan ate during meetings with his lawyers, which only took place about three times a year. “He ate a little bit,” Pradhan recalls. “He definitely had some of the hotcakes. He tried the Egg McMuffin, but he couldn’t get much of it down.”

Food wasn’t the only thing on Hassan’s mind that day. For all his anger and frustration with the force-feedings and long captivity, what he mostly wanted to talk about was books, says Pradhan. He was fluent in English, and in Camp 5 detainees can spend one hour a day alone in a windowless room, shackled to the floor, sitting in an old arm chair, either reading or watching TV. The chair, says Pradhan, “looks like your grandfather smoked and coughed on it for 40 years,” and the book selection is limited: William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is banned, as is John Grisham’s The Innocent Man and Frederick Douglass’s An American Slave, along with Slahi’s memoir . But in the decade-plus since he entered Gitmo, Hassan had immersed himself in American culture. Some of his favorite books include Twilight and Harry Potter. “He sees himself in some of the characters, and he draws lessons about fortitude,” says Pradhan. “He says, ‘Maybe I’m not that much different from everybody who reads these books.’”

‘It’s Not Who We Are’

During his State of the Union address in January 2015, President Obama renewed his vow to close Guantánamo. Some prisoners will be set free and relocated to countries that will take them. Others — such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — are set to be tried by military commissions. Dozens are considered too dangerous to be released, but there’s not enough evidence to charge them. The Pentagon is currently looking for a facility that will take them in the United States . “As Americans, we have a profound commitment to justice,” Obama said. “It makes no sense to spend $3 million per prisoner to keep open a prison that the world condemns and terrorists use to recruit … It’s not who we are.”

Some lawmakers fear that former Guantánamo prisoners are ripe for recruitment. Earlier this year, Republican senators pushed a draft budget bill that would further limit the transfer of Gitmo detainees. “The war on terror has reached a lethal phase,” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a GOP presidential hopeful, told Fox News in January. “It is insane to be letting these people out of Gitmo to go back to the fight.” Recidivism data from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicate 17.9 percent of former detainees became directly involved in “terrorist or insurgent activities” after their release. Yet it’s unclear what involvement entails. A Seton Hall University School of Law report from 2012 suggests the definition is overly broad, including those who have “spoken critically of the government’s detention policy.”

As for Hassan, on June 12, 2015, Gitmo guards came into his cell at night. Once again they took off his clothes and put him in a diaper. Once again they stripped him of his senses with a blindfold and earmuffs, and once again they led him onto a plane for a long journey. Only this time, when the plane landed, he was in Oman. The country had welcomed him on humanitarian grounds. Reprieve and the U.S. government wouldn’t comment on his exact whereabouts in Oman, and local reporters say the government in Muscat has warned them away from trying to interview former Gitmo detainees. But more than a decade after he arrived at Gitmo, Emad Hassan was finally free, and nothing seemed lost in translation.

Note: The photo above of Al-Qa’idah in Yemen was taken by Justin Ames, and featured in an article from January 2016 for the website The Velvet Rocket.

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 Decides Yemeni at Guantánamo Still Poses A Threat 14 Years After Capture

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.

In its latest “Unclassified Summary of Final Determination,” a Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo — a high-level review process involving representatives of 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 — decided, by consensus, that “continued law of war detention” of Suhayl Abdul Anam al-Sharabi (aka Zohair al-Shorabi, ISN 569), a 38- or 39-year old Yemeni, “remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”

The decision, dated March 31, 2016, and following on from his PRB on March 1, is not entirely surprising for two reasons — firstly, because of allegations levelled against al-Sharabi, suggesting that he was actually involved with terrorists, unlike the majority of prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened in January 2002, and, coupled with this, a failure on his part to show contrition, and to come up with a plan for his future.

In its determination, the board stated that its members had “considered the detainee’s past involvement with terrorist activities to include contacts with high-level al Qaeda figures, living with two of the 9/11 hijackers in Malaysia, and possible participation in KSM’s plot to conduct 9/11-style attacks in Southeast Asia. The Board noted the detainee’s refusal to admit the extent of his past activities, as well as his evasive and implausible responses to basic questions. Further, the Board considered the detainee’s defiant behavior while in detention, which has only recently changed to be more compliant, and the detainee’s lack of a credible plan for the future.”

Regarding the alleged plot by KSM — a reference to the “high-value detainee” and alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — I have never found it plausible that any other plots were seriously underway to follow up on 9/11, and I think it is important that, institutionally, no evidence has been found of any follow-up plot, which would otherwise provide comfort to those who try to defend the horrors of the “war on terror” — extraordinary rendition, torture and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial.

As Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told me during an interview in 2009, when discussing the Bush administration’s expectation of another attack, “I thought before that it had persisted all the way through 2002, but I’m convinced now, from talking to hundreds of people, literally, that that’s not the case, that their fear of another attack subsided rather rapidly after their attention turned to Iraq, and after Tommy Franks, in late November as I recall, was directed to begin planning for Iraq and to take his focus off Afghanistan.”

Nevertheless, al-Sharabi’s connection with Al-Qaeda — whether a plot existed or not — cannot be brushed aside easily, and, to be overcome, would require a commitment on his part to engage with the review board that was evidently not forthcoming, hence his “refusal to admit the extent of his past activities,” his “evasive and implausible responses to basic questions” (which is clearly no way to behave before what is, essentially, a parole board), and his “lack of a credible plan for the future,” which is also no way to impress one’s captors if the possibility of release exists.

It clearly did not help that al-Sharabi chose to undertake his PRB without the support of his lawyers, at Kilmer, Lane & Newman, LLP, in Denver, Colorado, and it is to be hoped that he will engage more thoroughly with the process when his case is reviewed again.

As the board members described it, “The Board looks forward to reviewing the detainee’s file in six months and hopes to see continued compliance in detention, continued participation in educational opportunities, a more thoughtful articulation regarding handling the challenges of resettlement, and candor with the Board.”

With the review board’s decision in al-Sharabi’s case, 20 men have now been recommended for release , while six have had their ongoing imprisonment recommended (see our detailed Periodic Review Board list for the full story). This is still a success rate for the prisoners of 77%, and a damning indictment of the government’s claims, made by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force back in 2010, that the majority of the men who were later put forwards for PRBs were “too dangerous to release,” even though the task force conceded that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. Of the 26 men in whose cases PRB decisions have been taken, 24 have been from the “too dangerous to release” camp, and 19 of those men have been recommended for release.

48 men were initially designated as being “too dangerous to release,” although two died before the PRBs began. By that time, however, 25 others had been added, who had initially been recommended for trials until a number of rulings by the appeals court in Washington, D.C. overturned some of the few convictions achieved in Guantánamo’s military commission trial system, on the embarrassing basis that the war crimes for which the men had been convicted had been invented by Congress.

Decisions have been taken in the cases of just two of the 25 — al-Sharabi and Tariq al-Sawah, an Egyptian whose PRB recommended his release last year, and who was freed in Bosnia in January. Two others have had reviews and are awaiting the results, and others are scheduled to have reviews in the coming months. 35 men in total are awaiting reviews, which, the administration has promised, will take place before President Obama leaves office.

It is likely that a greater proportion of these men will have their ongoing imprisonment recommended, unlike those in the “too dangerous to release” category, which, on reflection, must be regarded by the government as an ill-advised definition.

However, it ought to be troubling, to some extent, that the US continues to defend the ongoing imprisonment of men like Suhayl al-Sharabi, who was involved with Al-Qaeda when he was in his early 20s, and against whom no evidence exists that he was involved in any concrete plot, or contributed in any way to any efforts that killed a single American. Set against these concerns is the reality that he has further opportunities to address the review board, to try to persuade them to approve his release, but in the end the government ought to be defending prisoners’ ongoing imprisonment either because it is putting them on trial — a situation that only applies to ten of the 89 men still held at Guantánamo — or because it maintains that it has the right to hold combatants until the end of hostilities.

The PRBs are neither, and, while they are a useful way of chipping away at decisions taken back in 2010 that were clearly far too cautious, that does not eliminate the fundamental problem that a parole-type system has been set up to review what are supposed to be, for the most part, wartime detentions, and that prisoners detained according to the laws of war ought to be freed at the end of hostilities, and not required to plead for their release via government review boards.

The government has been unwilling to accept that its “war on terror” has an end date, and it is unsettling that there have not been more robust legal challenges to the ongoing imprisonment of men for longer than the Vietnam War, or the First and Second World Wars combined.

If Guantánamo is to be closed, as we still dare to hope it might be by the time President Obama leaves office, the men facing trials, and those recommended for ongoing imprisonment without trials, will need to be moved to a facility or facilities on the US mainland. When — if — this happens, those facing trials should be tried in federal court, and as few as possible of the rest should be designated for ongoing imprisonment without trial. If any evidence exists to justify their detention, they too should be put on trial.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” the only comfort we can take from the intention to move men from Guantánamo to the US mainland for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial is the fact that they will be able to make new legal challenges regarding the basis of their ongoing imprisonment, which, we believe, will challenge the administration more effectively than was possible when they were at Guantánamo.

As “Close Guantánamo” co-founder Tom Wilner has explained, “If the detainees are brought to the United States, the government loses its prime argument for denying them constitutional rights. The imprisonment of anyone without charge or trial on the US mainland is radically at odds with any concept of constitutional due process. Bringing them to the United States means that they would almost certainly have full constitutional rights and the ability to effectively challenge their detentions in court. They would then no longer be dependent solely on the largesse of the Obama administration, or whatever administration happens to follow it, but could gain relief through the courts.”

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.

Fugitive From Justice: A Timeline of the Crimes Committed by Guantánamo’s Torture Chief, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, As He Fails to Show Up at a French Court

In the long quest for accountability for those who ordered and implemented the crimes committed by the United States since 9/11 in its brutal and counter-productive “war on terror,” victory has so far proven elusive, and no one has had to answer for the torture, the extraordinary rendition, the CIA “black sites,” the proxy torture prisons elsewhere, the shameful disregard of the Geneva Conventions and the embrace of indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that has been such a shame and disgrace for anyone not blinded by the violence and vengeance that have consumed so much of the US’s actions and attitudes in the last 14 and a half years.

In the US itself, President Obama made it clear from the beginning that he was looking forwards and not backwards when it came to accountability, as though sweeping the crimes mentioned above under the carpet would remove their poison from infecting US society as a whole. An early example of refusing to allow any victims of extraordinary rendition and torture anywhere near a courtroom was the Obama administration, in 2009 (and into 2010), invoking the “state secrets doctrine” (a blanket denial of any effort to challenge the government’s actions) to prevent the British resident and torture victim Binyam Mohamed and others from challenging the Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen for its role as the CIA’s travel agent for torture.

In February 2010, President Obama also allowed a Justice Department fixer to override the conclusions of an ethics investigation into John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who wrote and approved the 2002 “torture memos” that cynically purported to redefine torture so it could legally be used by the CIA. The investigation had concluded that they were guilty of “wrongful conduct,” but they received only a slapped wrist after Deputy Attorney General David Margolis concluded instead that they had merely exercised “poor judgment.”

And in December 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee published the damning executive summary of its exhaustive, four-year report into the CIA’s torture program, but calls for accountability have not been followed up by any branch of the US government. In September 2015, Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) “filed a complaint with the US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General requesting an immediate review of the conduct of Justice Department officials in response to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, including possibly misleading statements about evidence of torture,” and in October 2015 the ACLU filed a lawsuit against James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two psychologists who designed, implemented and oversaw the CIA’s torture program. The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, is on behalf of three of the program’s victims, one of whom died.

Readers can also join the ACLU in asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special prosecutor to hold Mitchell and Jessen accountable for their actions, and join Amnesty international in asking the Attorney General to read the Senate torture report and to act on it. As AIUSA states, “the Justice Department has failed to commit to reading and reviewing the full report. In litigation the Justice Department has even said that its copies of the full report remain unread, in a sealed envelope.”

Despite these failures, efforts to secure accountability have also been made outside the US, although it has been difficult for the countries involved because the US has refused to cooperate with investigations at any level. When WikiLeaks released a trove of US diplomatic cables in 2010, it became apparent that the Bush administration had put pressure on Germany not to conduct an investigation into the rendition and torture of Khaled El-Masri, a notorious case of mistaken identity, and the Obama administration had done the same with the Spanish government in 2009, an investigation into six former Bush administration lawyers — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, William Haynes, the Pentagon’s former general counsel, Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy, Jay Bybee, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel — for “creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture.”

Nevertheless, there has been some success. In Italy, CIA officials were successfully prosecuted, in absentia, for their role in the kidnapping and rendition of Abu Omar, a cleric, in Milan in 2003, and the European Court of Human Rights has found Macedonia guilty in the rendition of Khaled El-Masri, also granting him a small amount of compensation (60,000 Euros). In Poland, where the CIA ran a “black site” for torture in 2002-03, and where an official prosecutor-led investigation has been ongoing for many years, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Polish government, in 2015, to pay $262,000 compensation to the “high-value detainees” Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, both of whom have been held at Guantánamo since September 2006.

Cases are still ongoing in Spain, in Germany, in Lithuania (another European “black site,” along with Romania, where blanket denial has been the government’s response), and in Africa lawyers are seeking to get the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to re-examine the case of rendition and torture victim Mohammed al-Asad, having turned it down in 2014, before the Senate torture report was released, in which he is named.

There have also been victories involving the suppression of the free movement of senior US officials, most notably in the case of former President George W. Bush, who cancelled a visit to Switzerland in February 2011 after lawyers prepared a torture complaint against him, although it is reasonable to assume that this is not the only time that senior officials and others involved with the Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies have decided not to travel abroad.

A month ago, one of these officials, former Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantánamo between 2002 and 2004, when the worst of the torture took place at the prison, presumably added France to his own personal list of countries not to visit when, as Deutsche Welle put it, he “was a no-show in a French court,” where he had been summoned to answer questions stemming from accusations that he oversaw the torture of three French nationals at Guantánamo.”

The three men in question are Mourad Benchellali and Nizar Sassi (released in July 2004) and Khaled Ben Mustapha (released in March 2005), and, on its website, the Center for Constitutional Rights explains the long history of the complaint against Miller as follows:

There is an ongoing investigation in France into the torture and other serious mistreatment of three French citizens  who were detained at Guantánamo. The jurisdiction of the instructing judge was confirmed by the appeals court in June 2005.  In January 2012, the former investigating magistrate, Sophie Clement, issued a formal request, or “letter rogatory”, to the United States. According to news reports, the French investigative judge requested access to the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, to relevant documents as well as to all persons who had contact with the three victims during their detention there. The United States still has not replied. On February 26, 2014, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights submitted an expert report urging the French investigating magistrate to issue a subpoena for former Guantánamo commander Geoffrey Miller. The magistrate denied the request. On March 5, 2015, the court of appeals in Paris (Chambre de l’instruction de la Cour d’appel de Paris) heard an appeal by the plaintiffs requesting a reversal of the decision not to subpoena Miller. CCR and ECCHR submitted materials to assist the court of appeals in understanding Miller’s role in the chain of command and key developments regarding interrogation practices at Guantánamo. On April 2, 2015, the appeals court ordered the lower court to summon Miller to explain his role in the abuse. On January 20, 2016, the court summoned Miller to appear before the court on March 1, 2016.

Following Miller’s failure to turn up, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights issued the following statement:

Miller’s absence speaks volumes about the Obama administration’s continued unwillingness to confront America’s torture legacy. The administration not only refuses to investigate US officials like Miller for torture, it apparently remains unwilling to cooperate with international torture investigations like the one in France. Geoffrey Miller has much to answer for regarding the treatment of detainees during his tenure. The Convention Against Torture obligates both France and the US to prevent and punish torture, including through the exercise of universal jurisdiction, but only one country is upholding its obligations in this case. The Obama administration’s continued embrace of impunity sends a clear message that it will pick and choose which international obligations to honor. The court should recognize the necessity of its investigation in light of the US government’s failure to pursue accountability for the torture of men at Guantánamo.

While lawyers work out whether they can seek an arrest warrant for Maj. Gen. Miller, I’m posting below the full complaint against him from February 2014, as a reminder of some of the horrors of Guantánamo’s long and disgraceful history, in which he played a major part, and also as a reminder of other disgraceful developments, bearing in mind Miller’s transfer to Iraq, after Guantánamo, where he oversaw some of the developments that led to the Abu Ghraib scandal. See the original document for the footnotes.

The complaint against Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of Guantánamo

JOINT EXPERT OPINION by: Katherine Gallagher, Senior Staff Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), New York, and Vice President, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Paris, and Wolfgang Kaleck, General Secretary, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), Berlin

Introduction

The Center for Constitutional Rights (“CCR”) and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (“ECCHR”) present this dossier containing key information regarding the criminal role played by GEOFFREY MILLER, a retired U.S. Major General in the United States army, who served as Commander of Joint Task Force Guantánamo and Deputy Commanding General of Detention Operations in Iraq, in the torture and other serious abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody in Guantánamo and Iraq. With this dossier, we seek to assist the investigations by the honorable Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris (file no. 2275/05/10). […]

CCR and ECCHR organizations have long-standing expertise on the factual and legal questions at issue in this case. On 10 January 2013, both organizations were accepted as a party (acusación particular) in an on-going investigation by the Spanish Audiencia Nacional into “an authorized and systematic plan of torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of any detainee,” perpetrated by U.S. government officials against persons detained in Guantánamo and other locations (file no. 150/09-P). CCR and ECCHR have submitted numerous legal and factual expert opinions in a second criminal proceeding in Spain brought against six former U.S. officials. CCR and ECCHR have also sought accountability for the criminal violations committed by U.S. officials against specific individuals through its initiation of proceedings, including in Canada, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. Additionally, since 2002, CCR has represented plaintiffs who have been subjected to every facet of the United States‟ torture program, from Guantánamo detainees, to Abu Ghraib torture survivors, and victims of extraordinary rendition and CIA ghost detention. CCR has represented former detainees in U.S. federal courts in habeas corpus proceedings and civil actions, seeking habeas relief, injunctions or damages. Furthermore, ECCHR has represented a victim of extraordinary rendition and CIA secret detention before German courts.

Role and Functions of Geoffrey Miller: 2002-2006

i. Overview of Miller’s Roles and Responsibilities

On 8 November 2002, MG Geoffrey Miller took command of JTF-GTMO. As commander of JTF-GTMO, MG Miller‟s mission at Guantánamo was “to integrate both the detention and intelligence function to produce actionable intelligence for the nation … operational and strategic intelligence to help the [United States] win the global war on terror.” MG Miller unified the command over military intelligence units and military police units, and had them work together to “soften up” detainees for interrogation. Miller implemented newly established interrogation techniques that violated the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Notably, when Miller took command of JTF-GTMO, he had no first-hand experience with detainees or interrogations. Miller reported to Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, and was in regular contact with Rumsfeld during his time at Guantánamo.

While in the position of commander of JTF-GTMO, MG Miller travelled to Iraq, and specifically to Abu Ghraib prison, in August–September 2003. MG Miller was sent to Iraq to bring Secretary Rumsfeld’s 16 April 2003 policy guidelines for Guantánamo to the Combined Joint Task Force 7 (CJTF-7) in Iraq as a possible model for the command-wide Iraq policy; Miller recommended that such a model be adopted. In September 2003, General Ricardo Sanchez, Commander of Coalition Ground Forces in Iraq, authorized the use of techniques that largely reflected Miller‟s recommendations and the 16 April 2003 memorandum.

MG Miller became Deputy Commanding General of Detention Operations in Iraq in April 2004. This newly-established position created a unity of command in Iraq for all detention and interrogation operations.25 Among the detention facilities under Miller‟s command was the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

ii. Role of Miller in Torture and other Serious Violations of International Law at Guantánamo

MG Miller became commander of the newly formed JTF-GTMO, a unit that combined the detention and security operations (JTF-160) and interrogators and intelligence gathering function (JRF-170), in November 2002. JTF-GTMO ran the U.S. detention facilities, including Camp X-Ray, Camp Delta and Camp Echo. Immediately prior to his arrival at Guantánamo, new interrogation techniques were drawn up that did not conform to the Geneva Conventions and went beyond those approved in the U.S. Army Field Manual; MG Miller supported and implemented these techniques. On 2 December 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld formally approved these additional interrogation techniques, which included hooding, stress positions, removal of clothing, forced grooming, exploitation of individual and cultural phobias (e.g. dogs), isolation for up to 30 days, and removal of all comfort items, including religious items. MG Miller implemented techniques designed to “soften up” detainees, including sleep deprivation, extended isolation, forcing detainees to stand or crouch in “stress positions,” stripping detainees and exposure to extremes of heat and cold.

Secretary Rumsfeld rescinded permission for the more controversial techniques on 15 January 2003, although under MG Miller’s command at Guantánamo, these techniques continued to be used in certain cases.

When MG Miller was solicited for his input on interrogation techniques in January 2003, he stated: “The command must have the ability to conduct interrogations using a wide variety of techniques,” listing the following techniques as “essential”: use of an isolation facility; interrogating detainee in an environment other than a standard interrogation room; varying levels of deprivation of light and auditory stimuli to include the use of a white room for up to three days; the use of up to 20-hour interrogations; the use of a hood during transportation and movement; removal of all comfort items, including religious items; serving of “meals ready to eat” instead of hot rations; forced grooming, including shaving of facial hair and head; and use of false documents and reports. In February 2003, Miller again pressed to be able to isolate detainees and interrogate them up to 20 hours, calling this the “hallmark” interrogation technique. Miller later also requested that sound modulation be authorized for interrogations at Guantánamo.

Around the same time as Secretary Rumsfeld issued new interrogation guidelines, which authorized 24 techniques including dietary manipulation, environmental manipulation, sleep adjustment and “false flag,” reports surfaced of detainee mistreatment at Guantánamo. MG Miller‟s response to the allegations of mistreatment of detainees was subsequently criticized in the Senate Armed Services Committee as inadequate. Serious mistreatment of detainees continued. Even after MG Miller purportedly ordered that “fear up harsh” not be used, he sought approval for an interrogation plan in July 2003 that included previously banned interrogation techniques; that plan was subsequently authorized by Rumsfeld.

The serious violations of international law, including violations of the Torture Convention and Geneva Conventions, are well documented. Released detainees describe the serious abuse to which they were subjected during the time that MG Miller was commander of Guantánamo: being short shackled in painful “stress positions” for many hours at a time, causing deep flesh wounds and permanent scarring; threats with unmuzzled dogs; forced stripping; being photographed naked; being subjected to repeated forced body cavity searches; being exposed to extremes of heat and cold for the purpose of causing suffering; being kept in filthy cages for 24 hours per day with no exercise or sanitation; denial of access to necessary medical care; deprivation of adequate food, sleep, communication with family and friends, and of information about their status; and violent beatings by the “Extreme Reaction Force”. It is recalled that twelve years since the opening of Guantánamo, none of the detainees – the vast majority of whom have never been charged with any crime and will not be charged with any crime, despite continued detention – have been permitted to have any visits with their families and have had very limited contact with the outside world. These acts constitute torture, and violate, at a minimum, the Geneva Conventions prohibition on coercive interrogations.

In October 2003, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) conducted more than 500 interviews at Guantánamo before meeting with MG Miller and his top aides. The ICRC voiced its concern regarding the lack of a legal system for the detainees, the continued use of steel cages, the “excessive use of isolation‟ and the lack of repatriation for the detainees. The ICRC concluded that the interrogators had “too much control over the basic needs of detainees … the interrogators have total control over the level of isolation in which detainees were kept; the level of comfort items detainees can receive; and the access to basic needs of the detainees.” MG Miller objected at the comment and told the ICRC that interrogation techniques were none of their concern. The ICRC told MG Miller that those methods and the lengths of interrogations were coercive and having a “cumulative effect” on the mental health of the detainees and that the steel cages, coupled with the maximum security nature of the facility and the isolation techniques, constituted harsh treatment. Following that visit, the ICRC expressed rare public criticism of the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo under MG Miller‟s authority, stating that “the US authorities have placed the internees in Guantanamo beyond the law. This means that, after more than eighteen months of captivity, the internees still have no idea about their fate, and no means of recourse through any legal mechanism.” The ICRC continued, stating that there is “worrying deterioration in the psychological health of a large number.” Ten years ago, the ICRC expressed concern with the “seemingly open-ended system of internment,” that existed under MG Miller‟s watch; with only minor modifications, that system continues to operate.

iii. Role of Miller in Torture of Mohammed al Qahtani

Mohammed al Qahtani, a detainee from Saudi Arabia, was transferred to Guantánamo in early 2002. He was subjected to a prolonged, aggressive interrogation that violated international law, known as the “First Special Interrogation Plan.” The interrogation plan was authorized by then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld shortly after MG Miller took over command of JTF-GTMO. Despite objections to the plan by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the Department of Defense (DoD) Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF), and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Miller authorized use of the interrogation plan and played a key role in its execution. Indeed, Miller allowed the interrogation to proceed while the CITF refused to allow any of its agents to be involved in any way with it. This interrogation plan included 48 days of severe sleep deprivation and 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, dehumanizing treatment, the use of physical force against him, prolonged stress positions, prolonged sensory overstimulation, and threats with military dogs.

MG Miller played a direct role in the torture of Mr. al Qahtani when he authorized the sleep deprivation program under which Mr. al Qahtani was kept awake for twenty hours, and authorized and supervised the state of severe isolation and sensory deprivation to which Mr. al Qahtani was subjected, among other acts. The Schmidt Report recommended that Miller be held accountable and admonished for his role – as both a direct participant and for failing to prevent his subordinates from abusing – in the interrogation of Mr. Al Qahtani.

Mohammed al Qahtani was interrogated from 23 November 2002 through 16 January 2003. The techniques were directly inspired by the “Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE)” techniques, which are techniques taught to U.S. military members on how to resist hostile interrogations. These techniques were later widely acknowledged as torture. Indeed, the former convening office of the military commissions at Guantánamo declared that she could not bring charges against Mr. al Qahtani due to the torture inflicted on him: “we tortured al-Qahtani. … His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case for prosecution.”

Rather than receiving treatment and support for the torture he was subjected to, Mr. al Qahtani remains detained at Guantánamo without charge.

iv. Role of Miller in Torture and other Serious Violations of International Law in Iraq and at Abu Ghraib

MG Miller’s responsibility for violations in Iraq relates not only to the time-period during which he was Deputy Commanding General of Detention Operations, but also relates to the period during which the most notorious acts of torture in Iraq occurred. MG Miller was sent to Iraq in August 2003 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assess intelligence operations and, he has said, conduct “strategic interrogation and intelligence development and detention operations in theatre.” It was shortly after this visit by MG Miller that the most serious abuses and torture at Abu Ghraib occurred.

MG Miller was explicitly authorized to conform interrogation methods in Iraq to those at Guantánamo. Miller wanted to “Gitmo-ize” Iraq and Abu Ghraib. During his visit to Iraq, Miller and his team discussed the 16 April 2003 tactical guidelines for Guantánamo with those involved in interrogations in Iraq, and – despite the clear instruction that these interrogation techniques were limited to “unlawful combatants held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” – recommended that it serve as a model for Iraqi-wide policy. These guidelines were subsequently adopted for use at Abu Ghraib. It is important to recall that the systems in place in Guantánamo and Iraq were intended to be treated differently under the Bush administration: the Geneva Conventions were declared inapplicable at Guantánamo – a decision later overturned by the United States Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld – but were always applicable to Iraq. Thus, by recommending interrogation policies from Guantánamo be applied in Iraq, Miller was advising that policies that fell outside the scope of the Geneva Conventions could be applied to a country, a conflict and civilian detainees protected by the Geneva Conventions.

When MG Miller toured the detention facility used by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), he remarked that they were “running a country club” and indicated he thought that the treatment of detainees was too lenient. One member of the U.S. military who accompanied Miller on this tour reported that “Miller recommended the ISG shackle detainees and make them walk on gravel rather than on concrete pathways to show the detainees who was in control.” Brigadier General Janis Karpinski stated that MG Miller said, during a briefing on interrogations: “Look, you have to treat them like dogs. If they ever felt like anything more than dogs, you have effectively lost control of the interrogation.” An MG in Iraq reported that MG Miller told him that he was “not getting the maximum” out of his detainees because they “’haven’t broken [the detainees]’ psychologically” and that Miller said he would “get back to [him] with some ideas of how you can perhaps deal with these people where you can actually break them, some techniques you can use.”

Col. Thomas Pappas, then-commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade at Abu Ghraib, stated that MG Miller told him that at Guantánamo they used military working dogs and that dogs were effective in setting the atmosphere for interrogations. According to MG Miller, his team recommended a strategy to work the operational schedule of the dog teams so the dogs were present when the detainees were awake, not when they are sleeping. Pappas said that the “tenor of the discussions was that we had to get tougher with the detainees.” As is now known, dog teams arrived at Abu Ghraib in the wake of MG Miller‟s visit to Iraq, and these military dogs were used to abuse detainees, including during interrogations.

MG Miller also recommended that the detention and interrogation operations being integrated under one command authority in Iraq, as had been done at Guantánamo.

Following MG Miller’s trip to Iraq, Lieutenant General (LTG) Sanchez adopted a policy that drew heavily from Rumsfeld’s 16 April 2003 memorandum, and included such techniques as the presence of working dogs, stress positions, sleep management, loud music and light control. The policies were applicable to all detainees, including civilian detainees. Following a legal review, however, a number of the policies LTG Sanchez approved on 14 September 2003 were deemed to be in contravention of the Geneva Conventions, including Article 17 of the Third Geneva Conventions which prohibits coercive interrogations. LTG Sanchez’s policy was later rescinded and replaced with a new policy on 12 October 2003. The 12 October 2003 policy allowed for an additional nine techniques, namely those omitted because of concern that they violated the Geneva Conventions, upon request and approval. These prohibited techniques also resurfaced in the policy for interrogations at the SMU TF.

Shortly after MG Miller’s visit to Iraq, detainees were subjected to “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses.” The migration of interrogation policies and practices from Guantánamo to Iraq was cited as a specific factor in the torture of detainees in Iraq. For example, forced nakedness never showed up on any of the interrogation policies authorized in Iraq but were seen as “imported” techniques that “could be traced through Afghanistan and GTMO.”

The Taguba Report criticized many of MG Miller’s recommendations and his use of Guantánamo operational procedures and interrogation authorities as baselines for his observations and recommendations in Iraq. Miller’s impact is apparent when assessing the impact of creating a unified police and interrogation unit: the torture of detainees involved both the military police and interrogators (as well as private military contractors), with interrogators encouraging military police to isolate, strip and otherwise abuse or humiliate detainees prior to interrogation sessions. Taguba noted the recommendations of MG Miller’s team that “the ‘guard force’ be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees appears to be in conflict with … Army Regulation (AR 190-8) that military police do not participate in military intelligence supervised interrogation sessions,” and concluded, “Military Police should not be involved with setting favorable conditions for subsequent interviews. These actions … clearly run counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility.”

MG Miller returned to Iraq to take up his position overseeing detention and interrogation in April 2004 – the same month that the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib became public. Although Miller knew that there were serious concerns about the treatment of detainees there, having been advised of such concerns at least with regards to the Special Mission Unit Task Force during his August-September 2003 visit, and then the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, allegations of torture and abuse at detention centers across Iraq persisted throughout Miller’s time there.

Conclusion

The information above demonstrates that Geoffrey Miller bears individual criminal responsibility for the war crimes and acts of torture inflicted on detainees in U.S. custody at Guantánamo and in Iraq. Based on his position as a commander, Miller is responsible for the acts he authorized, commanded or directed his subordinates to commit, as well as for the acts of his subordinates which he failed to prevent or punish. Based on his leadership position and involvement in developing, authorizing and implementing interrogation policies, Miller can also be held responsible as a member of a joint criminal enterprise for his involvement in the torture of detainees in U.S. custody, or, alternatively, for aiding and abetting torture and other war crimes.

Based on the foregoing there is a sufficient connection between GEOFFREY MILLER and the pending torture investigation to warrant issuing a SUBPOENA TO HEAR THE TESTIMONY OF GEOFFREY MILLER as it relates to the allegations under investigation and “an authorized and systematic plan of torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of any detainee.”

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.

Who Are the Two Libyans Freed from Guantánamo and Given New Homes in Senegal?

On April 3, two Libyans — former opponents of Colonel Gaddafi, who was overthrown in 2011 — were freed from Guantánamo and resettled in Senegal, whose Ministry of Foreign Relations issued a statement pointing out that the two men were granted “asylum … in accordance with the relevant conventions of international humanitarian law, also in the tradition of Senegalese hospitality and Islamic solidarity with two African brothers who have expressed interest in resettlement in Senegal after their release.”

The two men — Omar Mohamed Khalifh, 44, and Salem Gherebi, 55 — are the first former prisoners to be resettled in the west African country, and with their release 89 men remain in Guantánamo, of whom 35 have been approved for release — 23 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, and 12 other approved for release since January 2014 by another high-level review process, the Periodic Review Boards.

Khalifh, also identified as Omar Khalif, went before a Periodic Review Board in June 2015 and was approved for release in September, bringing freedom within sight for an amputee with numerous other health problems who, as the Libyan-born British resident Omar Deghayes (released from Guantánamo in December 2007) told me in 2010, was not who the Americans thought he was:

“They call him ‘The General,’” Deghayes told me, “not because of anything he has done, but because he decided that life would be easier for him in Guantánamo if he said yes to every allegation laid against him.” Even so, as Deghayes also explained, this cooperation has been futile, as Khalifh has been subjected to appalling ill-treatment, held in a notorious psychiatric block where the use of torture was routine, and denied access to adequate medical attention for the many problems that afflict him, beyond the loss of his leg. As Deghayes described it, “He has lost his sight in one eye, has heart problems and high blood pressure, and his remaining leg is mostly made of metal, from an old accident in Libya a long time ago when a wall fell on him. He describes himself as being nothing more than ‘the spare parts of a car.’”

Omar Deghayes told me about Khalifh when we were travelling around the UK showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the documentary film I co-directed with Polly Nash, in which Omar features prominently, to student audiences, and I included his analysis in an article that same year after Khalifh, unfortunately, had his habeas corpus petition turned down.

Khalifh’s lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York (CUNY), confirmed his physical ailments to the Miami Herald, explaining that he “has no right leg below the knee from a 1998 landmine accident in Afghanistan and a left leg held together by metal pins from a 1995 construction site accident in Sudan,” and that he “is blind in his left eye and has glaucoma in his right eye, as well as shrapnel in his left side.”

Kassem said, “I’m unsure why a man with only one eye left, one leg, one fully functioning arm, and whose only supposed crime was to oppose the Gadhafi dictatorship was not freed years ago. Now, he looks forward to receiving proper medical care for his ailments and starting the long process of rebuilding his life after more than a decade at Guantánamo.”

Less is known about Salem Gherebi (aka Salim Gherebi or Ghereby), the other man freed in Senegal, who was approved for release in January 2010 by the Guantánamo Review Task Force. As I explained in a profile of him in September 2010:

Initially, it was alleged that he arrived in Afghanistan in 1995, having lost most of the fingers of his right hand in an explosives accident in Tajikistan the year before, and that he was an al-Qaeda operative in Kabul, who had “reportedly” trained at an al-Qaeda training camp in 1996 (an allegation that borders on the implausible, as Osama bin Laden only returned to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996). By 2006, the US authorities had dropped the claims about losing his fingers and being an al-Qaeda member in exchange for a new set of allegations, most of which centered on his purported links with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Deciding that his name was actually Rafdat Muhammed Faqi Aljj Saqqaf, the authorities alleged that he had lived in Pakistan in the early 1990s and then, fearing that talks between the Libyan and Pakistani governments would lead to the deportation of all Libyans from Pakistan, had moved back to Afghanistan, where he stayed in refugee camps.

In response to an email tonight, Omar Deghayes let me know about his relationship with Salem, describing him as “a friend of mine, married to a Pakistani woman, with two young boys and a daughter,” and “a great personality, kind, learned, generous and humble.” He added, “He taught me a lot inside prison when we were at Camp Five.” Modeled on a maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, and consisting of solid-walled isolation cells, Camp Five was used hold those who, at the time, were regarded as the most non-compliant prisoners, or those considered to have the greatest intelligence value (before 14 “high-value detainees” arrived from CIA “black sites” in September 2006).

Omar also explained that, “When the Libyans came to interrogate him, they were so frustrated that he refused to say a word despite all their threats, not even his name.” He added that, “although he kept much to himself when it came to the guards in Guantánamo, even so he was mistreated and put in Camp Romeo where his clothes were taken away.” Little discussed, Camp Romeo was a punishment block where prisoners were “stripped from the waist down,” and “often left naked for days,” as was reported in 2005.

Following his release, his attorney Rick Wilson said that Gherebi “looks forward to being reunited with his family as soon as possible … including a 15-year-old daughter who he’s never met in person,” as the Miami Herald explained, adding, “His wife is Pakistani but she and their three children have been living in Libya with the Gherebi family.”

Wilson noted that Gherebi “was also very interested in being in a country where Islam was practiced,” and in that respect Senegal is obviously a useful destination for his resettlement, being 94% Muslim. The Miami Herald also noted that “Senegal’s foreign ministry disclosed the weekend transfer on the occasion of Senegal’s 56th Independence Day following a military parade,” and that the Pentagon “soon followed with an official announcement.”

Rick Wilson also stated that, before Gherebi’s capture, he “was a grade school science teacher,” although he admitted that he did not know “exactly what he will do” with his new-found freedom. “His primary concern is his family, seeing them and being with them,” he said, adding, “The same for them. They are very anxious.”

Last week, the Washington Post broke the news that the Pentagon had “notified Congress that it intends to resettle nearly a dozen detainees,” including long-term hunger striker Tariq Ba Odah, who weighs just 74 pounds, and whose lawyers have been trying to get a judge to order his release. Reuters revealed in January that, shamefully, Ba Odah’s release had been prevented by the Pentagon, which had refused to share medical records with a country that had been willing to offer him a new home.

According to the New York Times, following the release of the two Libyans, nine other men “are expected to leave in the next two weeks.”

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.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 146 prisoners released from February 2009 to January 2016 (by President Obama), whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; 1 Mauritanian; 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; 13 Afghans (here and here); 3 British residents; 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; 2 Algerians; 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan), repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani); 4 Uighurs to Bermuda; 1 Iraqi; 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad); 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni; 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); 2 Somalis; 4 Afghans; 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland; 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania; 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); 1 Algerian; 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians; 2 Saudis; 2 Sudanese; 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian to Uruguay; 4 Afghans; 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis to Kazakhstan; January 2015 — 4 Yemenis to Oman, 1 Yemeni to Estonia; June 2015 — 6 Yemenis to Oman; September 2015 — 1 Moroccan and 1 Saudi; October 2015 — 1 Mauritanian and 1 British resident (Shaker Aamer); November 2015 — 5 Yemenis to the United Arab Emirates; January 2016 — 2 Yemenis to Ghana; 1 Kuwaiti (Fayiz al-Kandari) and 1 Saudi; 10 Yemenis to Oman; 1 Egyptian to Bosnia and 1 Yemeni to Montenegro.

20th Guantánamo Prisoner – Part of the Non-Existent “Karachi Six” – Approved for Release by Review Board; 5th Man’s Detention Upheld

Last week, the Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo made two decisions — to recommend one prisoner for release, and to recommend another for ongoing imprisonment. The decisions mean that, since the PRBs began in November 2013, 20 prisoners have now been approved for release, while five have had their ongoing imprisonment recommended, a success rate, for the prisoners, of 80%.

This is all the more remarkable — and all the more damaging for the government’s credibility — because the PRBs were established to review the cases of all the men not recommended for trials, and not already approved for release (by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established when he took office in 2009) — men who were described as “too dangerous to release”; a description that, it now transpires, was patently untrue, as myself and other commentators remarked at the time.

The task force itself acknowledged that it had insufficient evidence to put these men on trial, which alarmed those of us paying close attention, as it obviously meant that what purported to be evidence was not evidence at all, but a collection of dubious statements made by the prisoners themselves, or by their fellow prisoners, possibly involving the use of torture or other forms of abuse, or assessments that, because of their behavior, and threats they may have made while at Guantánamo, it was unsafe to release them. It should be noted that these assessments of the threat level may or may not have been true, because, of course, men treated as appallingly as the Guantánamo prisoners have been might not have posed a threat, but might only have been extremely indignant about the circumstances of their imprisonment.

When the PRBs began, 46 men were initially in the “too dangerous to release” category, and all but one of the men about whom decisions have been taken were in this category. 18 others had initially been recommended for prosecution, but had been made eligible for PRBs when a number of critical appeals court decisions largely discredited the military commission trial system used for the Guantánamo prisoners. The one man in this category approved for release, an Egyptian, was freed in January, but reviews have recently begun for others, and others are scheduled for the coming months.

The man approved for release on March 23 was Ayub Murshid Ali Salih (ISN 836, Yemen), also identified as Ayoub Saleh or Ayyub Salih, whose review took place in February, as I wrote about here. He was seized in Karachi, Pakistan in September 2002, on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and on the same day as Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the men allegedly responsible for the attacks, but while he and five others were initially described as “the Karachi Six” and sent for to CIA “black sites” for torture, “based on concerns that they were part of an al Qa’ida operational cell intended to support a future attack,” as the military described it, by the time of his PRB it was acknowledged that “this label more accurately reflects the common circumstances of their arrest and … it is more likely the six Yemenis were elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qa’ida planners considered potentially available to support future operations.”

In its final determination, the board, after specifically noting that its members had, “by consensus, determined that continued law of war detention of the detainee is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” stated:

In making this determination, the Board noted that the detainee’s degree of involvement and significance in extremist activities has been reassessed to be that of a low-level fighter, and the detainee’s relative candor in discussing his time in Afghanistan. Further, the Board considered the detainee’s acceptance of the mistakes he has made and credible desire not to repeat those mistakes, his acknowledgement that he has benefitted from his time in detention and has taken advantage of educational opportunities while at Guantánamo, and his lack of ongoing extremist ties.

The decision is not only good news for Ayyub Salih, but also suggests that the other five men captured at the same time as him might also secure their release. Two of these men currently have PRBs scheduled — Said Salih Said Nashir (ISN 841), whose PRB is on April 21, 2016, and Shawqi Awad Balzuhair (ISN 838), whose PRB is on May 19, 2016 — while the other three — Bashir Nasir Ali al-Marwalah (ISN 837), Musab Omar Ali al-Mudwani aka Musa’ab al-Madhwani (ISN 839) and Hail Aziz Ahmed al-Maythali (ISN 840) — await dates for theirs. Of the five, only al-Madhwani has had his case previously examined publicly, when, in 2010, a judge ruling on his habeas corpus petition reluctantly turned it down, noting, however, that he did not think Madhwani was dangerous, and adding, “There is nothing in the record now that he poses any greater threat than those detainees who have already been released.”

On the same day that Ayyub Salih was recommended for release, Mohammed al-Ansi (ISN 29, Yemen), also identified as Muhammad al-Ansi, was recommended for ongoing imprisonment, even though, as I noted at the time of his PRB in February, his lawyer, Lisa Strauss, had made a convincing case for his release, when, as I put it, “she explained how he has become a prolific artist, how he is ‘at peace with his fellow detainees and the guards as reflected in the minimal disciplinary infractions,’ and how he loves American culture.”

Nevertheless, the board members obviously had doubts based on al-Ansi’s own contributions, which were not made public at the time of his PRB. In its final determination, after stating that its members had, “by consensus, determined that continued law of war detention of the detainee remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” the board explained that they had “considered the significant derogatory information regarding the detainee’s past activities in Afghanistan,” and had, in particular, “noted [his] lack of candor resulting in an inability to assess [his] credibility and therefore his future intentions.”

Bearing in mind that al-Ansi will have a further administrative review in six month’s time, the board then encouraged him “to continue to be compliant, continue taking advantage of educational opportunities and continue working with the doctors to maintain his health,” as well as also encouraging him “to be increasingly forthcoming in communications with the Board.”

Note: The next PRB, for Obaidullah (ISN 762, Afghanistan), whose innocence, I think, was convincingly demonstrated by his legal team many years ago, is on April 19. As noted above, Said Salih Said Nashir’s PRB is two days after, and the PRB for Uthman Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman (ISN 027, Yemen), whose habeas corpus petition was granted in 2010, in a decision that was then reversed by the Washington, D.C. appeals court in 2011, is on April 26.

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.

Breach Theatre On Tour With Acclaimed Theatre/Video Dramatization of the Battle of the Beanfield

It’s over 30 years since the Battle of the Beanfield, a notoriously dark day in modern British history, when, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, 1,400 police from six counties and the Ministry of Defence “decommissioned” a convoy of around 500 new age travellers, free festival goers and environmental activists who were attempting to travel to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th annual free festival in the fields opposite the stones.

The Stonehenge Free Festival was a wild anarchic jamboree, which lasted for the whole of the month of June, and, in its last few years, attracted many tens of thousands of people, myself included — and the effect on me was so profound that I ended up writing about the festival and the Beanfield (and much more besides) in my 2004 counter-cultural history, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and then focused exclusively on the Beanfield in my 2005 book, The Battle of the Beanfield.

The festival’s violent suppression, in a one-sided rout of heartbreaking brutality, was one of the grimmer episodes in Thatcher’s bleak, eleven-year reign, dealing a crippling blow to Britain’s traveller movement, even though dissent refused to go away, as an ecstasy-fuelled rave scene, the road protest movement and the anti-globalization movement emerged to challenge the status quo in the late 80s and the 90s.

Arguably, the rise of money-obsessed New Labour, the depoliticization that has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of an almost entirely all-encompassing materialism and the commodification of almost everything, and the endless climate of fear cynically introduced after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have dealt a hammer blow to the intense adversarial nature of the counter-culture from the 60s onwards, but I’m glad to report that Breach Theatre, a pioneering theatre and performance company of young people, emerging from Warwick University, have created ‘Beanfield’, which won the 2015 Total Theatre Award for an Emerging Artist or Company for a tour last year that began at the University of Warwick in June, followed by some London dates in July, Edinburgh Fringe in August, and London again in October.

This year, ‘Beanfield’ is on tour again. Having started in Salisbury on March 24, and Corsham on March 26, the following itinerary runs through to May, and I hope you can make it along to one of the performances. I’ll be seeing it next week at Battersea Arts Centre, and I’m really looking forward to it.

These are the forthcoming dates with links to the theatres:

Home, Manchester: 31st March-2nd April 2016

Battersea Arts Centre, London: 5th-21st April 2016

Birmingham Repertory Theatre: 26th-27th April 2016

Wardrobe Theatre, Bristol: 28th-30th April 2016

The Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter: 3rd-7th May 2016

A “multi-media show about national heritage, state violence and civic freedom,” ‘Beanfield’ involves both performance and film, the former directed by Billy Barrett, winner of the Sunday Times Harold Hobson Drama Critic Award 2014, and the latter by Guardian award-winning filmmaker Dorothy Allen-Pickard. It includes film of a visit to the Beanfield last spring where some events of the day were re-created (and where I was asked along as a consultant), and live performance based on a visit to Stonehenge for the summer solstice last June.

As I explained in an article last June, It’s 30 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Trashed the Travellers’ Movement at the Battle of the Beanfield:

Dorothy and Billy invited me to Wiltshire on a memorable day back in March, to be a consultant as they filmed recreations of the events of June 1, 1985 for the show. The political engagement of everyone involved — mostly students at Warwick University — was refreshing, and it was great to discover that they had all been studying my book in preparation for the filming, which took place at the Beanfield itself.

It was my first visit to this iconic site, although I had passed it many times on the A303, and as we arrived at what we knew to be the approximate location, it became apparent that the change in the road layout since 1985 — with the replacement of a section of the A303 with a dual carriageway — made it difficult to work out exactly where the Beanfield — and the pasture field — were. After driving into the car park of the hotel by the Parkhouse roundabout, we were accosted by an angry local who wanted us to know that, although 30 years had passed, people were still very sensitive about the events of the day.

However, after he was talked down, he pointed us in the right direction, and, while police sirens passed us by, we spent a few hours filming, and reflecting on the events of the day, with — ironically, given the convoy’s environmental leanings — a small solar farm in the background, where, 30 years ago, there would only have been broken and burning vehicles, and bleeding travellers.

‘Beanfield’ is also available as a book, published by Oberon Books, and I’m pleased to have written the foreword to it.

And finally, posted below is a short video promoting the tour:

The Beanfield Tour Trailer from Dorothy Allen-Pickard on Vimeo.

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.