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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington12232009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington12232009.html<br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">December 23,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Guantánamo's
"Mickey Mouse" Prisoners <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">The
Afghan Four </b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By
ANDY WORTHINGTON <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">O</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>ver the weekend, 12 prisoners were released
from Guantánamo, as the Justice Department announced in
<a href="http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/December/09-ag-1369.html">a
press release</a> on December 20. I have previously reported the stories
of
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/12/21/the-stories-of-the-two-somalis-freed-from-guantanamo/">
the two Somalis</a> who were released -- emphasizing how nothing about
their cases demonstrated that they were “the worst of the worst” -- and
will soon be reporting the stories of the six Yemenis transferred to the
custody of the Yemeni government. <br><br>
For now, however, I’d like to turn to the four Afghans transferred to the
custody of the Afghan government, because, in contrast to the
fearmongering of opportunistic Republicans, who continue to claim that
Guantánamo is full of terrorists, the stories of these four men
demonstrate instead the incompetence of senior officials in the Bush
administration, revealing how, instead of detaining men who had any
connection to al-Qaeda, or those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, they
filled Guantánamo with what Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of
Guantánamo in 2002,
<a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-gitmo22dec22,0,5995685.story">
described as “Mickey Mouse” prisoners</a>.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Sharifullah, the US
ally who had guarded Hamid Karzai<br><br>
</b></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>The first of the four Afghans,
Sharifullah, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, was seized
by U.S. forces from an Afghan military compound with another man, Amir
Jan Ghorzang (identified by the Pentagon as Said Amir Jan), who was
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/the-guantanamo-files-website-extras-12-the-last-of-the-afghans-part-two/">
released from Guantánamo in September 2007</a>. Both men were accused of
hoarding explosives for the Taliban and being involved in various plots,
but insisted that they were loyal government soldiers. In Guantánamo,
Sharifullah explained that he was one of the first recruits in the new
Afghan army, trained by British officers, and added that he had then
spent seven months as part of a group that was responsible for guarding
President Karzai. When he was unable to get a promotion, however, he
returned to Jalalabad, where he had just taken up a new position as an
officer when he was seized.<br><br>
Amir Jan Ghorzang was the more vociferous of the two in Guantánamo,
lamenting the fact that the U.S. soldiers who had seized them had been
duped by traitors who were taking money from both the U.S. military and
al-Qaeda, and were passing off innocent men as members of al-Qaeda and
the Taliban. “I’m here because somebody got paid some dollars,” he
explained, adding that he had been imprisoned by the Taliban for five
years, because of his opposition to them, and had also worked for Haji
Qadir, a commander who fought with the Americans during the battle of
Tora Bora, a showdown between al-Qaeda and U.S.-backed Afghan forces in
December 2001. <br><br>
The cases of both men -- as with many other men who had been working for
the Karzai government, but had been betrayed by rivals -- revealed how
little the U.S. authorities were concerned with establishing the truth
about their allegations, as it would have been easy to track down
witnesses in Afghanistan who could have verified their stories (as
reporters for McClatchy Newspapers did in 2008, when
<a href="http://services.mcclatchyinteractive.com/detainees/70">they
interviewed Ghorzang</a>). Nevertheless, he was, in the end, more
fortunate than Sharifullah, whose continued presence in Guantánamo for
two years and three months after his release was, frankly, inexplicable.
As Ghorzang explained in the following exchange in Sharifullah’s
tribunal, when he was called as a witness:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>Sharifullah</b>: Do you know that I was involved to work in the new
government? Was I honestly working and working for the new
government?<br><br>
<dd>Ghorzang</b>: You were working with the new government and he was
involved with the Karzai government, in support of the Karzai
government.<br><br>
</dl><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">Mohammed Hashim: the
fantasist put forward for a trial by Military Commission<br><br>
</b></font>The story of the second man, Mohammed Hashim, remains as
bewildering now as it was when he was put forward for a trial by Military
Commission at Guantánamo in May 2008, and I wrote an article entitled,
“<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/06/04/afghan-fantasist-to-face-trial-at-guantanamo/">
Afghan fantasist to face trial at Guantánamo</a>,” in which I stated that
it “appear[ed] to plumb new depths of misapplied zeal.” Hashim, who was
about 26 years old at the time of his capture, was first seized by Afghan
forces after he was found taking measurements near the home of Mullah
Omar, the Taliban’s reclusive leader, and asking locals about security
arrangements. Subsequently released, he was then seized again and handed
over (or sold) to U.S. forces. <br><br>
If there was something about the circumstances of his initial capture
that should have set alarm bells ringing, regarding his mental health,
these were ignored when the U.S. authorities decided to charge him with
“conducting reconnaissance missions against U.S. and coalition forces,”
and “participating in a rocket attack venture on at least one occasion
against U.S. forces for al-Qaeda,” and ignored the fact that, at his
tribunal, his testimony revealed that he was (as I described it) “either
one of the most fantastically well-connected terrorists in the very small
pool of well-connected terrorists at Guantánamo, or, conversely, that he
[was] a deranged fantasist. From the resounding silence that greeted his
comments at his tribunal, I can only conclude that the tribunal members,
like me, concluded that the latter interpretation was the more
probable.”<br><br>
After explaining that he had spent five years with the Taliban, because
he needed the money, Hashim proceeded to claim that:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>he knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance, because a man that he
knew, Mohammad Khan, “used to tell me all these stories and all the
details about how they were going to fly airplanes into buildings. He
didn’t tell me the details, that it was New York, but he said they had 20
pilots and they were going to orchestrate the act.” What rather detracted
from the shock value of this comment was Hashim’s absolutely inexplicable
claim that his friend Khan, who had told him about the 9/11 plan, was
with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s opponents, who were also
implacably opposed to al-Qaeda.<br><br>
</dl>Hashim also claimed that he and another man had been responsible for
facilitating Osama bin Laden’s escape from Afghanistan, and that,
afterwards, he had worked as a spy, and had heard about how the Syrian
government had been sending weapons to Saddam Hussein, which had then
been sent to Afghanistan via Iran. As I explained at the time, the
cumulative effect of Hashim’s statements was that it was “impossible not
to conclude that [his] story was, if not the testimony of a fantasist,
then a shrewd attempt to avoid brutal interrogations by providing his
interrogators with whatever he thought they wanted to hear.” <br><br>
A darker truth, of course, may be that his rambling statement actually
revealed the themes pursued relentlessly by the interrogators at
Guantánamo: not only “what do you know about the 9/11 attacks?” and “when
did you last see bin Laden?” but also, at
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington04292009.html">the
insistence of Vice President Dick Cheney</a>, “what was the connection
between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?” As we know from the interrogations
of the CIA’s most famous “ghost prisoner”
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/06/18/world-exclusive-new-revelations-about-the-torture-of-ibn-al-shaykh-al-libi/">
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi</a>, who
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/05/10/ibn-al-shaykh-al-libi-has-died-in-a-libyan-prison/">
confessed under torture in Egypt</a> that there were connections between
al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which was later used as part of the
justification for the invasion of Iraq, securing this sort of information
was regarded as critical in the run-up to the invasion, even though the
administration claimed that its embrace of torture (or, rather, the
euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation techniques”) was designed
to prevent further terrorist attacks.<br><br>
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">Abdul Hafiz: the wrong man
with a satellite phone<br><br>
</b></font>The third man, Abdul Hafiz, who was 42 years old when he was
seized in 2003 from his village near Kandahar, was accused in his
tribunal of working for a Taliban militia group and of being involved in
two killings in Kabul. It was also alleged that he was captured with a
satellite phone linked to one of the killings, and that he “attempted to
call an al-Qaeda member who is linked to the murder of an ICRC
[International Committee of the Red Cross] worker.”<br><br>
In response, Hafiz, who described himself as “handicapped” and who
repeatedly stated that he has problems with his memory, claimed that his
name was Abdul Qawi, and that he had been confused with Abdul Hafiz,
because Hafiz, for whom he had been working, had given him the phone at a
checkpoint. As he stated, “He told me that he did not have any documents
to have the phone with him. So he said, ‘You can have my phone because
you are handicapped and I don’t think they will search you.’” He added
that he did not even know how to use the phone. <br><br>
Describing Hafiz as someone who supported the new government of Hamid
Karzai and was “preaching in the village to bring the peace,” he said, “I
was working for him to bring peace … He gave me the telephone in the
morning and told me to keep it in my pocket. He told me to work and
preach to the people not to fight. That war is not good. This is the
reason that I lost my leg. Fighting is not good. War does not have good
consequences.”<br><br>
He also explained, “I was just in my home when they captured me and
brought me here. I didn’t do anything,” and expressed frustration at not
being able to see classified documents containing evidence against him,
saying, “In our culture, if someone is accused of something, they are
shown the evidence.” At his review in 2005, he presented the board with
letters from his family -- all addressed to Abdul Qari, not Abdul Hafiz
-- including one from his brother, which read, “My respectful brother,
you didn’t have any relationship with any political people. We were
hoping that you would get released very, very soon. We do not understand
why you’re still detained there without a crime.” He was clearly so
desperate to be freed from Guantánamo and not to be “amongst these beasts
and these people” (as he described his fellow prisoners at one point),
that he even offered to present the board with a letter from his wife,
even though “It is a big shame in our culture to read my wife’s letter to
you, but now I am in a very tough situation.”<br><br>
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">Mohamed Rahim: a spectacular
case of mistaken identity<br><br>
</b></font>If Abdul Qari’s continued imprisonment appeared to be
inexplicable, there was, on the surface at least, more of a case against
Mohamed Rahim, the fourth prisoner released at the weekend, but this too
collapses spectacularly under scrutiny. A resident of a village near
Ghazni, Rahim was accused, in his tribunal, of being the chief of
logistics for a company providing support directly to the Taliban
government, of working for the Taliban Intelligence Office, and of
controlling a large weapons cache for the Taliban. In response, he
explained that he had been forced to work for the Taliban, and that,
because he “was sick” and unable to fight, he was made to work in an
administrative post. He denied the allegation that he worked for the
Taliban Intelligence Office, calling it an “outrageous” accusation, and
also denied controlling a weapons cache. “This doesn’t make sense,” he
said. “I was captured in my house. I have no information on these
weapons.”<br><br>
By the time of his next review, in 2005, numerous other allegations had
been added, including a claim that he was “identifiable as a former
companion of bin Laden during the jihad against the Russians,” and
another that he “was among a group protecting bin Laden at his last
meeting at Tora Bora.” It was also suggested that he “was entrusted by
bin Laden to exfiltrate his guard forces from Afghanistan back to their
countries of origin,” and that “bin Laden and his companions spent the
night in a house belonging to an Afghan acquaintance of the
Detainee.”<br><br>
There was more in this vein, including a claim that he “attempted to
export gems from Afghanistan to Germany in order to raise revenue to
finance al-Qaeda,” but what was completely overlooked by his review board
-- and presumably, by those who were supposed to be capable of analyzing
the intelligence relating to the Guantánamo prisoners -- is that when he
stated, “I am a sick poor farmer with enemies,” he was telling the truth
for one particularly glaring reason, which only emerged in passing in his
review, when his Designated Military Officer (a soldier assigned to him
in place of a lawyer) pointed out that he was Hazara.<br><br>
One of four main population groups in Afghanistan -- the others being
Pashtuns, Tajiks and Uzbeks -- the Hazara, Shia Muslims who are at least
partly of Mongol origin, were despised by the Sunni Taliban, who
slaughtered them in their thousands. As a result, it is not only
appropriate to conclude that the allegations against Rahim were invented
by his enemies, but also to conclude that his enemies in Guantánamo came
up with the outrageous claims that he was intimately associated with
Osama bin Laden.<br><br>
<font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">Release or imprisonment in
Afghanistan?<br><br>
</b></font>With the exception of
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/01/14/former-guantanamo-prosecutor-condemns-chaotic-trials-in-case-of-teenage-torture-victim/">
Mohamed Jawad</a>, who was
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/09/02/reflections-on-mohamed-jawads-release-from-guantanamo/">
released in August</a> after he
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington07312009.html">won his
habeas corpus petition</a>, these men are the first Afghans released
since January 2009, when
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/01/26/refuting-cheneys-lies-the-stories-of-six-prisoners-released-from-guantanamo/">
Haji Bismullah</a>, who worked for the government of Hamid Karzai as the
chief of transportation in a region of Helmand province, was released. Of
the 219 Afghans once held at Guantánamo, there are now just 21 remaining
in the prison, but it is uncertain whether the four men just released
will regain their freedom, or whether, in common with all the Afghan
releases since August 2007 (except Jawad, whose case attracted
international scrutiny), they will be
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington05092008.html">imprisoned
on arrival in Kabul</a>, in a wing of the main prison, Pol-i-Charki,
which was refurbished by the U.S. military, and which, although nominally
under Afghan control, is reportedly overseen by Americans. <br><br>
After all this time, and with such scandalous stories of ineptitude on
the part of the United States, I would say that the least these men
deserve is to be freed outright, and allowed to be reunited with their
families. <br><br>
Andy Worthington</b> is a British journalist and historian, and the
author of
'<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga">
The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's
Illegal Prison'</a> (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at:
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/">www.andyworthington.co.uk</a>
He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:andy@andyworthington.co.uk">andy@andyworthington.co.uk</a>
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