Psyche, Science, and Society

Many at Guantanamo not even acused of anti-US “terrorism”

August 12th, 2007

The Boston Globe today brings word that many of those held at Guantanamo Concentration Camp are not even accused of anti-US “terrorism”, but are simply Afghans, possibly corrupt ones, who got in the way of US plans to control the country post-Taliban:

When US special forces wanted to defeat the Taliban, they befriended Abdullah Mujahid, the police chief of this mountainous province. They visited his home with a gift of chocolates, and gave money and equipment to his fighters.

Mujahid met frequently with US troops, and even arrested and handed over a suspect the US military sent to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But as the threat of the Taliban receded, US forces sought to replace Mujahid — an illiterate leader who had been accused of corruption — with a professionally trained police chief. Soon, Mujahid was accused of being responsible for an attack on US forces. He was sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he languishes not far from the man he arrested.

The fall of Mujahid offers a rare glimpse into the trials of postwar Afghanistan, where US special forces struggled to rein in the warlords they once wooed.

But it also reveals the extent to which the military is using the Guantanamo Bay detention center for a starkly different purpose than the one outlined by President Bush: to keep the worst terrorism suspects behind bars.

A Globe investigation found that the military has used Guantanamo Bay not just for terrorists “picked up on the battlefield” — as Bush has repeatedly asserted — but also for uncooperative or unruly tribal chieftains, many of whom had been key supporters of the US-led invasion.

The use of Guantanamo Bay for purposes other than fighting international terrorism could have legal significance, because Bush has tried to justify creating a place where detainees can be held without normal legal protections on the grounds that the prisoners are enemy combatants who might launch a terrorist attack if they are released.

Despite Bush’s assertions, at least 52 detainees who had been held at Guantanamo Bay were not accused of ties to the Taliban or Al Qaeda, according to publicly released military records detailing the accusations against nearly 500 prisoners. At least a dozen were once officials in the post-Taliban government, arrested in their homes or offices during a broader US campaign to rein in warlords.

Mujahid was one. The former head of the United Nations office in Gardez, Thomas Ruttig, said he urged the Afghan government to remove Mujahid from his post because he was seen as an uneducated, disruptive, and corrupt figure. But Ruttig said he expected Mujahid to be fired or tried for corruption in Afghanistan, not held indefinitely in Cuba without a trial.

“I never dreamed he would be sent to Guantanamo,” Ruttig said in a recent interview in Kabul.

John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch researcher, helped write a 2003 report that accused Mujahid and his inner circle of allowing their fighters to set up illegal checkpoints to take money from truck drivers. But he, too, said Mujahid should not have been sent to Guantanamo Bay.

“Guantanamo is not even vaguely the appropriate place for him,” he said, adding that the administration shouldn’t use its power to hold accused terrorists at Guantanamo to solve political or criminal problems in Afghanistan.

The distinction between Guantanamo and a regular military or civilian prison is significant because Guantanamo detainees are stripped of most of their rights, and can be held on unspecified charges without being given a chance to mount a normal legal defense.

For a year after Mujahid’s arrest in July 2003, the military refused to release any information about why he was arrested. But in 2004, after a Supreme Court ruling forced the government to reveal why people were being held, the military accused Mujahid of “being responsible for” an attack in which a US soldier was killed, though UN and Afghan officials say Mujahid was not in Gardez at the time.

Then, in 2005, the military accused him of being a senior leader of a militant group operating in India-held Kashmir. But Pakistani news accounts suggest that another man by the same name who died last fall was a senior leader of that group.

Now, even the military has stopped saying that Mujahid belongs in Guantanamo Bay. In February, Pentagon officials informed his lawyers that he was among a group of at least 12 detainees who had been cleared to return to Afghanistan, either for release or further detention.

Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon declined to discuss the accusations against Mujahid, but said the decision to clear him for transfer does not “change the fact that he still poses a threat to the United States.”

Presumably many of those held pose “a threat to the United States” beacuse they resent being imprisoned without charges or trial for years on end. And the potential that they might describe their treatment at US hands certainly makes them a danger to the government that subjected them to abuse for those long years.

Evidently, Mujahid’s major “crime” was refusing to cooperate in hiding torture and murder by US special forces:

Relations between Mujahid and the special forces deteriorated further in March 2003. US soldiers in Gardez had severely beaten a group of Afghan prisoners during an interrogation, and one of them had died, according to several former Afghan police and a report by the Afghan attorney general’s office, which investigated the case.

The second Commander Mike ordered that the seven living prisoners be transferred to Mujahid’s jail, according to the attorney general’s report and Raz Mohammad Dalili, the Afghan governor at the time who helped make the arrangements for the transfers.

At a joint security meeting, Commander Mike threatened to kill Mujahid if he released the prisoners, according to the Crimes of War Project, a Washington human rights group that investigated the alleged abuse.

The Americans who dropped off the prisoners spoke briefly to Mujahid in his office behind a closed door and then drove away, said Mehboob Ahmad, Mujahid’s personal driver.

Some of the prisoners were unconscious, and their bodies had turned black and blue, Ahmad said. Mujahid ordered that they be given medical treatment and mattresses, Ahmad said.

“Mujahid was upset. We all were,” he said. “I think anyone who would have seen them in that condition would be upset.”

Mujahid described the prisoners’ injuries to Afghan military prosecutors, who later wrote a report recommending that the American soldiers be punished. In January of this year, two special forces soldiers received administrative punishments in connection with the prisoners’ treatment. Major James Gregory, a spokesman, said at the time that the special forces command “takes all allegations of abuse seriously.”

Weeks after the prisoners were dropped off at Mujahid’s jail, the Afghan government decided to remove Mujahid from his post. Dalili, the governor, said in a recent interview in Kabul that the second Commander Mike helped persuade him — and Afghanistan’s central government — to replace Mujahid with a professionally trained police chief.

And the American abusers still run rampant across Afghanistan:

But a few things have not changed, according to the people of Gardez: Americans who use only their first names still broker deals, make arrests, and detain people across the restive countrywide.

The insurgency they are fighting rages on.

Entry Filed under: Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Special Forces