[Vision2020] McClatchy Newspaper Report on Detainees

Wed Jun 25 10:29:42 PDT 2008

Hail to the Vision!

My radio commentary today is on the torture of detainees at Gitmo, the Afghan prisons, and CIA secret prisons.  I will post my column later today.

Reporters from the McClatchy newspapers tracked down 66 former detainees and determined that two thirds of them were not terrorists.  A goodly number of them were picked up by mistake, or turned in by personal enemies or Pakistani intelligence for bounties ranging from $3,000-5,000.  Some were arrested simply because they had an AK-47 in their houses, a normal state of affairs in Western Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iraq.  Indeed, American authorities allow it in Iraq.

Below are selections from two McClatchy articles and attached are the full articles plus a summary of Murat Kurnaz's story, a young Turk with German citizenship.  In November 2001 Kurnaz went to Pakistan to study how to be a good Muslim husband.  He was sold to the U.S. military for $3,000 by Pakistani agents, and spent 5 years in Bagram and Gitmo, even though as early as 2002 he was cleared of any charges by German intelligence.

Here are the selections, which ends with a description of the deadly conditions for detainees at Bagram Air Force base.

"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.

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.

. . .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 McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support 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.

. . .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.

. . .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.

. . .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 leadership, and it isn't clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.

. . .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.

. . .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 reports 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 assessment 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 assessed around 40 of these individuals, mostly Afghans. ... I only can remember recommending that ONE should be kept at GITMO."

. . .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."

. . ."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 reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn't belong there, a former White House official said.

. . .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.

. . . One Afghan whom McClatchy interviewed might have been cleared readily had the tribunal undertaken the most basic steps. Swatkhan Bahar had to beg for help from the three U.S. military officers who presided over his tribunal at Guantanamo during the summer of 2004.

U.S. authorities accused Bahar of helping Taliban forces attack American soldiers, according to an unclassified transcript of the proceedings. Speak with someone from Afghanistan, Bahar pleaded, and you will find out who I am: an employee of the Afghan Interior Ministry in Khost and a friend of the Americans.

A Marine colonel replied that no witnesses were available from outside Guantanamo to testify on Bahar's behalf. It took a McClatchy reporter only a couple of phone calls to find Mohammed Mustafa, who was the Afghan Interior Ministry's security chief for Khost from late 2001 to mid-2003. Mustafa confirmed much of Bahar's story: He said that a rival in the Afghan security services had framed Bahar.

. . .That appears to be true in the case of Ali Shah Mousavi. A former member of Afghanistan's interim loya jirga, the first democratic legislative body formed after the Taliban fell, Mousavi is a Shiite Muslim, a sect that the Taliban oppressed and al Qaida often targeted for death as heretics.

The American officers at Mousavi's tribunal said he was accused of being a Taliban and al Qaida supporter. The officers apparently hadn't spoken with witnesses from Afghanistan. If they had, Abdul Jabar Sabit, the country's attorney general, would have told them differently.

Sabit interviewed Mousavi at Guantanamo, where the attorney general was given a briefing by American military officials about the charges against Mousavi. "He was there because of the Kalashnikov. ... His house was searched and two Kalashnikovs were discovered, and that was enough for the Americans," Sabit said in a conversation at his Kabul office. Kalashnikovs, also known as AK-47s, can be found in virtually every household in Afghanistan.

A second senior Afghan official confirmed Sabit's account. "There was a feud, and he was handed over to the Americans even though he was innocent," said an intelligence officer who's met Mousavi and reviewed his case several times. "He is actually very pro-government."

. . . According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn't a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

. . .Nazar Gul was of even less intelligence value. None of the Afghan security or intelligence officials whom McClatchy interviewed said they'd heard of Gul, making it unlikely that he was the dangerous insurgent the U.S. said he was.
Gul's American attorney, Ruben L. Iniguez, went to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2006 to check the details of his story of working as a guard for the Afghan government, and later said in sworn court filings — which included videotaped testimony by witnesses — and in an interview with McClatchy that every fact checked out.

When U.S. soldiers raided the house he was visiting, acting on a tip from a tribal rival who was seeking revenge against another man, they apparently confused Gul with a militant with a similar name — who was also imprisoned at Guantanamo, according to an Afghan intelligence official and Gul's American lawyer.

. . .American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, as if they were corralling livestock. The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

. . .The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists. Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He'd been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.

. . .Spc. Jeremy Callaway, who admitted to striking about 12 detainees at Bagram, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he was uncomfortable following orders to "mentally and physically break the detainees." He didn't go into detail. "I guess you can call it torture," said Callaway, who served in the 377th from August 2002 to January 2003.

. . .The mistreatment of detainees at Bagram, some legal experts said, may have been a violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which forbids violence against or humiliating treatment of detainees.
The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 imposes penalties up to death for such mistreatment.

Nick Gier
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