Guantanamo: Now at Bagram

by Andy Worthington

Back in September 2005, when I first began researching Guantánamo for my book The Guantánamo Files, the prison was still shrouded in mystery, even though attorneys had been visiting prisoners for nearly a year, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2004, that they had habeas corpus rights.

Researchers at the Washington Post and at Cageprisoners, a human rights organization in the U.K., had compiled tentative lists of who was being held, but, although these efforts were commendable, much of it was little more than groping in the dark — a broken jigsaw puzzle based on media reports and interviews with released prisoners — because the Bush administration refused to provide details of the names and nationalities of those it was holding.

In April 2006 — four years and three months after Guantánamo opened — the government finally conceded defeat, after the Associated Press took the Pentagon to court, and won. That month, the first ever list of prisoners — containing the names and nationalities of the 558 prisoners who had been subjected to the administration’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals (one-sided reviews, designed to rubberstamp their prior designation as “enemy combatants”) — was released, and was followed in May by a list of the 759 prisoners held up to that point (including the 201 who had been released before the tribunals began), which included names, nationalities, and, where known, dates of birth and places of birth.

The government also released 8,000 pages of tribunal transcripts and allegations against the prisoners, which pierced the veil of secrecy still further, allowing outside observers, as well as lawyers, the opportunity to examine whether the government’s claims that the prison was full of terrorists were true, and to conclude that, actually, the prison was largely populated by innocent men or low-level Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the 9/11 attacks, and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism.

These records revealed that an overwhelming majority of the men had not been seized by U.S. forces on the battlefield, but had been sold to them by their Afghan or Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments were widespread, and — perhaps most shockingly — the transcripts also revealed that a vast amount of the government’s supposed evidence consisted not of verifiable facts, but of “confessions” made by other prisoners — or by the prisoners themselves — under unknown circumstances. A great deal of demonstrably unreliable information was attributed to unidentified figures in al-Qaeda — in general, the “high-value detainees,” including Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who were being held in secret CIA prisons where the use of torture had been sanctioned by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, in its notorious “torture memos.”

Other information came from unidentified “sources” within Guantánamo, and in the last year, as judges have finally been able to examine these allegations in the District Courts charged with hearing the prisoners’ habeas corpus cases, many of these sources have been revealed as deeply untrustworthy: talkative informants regarded with suspicion by many of those working behind the scenes in the military and other agencies; mentally ill prisoners; and others whose accounts have not stood up to outside scrutiny, and have been revealed as part of a supposed “mosaic” of intelligence that, as one judge, Gladys Kessler, declared in May, “is only as persuasive as the tiles which compose it and the glue which binds them together.” As I explained at the time, Judge Kessler “then proceeded to highlight a catalog of deficiencies in the tiles and the glue,” dismissing the “mosaic” as being “composed of second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions.”

In addition, although few of the prisoners were willing to talk to a panel of the military officers about how they had been abused in U.S. custody, enough accounts emerged for lawyers and observers (who also drew on official reports about how torture techniques, used in U.S. military schools to train U.S. military personnel to resist enemy interrogation, had been reverse engineered for use at Guantánamo) to build up their own, more convincing “mosaic” of intelligence, demonstrating that abuse — and, in some cases, torture — was also widespread throughout Guantánamo, raising fears that even confessions that appeared legitimate were fatally tainted because they had been extracted using coercion.

It would be difficult to underestimate how important the release of these documents was to those engaged in a seemingly endless struggle to secure justice for those held without charge or trial, who had, in general, been rounded up indiscriminately, and had never been adequately screened to determine whether they constituted a threat to the U.S. or its allies. However, over three years on from the release of these lists — and eight months into the Obama administration — history is repeating itself at the U.S. prison in Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. The difference, however, is that at Bagram the clock has stopped before any painful details of incompetence have been released, leaving lawyers and other observers still groping in the dark.

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