The first fruit of my research was my book The Guantánamo Files, in which, based on an exhaustive analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon (plus other sources), I related the story of Guantánamo, established a chronology explaining where and when the prisoners were seized, told the stories of around 450 of these men (and boys), and provided a context for the circumstances in which the remainder of the prisoners were captured.

I’ve also been tracking the Obama administration’s stumbling progress towards closing the prison, reporting the stories of the 41 prisoners released since March, and covering other aspects of the Guantánamo story.

Overall, as it stood at December 31, 2009, 574 prisoners had been released from Guantánamo (42 under Obama), one — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani — had been transferred to the US mainland to face a federal court trial, six had died, and 198 remained.

One man, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence after a one-sided trial by Military Commission in 2008.

To this I would only add that, nearly a year after President Obama took office, I hope that the list and its references provide a useful antidote to the current scaremongering regarding the failed Christmas plane bomber, Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and his alleged ties with one — just one — of the 574 prisoners released from Guantánamo, in a Yemen-based al-Qaeda cell.

This purported connection is being used by those who want the evil stain of Guantánamo to endure forever to argue that no more of the Yemenis — who make up nearly half of the remaining prisoners — should be released.

This is even though the ex-prisoner in question is a Saudi, even though no more than a dozen or so of the 574 prisoners released have gone on to have any involvement whatsoever with terrorism, and even though all of these men were released during the presidency of George W. Bush.

One year ago, it looked feasible that Guantánamo would close by January 2010. We now know that President Obama’s self-imposed deadline will be missed, partly through the unprincipled agitating of opportunistic opponents in Congress and the media, and partly through the government’s own lack of courage in the face of this opposition.

But this is no reason for complacency.

As the eighth anniversary of the prison’s opening approaches, it remains imperative that those who oppose the existence of indefinite detention without charge or trial maintain the pressure to close Guantánamo. We need to instead, for the full reinstatement of the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war, and federal court trials for terrorists —

And to charge or release the prisoners held there as swiftly as possible.

Mr. Mohamed’s lawyers have spent over three years attempting to secure information proving that their client, seized in Pakistan in April 2002, was rendered by the CIA to 18 months of torture in Morocco, and was then transferred to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, before arriving in Guantánamo in September 2004.

The Home Secretary’s unprecedented decision was based on evidence uncovered during a judicial review of Mr. Mohamed’s case in the High Court this summer. This established that an MI5 agent had acted illegally when he interrogated Mr. Mohamed during his “unlawful” detention in Pakistani custody, but there is clearly more to the story, involving other evidence of the activities of both MI5 and the CIA. Much of this was only heard in closed sessions in the High Court, when the agent was being cross-examined, but the judges also gave weight to an admission, on behalf the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, that Mr. Mohamed had “established an arguable case” that he had been subjected to torture in US control.

For defenders of the absolute ban on torture, the decision demonstrates that, whatever the circumstances, the use of torture can neither be condoned nor hidden forever. Back in 2002, when CIA planes were criss-crossing the globe, rendering kidnapped “terror suspects” to prisons in other countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Syria, where they could be either “disappeared” or tortured on America’s behalf, few of the European countries who aided the United States in its policies of “extraordinary rendition” and torture bothered to think about the consequences.

Either through ferocious diplomatic pressure, or because they had bought into the “War on Terror” rhetoric, countries including Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK provided key intelligence identifying suspects, assisted the kidnappings, interviewed prisoners when they were being held illegally, or provided information about them when they were already held in unknown conditions and in unknown locations.

For the Bush administration, none of this was regarded as a problem. Using wartime powers granted by Congress after the 9/11 attacks, the US government believed that national security concerns trumped its obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions, and in secret memos, lawyers close to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was driving the policies, granted the CIA unfettered powers to deal with “terror suspects,” sought to redefine torture, and, from the summer of 2002 onwards, authorized the CIA to run its own secret torture prisons.

Although the US administration, in its dying days, has so far managed to avoid accountability for its actions within the United States, its policies — and the actions of other countries who provided assistance — have come under increasing scrutiny in Europe.

In November 2006, the UN declared that the Swedish government had violated the universal torture ban in December 2001, when it handed over two Egyptian asylum seekers, Mohammed al-Zari and Ahmed Agiza, to the CIA. The men were then rendered to Egypt, where they were tortured, in spite of a “diplomatic assurance” from the Egyptian government, secured by the Swedes before the rendition took place, which purported to guarantee that they would be treated humanely.

Last year, in Germany and Italy, arrest warrants were issued for a number of CIA agents involved in the kidnapping, rendition and torture of two other men, Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen who was kidnapped in Macedonia and rendered to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, because he shared a name with someone who had allegedly aided the 9/11 hijackers, and Abu Omar, a cleric who was kidnapped in a Milan street in February 2003 and rendered to Egypt.

But while these cases have, to some extent, become mired in red tape, the latest developments in Binyam Mohamed’s case hold out the hope that, with the demise of the Bush administration, the absolute ban on the use of torture will be vigorously reinstated, if not voluntarily, then through court cases establishing that complicity in torture is unforgiveable.

In the 1960s, Diego Garcia, the centerpiece of the Chagos Islands (which are part of the British Overseas Territories) was leased to the United States for use as a strategically important airbase.

The deal had two crucial components: one was a sizeable discount on Trident Polaris, Britain’s nuclear missile programme, and the other was the removal from the islands (to a life of poverty in Mauritius and the Seychelles) of the 2,000 inconvenient British subjects (the “residents”), who traced their ancestry back nearly 200 years to African- and Indian-born labourers from Mauritius, shipped in by French coconut planters in the years before Napoleon’s fall and the transfer of the islands’ sovereignty to the UK.

To be honest, the Chagossians never stood a chance, even though their long legal struggle had secured significant victories. In 2000, when the High Court ruled that the islanders’ expulsion had been illegal, foreign secretary Robin Cook made it clear that he supported their case, but was overruled by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who blocked their return by “orders in council,” an ancient royal prerogative that conveniently bypassed parliament.

In 2006, three judges, declaring that Blair’s actions were illegitimate, upheld the islanders’ right to return, ordering the government to pay their legal costs and attempting to withhold support for an appeal to the House of Lords, and in May 2007 the court of appeal upheld that decision, ruling that the British government’s removal of the men, who, as the Guardian explained, were “tricked out of their homes, encouraged to leave on temporary trips, and not allowed back,” was an “abuse of power.”

Nevertheless, the importance of Diego Garcia to the US government in the years since the 9/11 attacks has ensured that Tony Blair’s relentless support of the Bush administration would trump Robin Cook’s almost forgotten attempts to secure an “ethical” foreign policy for the UK. In the persistent warmongering of the last seven years, Diego Garcia’s strategic importance to the US has been more pronounced than ever.

The first ground troops in the Afghan invasion set off from Diego Garcia, countless bombers have used the base as they have embarked on the missions that have killed so many civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, perhaps most importantly, other planes have arrived bearing precious cargo: allegedly important prisoners in the “War on Terror.” Some, like the Australian David Hicks and Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, were interrogated, in the early days of the “War on Terror,” in the bowels of ships moored off the coast of Diego Garcia, and others, it appears, were held in a secret prison on Diego Garcia itself, as I reported in an article this summer.

Set against such an important component in the “War on Terror,” therefore, it was clear that the demands of the Chagossians were never going to succeed. However, what made the verdict particularly galling, beyond the spinelessness of the Lords, was a statement by the current foreign secretary David Miliband — who has yet to explain in a satisfactory manner if the British government actually knew anything about a secret prison on Diego Garcia — in which he noted “the government’s regret at the way the resettlement of the Chagossians was carried out in the 1960s and 1970s and at the hardship that followed for some of them.”

It was a classic New Labour moment: an apparent gesture of contrition from a government that likes to say sorry for historic crimes, but that refuses to do anything about its own.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and a regular commentator on US politics and the “War on Terror.” Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk

The issue is unfettered executive power, and it has been manifested, to the horror of the world, and the dismay of Americans who pride themselves on being a nation founded on the rule of law, in the endorsement of torture as official US policy, the transformation of the CIA into an organization that has run a colossal “extraordinary rendition programme” and a network of secret prisons around the world, and the detention of thousands of prisoners without charge or trial in a legal black hole between the Geneva Conventions and the US court system.

In Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, over 20,000 prisoners in US custody are held neither as Prisoners of War, who would be protected from “humiliating and degrading treatment” and coercive interrogations by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects who will be tried in a US court. The only trials put forward by the government — the Military Commissions at Guantánamo — are so tainted by accusations of pro-prosecution bias and the suppression of exculpatory evidence that the administration is fighting a losing battle to establish their legitimacy, nearly seven years after they were set up by Dick Cheney and David Addington.

In John McCain’s case, his refusal to discuss executive overreach is understandable. Republicans have been encouraged to endorse without question the bellicose rhetoric of the “War on Terror” and to turn a blind eye to the government’s shredding of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Forget the rights of foreign prisoners; warrantless wiretapping and the President’s self-declared right to imprison anyone as an “enemy combatant” — even American citizens — have been sold as vital steps to protect America, rather than a naked power grab by a Vice President who believes, above all, in unfettered executive power.

Although McCain has stated that he wants to close Guantánamo, and has often declared his opposition to the use of torture by US forces, he has flip-flopped horribly as the election has approached. Back in February, he conveniently shelved his lifelong opposition to torture by voting against a bill banning the use of torture by the CIA, and after the Supreme Court ruled, in June, that the prisoners at Guantánamo have constitutional habeas corpus rights, he declared that it was “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

The disappointment, therefore, is in Barack Obama’s unwillingness to tackle the administration’s crimes head-on. His team has presumably discovered that neither the plight of prisoners held beyond the law nor the executive’s dictatorial power grab is of paramount importance to voters, but this is lamentable for two reasons: firstly, because Obama clearly both knows and cares about the law, and secondly because it is the Bush administration’s quest for unfettered executive power that has led to almost all the ills that currently plague the United States.

On respecting the law, Obama has a proven track record. He has worked with lawyers representing the Guantánamo prisoners, and has consistently voted against ill-conceived “War on Terror” legislation. Last August, in a speech in Washington D.C., he touched on all the issues that are currently lacking in his campaign:

In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values. What could have been a call to a generation has become an excuse for unchecked presidential power. A tragedy that united us was turned into a political wedge issue used to divide us.

And as recently as June, after the Supreme Court’s ruling, he declared that the ruling was “an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.”

This is not only fine oratory; it is also, I believe, essential to Obama’s campaign for change. In order to demonstrate quite how different he is from the Republicans who have brought the country to the brink of ruin, he should use his opposition to the Iraq war as a springboard for an assault on the executive’s power grab, in which all the horrors of the “War on Terror”, outlined above, would also be included. Instead of playing on the folly of an expensive war without end, he should be focusing on the war’s origins, and nailing it as the supreme gesture of a power-crazed executive, acting without restraint and with the arrogant assumption that it has destroyed both the “quaint” principles on which the United States was founded, and the separation of powers that was established to prevent tyranny.

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Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and a regular commentator on US politics and the “War on Terror.” Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk

Even when they were about to release him, the US military was unwilling to treat Sami al-Haj with dignity.

The final days in Guantánamo Bay were very hard. There had been so many false promises that Sami was still uncertain whether he was going to leave, and for the last 15 days he stopped drinking water, in addition to refusing food. Only the food and liquid forced into him kept him alive.

The Admiral came himself to process Sami out. He brought a paper and read it out before telling Sami to sign it. The paper said that Sami recognized the right of the United States to take him as a prisoner again if he did anything wrong. Sami refused. He explained that I, as his lawyer, had told him not to sign any such document.

At around 7 pm on April 30, Sami was taken to the airport. The aircraft waiting was similar to the one that had originally brought him from Afghanistan. Sami and the eight prisoners released with him had to enter through the rear of the plane. Like each man, Sami had his eyes covered, muffs on his ears, and shackles on both his hands and legs. The plane took off at about 10.30pm that night on the first leg of the journey, a 15-hour flight to Baghdad, Iraq.

“When I first requested the toilet the guards said it was not allowed,” Sami said. “So I said I would do it in the chair.” The guards then took him to the toilet, but they would not close the door, unshackle his hands, or take off the eye cover.

They said that they would pull his trousers down and sit him down, and added that he would not be allowed to use the tap to wash afterwards. Eventually, after much argument about how this was senseless and uncivilized, Sami said that he could not use the toilet at all under these circumstances.

Sami ate nothing on the flight. In truth, he never intended to, as he had vowed to himself that he would remain on hunger strike until he was safely in Sudan. He had resolved that he would only break his protest by asking his wife to feed him – his first normal food for 16 months.

Baghdad was only a stopover. Everyone had to change planes. On the second leg of the flight, it was another four hours to Khartoum, a total of twenty in all. By the end, Sami was weak, far weaker than when he left the prison in Cuba.

Even then, the American soldiers were not content to set him free. Before turning him over to the Sudanese authorities, they took off the metal cuffs, but replaced them with plastic restraints, so tight that they cut into his wrists.

“After the plane, the first thing I knew, I was here in the hospital,” Sami told me. Earlier, a member of the medical staff had taken me aside to describe how they had feared for him when he had been transferred from the American soldiers onto a hospital gurney. He had been almost unconscious, and his life signs had dropped to dangerously weak levels. For a while, it seemed that Sami had only come home to die.

It was a strange contrast to Guantánamo, where I recently met a shackled Sami in Camp Iguana. Now we were talking in the VIP room of the Khartoum hospital, with Sami wearing the white traditional robe of a Sudanese, smiling at those around him, and gently instructing his seven-year old son Mohammed to pass around the tin of sweets.

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Edited down by Andy Worthington. The full version of this article is here.

The Media Guardian this week also published a longer story on the story of Sami al-Haj.

Although 464 of these men have now been released – or, in rather fewer cases, transferred to the custody of their home governments – their stories remain largely unknown, as do those of the majority of the 310 detainees still held at Guantánamo.

In February 2006, when I first began researching the detainees’ stories, it was this combination of factors – the exceptional flight from domestic and international law on the part of US administration, and the fact that almost nothing was known about the men imprisoned in Guantánamo – that first prompted me to action.

In the first weeks of my research I was restricted, like everyone else who had attempted to answer the question, “Who is in Guantánamo?” to news reports and interviews with released detainees, and trawls for information that were often based on little more than gossip and rumour.

Those who had been before me, attempting to extract information from the prison’s fortress-like seclusion, were, primarily, teams at Alasra, a Saudi-based Arabic language website, the Washington Post and the British human rights group Cageprisoners.

All this changed in a two-month period, from March to May, when the Associated Press, which had requested documents relating to the detainees under Freedom of Information legislation, but had been turned down by the Pentagon, took the government to court and won. The released documents contained, for the first time, the names and nationalities of all the detainees, and their ISNs – the Internment Serial Numbers by which they were all identified, having been shorn of their identities as part of the dehumanizing process of detention and interrogation.

Also released were 8,000 pages of transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which had been convened to assess whether, on capture, the detainees had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants,” and the annual Administrative Review Boards, convened to assess whether the detainees were still a threat to the United States and/or still had ongoing “intelligence value.”

The tribunals were instigated in the wake of a momentous Supreme Court decision, in June 2004, that Guantánamo – leased from Cuba since 1903, and chosen as a prison location because it was presumed to be beyond the reach of the US courts – was in fact US sovereign territory, and that the detainees had the right to challenge the basis of their detention. These tribunals were, of course, both a lamentable and an illegal response to the Supreme Court ruling.

Although the justices’ decision allowed the detainees, for the first time, to seek legal representation, they were not allowed lawyers in their tribunals, which were also criticized for relying on classified evidence that could have been – and in some cases clearly was – obtained through torture, coercion and bribery, either of other detainees in Guantánamo or of various “high-value” suspects held in a shadowy network of secret prisons run by the CIA.

These transcripts, and those of the subsequent review boards, were, however, the only means whereby the detainees were allowed to tell their own stories, and it was through a detailed analysis of these documents – transcribed and cross-referenced with the names, nationalities and ISNs of the detainees – that I was able to put together, for the first time, a chronology of the circumstances of each detainee’s capture, whether in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, crossing the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan, or in 17 other countries where they were seized and subjected to “extraordinary rendition.”

As I gave voices to the previously mute detainees, I also came to understand how it was that so many of the men appeared to have nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda and 9/11. Although many were Taliban foot soldiers, they were largely recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war with the Northern Alliance, which began long before 9/11, and there were, moreover, many hundreds of completely innocent men – humanitarian aid workers, missionaries, religious students, entrepreneurs, economic migrants and drifters – who were sold to the Americans for bounty payments, averaging $5,000 a head, by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, or by unscrupulous citizens and villagers.

In the cases of the Afghans, who comprised over a quarter of the prison’s population, Taliban conscripts, forced to join the Taliban on pain of death, jostled with farmers, taxi drivers and pro-American, pro-Karzai soldiers and political leaders. Taking advantage of the gullibility of the US military and its Special Forces, whose intelligence gathering capabilities, in this as in so much of the “War on Terror,” were sorely lacking, most of these men were betrayed by rivals or swept up during raids based on untrustworthy tip-offs.

This is not to say that there were no dangerous prisoners amongst those who ended up in American custody. Several dozen of the detainees, at least, were members of, or actively affiliated with al-Qaeda, and it’s probable that, amongst those claiming to be nothing more than Taliban foot soldiers, there were some who were committed to Osama bin Laden’s global, anti-American jihad.

However, the correct venue for these allegations to be tested was – and still is – in a court of law, not in a dangerously novel prison environment where, in the name of extracting information from uncooperative detainees (with no consideration of whether they were not forthcoming because they had no information to give), torture became a substitute for the skilled gathering of intelligence, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention Against Torture, the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution were shredded with impunity, and the rigged tribunals – the basis of my research – were instigated, based largely on “confessions” by other detainees, in an attempt to disguise the manifest failures of the whole malign experiment.

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This is a guest post.
Andy’s book, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, is published by Pluto Press.
The official launch takes place on Wednesday November 28 at Bookmarks, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE. All are welcome and admission is free, but please call Bookmarks on 020 7637 1848 to reserve a place.

Andy will be joined for the launch by released British detainee Moazzam Begg and Zachary Katznelson, senior counsel for Reprieve, the London-based legal charity that represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees. As well as discussing the book, they will be talking about the plight of the six British residents still held in Guantánamo, conditions in the prison today, and attempts by the US and UK governments to bypass international safeguards preventing the return of men to regimes where they face the risk of torture.