WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Files on All Guantanamo Prisoners
In its latest release of classified US documents, WikiLeaks is shining the light of truth on a notorious icon of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” — the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which opened on January 11, 2002, and remains open under President Obama, despite his promise to close the much-criticized facility within a year of taking office.
In thousands of pages of documents dating from 2002 to 2008 and never seen before by members of the public or the media, the cases of the majority of the prisoners held at Guantánamo — 758 out of 779 in total — are described in detail in memoranda from JTF-GTMO, the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Bay, to US Southern Command in Miami, Florida.
These memoranda, which contain JTF-GTMO’s recommendations about whether the prisoners in question should continue to be held, or should be released (transferred to their home governments, or to other governments) contain a wealth of important and previously undisclosed information, including health assessments, for example, and, in the cases of the majority of the 171 prisoners who are still held, photos (mostly for the first time ever).
They also include information on the first 201 prisoners released from the prison, between 2002 and 2004, which, unlike information on the rest of the prisoners (summaries of evidence and tribunal transcripts, released as the result of a lawsuit filed by media groups in 2006), has never been made public before. Most of these documents reveal accounts of incompetence familiar to those who have studied Guantánamo closely, with innocent men detained by mistake (or because the US was offering substantial bounties to its allies for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects), and numerous insignificant Taliban conscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Beyond these previously unknown cases, the documents also reveal stories of the 397 other prisoners released from September 2004 to the present day, and of the seven men who have died at the prison.
The memos are signed by the commander of Guantánamo at the time, and describe whether the prisoners in question are regarded as low, medium or high risk. Although they were obviously not conclusive in and of themselves, as final decisions about the disposition of prisoners were taken at a higher level, they represent not only the opinions of JTF-GTMO, but also the Criminal Investigation Task Force, created by the Department of Defense to conduct interrogations in the “War on Terror,” and the BSCTs, the behavioral science teams consisting of psychologists who had a major say in the “exploitation” of prisoners in interrogation.
Crucially, the files also contain detailed explanations of the supposed intelligence used to justify the prisoners’ detention. For many readers, these will be the most fascinating sections of the documents, as they seem to offer an extraordinary insight into the workings of US intelligence, but although many of the documents appear to promise proof of prisoners’ association with al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations, extreme caution is required.
The documents draw on the testimony of witnesses — in most cases, the prisoners’ fellow prisoners — whose words are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion (sometimes not in Guantánamo, but in secret prisons run by the CIA), or because they provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantánamo.
Regular appearances throughout these documents by witnesses whose words should be regarded as untrustworthy include the following “high-value detainees” or “ghost prisoners”. Please note that “ISN” and the numbers in brackets following the prisoners’ names refer to the short “Internment Serial Numbers” by which the prisoners are or were identified in US custody:
Abu Zubaydah (ISN 10016), the supposed “high-value detainee” seized in Pakistan in March 2002, who spent four and a half years in secret CIA prisons, including facilities in Thailand and Poland. Subjected to waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, on 83 occasions in CIA custody August 2002, Abu Zubaydah was moved to Guantánamo with 13 other “high-value detainees” in September 2006.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (ISN 212), the emir of a military training camp for which Abu Zubaydah was the gatekeeper, who, despite having his camp closed by the Taliban in 2000, because he refused to allow it to be taken over by al-Qaeda, is described in these documents as Osama bin Laden’s military commander in Tora Bora. Soon after his capture in December 2001, al-Libi was rendered by the CIA to Egypt, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that al-Qaeda operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss obtaining chemical and biological weapons. Al-Libi recanted this particular lie, but it was nevertheless used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Al-Libi was never sent to Guantánamo, although at some point, probably in 2006, the CIA sent him back to Libya, where he was imprisoned, and where he died, allegedly by committing suicide, in May 2009.
Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj (ISN 1457), a Yemeni, also known as Riyadh the Facilitator, who was seized in a house raid in Pakistan in February 2002, and is described as “an al-Qaeda facilitator.” After his capture, he was transferred to a torture prison in Jordan run on behalf of the CIA, where he was held for nearly two years, and was then held for six months in US facilities in Afghanistan. He was flown to Guantánamo in September 2004.
Sanad Yislam al-Kazimi (ISN 1453), a Yemeni, who was seized in the UAE in January 2003, and then held in three secret prisons, including the “Dark Prison” near Kabul and a secret facility within the US prison at Bagram airbase. In February 2010, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. granted the habeas corpus petition of a Yemeni prisoner, Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, largely because he refused to accept testimony produced by either Sharqawi al-Hajj or Sanad al-Kazimi. As he stated, “The Court will not rely on the statements of Hajj or Kazimi because there is unrebutted evidence in the record that, at the time of the interrogations at which they made the statements, both men had recently been tortured.”
Others include Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani (ISN 10012) and Walid bin Attash (ISN 10014), two more of the “high-value detainees” transferred into Guantánamo in September 2006, after being held in secret CIA prisons.
(Andy Worthington)
How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files
The nearly 800 documents in WikiLeaks’ latest release of classified US documents are memoranda from Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO), the combined force in charge of the US “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to US Southern Command, in Miami, Florida, regarding the disposition of the prisoners.
Written between 2002 and 2008, the memoranda were all marked as “secret,” and their subject was whether to continue holding a prisoner, or whether to recommend his release (described as his “transfer” — to the custody of his own government, or that of some other government). They were obviously not conclusive in and of themselves, as final decisions about the disposition of prisoners were taken at a higher level, but they are very significant, as they represent not only the opinions of JTF-GTMO, but also the Criminal Investigation Task Force, created by the Department of Defense to conduct interrogations in the “War on Terror,” and the BSCTs, the behavioral science teams consisting of psychologists who had a major say in the “exploitation” of prisoners in interrogation.
Under the heading, “JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment,” the memos generally contain nine sections, describing the prisoners as follows, although the earlier examples, especially those dealing with prisoners released — or recommended for release — between 2002 and 2004, may have less detailed analyses than the following:
1. Personal information
Each prisoner is identified by name, by aliases, which the US claims to have identified, by place and date of birth, by citizenship, and by Internment Serial Number (ISN). These long lists of numbers and letters — e.g. US9YM-000027DP — are used to identify the prisoners in Guantánamo, helping to dehumanize them, as intended, by doing away with their names. The most significant section is the number towards the end, which is generally shortened, so that the example above would be known as ISN 027. In the files, the prisoners are identified by nationality, with 47 countries in total listed alphabetically, from “az” for Afghanistan to “ym” for Yemen.
2. Health
This section describes whether or not the prisoner in question has mental health issues and/or physical health issues. Many are judged to be in good health, but there are some shocking examples of prisoners with severe mental and/or physical problems.
3. JTF-GTMO Assessment
a. Under “Recommendation,” the Task Force explains whether a prisoner should continue to be held, or should be released.
b. Under “Executive Summary,” the Task Force briefly explains its reasoning, and, in more recent cases, also explains whether the prisoner is a low, medium or high risk as a threat to the US and its allies and as a threat in detention (i.e. based on their behavior in Guantánamo), and also whether they are regarded as of low, medium or high intelligence value.
c. Under “Summary of Changes,” the Task Force explains whether there has been any change in the information provided since the last appraisal (generally, the prisoners are appraised on an annual basis).
4. Detainee’s Account of Events
Based on the prisoners’ own testimony, this section puts together an account of their history, and how they came to be seized, in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, based on their own words.
5. Capture Information
This section explains how and where the prisoners were seized, and is followed by a description of their possessions at the time of capture, the date of their transfer to Guantánamo, and, spuriously, “Reasons for Transfer to JTF-GTMO,” which lists alleged reasons for the prisoners’ transfer, such as knowledge of certain topics for exploitation through interrogation. The reason that this is unconvincing is because, as former interrogator Chris Mackey (a pseudonym) explained in his book The Interrogators, the US high command, based in Camp Doha, Kuwait, stipulated that every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be transferred to Guantánamo — and that there were no exceptions; in other words, the “Reasons for transfer” were grafted on afterwards, as an attempt to justify the largely random rounding-up of prisoners.
6. Evaluation of Detainee’s Account
In this section, the Task Force analyzes whether or not they find the prisoners’ accounts convincing.
7. Detainee Threat
This section is the most significant from the point of view of the supposed intelligence used to justify the detention of prisoners. After “Assessment,” which reiterates the conclusion at 3b, the main section, “Reasons for Continued Detention,” may, at first glance, look convincing, but it must be stressed that, for the most part, it consists of little more than unreliable statements made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners — either in Guantánamo, or in secret prisons run by the CIA, where torture and other forms of coercion were widespread, or through more subtle means in Guantánamo, where compliant prisoners who were prepared to make statements about their fellow prisoners were rewarded with better treatment. Some examples are available on the homepage for the release of these documents: http://wikileaks.ch/gitmo/
With this in mind, it should be noted that there are good reasons why Obama administration officials, in the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by the President to review the cases of the 241 prisoners still held in Guantánamo when he took office, concluded that only 36 could be prosecuted.
The final part of this section, “Detainee’s Conduct,” analyzes in detail how the prisoners have behaved during their imprisonment, with exact figures cited for examples of “Disciplinary Infraction.”
8. Detainee Intelligence Value Assessment
After reiterating the intelligence assessment at 3b and recapping on the prisoners’ alleged status, this section primarily assesses which areas of intelligence remain to be “exploited,” according to the Task Force.
9. EC Status
The final section notes whether or not the prisoner in question is still regarded as an “enemy combatant,” based on the findings of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, held in 2004-05 to ascertain whether, on capture, the prisoners had been correctly labeled as “enemy combatants.” Out of 558 cases, just 38 prisoners were assessed as being “no longer enemy combatants,” and in some cases, when the result went in the prisoners’ favor, the military convened new panels until it got the desired result.
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What the Guantanamo leaks won’t reveal
Darryl Li
In the coming days, many will pore over the Guantánamo files released by Wikileaks to find startling revelations or to justify pre-existing positions. But before diving in, it may help to reflect on a few things that may not be explicit in the documents but are crucial to understanding their significance. These include:
1. “Threat assessment” is a game with no winners: If the initial document dump is any guide, most of what Wikileaks has obtained are “detainee assessments” that reveal more about the inner fantasy world of the US intelligence apparatus than who the detainees really are. The fantasy is not some elaborate conspiracy to fabricate stories from whole cloth; rather, it is the result of an intense desire for “useful” intelligence, coupled with an astounding lack of safeguards or quality control.
Journalists and bloggers are already hard at work cataloging the contradictions, omissions, and simple failures of logic in these files. Analyzing the Pentagon Papers decades ago, Hannah Arendt was struck by the bureaucratic self-deception and “defactualization” that thrive in environments of official secrecy, and the same rings true here: The Guantanamo jailers saw what they wanted to see – and found what pressures from above and their own cultural presuppositions pushed them to find. A recent Guardian headline captures this terrifying inertia: “Guantánamo piled lie upon lie through the momentum of its own existence.” Stephen Abraham, a former army intelligence officer once stationed at Guantánamo, described in detail the shoddiness of the dossiers, which were reviewed mainly for “format and grammar. The quality assurance review would not ordinarily check the accuracy of the information.”
Although these assessments would be considered “analytical” rather than “raw” intelligence, one can see very little analysis in them at all. They cite intelligence reports without any discernible attempt to assess their veracity. They read as if someone searched for the detainee’s name in a giant database and then simply pasted together all the passages they could find. For these reasons, one of the worst things one could do is use these files as a baseline for assessing the culpability or dangerousness of their subjects. The “detainee assessments” should not feed the stale, speculative, and fearmongering debate over Guantánamo “recidivism”; they should end it.
2. Torture. In the fantasy world of secret documents, the first inconvenient truths to disappear are the allegations of detainee torture and abuse. The “detainee assessments” do not discuss the interrogation tactics or conditions of detention to which prisoners were subjected. Revealingly, one of the few dossiers to mention allegations of torture refers only to “publicly released records” – any internal concerns about abuse, presumably, were discarded in the sausage-making process. And for detainees who spent time in foreign or secret CIA prisons before arriving in Cuba, such pre-Guantánamo sojourns are usually mentioned only in passing if at all.
Dossiers of “high-value detainees” Abu Zubayda and ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri contain no hint of their repeated waterboarding and other abuses documented by, among others, the International Committee of the Red Cross. Mamdouh Habib’s assessment casually notes that “he spent six months with Egyptian interrogators before being transferred to U.S. custody.” Yet in those six months he says he was beaten and subject to electric shocks in interrogations personally overseen by Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, whom the later Obama administration later hoped to install as president.
Unfortunately, these assessments are blissfully walled off from abuse. Most useful information on torture at Guantánamo would likely have be in other databases housing detainee medical records or logs and video kept by guards and interrogators. Other documentation that would address torture directly was likely classified at a much higher level and/or destroyed (like the CIA video tapes of black site interrogations, an act for which the Obama administration has declined to file criminal charges).
3. The farce of prosecutions: Many have rightly condemned the “military commissions” established at Guantánamo as incompatible with basic standards of fairness. Yet for all but a few dozen detainees, the government does not have sufficient evidence to file charges even before its own kangaroo courts, let alone normal civilian tribunals.
The Washington Post recently reported the Obama administration was shocked to learn this, though it should not have been a surprise. The initial roundups were astoundingly haphazard, relying largely on payment of bounties for Arabs and other Muslim travelers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The jumbled mess of the Guantánamo files is a testament to this.
What is shocking is how some commentators point to the paucity of reliable evidence as vindication of their position to hold people indefinitely without trial. This heads-we-win-tails-you-lose attitude came out during the fretting over the near-acquittal (on all but one charge) of Ahmed Ghailani, the only Guantánamo prisoner to be tried in the U.S. For many in the U.S., the Ghailani verdict (which nevertheless yielded a life sentence) did not dispel fears of “terrorism”; it validated them and the idea that the rule of law is not to be trusted.
This embodies the deeper problem in the U.S. political debate over Guantánamo: near-total denial about the sheer incompetence of the world’s most expensive intelligence apparatus in the original detention decisions. Confronting this unfortunate fact is the only way to defuse the politics of hysteria that currently dominates debates over the fate of Guantánamo detainees.
4. The other prisons: As horrific as Guantánamo is, the incredible degree of scrutiny it has received also makes it probably the least terrifying part of the global network of extraterritorial prisons created by the US in the wake of 9/11. We still know next to nothing about detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as secret CIA prisons (allegedly now closed) that operated in those countries plus Poland, Romania, Thailand, and elsewhere. In the last decade, the US shuttled hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners around the world through a kind of sovereign underground of legal black holes, between military bases, CIA installations, and prisons of allied states.
As important as they are, the Guantánamo documents provide only a narrow view of one node in this complex network. Without any viable accountability mechanisms in the U.S. our main hope for learning more comes from investigations elsewhere, especially Britain, where a court recently ordered the Defence Ministry to release some details about detainees rendered from Iraq and Afghanistan.
5. The role of client states: The single most underappreciated fact about the “Global War on Terror” is the importance of repressive client states in doing most of the dirty work. Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco in particular have intelligence agencies experienced in dealing with militant “Islamists,” with even fewer concerns about legal oversight than their U.S. counterparts.
This collaboration is deep and longstanding. Since the Clinton years, the U.S. has orchestrated the abduction and forcible transfer of suspected “Islamists” to their homelands so they could be interrogated without apparent U.S. responsibility, a practice known as “extraordinary rendition.” We can infer that most Egyptian, Moroccan, and Jordanian captives were sent directly home, since very few of them ever arrived in Guantánamo. These intelligence agencies and many others even conducted interrogations at Guantánamo and are crucial for holding or monitoring detainees after repatriation.
In many ways, the most important files from the “Global War on Terror” are sitting in the secret police headquarters of U.S. proxy regimes in the Muslim world. Despite fears in Washington, it is too soon to tell how the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions will affect these relationships. The recent dissolution of the hated State Security (Amn al-Dawla) service in Egypt is a welcome step, but it seems to have handled the routine repression of the population, leaving the more sensitive CIA collaboration to the relatively unscathed General Intelligence Service (al-Mukhabarat al-‘Amma). In any event, these relationships remind us that the struggle over torture and detention in the “Global War on Terror” is not simply about the rule of law; it is also a story of the workings of global hegemony in the 21st century and how people seek to resist it.
Darryl Li is graduate of Yale Law School and currently a PhD Candidate in Anthropology & Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard and has worked on legal defense of Guantánamo detainees. The views in this piece reflect only his own.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/04/2011425182559745235.html
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