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McClatchy Wa****ngton Bureau
Sun, Jun. 15, 2008
America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men
by Tom Lasseter
McClatchy Newspapers
GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as
he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at
the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
They shouted "Allahu Akbar" — God is great — as one of them hefted a
metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent
thick streams of blood running down his face.
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the
U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as
"the worst of the worst."
But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his
Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in
the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S.
forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed
"infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors
didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.
"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the
government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy.
Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information
that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three
continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and,
according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has
wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of
flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local
officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate
knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed
thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal do***ents and other records.
This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level
Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At
least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and
had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In
effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or
its allies.
The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom
they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.
Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and
interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way
stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.
While he was held at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, "When
I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, 'What is my crime?'
the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs."
The McClatchy re****ting also do***ented how U.S. detention policies
fueled sup****t for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who
went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a
school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.
Of course, Guantanamo also houses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged
mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who along with four other
high-profile detainees faces military commission charges. Cases also
have been opened against 15 other detainees for assorted offenses, such
as attending al Qaida training camps.
But because the Bush administration set up Guantanamo under special
rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges or federal court
challenge, it's impossible to know how many of the 770 men who've been
held there were terrorists.
A series of White House directives placed "suspected enemy combatants"
beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections
for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed
legislation that protected those detention rules.
However, the administration's attempts to keep the detainees beyond the
law came cra****ng down last week.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that detainees have the right to
contest their cases in federal courts, and that a 2006 act of Congress
forbidding them from doing so was unconstitutional. "Some of these
petitioners have been in custody for six years with no definitive
judicial determination as to the legality of their detention," the court
said in its 5-4 decision, overturning Bush administration policy and two
acts of Congress that codified it.
One former administration official said the White House's initial policy
and legal decisions "probably made instances of abuse more likely. ...
My sense is that decisions taken at the top probably sent a signal that
the old rules don't apply ... certainly some people read what was coming
out of Wa****ngton: The gloves are off, this isn't a Geneva world anymore."
Like many others who previously worked in the White House or Defense
Department, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of
the legal and political sensitivities of the issue.
McClatchy's interviews are the most ever conducted with former
Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee
backgrounds has previously been re****ted on by other media outlets, but
not as comprehensively.
McClatchy also in many cases did more research than either the U.S.
military at Guantanamo, which often relied on secondhand accounts, or
the detainees' lawyers, who relied mainly on the detainees' accounts.
The Pentagon declined to discuss the findings. It issued a statement
Friday saying that military policy always has been to treat detainees
humanely, to investigate credible complaints of abuse and to hold people
accountable. The statement says that an al Qaida manual urges detainees
to lie about prison conditions once they're released. "We typically do
not respond to each and every allegation of abuse made by past and
present detainees," the statement said.
LITTLE INTELLIGENCE VALUE
The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials
knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many
of the prisoners there weren't "the worst of the worst." From the moment
that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army
Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the
population didn't belong there.
Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates
that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups
or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot
soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew
nothing about global terrorism.
Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al
Qaida's leader****p, and it isn't clear that any of them knew any
terrorists of consequence.
If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication —
and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense
officials said in interviews that they are — most of the prisoners at
Guantanamo weren't terrorist masterminds but men who were of no
intelligence value in the war on terrorism.
Far from being an ally of the Taliban, Mohammed Akhtiar had fled to
Pakistan shortly after the puritanical Islamist group took power in
1996, the senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. The Taliban
burned down Akhtiar's house after he refused to ally his tribe with
their government.
The Americans detained Akhtiar, the intelligence officer said, because
they were given bad information by another Afghan who'd harbored a
personal vendetta against Akhtiar going back to his time as a commander
against the Soviet military during the 1980s.
"In some of these cases, tribal feuds and political feuds have played a
big role" in people getting sent to Guantanamo, the intelligence officer
said.
He didn't want his name used, partly because he didn't want to offend
the Western officials he works with and partly because Afghan
intelligence officers are assassinated regularly.
"There were Afghans being sent to Guantanamo because of bad
intelligence," said Helaluddin Helal, Afghanistan's deputy interior
minister for security from 2002 to early 2004. "In the beginning,
everyone was trying to give intelligence to the Americans ... the
Americans were taking action without checking this information."
Nusrat Khan was in his 70s when American troops shoved him into an
isolation cell at Bagram in the spring of 2003. They blindfolded him,
put earphones on his head and tied his hands behind his back for almost
four weeks straight, Khan said.
By the time he was taken out of the cell, Khan — who'd had at least two
strokes years before he was arrested and was barely able to walk — was
half-mad and couldn't stand without help. Khan said that he was taken to
Guantanamo on a stretcher.
Several Afghan officials, including the country's attorney general,
later said that Khan, who spent more than three years at Guantanamo,
wasn't a threat to anyone; he'd been turned in as an insurgent leader
because of decades-old rivalries with competing Afghan militias.
Ghalib Hassan was an Interior Ministry-appointed district commander in
Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, a man who'd risked his life to help
the U.S.-backed government. Din Mohammed, the former governor of that
province and now the governor of Kabul, said there was no question that
local tribal leaders, offended by Hassan's brusque style, fed false
information about him to local informants used by American troops.
The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the
secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy's findings. The
defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson,
refused to speak with McClatchy.
The Pentagon's only response to a series of written questions from
McClatchy, and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed
for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.
"These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the
struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of
innocent civilians," Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided
no examples.
Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at
Guantanamo, said that detainees had supplied crucial information about
al Qaida, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.
"Included with the folks that were brought here in 2002 were, by and
large, the main leader****p of al Qaida and the Taliban," he said in a
phone interview.
Buzby agreed, however, that some detainees were from the bottom rung.
"It's all about developing the mosaic ... there's value to both ends of
the spectrum," he said.
Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said
McClatchy's conclusions squared with their own observations.
"As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of
telling the people writing re****ts based on their interrogations that
their material was essentially worthless," a U.S. intelligence officer
said in an e-mail, using the military's slang for Guantanamo.
Guantanamo authorities periodically sent analysts at the U.S. Central
Command "rap sheets on various prisoners and asked our *****sment
whether they merited continued confinement," said the analyst, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
"Over about three years, I *****sed around 40 of these individuals,
mostly Afghans. ... I only can remember recommending that ONE should be
kept at GITMO."
'WAR COUNCIL' REWRITES DETAINEE LAW
At a Pentagon briefing in the spring of 2002, a senior Army intelligence
officer expressed doubt about the entire intelligence-gathering process.
"He said that we're not getting anything, and his thought was that we're
not getting anything because there might not be anything to get," said
Donald J. Guter, a retired rear admiral who was the head of the Navy's
Judge Advocate General's Corps at the time.
Many detainees were "swept up in the pot" by large operations conducted
by Afghan troops allied with the Americans, said former Army Secretary
White, who's now a partner at DKRW Energy, an energy company in Houston.
One of the Afghan detainees at Guantanamo, White recalled, was more than
80 years old.
Army Spc. Eric Barclais, who was a military intelligence interrogator at
Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan from September 2002 through January 2003,
told military investigators in sworn testimony that "We recommended lots
of folks be released from (Bagram), but they were not. I believe some
people ended up at (Guantanamo) that had no business being sent there."
"You have to understand some folks were detained because they got turned
in by neighbors or family members who were feuding with them," Barclais
said. "Yes, they had weapons. Everyone had weapons. Some were Soviet-era
and could not even be fired."
A former Pentagon official told McClatchy that he was shocked at times
by the backgrounds of men held at Guantanamo.
" 'Captured with weapon near the Pakistan border?' " the official said.
"Are you kidding me?"
"The screening, the understanding of who we had was horrible," he said.
"That's why we had so many useless people at Gitmo."
In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo
and re****ted to senior National Security Council officials that many of
them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.
Despite the analyst's findings, the administration made no further
review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that
all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.
Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of
five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called
themselves the "War Council" devised a legal framework that enabled the
administration to detain suspected "enemy combatants" indefinitely with
few legal rights.
The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed
President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international
treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited
detentions and harsh interrogations.
The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend
themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council
members, their bosses and Bush — should be ****elded from prosecution for
actions that many experts argue are war crimes.
With the sup****t of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in
February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled
out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners
of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.
The Bush administration didn't launch a formal review of the detentions
until a 2004 Supreme Court decision forced it to begin holding military
tribunals at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court ruling last week said that
the tribunals were deeply flawed, but it didn't close them down.
In late 2004, Pentagon officials decided to restrict further
interrogations at Guantanamo to detainees who were considered "high
value" for their suspected knowledge of terrorist groups or their
potential of returning to the battlefield, according to Matthew Waxman,
who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs,
the Defense Department's head official for detainee matters, from August
2004 to December 2005.
"Maybe three-quarters of the detainees by 2005 were no longer regularly
interrogated," said Waxman, who's now a law professor at Columbia
University.
At that time, about 500 men were still being held at Guantanamo.
So far, the military commissions have publicly charged only six
detainees — less than 1 percent of the more than 770 who've been at
Guantanamo — with direct involvement in the 9-11 terrorist attacks; they
dropped the charges in one case. Those few cases are now in question
after the high court's ruling Thursday.
About 500 detainees — nearly two out of three — have been released.
During a military review board hearing at Guantanamo, Mohammed Akhtiar
had some advice for the U.S. officers seated before him.
"I wish," he said, "that the United States would realize who the bad
guys are and who the good guys are."
HOW FOOT SOLDIERS, FARMERS GOT SWEPT UP
How did the United States come to hold so many farmers and goat herders
among the real terrorists at Guantanamo? Among the reasons:
After conceding control of the country to U.S.-backed Afghan forces in
late 2001, top Taliban and al Qaida leaders escaped to Pakistan, leaving
the battlefield filled with ragtag groups of volunteers and conscripts
who knew nothing about global terrorism.
The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody
indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani
police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged im****tance of
the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars,
but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties —
advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in
late 2001 — there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the
detainees' backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees — 22 out
of 66 — whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S.
forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who'd been captured around mid-2002
or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, a fight
that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.
American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false re****ts
passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges
in Afghanistan, a nation that had experienced more than two decades of
occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that
Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant
connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom
the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were
innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with
Afghan intelligence and security officials.
Detainees at Guantanamo had no legal venue in which to challenge their
detentions. The only mechanism set up to evaluate their status, an
internal tribunal in the late summer of 2004, rested on the decisions of
rotating panels of three U.S. military officers. The tribunals made
little effort to find witnesses who weren't present at Guantanamo, and
detainees were in no position to challenge the allegations against them.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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