[Ppnews] “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington09132007.html

September 13, 2007


The Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners 
Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 
hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

In another resounding demonstration of the 
importance of legally constituted checks and 
balances on executive power in the United States, 
the Associated Press, after filing a request to 
the Pentagon under the Freedom of Information 
Act, has secured 58 transcripts from the latest 
round of annual Administrative Review Boards at 
Guantánamo, convened to assess whether the 
detainees still pose a threat to the US, or if 
they are still presumed to have ongoing “intelligence value.”

This is just the latest in a series of important 
actions undertaken by the AP with regard to 
Guantánamo. Previously, the agency secured the 
right to reproduce 60 habeas petitions, and 
obtained the 517 Summaries of Evidence for the 
Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) held at 
Guantánamo. Used to assess whether the detainees 
had been correctly designated as “enemy 
combatants,” these documents were analyzed by 
Mark and Joshua Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School 
to produce a ground-breaking report in February 
2006, which demonstrated that, according to the 
government’s own allegations, only 8 percent of 
the detainees were accused of having any kind of 
affiliation with al-Qaeda, 55 percent were not 
determined to have committed any hostile acts 
against the US or its allies, and 86 percent were 
not captured by US forces, but by their Pakistan 
and Afghan allies, at a time when the Americans 
were making bounty payments, equivalent to an 
average worker’s lifetime salary, for the 
delivery of al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.

Subsequent revelations have done little to 
suggest that even these lowly figures are 
reliable, and the recent testimony of Lt. Col. 
Stephen Abraham, who was involved in compiling 
the “evidence” for the Tribunals, has been 
particularly damaging to the government’s case. 
Abraham declared that the gathering of materials 
for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, and 
frequently consisted of intelligence “of a 
generalized nature – often outdated, often 
‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the 
individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the 
circumstances related to those individuals’ 
status,” and concluded that the whole system was 
geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ 
prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

In spring 2006, the AP secured its greatest 
victory, after taking the government to court 
over its refusal to reveal the names and 
nationalities of the Guantánamo detainees, as 
well as 8,000 pages of transcripts from their 
CSRTs and the first round of ARBs. A treasure 
trove of information (though not necessarily in 
the way that Donald Rumsfeld had in mind when he 
declared, in December 2001, that the first 
prisoners captured crossing from Afghanistan to 
Pakistan “should be a treasure trove” of 
intelligence leads), these documents not only 
revealed – for the first time in four years, 
scandalously – who was actually held in 
Guantánamo, but also provided, through the 
transcripts, the first opportunity for the 
detainees to tell their stories to the world.

Although the tribunals and review boards were – 
and are – as monstrously illegal as the rest of 
the Guantánamo regime, with lawyers excluded from 
the hearings and decisions based largely on 
secret evidence obtained through torture, 
coercion and bribery, the information contained 
in the transcripts was so compelling that, when 
cross-referenced with the detainees’ names and 
arranged chronologically, it provided the basis 
for my forthcoming book The Guantánamo Files, 
which unveils the story of Guantánamo and the 
majority of its detainees for the first time.

The latest documents secured by the AP have just 
been released to the public by the Department of 
Defense, and it would, I think, be fair to say 
that they are the second most important set of 
documents relating to Guantánamo that have been 
released by the Pentagon (following the spring 
2006 documents described above). As well as 
containing the 58 transcripts from the Second 
Round of the ARBs, the documents also include, 
for the first time, the ”evidence” – in the form 
of the Unclassified Summaries of Evidence so 
heavily criticized by Stephen Abraham – for all 
the Tribunals with the names of the detainees 
included (they were previously redacted), as well 
as all the Unclassified Summaries for both rounds 
of the ARBs. Also included are transcripts of the 
habeas corpus petitions of 179 detainees, and the 
whole set of documents is indexed so thoroughly 
that it appears, implausibly, to have been 
compiled as a testament to the importance of 
Freedom of Information legislation, with the aim 
of facilitating a greater understanding of 
Guantánamo and its detainees than has previously been possible.

These documents will provide lawyers, human 
rights activists and researchers with an 
invaluable base from which to gain at least a 
glimpse into the lives of the many dozens of 
detainees without legal representation, who have 
never taken part in any tribunals or review 
boards and whose stories were hitherto completely 
unknown. More crucially, perhaps, they will also 
enable critics of the regime to follow the ways 
in which additional allegations – produced under 
dubious circumstances in countless interrogations 
both at Guantánamo and in secret prisons – have 
mounted up against the detainees during the long 
years of their illegal imprisonment.

The only disappointment is that the documents 
relating to the decisions made by the review 
boards about whether to release detainees, or to 
continue to hold them, are so heavily redacted as 
to be all but useless, but even on this point 
other documents – the “Indexes to Transfer and 
Release Decisions” – provide invaluable, and 
previously concealed information about who has 
been released, and, more crucially, about the 
many dozens of detainees – at least 70, according 
to my first analysis – who have been cleared for 
release through the ARBs but are still held at 
Guantánamo because the US government cannot reach 
a satisfactory agreement with their home 
governments (as in the cases of the Yemenis), or 
is unwilling to return them to regimes where, 
ironically, after years of lawless and brutal 
detention in US custody, they face the prospect 
of torture or other ill-treatment. While 
information about who has been cleared is made 
available to individual detainees’ lawyers, the 
value of these documents is that they enable this 
information to be extended to those particularly 
vulnerable individuals without legal representation.

Of particular interest, for now, are the 
transcripts of the ARBs, especially as the AP 
trailed the release of the documents with a 
series of press releases over the weekend, 
picking out a few stories that contain important 
information. Chief amongst these is the 
transcript of the review board hearing of 
Mohammed al-Qahtani, one of several men presumed 
to be the intended “20th hijacker” on 9/11. 
Al-Qahtani’s story has been widely reported, 
particularly in 2005 when Time obtained a 
day-to-day transcript of the “enhanced 
interrogation techniques” to which he was 
subjected over a 50-day period from November 2002 
to January 2003, when he was, amongst other 
things, interrogated and kept awake for 20 hours 
a day on most days, stripped naked, sexually 
humiliated, and forced to bark like a dog.

Although al-Qahtani’s lawyer reported in March 
2006 that he had recanted his confession, the 
transcript of his ARB hearing is the first time 
that he has denied the 9/11 allegations in 
person, telling his review board, “this is the 
first statement I am making of my own free will 
and without coercion or under the threat of 
torture,” and stating, “I am a businessman, a 
peaceful man. I have no connection to terrorism, 
violence or fighters.” Refuting allegations that 
he admitted traveling to Afghanistan in 2001, 
that he attended a training camp, and that met 
Osama bin Laden and agreed to participate in a 
“martyr mission” for al-Qaeda, al-Qahtani said 
that the statements were not true and that he had 
only admitted to them while he was being 
“tortured” at Guantánamo, and included his 
allegations of torture in a statement that was read out to the board.

In other press releases over the weekend, Andrew 
O. Selsky and Ben Fox of the AP focused on the 
story of Ayman Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor caught up 
in the failed Tora Bora campaign, in November and 
December 2001, when the US military allowed Osama 
bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and numerous other 
senior figures in al-Qaeda and the Taliban to 
escape across the unguarded Pakistani border. 
Explaining that he was not a terrorist but had 
been caught up with al-Qaeda in the Tora Bora 
mountains, Batarfi said that he met Osama bin 
Laden in the mountains, to explain to him that 
the defense of Tora Bora was a lost cause, 
because “Most of all the total guns in the Tora 
Bora area was 16 Kalashnikovs and there are 200 
people.” He noted, however, that bin Laden “did 
not prepare himself for Tora Bora and to be frank 
he didn't care about anyone but himself. He came 
for a day to visit the area and we talked to him 
and we wanted to leave this area. He said he 
didn't know where to go himself and the second 
day he escaped and was gone.” Abandoned in the 
mountains, Batarfi said that he struggled to tend 
to the wounded and dying, who were overwhelmed by 
American air power. “I was out of medicine and I 
had a lot of casualties,” he explained. “I did a 
hand amputation by a knife and I did a finger 
amputation with scissors, and if someone was 
injured badly I was just operating on the table.”

Batarfi’s story is not widely known, although I 
was able to cover it in depth in my book because 
he has taken part in previous tribunals and 
review boards. As a result, I was more interested 
in uncovering the stories of other detainees 
whose voices had, until these documents were 
released, not been heard at all despite having 
spent over five and half years in US custody. 
Although these men are not strictly “ghost” 
prisoners – because their names and nationalities 
were released under duress last year, as opposed 
to the thousands of unknown, unrepresented and 
unreported prisoners held in Afghanistan, Iraq 
and other undisclosed locations – there is still 
something deeply disturbing about the fact that, 
after all this time, in which they have been held 
without charge or trial, in conditions of almost 
total isolation that would be difficult for even 
the most hardened of convicted criminals on the 
US mainland to endure, the voices of these men 
are being heard for the first time.

They include Hani al-Khalif, a former Saudi 
soldier, who served with US soldiers during the 
first Gulf War, who maintained that he had 
traveled to Afghanistan in the winter of 2000 to 
fight with the Taliban against the Northern 
Alliance, and explained, “The Taliban government 
is the right side to belong to because the other 
side has come out of the Taliban which is wrong,” 
and another Saudi – who didn’t wish to be 
identified – who said that he “wanted to 
participate in jihad for religious purposes to 
help people in need of food distribution,” 
because this would “strengthen his relationship 
with God,” and described how he had made the 
decision “because of emotion, because I saw a 
picture of a little baby that had dirty clothes 
and her hair was not combed or cut.” He insisted 
that “his goal was to help for two months and 
then return home,” but said that on arrival in 
Afghanistan he was tricked into attending the 
al-Farouq camp (a camp for Arab recruits that was 
affiliated with al-Qaeda), where he was dismayed 
to discover that it was “a terrorist training 
camp with political motivations, not religious goals.”

Also included is the testimony of Hisham Sliti, a 
Tunisian client of the London-based legal charity 
Reprieve, which represents dozens of Guantánamo 
detainees. Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal 
director, reported Sliti’s story in his book Bad 
Men: Guantánamo and the Secret Prisons, in which 
he portrayed an affable former drug addict, 
imprisoned for many years in prisons in Italy and 
Belgium, who reminisced at length about the 
quality of the European prisons compared to 
Guantánamo. “In Italy the prison was wide open 
for six hours a day,” he explained. “You could 
have anything in your room – I had a little 
fornello, a gas cooker. Can you imagine the 
Americans allowing that? Here, we call a plastic 
spoon a ‘Camp Delta Kalashnikov,’ as the soldiers 
think we’re going to attack them with it.” In the 
first hearing that Sliti deigned to attend, he 
lived up to Stafford Smith’s character sketch, 
explaining at length his various exploits in 
Europe, and telling the board that he only ended 
up in Afghanistan because he had begun attending 
mosques in Belgium, where the country had been 
portrayed as “a clean, uncorrupted country where 
he could study Sharia and further his religious 
education,” but that what he found instead was 
that “I didn’t care for the country. It was very 
hot, dusty and [the] women were ugly. The 
atmosphere and environment didn’t agree with me.”

Another first-time testimony is that of Ravil 
Mingazov, the last of eight Russians in 
Guantánamo, who, it turns out, was actually born 
in Tajikistan. A former soldier in the Russian 
army, Mingazov explained that, although he had 
been honored for excellent service early in his 
career, he subsequently converted to Islam and 
fell out of favor with the KGB to such an extent 
that he deserted the army, left his wife and 
family, and fled to Afghanistan with the help of 
members of the Taliban-affiliated Islamic 
Movement of Uzbekistan. Refuting allegations that 
he trained at al-Farouq, he said that he had made 
up these stories while imprisoned at the US 
airbase in Bagram, and added that he had in fact 
fled from the IMU, traveling to Pakistan, where 
he stayed at a center run by the missionary 
organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi in Lahore. He 
explained that he was captured, with 16 other 
Guantánamo detainees, after moving to a guest 
house used by university students in Faisalabad, 
which was, unfortunately, owned – or otherwise 
connected to – the “high-value” al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah.

Sadly – given its undiluted focus on 
anti-American militancy – the only other 
first-time story, that of the Saudi Abdul Rahman 
al-Zahri, was the only one of the previously 
unheard voices picked up by the AP, which 
reported that he “proudly proclaimed himself a 
holy warrior and ‘an enemy of the United 
States.’” As the AP described it, al-Zahri 
“praised the Sept. 11 attacks and other terrorist 
strikes and said they were retaliation “for your 
criminal acts and your military invasion [of] the 
Islamic countries.” While this was a fair précis 
of his story – although it did not mention that 
he was not a member of al-Qaeda, stating instead 
that he would have been “honored” to have been 
chosen as a member – it was, as I have indicated 
above, unrepresentative of the majority of the 
stories reported in the transcripts.

On the sixth anniversary of 9/11, al-Zahri’s 
“confession” will no doubt assure some Americans 
that the Bush administration’s unprecedentedly 
lawless and brutal conduct over the last six 
years is justified, but I believe that what the 
majority of the documents reveal – both through 
some of the examples cited above, and through the 
many stories of wronged men betrayed by rivals or 
through false intelligence that are scattered 
throughout the transcripts – is exactly the 
opposite. From my particular perspective, as 
someone who has studied the stories of the 
detainees in depth for the last 18 months, the 
most heart-rending aspect of the transcripts is 
the confusion and despair shown by detainees who, 
year after year in their review boards, and often 
more frequently in their interrogations, have 
painstakingly repeated their stories ad nauseam, 
refuting wild and unsubstantiated allegations, 
and at a loss to understand why they, in 
particular, have been singled out for inclusion 
in a never-ending cycle of total isolation and 
evidence-free crimes. To give just one example, 
the Afghan Mohammed Zahir, a 54-year old teacher 
who had fled to Iran during the time of the 
Taliban, has been telling his captors, since he 
was seized in 2003, that he had returned to 
Afghanistan to serve the new government of Hamid 
Karzai by teaching in a secular school, but 
received threatening night letters from the 
Taliban, who betrayed him to the Americans. “You 
captured me because I am an Afghan or a Muslim,” 
he told his review board, “but I haven’t done 
anything. I was teaching the children under the tree.”

In conclusion, then, the release of these 
documents – which was perhaps contrived by the 
Pentagon to coincide with 9/11, in the hope that 
they would be conveniently brushed under the 
carpet – does not vindicate the government’s 
post-9/11 policy, when, as CIA director Cofer 
Black so memorably described it, “the gloves came 
off,” but hints rather at the true legacy of 
9/11: torture, “disappearances” and a regime of 
secret prisons that should be anathema to those 
living in a country – the United States – that 
was founded on the rule of law, and that should 
only be able to regard itself unflinchingly as a 
beacon of civilized values if it returns to these 
foundations, insisting that those in charge of 
the country return to the rule of law that they 
have flouted so outrageously, with such damaging 
consequences for America’s reputation abroad, and 
a concomitant disregard for the rights of 
Americans themselves (as the hidden history of 
torture in the case of Jose Padilla recently showed).

In the reflected world in which America admires 
itself, the prisoners revealed in these 
transcripts should be charged with crimes and 
prosecuted in a recognized court of law, rather 
than being consigned to an extra-legal black 
hole, where men’s futures are dealt with in a 
paranoid and gullible atmosphere in which 
allegations obtained through torture, coercion or 
bribery are regarded as the truth, abuse is rife, 
and the presumption of innocence has been done 
away with completely. 9/11 was a crime – a 
monstrous crime – but it should not have provided 
an opportunity for the nation’s supposed 
defenders to embark on a counter-campaign that 
has ended up mocking the very values that it purported to defend.

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the 
author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>‘The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (to be 
published by Pluto Press in October 2007).His 
website is: www.andyworthington.co.uk He can be 
reached at: <mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk




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