Psyche, Science, and Society

Former Guantanamo prosecutor speaks to BBC

The BBC has an interview with Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a Guantanamo prosecutor who gave up his career in the military because he no longer believed that the Military Commissions were providing a fair process. Lt. Col. Vandeveld will be known to regular readers of this site as the former prosecutor of Mohammed Jawad, the youth who was abused on the recommendation of a BSCT psychologist.  On the BBC web site one can also view three short videos with Lt. Col. Vandeveld:

Guantanamo prosecutor speaks out

Guantanamo lawyer tells why he quit

Guantanamo lawyer emailed priest

As a psychologist, when I read these accounts of career military attorneys taking great personal risks to oppose an unjust system, I wonder, Where Are the Psychologists? Not one psychologist is known to have risked his or her career to protest the systemic abuses. [The only known partial exception is Michael Gelles, who protested the worst abuses at Guantanamo in 2002, n perhaps later. But Gelles was supported by his chain of command and insists his career was not injured as a result.]

Guantanamo ‘a stain on US military’

By Gordon Corera, Security correspondent, BBC News

The tribunals used for putting suspects on trial at Guantanamo Bay are a “stain on America’s military”, a former military prosecutor has told the BBC in his first interview since resigning.

For Lt Col Darrel Vandeveld, a devout Catholic, the twin responsibilities of religious faith and military duty led to a profound moral crisis.

His resignation has led to charges against six inmates being dropped, at least for now, and called into question the possibility of a fair legal process at Guantanamo.

“I know so many fighting men and women who are stained by the taint of Guantanamo, so I’m here to tell the truth about Guantanamo and how a few people have sullied the American military and the constitution,” he told me during an interview in his home town of Erie, Pennsylvania.

A reservist, Darrel Vandeveld was called up as a military lawyer after 9/11 and served in Iraq, Bosnia and Africa.

In 2007, he became a prosecutor for the military commissions which tried terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, a role he took enthusiastically.

“I went down there on a mission and my mission was to convict as many of these detainees as possible and put them in prison for as long as I possibly could,” he told the BBC.

“I had zero doubts. I was a true believer.”

But his zeal did not last long.

When he arrived, he says he found the prosecutor’s office in chaos, with boxes scattered around the floor, files disorganised, evidence scattered in different places and no clear chain of command.

And more seriously, he soon discovered that defence lawyers were not receiving information which could help clear their clients, including evidence that suspects had been “mistreated” in order to secure confessions.

Accused of attack

It was one case in particular, that of a young Afghan called Mohammed Jawad, which caused most concern.

Mr Jawad was accused of throwing a grenade at a US military vehicle.

Col Vandeveld says that in a locker he found indisputable evidence that Mr Jawad had been mistreated.

After Mr Jawad had tried to commit suicide by banging his head against a wall at Guantanamo, Col Vandeveld says that psychologists who assisted interrogators advised taking advantage of Mr Jawad’s vulnerability by subjecting him to specialist interrogation techniques known as “fear up”.

He was also placed, Col Vandeveld says, into what was known as the “frequent flyer” programme in which he was moved from cell to cell every few hours, with the aim of preventing him sleeping properly, and securing a confession.

A devout Catholic, Col Vandeveld found himself deeply troubled by what he discovered.

But the classified nature of his work meant he was unable to share his growing doubts with friends and family.

As a result, he took the unusual step of emailing a Jesuit priest called Father John Dear, who is a well known peace activist.

In his email, Col Vandeveld talked of having “grave misgivings”.

Father Dear was initially unsure if the email was serious and fashioned a quick reply.

“I sort of didn’t believe it. But on the off chance he was a military prosecutor I wrote back and said ‘quit’.”

Col Vandeveld says his jaw dropped when he read the email, adding: “I lived in dread of that answer.”

But eventually he did resign and has chosen to speak out about what he saw, giving the BBC his first interview.

“I never suffered such anguish in my life about anything,” he says, looking back over the period.

“It took me too long to recognise that we had abandoned our American values and defiled our constitution.”

Cases dropped

Col Vandeveld was prosecuting six cases, including that of Binyam Mohamed, the last British resident held at Guantanamo.

After his resignation, charges in these cases were dropped but with the possibility they may be re-filed at any point.

Col Vandeveld declined to discuss details of Mr Mohamed’s case and others which remain classified.

But Binyam Mohamed’s lawyers say he was tortured as part of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme and are hopeful that he may not be charged again, on the grounds that this might reveal too many details of the rendition programme.

Col Vandeveld was forced to undergo a mental status evaluation after expressing his concerns and his military career is over.

But he has returned to his community in Erie where local newspapers have praised the stand he took. He has no regrets.

In response to his claims, a Pentagon spokesman told the BBC: “We dispute Darrel Vandeveld’s assertions and maintain the military commission process provides full and fair trials to accused unlawful enemy combatants who are charged with a variety of war crimes.”

President-elect Barack Obama has said he wants to shut Guantanamo but no-one thinks it will be easy.

Col Vandeveld believes that it is possible though.

“No justice will be obtained at Guantanamo,” he said. “And if that entails moving them (the suspects) temporarily to the US for trial: so be it.”

1 comment December 3rd, 2008

Interrogator who found Zarqawi speaks out

Yet another veteran interrogator is disillusioned with the Bush administration military’s commitment to abusive, immoral, and ineffective interrogation techniques:

I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq

By Matthew Alexander, Washington Post

I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I’m still alarmed about that today.

I’m not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me — both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn’t work.

Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi’s forces (members of Iraq’s Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq’s majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology — one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war’s biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi’s associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader’s location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But Zarqawi’s death wasn’t enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.

I know the counter-argument well — that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that’s not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, “I thought you would torture me, and when you didn’t, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That’s why I decided to cooperate.”

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material — including passages copied verbatim from the Army’s unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army’s own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don’t even want the public to hear them.

My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war — one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can’t force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I’ll say to them, “Which one?”

Americans, including officers like myself, must fight to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them. Other interrogators are also speaking out, including some former members of the military, the FBI and the CIA who met last summer to condemn torture and have spoken before Congress — at considerable personal risk.

We’re told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations — and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.

I’m actually quite optimistic these days, in no small measure because President-elect Barack Obama has promised to outlaw the practice of torture throughout our government. But until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning. Zarqawi is dead, but he has still forced us to show the world that we do not adhere to the principles we say we cherish. We’re better than that. We’re smarter, too.

howtobreakaterrorist@gmail.com

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Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.” He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.

Add comment November 30th, 2008

Judge called Mukasey “Tyrant” before AG collapsed

Impassioned dissent on Bush administration apologists now extends to senior judges. It turns out that right before Attorney General Mukasey collapsed, a Washington State Supreme Court jusge yelled “Tyrant!” at him, in protest of Mukasey’s defense of detainee treatment. Elsewhere I read that the judge in question was a member of the conservative Federalist society, where Mukasey was speaking. More and more conservatives can no longer quietly accept this administration’s shredding of the Constitution, international law, and human rights:

Judge yelled ‘tyrant’ at Mukasey before his collapse

By Nick Juliano

Before Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed last week at a speech to the conservative Federalist Society, one audience member could not contain his disapproval with the speech’s subject matter.

Mukasey’s defense of President Bush’s policies on prisoner treatment and their indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay was too much for Washington State Supreme Court Judge Richard Sanders.

He shouted, “Tyrant! You are a tyrant!”

Sanders acknowledged his conduct in an interview with The Seattle Times.

“Frankly, everybody in the room was applauding or sometimes laughing, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to stand up and say something.’ And I did,” he told the paper. “I stood up and said, ‘Tyrant,’ then I sat down again, then I left.”

The outburst came well before Mukasey’s collapse and likely did not contribute to it. Sanders left before the end of Mukasey’s speech because he wasn’t enjoying himself, he told the paper.

While he regrets shouting at the country’s top law enforcement officer, Sanders says he still believes the policies Mukasey was advocating — namely that the US is not obligated to adhere to the Geneva conventions in battling al Qaeda — could lead to “tyranny.” In the speech, Mukasey argued that because the international terrorist group didn’t sign the convention, the US shouldn’t be bound by them, but Sanders said that wasn’t the point.

“I didn’t sign the Geneva Conventions, you didn’t sign the Geneva Conventions, but the United States did sign the Conventions,” he told the Times. “And that’s the point, isn’t it?”

Add comment November 26th, 2008

For Hamdan, conviction means ticket home

In the convoluted logic that is Guantanamo, conviction of war crimes seems to be a ticket home, out of hell. First came David Hicks. Now Salim Hamdan:

Official: Bin Laden’s Driver Heading Home to Yemen

By Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Osama bin Laden driver Salim Hamdan is being transferred from the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, back to his home country of Yemen, a senior defense official said.

Hamdan was convicted of aiding al-Qaida in August and sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison. He would be eligible for release in January with credit for time served.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter, said Monday that Hamdan will serve out the remainder of his sentence in Yemen.

Waleed Alshahari, who ovesees Guantanamo Bay issues for the Yemen Embassy in Washington, said he was surprised to learn plans for Hamdan’s release because there have been no new negotiation on the release of the 90 or so Yemeni detainees at the prison.

He said any deal over their release likely will come under President-elect Barack Obama’s administration.

”It seems the new administration wants to close this prison, so so there will be negotiations with them,” he said. Security has been a roadblock. The U.S. is concerned the detainees will be released as soon as they are returned to Yemen. Yemeni and U.S. officials agree there should be a new, secure rehabilitation center built in Yemen but officials there say they can’t afford it and have asked the U.S. to build it.

Alshahari said he believes the Obama administration will seek a deal with a neighboring country to help pay for the project.

Charles Swift, one of Hamdan’s defense lawyers, told The Washington Post: ”Certainly the fair thing to do is to return him. If you don’t, you really come to the absolute thing of the commissions becoming a complete sham.”

A jury of six U.S. military officers sentenced Hamdan at Guantanamo’s first war-crimes trial earlier this year, and at the time he had already served five years and a month at the Cuba facility.

Pentagon officials had suggested all along that they could hold the 40-year-old Guantanamo prisoner indefinitely regardless of the sentence. The Pentagon reserves the right to hold him and other ”enemy combatants” who are considered dangerous to the United States, even those who are acquitted or complete sentences in the tribunal system.

Guantanamo prosecutors had sought a sentence of 30 years to life for Hamdan, whose trial inaugurated the special commission system in July. They also had argued that as an ”enemy combatant” he should not receive credit for his time detained there. A military judge rejected that argument.

While convicted of supporting terrorism, Hamdan was acquitted by a jury of military officers of providing missiles to al-Qaida and knowing his work would be used for terrorism. He was cleared of being part of al-Qaida’s conspiracy to attack the United States.

He could have faced up to life in prison and his relatively light sentence was considered a rebuke to military prosecutors who portrayed him as a hardened al-Qaida warrior.

Add comment November 25th, 2008

Accountability: Newsweek on Truth Commission

Newsweek on a torture Commission of Inquiry (Truth Commission):

Obama to Take On Torture?

By Michael Isikoff
[From the magazine issue dated Dec 1, 2008]

Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But one idea that has currency among some top Obama advisers is setting up a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible. “At a minimum, the American people have to be able to see and judge what happened,” said one senior adviser, who asked not to be identified talking about policy matters. The commission would be empowered to order the U.S. intelligence agencies to open their files for review and question senior officials who approved “waterboarding” and other controversial practices.

Obama aides are wary of taking any steps that would smack of political retribution. That’s one reason they are reluctant to see high-profile investigations by the Democratic-controlled Congress or to greenlight a broad Justice inquiry (absent specific new evidence of wrongdoing). “If there was any effort to have war-crimes prosecutions of the Bush administration, you’d instantly destroy whatever hopes you have of bipartisanship,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice criminal division chief during the Clinton administration. A new commission, on the other hand, could emulate the bipartisan tone set by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton in investigating the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 panel was created by Congress. An alternative model, floated by human-rights lawyer Scott Horton, would be a presidential commission similar to the one appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975 and headed by Nelson Rockefeller that investigated cold-war abuses by the CIA.

The idea of such panels is not universally favored among Obama advisers. Some with ties to the intelligence community fear the demoralizing impact on intelligence officers, said one source who had discussions with Obama aides about the idea. But during the campaign, both Obama and Eric Holder, slated to be nominated as attorney general, sharply criticized the use of torture and the legal rulings that permitted them. Holder called some Bush counterterror policies “excessive and unlawful.”

The legal rulings on interrogation are among matters being reviewed by an Obama transition team headed by David W. Ogden, once chief of staff to former attorney general Janet Reno. The team has already moved into the first floor of Justice. Detainee policies are an even stickier issue—underscored last week when a federal judge ordered the release of five Bosnians held at Guantánamo Bay. Obama is committed to shutting down Gitmo. But his advisers are wrestling with what to do about the remaining 250 detainees there, especially those considered dangerous. Obama is unlikely to continue the military tribunals started by President Bush. One idea his advisers are exploring is the creation of new national-security courts. But a spokesman for Obama’s transition team said that decisions on all of these issues won’t be made till after the new national-security team is in place.

Add comment November 23rd, 2008

Case against Mohammed Jawad collapses

In a major development, it looks as if the war crimes trial against Mohammed Jawad has collapsed. Last month the Military Commissions judge threw out Jawad’s confession to Afghan authorities, ruling that it had been extracted through torture. This week the same judge threw out Jawad’s confession given to US authorities upon his being turned over to the US, ruling that the latter cobfession was the result of fear continuing from his Afghan torture:

in part because the U.S. interrogator used techniques to maintain “the shock and fearful state” associated with his arrest by Afghan police, including blindfolding him and placing a hood over his head.

“The military commission concludes the effect of the death threats which produced the accused’s first confession to the Afghan police had not dissipated by the second confession to the U.S.,” Henley wrote. “In other words, the subsequent confession was itself the product of the preceding death threats.”

According to the former prosecutor, who resigned because he felt vital information was being withheld from the defense, this ddevelopement signifies the end of the case:

“It’s not the death knell of the case _ it buries the case,” said Darrel Vandeveld, a lieutenant colonel in the Army reserves. “The commissions at this point are utterly lifeless.”

Great credit should be given to his vigorous and principled defense attorney, Maj. David Frakt, who has used every tool available to him to fight for his client and for justice and human decency.

Here is the complete AP story:

Gitmo judge tosses out detainee’s 2nd confession

By David McFadden

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A U.S. military judge has blocked Pentagon prosecutors from using a Guantanamo prisoner’s statements to U.S. authorities as trial evidence, saying they were tainted by an earlier confession tortured out of the suspect by Afghan officials.

Mohammed Jawad’s confession to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan following his capture in 2002 was the last incriminating statement available to prosecutors for the Afghan’s war-crimes trial at Guantanamo Bay, his military defense attorney, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, said Thursday.

Wednesday’s dismissal of Jawad’s confession in U.S. custody decimates the government’s case against the Afghan prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, according to the former prosecutor, who quit several weeks ago in a dispute over the handling of the case.

“It’s not the death knell of the case _ it buries the case,” said Darrel Vandeveld, a lieutenant colonel in the Army reserves. “The commissions at this point are utterly lifeless.”

Jawad, now about 23, is scheduled to face trial Jan. 5 on charges that he threw a grenade that wounded two American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter. He was 16 or 17 at the time of the 2002 attack in Kabul.

The Army judge, Col. Stephen Henley, ruled last month that Jawad’s confession to Afghan police commanders and high-ranking government officials on Dec. 17, 2002 was only achieved after they threatened to kill him and his family _ a strategy that he said was intended to inflict severe pain and constituted torture.

In Wednesday’s ruling, Henley disqualified Jawad’s second confession while in U.S. custody on Dec. 17 and 18, in part because the U.S. interrogator used techniques to maintain “the shock and fearful state” associated with his arrest by Afghan police, including blindfolding him and placing a hood over his head.

“The military commission concludes the effect of the death threats which produced the accused’s first confession to the Afghan police had not dissipated by the second confession to the U.S.,” Henley wrote. “In other words, the subsequent confession was itself the product of the preceding death threats.”

Under the Military Commissions Act, which governs America’s first war-crimes trials since the World War II era, statements obtained through torture are not admissible. But some statements obtained through “coercion” may be admitted at the discretion of a military judge.

A spokesman for the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions, Joseph DellaVedova, said prosecution authorities could not immediately comment on Henley’s ruling.

Hina Shamsi, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that it would be a “tragic legacy” for the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush if Jawad’s case proceeds at Guantanamo.

Add comment November 21st, 2008

The ever rising number of child soldiers at Guantanamo

Last week the U.C. Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas reported that, despite Defense Departmen t claims to the UN that only eight juveniles had been held at Guantanamo, the true number was at least 12 and possibly much higher. The DoD then admitted their “error” and revised their UN report Andy Worthington reports today that the true number is at least 22. Evidently no one in the Defense Department passed elementary arithmetic, or truth-telling:

Number of juveniles held at Guantanamo almost twice official Pentagon figure

By Andy Worthington

On Sunday, the Pentagon admitted that 12 juveniles — those under the age of 18 at the time their alleged crimes took place — have been held at Guantanamo Bay (as opposed to the figure of eight that was submitted to the UN in May). But a RAW STORY count, drawn from the Pentagon’s own records, reveals that the total number of juveniles held at Guantanamo is at least 22 — nearly double the official Pentagon figure.

In a submission to the 48th Session of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (PDF), the Pentagon claimed that it had only held eight juveniles during the life of the Guantanamo Bay prison. It acknowledged that three Afghans under the age of 16 were released in January 2004 (as reported in the New York Times), stated that another three juveniles were repatriated between 2004 and 2006 and claimed that it was only holding two prisoners who were juveniles at the time of their capture: the Canadian Omar Khadr and the Afghan Mohamed Jawad, who are both facing a trial by Military Commission. The much-criticized Commission was created by the Defense Department as part of “terror trials” conceived in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Last week, the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, based at the University of California, issued a report pointing out that, contrary to the Pentagon’s assertions, at least 12 prisoners were juveniles at the time of their capture. The report correctly stated that, in addition to Omar Khadr and Mohamed Jawad, Mohamed El-Gharani, a Saudi resident born to parents from Chad, was still imprisoned. Just 14 years old when he was seized in October 2001, El-Gharani had traveled to Pakistan to study information technology, but had been rounded up in a random raid on a mosque, tortured in Pakistani custody and then held in U.S. detention, first in Afghanistan, and then in Guantanamo.

The report also asserted that the Pentagon had forgotten to include Yasser Talal al-Zahrani. Al-Zahrani, a Saudi national, was 17 when he was seized in Afghanistan, andwas one of three prisoners who died in Guantanamo (apparently by committing suicide) in June 2006.

After the report was issued, the Pentagon acknowledged that it had revised its figure from eight to 12, and said it had provided a corrected submission to the United Nations. Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon claimed that the problems arose because many of the prisoners did not know their dates of birth. But as the director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas explained the Center’s report had drawn on the Pentagon’s own sources, specifically the list of all the prisoners held at Guantanamo from January 11, 2002 until May 15, 2006, which included their names, nationalities, and dates of birth.

Close scrutiny of this list reveals that the Pentagon will need to revise its figures once more, as, by its own account, a total of 22 prisoners were juveniles at the time of capture. Moreover, contrary to the Pentagon’s account, five of these prisoners are still being held.

This imprecision seems to reflect the Pentagon’s lack of concern for whether prisoners were juvenile at the time of capture. Under the terms of Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict), the U.S. administration is required to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict,” but in May 2003, when the story first broke that juvenile prisoners were being held at Guantanamo, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a press conference, “This constant refrain of ‘the juveniles,’ as though there’s a hundred children in there — these are not children.”

Although the three juveniles released in January 2004 were held separately from the adult population and given some educational and recreational opportunities, there is no evidence that the rest of the juveniles held at Guantanamo received any preferential treatment whatsoever. In many cases, they were subjected to the kind of chronic abuse that has earned Guantanamo (and the U.S. prisons in Afghanistan) a reputation as facilities where the use of torture was routine.

The following is a list of the 22 juveniles held at Guantanamo:

Including Omar Khadr, Mohamed Jawad and Mohammed El-Gharani, five prisoners who were juveniles at the time of capture are still being held at Guantanamo. The two not previously mentioned are:

* Faris Muslim al-Ansari, a Yemeni, was 17 when he was seized crossing the Pakistani border. In Guantanamo, he explained (PDF, pp. 128-33) that his family had left Yemen when he was a child, and had moved to Afghanistan, where his father had fought the Russians. Denying an allegation that he was a Taliban fighter, he said, “I have never done anything military-related at all, and I don’t know anything about military fighting,” and added that he fled Jalalabad, where he was living with his parents, because “The Americans would target any Arabs, not just al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance would kill any Arab they saw.”

* Hassan bin Attash, a Saudi of Yemeni descent, is the brother of a “high-value detainee” charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, and was 16 or 17 when he was seized in Pakistan and transferred to the “Dark Prison,” a CIA prison near Kabul, which resembled a medieval dungeon, but with the addition of painfully loud music which was blasted into the cells 24 hours a day. He was then rendered to Jordan, where proxy torturers “worked on” him for 16 months. In Guantanamo, he told his lawyer that he was hung upside down, beaten and threatened with electric shocks, and added that afterwards he told his interrogators “whatever they wanted to hear.” In January 2004, he was rendered back to Afghanistan, and arrived in Guantanamo in September 2004.

In addition to the three juveniles released in January 2004 (Asadullah, Naqibullah and Mohammed Ismail), the following thirteen prisoners who were juveniles at the time of capture have also been released:

* Abdul Qudus, an Afghan, was 14 when he was sold to US forces by opportunistic Afghan soldiers. In Guantanamo, he explained (PDF, pp. 22-7) that he and Mohammed Ismail (one of the three juveniles released in January 2004) had been looking for work, and had ended up spending the night at an Afghan militia post. The following morning, the soldiers wanted to give them weapons and make them fight, and when they refused they were put in a car, delivered to the Americans, and accused of being with the Taliban. He was released in 2005 or 2006.

* Shams Ullah, an Afghan, was 15 or 16 he was seized by U.S. forces. In Guantanamo, it was alleged (PDF, pp. 71-4) that he had fired at U.S. and Afghan forces who had stopped him during a patrol. Shams had vague recollections of the events, but his uncle, Bostan Karim, who was seized separately, and is still held in Guantanamo, noted (PDF, pp. 138-50) that he had “a mental problem,” and explained, “When the Americans came to our house there was a Kalashnikov in our house and he knew that the Americans would take this gun. So, he took the gun and went to the mosque. The Americans asked him to stop and he didn’t stop, so they shot him and he became lame.” He was released in 2005 or 2006.

* Qari Esmhatulla, an Afghan, was 16 or 17 when Afghan soldiers stopped him as he walked home from visiting a shrine. In Guantanamo, he said (PDF, pp. 1-7) that he “admitted the things that were not true only to make them stop beating me,” and added, “I heard my captors talk about receiving a bounty from American forces for people they captured. They placed a grenade near me so they could have an explanation for arresting me.” He was released in October 2006.

* Peta Mohammed, an Afghan, was 17 when he was seized with two of the juvenile prisoners released in January 2004, after a raid by U.S. Special Forces on the compound of a warlord named Samoud. All were treated brutally in a U.S. base in Gardez and at Bagram, where, according to another released prisoner, Habib Rahman (PDF, pp. 84-9), they were abused until they admitted attacking U.S. forces. Mohammed was released in 2005 or 2006.

* Yousef and Abdulsalam al-Shehri, two Saudi cousins, were both 16 when they were seized in Afghanistan. Yousef was transported to a prison in Sheberghan run by Afghan warlord General Dostum, where he spent six weeks in horribly overcrowded conditions, surrounded by the dead and dying, before being transferred to U.S. custody. Abdulsalam was sent to Qala-i-Janghi, a fort run by Dostum, where several hundred prisoners were killed in bombing raids and by artillery fire after a number of them staged an uprising. The others, who hid in the basement, survived death by bombs and flooding. When asked at Guantanamo (PDF, pp. 158-66) if he took part in the uprising, Abdulsalam said, “How am I going to fight? With my fingers? I didn’t have a weapon.” He was released in June 2006 and Yousef was released in November 2007.

* Abdulrazzaq al-Sharekh, a Saudi, was 17 when he was seized after crossing the Pakistani border from Afghanistan. He had apparently been recruited to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance (PDF, pp. 35-42), and was released in September 2007.

* Rasul Kudayev, a former wrestling champion from the Russian territory of Kabardino-Balkaria, north of Georgia, was 17, according to the Pentagon, when he was seized in Afghanistan and imprisoned in Qala-i-Janghi. He was released in March 2004, but was arrested in October 2005, after 300 gunmen attacked government buildings in his hometown, and tortured horribly in police custody, despite protesting his innocence.

* Haji Mohammed Ayub, a Uighur (a Muslim from China’s Xinjiang province), had fled to Afghanistan to escape Chinese persecution, and was 17 when the settlement he shared with other Uighurs was bombed by U.S. forces (PDF, pp. 49-55). Seized by Pakistani villagers and sold to U.S. forces, he and four other Uighurs were released in May 2006 and sent to Albania, the only country prepared to accept them, where they have no work opportunities, and no prospect of ever being reunited with their families.

* Two Pakistanis, Mohammed Omar and Saji Ur Rahman, were, respectively, 17 and 15 years old when they were seized in Afghanistan and imprisoned in local jails for three months before being handed over (or sold) to U.S. forces. This year, they spoke to Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers (interviews here and here) as part of a survey of released prisoners, and it appeared that they had been recruited to fight, like thousands of other young Pakistanis, by militants connected to his madrassa (religious school). They were released in 2004.

In addition, two other Pakistani juveniles — Khalil Rahman Hafez and Sultan Ahmad (both 17 at the time of capture) — were released without their stories being told, and the 22nd juvenile prisoner was Yasser Talal al-Zahrani.

It remains plausible that the dates of birth of several other prisoners were recorded incorrectly by the Pentagon, and it should also be noted that Sami al-Haj, the al-Jazeera journalist released in May, told his lawyers at the legal action charity Reprieve that he believed that at least two dozen other prisoners were juveniles when they were seized.

Hundreds of juvenile prisoners are still being held in Afghanistan and Iraq. In its submission to the UN in May, the Pentagon claimed that it had held “approximately 90″ in Afghanistan since 2002, and was currently holding “approximately ten,” and had held “approximately 2,400″ in Iraq since 2003, and was currently holding “approximately 500.” If Guantanamo is anything to go by, these figures may not be reliable at all.

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Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press).

Add comment November 21st, 2008

Glenn Greenwald on today’s habeas decision

Glenn Greenwald on today’s habeas decision:

Five detainees ordered released “forthwith” after seven years at Guantanamo

By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below)
A federal district judge, Richard Leon, today ordered the Bush administration “forthwith” to release five Algerian detainees who have been held in Guantanamo without charges since January, 2002 — almost seven full years. The decision was based on the court’s finding that there was no credible evidence that the 5 detainees intended to take up arms against the U.S. The court found sufficient evidence to justify the ongoing detention of a sixth Algerian detainee.

When they were detained in 2001 in Bosnia, the Bush administration claimed that they were plotting to bomb the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. But once they were shipped to Guantanamo, the U.S. backed off that accusation and instead claimed they intended to travel to Afghanistan to fight against the U.S.

I don’t want to say too much about the legal reasoning behind the decision because it was just issued via an oral ruling from the bench, and I haven’t yet been able to obtain a copy of the judge’s decision. For now, then, the following can be noted about this landmark ruling — the first time a court has ruled that the Government’s evidence is insufficient to justify ongoing imprisonment of a detainee as an “enemy combatant”:

(1) These 5 detainees were able to be heard in federal court only because the U.S. Supreme Court in the Boumediene case last June — in a ruling John McCain called “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country” — struck down as unconstitutional Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act, which had purported to abolish habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees and prohibit them from challenging their detention in a federal court. The release order today resulted from the habeas corpus right which the Military Commissions Act purported to abolish but which the Boumediene Court restored. Appropriately enough, one of the 5 detainees who won his freedom today was the named plaintiff in that case, Lakhdar Boumediene.

(2) The five men ordered released today have been imprisoned in a cage by the Bush administration for 7 straight years without being charged with any crimes and without there being any credible evidence that they did anything wrong. If the members of Congress who voted for the Military Commissions Act had their way (see them here and here), or if the four Supreme Court Justices in the Boumediene minority had theirs, the Bush administration would nonetheless have been empowered to keep them encaged indefinitely, for the rest of their lives if desired, without ever having to charge them with any crime or allow them to step foot into a courtroom to petition for habeas corpus.

In addition to every Republican Senator (except Chafee), those voting to authorize that repellent power include Jay Rockefeller, Ken Salazar, Tom Carper, Ben and Bill Nelson, Debbie Stabenow, and Joe Lieberman.

(3) Judge Leon is a Bush-43 appointed Judge known as a right-wing ideologue and known for ruling in favor of the Government and for expansive executive power. He was Deputy Chief counsel for the Republicans on the Iran-Contra Committee in 1987, was Special Counsel to the Senate Banking Committee for the Whitewater investigation, and worked for both the Reagan and Bush 41 Justice Departments. That Judge Leon — of all judges — ruled that there was no credible evidence to suggest that these detainees are “enemy combatants” is as compelling a sign as one can imagine that there is no such evidence.

Simply juxtapose that finding with the fact that these men have been imprisoned for seven straight years with no meaningful due process, and one can vividly see the grotesque injustices we have wrought with Guantanamo and our denial of basic due process to detainees. That is a stain — one of many — that will never be fully expunged.

UPDATE: Here is a gut-wrenching account of what these detainees have endured (h/t Ondelette). The Bosnian Prosecutor who investigated their initial detention back in 2001 (which was effectuated at the behest of the U.S.) concluded they ought to be released, but the Bosnian Government succumbed to the pressure of the Bush administration and turned them over to the U.S. as they were being released (”hooded, shackled, and packed into waiting cars while their horrified families watched”), after which they were shipped to Guantanamo.

One of the detainees ordered released today had a wife who was pregnant at the time he was shipped to Guantanamo, who then gave birth to a daughter, now 6, whom he has never met. Another of the Bosnian-Algerians had an infant daughter at the time he was put in Guantanamo who died last year of congenital heart disease at the age of 6. Another of them “suffered months of facial paralysis from a brutal beating inflicted by Guantanamo camp soldiers.” And then there’s this, about one of the other detainees, Saber Lahmer:

When we last saw Saber in November, he was in his sixth month of solitary confinement. Since August, he has seen us, his legal team, twice and a psychiatrist on three brief occasions. For a few minutes each day, he sees the camp guards who bring his meals. He has had no other human contact. The glaring lights in his cell are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When we left the cell, we could hear Saber shouting — brief, truncated cries. We could not understand what he was saying.

According to Human Rights Watch, that detainee — “a university-educated father of two who once taught at the Islamic Cultural Center in Bosnia” — “continues to be housed 22 hours a day in a single cell, with nothing to occupy his time other than his Koran” and “now reports that he is going blind in his left eye, a result that he attributes to being housed in cells with fluorescent lights on 24 hours a day.”

We haven’t just imprisoned people with no evidence in cages for years. We’ve kept them encaged under often brutal and extreme conditions, many in unbroken solitary confinement for years. Today, a federal court ruled that for 5 of these men, there is no credible evidence that they did anything wrong, and if most of our political class — which supported the Military Commissions Act– had its way, they wouldn’t have even had this hearing at all.

Add comment November 20th, 2008

Today’s landmark habeas decision for download

Here is today’s landmark Boumediene  habeas decision ordering the release of five Guantanamo detainees.

Add comment November 20th, 2008

More on ordered release of five Guantanamo detainees

I just posted on the habeas hearing in which the judge has ordered the release of five of six Algerian detainees. The New York Times now has a more detailed account:

Judge Orders Five Detainees Freed From Guantánamo

By William Glaberson

After the first hearing on the government’s evidence for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled on Thursday that five of the prisoners are not being lawfully held and ordered their release.

The case, involving six Algerians detained in Bosnia in 2001, was an important test of the Bush administration’s detention policies, which critics have long argued swept up innocent men and low-level foot soldiers along with high-level and hardened terrorists.

The hearings for the Algerian men, in which all evidence was heard in proceedings closed to the public, were the first in which the Department of Justice presented its full justification for holding specific detainees since the Supreme Court ruled in June that Guantánamo detainees have a constitutional right to contest their imprisonment in habeas corpus suits.

Ruling from the bench, Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington said that the information gathered on the men had been sufficient to hold them for intelligence purposes, but was not strong enough in court.

“To rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation,” he said. He directed that the five men be released “forthwith” and urged the government not to appeal.

Judge Leon, an appointee of the first President Bush, had been expected to be sympathetic to the government.

The decision, lawyers said, is likely to be seen as a major judicial repudiation of the Bush administration’s effort to use the detention center at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a way to avoid scrutiny by American judges. President-elect Obama has said he will close the prison.

Detainees’ lawyers said it was a vindication of their arguments for years. “The decision by Judge Leon lays bare the scandalous basis on which Guantánamo has been based — slim evidence of dubious quality,” Said Zachary Katznelson, legal director at Reprieve, a British legal group that represents many Guantánamo detainees. “This is a tough, no-nonsense judge.”

Because of the Bush administration’s claims that most of the evidence against the men was classified, Judge Leon ordered that, after brief opening statements on Nov. 5, the entire case was to be heard in a closed courtroom.

The government argued that the six Algerians, who were residents of Bosnia when they were first detained in 2001, were planning to go to Afghanistan to fight the United States and that one of them was a member of Al Qaeda.

The five other men include Lakhdar Boumediene, for whom the landmark Supreme Court ruling in June was named.

It was not immediately clear whether the government would appeal, but some lawyers said they considered an appeal likely.

The one detainee Judge Leon found was lawfully held was Bensayah Belkacem, who has been described by intelligence agencies as a leading Al Qaeda operative in Bosnia.

The case has become an example of the Bush administration’s pattern of changing legal strategy in its long legal war over Guantánamo, as the courts have scrutinized its justifications for its detention policies in general and its reasons for holding individual detainees.

In 2002, President Bush made the government’s allegations against the men a showcase of his administration’s anti-terrorism approach. He said in his state of the union address that the six men had been planning a bomb attack on the United States Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Last month, though, Department of Justice lawyers said they were no longer relying on those accusations to justify the men’s detention.

The habeas corpus cases have moved slowly despite the Supreme Court’s decision in June that directed federal judges in Washington to act quickly on the cases, after nearly seven years of detention for many of the 250 men still held in Guantánamo.

Another district court judge in Washington, Ricardo M. Urbina, ordered the release of 17 other detainees last month, all ethnic Uighurs from western China. But in that case, he did not hold a hearing on the evidence, because the government conceded that the men were not enemy combatants.

The Justice Department won a stay of Judge Urbina’ release order and is appealing it. Arguments in that case are scheduled for Monday in the Untied States Courts of Appeals in Washington.

Separately, this week the Justice Department filed legal motions seeking to stop more than 100 of the other Guantánamo habeas corpus cases from proceeding now, in a move that detainees lawyers said was a government effort to avoid further court scrutiny.

Department of Justice lawyers argued in motions filed Tuesday that there were flaws in the ground rules of other judges for the Guantánamo cases that would require the government, among other things, to reveal classified evidence.

Detainees’ lawyers said the ruling on Thursday by Judge Leon would indicate to other judges that they should be skeptical of the government’s efforts to delay hearings.

P. Sabin Willett, one of the lawyers for the Uighurs, said that Judge Leon’s decision “sends a powerful message to all the other judges to get these cases moving.”

J. Wells Dixon, a detainees’ lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the ruling made clear that Guantánamo Bay had failed. But, he said, “Justice comes too late for these five men.”

Add comment November 20th, 2008