The transcripts and audio tapes of Guantanamo Bay detainee Combatant Status Review Tribunals from today’s story on NPR are damning. Even our worst serial killers are guaranteed more than those detained under suspicion. There is no speedy trial, no lawyer, no true opportunity to present witnesses. The law was twisted to support twisted policy.
Briefly: the detainees are present only for the unclassified portion of the tribunal, so they don’t know what, if any, evidence is being used against them (and so, cannot counter it). The unclassified evidence is paltry, consisting basically of a list of the allegations and habeas corpus petitions.
Some 430 men are currently imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. But look beyond the numbers. Look at the people.
One detainee asked that his supervisor at the Red Crescent Society in Bosnia testify at the proceeding. He is told that a request was made twice to the U.S. State Department, which handles the matter; each time, the date of the tribunal was emphasized. The tribunal president says there was no response from the State Department to either request.
In some cases, the detainees’ representatives don’t know what efforts have or are being made to locate requested evidence. The only witnesses available to Ait Idir and Boudella are the other men they were arrested with.
Lawyers for six Algerians got the tapes thanks to the FOIA. Their clients had been acquitted by a Bosnian court of plotting to bomb embassies in Bosnia. They walked out of the court free men, only to be immediately nabbed and jettisoned into Guantanamo Bay. That was in 2001. Their tribunals took place in 2004. They have been imprisoned nearly five years without being charged with a crime.
From three of the tribunal transcript excerpts published by Mother Jones:
Detainee 024, a 24-year-old British citizen named Feroz Ali Abbasi, was released and sent back to England in January 2005.
abbasi: So, you are telling me I am an enemy combatant. I am telling you by special Geneva Conventions, I am a non-combatant….
tribunal president:Once again, international law does not matter here. Geneva Convention does not matter here. What matters here and I am concerned about and what I really want to get to is your status as enemy combatant based upon the evidence that has been provided and your actions while you were in Afghanistan. If you deviate from that one more time you will be removed from this tribunal and we will continue to hear evidence without you being present….
abbasi: I know, but I have the right to speak….
tribunal president:No, you don’t.
abbasi: And the personal representative [assigned by the military, not his attorney] told me I can say whatever I like.
tribunal president:He was mistaken if he told you that….
… I don’t care about international law. … We are not concerned with international law.
Detainee 369, Adel Fattough Ali Algazzar, an Egyptian arrested in Pakistan.
tribunal member: … These are all the accusations. What we will get in the classified session is in theory evidence to support these accusations, but there are no other accusations against you besides what is listed here.
algazzar:I understand that but what I mean is if you say I am an enemy combatant and you say you have evidence, I don’t get to see it. Then I will stay here….
tribunal member: Do you have any theories about why the government and the Pakistani intel folks would sell you out and turn you over to the Americans?
algazzar:Come on, man, you know what happened. In Pakistan you can buy people for $10. So what about $5,000?
tribunal member: So they sold you?
algazzar:Yes.
Detainee 581 was accused of being Abdur Zahid Rahman, the Taliban’s former deputy foreign minister. He explained to the tribunal that he was, in fact, Abdur Sayed Rahman.
rahman: The entire time I have been here, I have not seen anything proving that I did anything wrong…. I have been here for three years and the past three years, whatever I say, nobody believes me…. I never even hit my own child at home. Why would I go and torture and murder someone?… The only time I have ever been in Afghanistan was for two days to attend a funeral…. I was only a chicken farmer in Pakistan.
An attorney for detainee Al-Ghizzawi, H. Candace Gorman, wrote an excellent blog of outrage about her client’s treatment. Al-Ghizzawi has never been charged with a crime.
When a court finally ordered the government to give her a transcript of his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, she discovered there had been two tribunals. He was three years in detention when the first tribunal found him NOT an enemy combatant. Instead of freeing him, the military held a second hearing five weeks later, in Washington, and never told him about it. This tribunal reversed his fate, deciding he was, indeed, an enemy combatant. The basis? Secret new evidence.
Gorman went to Washington to review this “secret” evidence. There was none. The evidence was not only not secret, it wasn’t even new. It included the originals of innocuous letters from her client to her, all translated by the government from the Arabic before copies were faxed to her. They should have been privileged as attorney-client communication.
Mr. Al-Ghizzawi, an innocent man, has been and continues to be held at Guantánamo for almost five years now. He is suffering from liver disease and not being treated. He is dying because the criminals running our country cannot admit the awful truth that Mr. Al-Ghizzawi (and countless others) were captured and are being held by mistake.
Released this week is the Report on Guantanamo Detainees by Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux and his son, Joshua Denbeaux, lawyers for two Guantanamo detainees, after analysis of 393 tribunal transcripts with the assistance of two dozen law students. Among the detainees determined not to be enemy combatants are some two dozen Uighurs, a Turkic people who fled persecution in China. Initially, the Uighers were found to be enemy combatants, because they were
- Muslim
- in Afghanistan
- associated with unidentified individuals or groups
- possessed Kalishnikovs
- stayed in guest houses
- were captured in Pakistan
- by bounty hunters.
Many released detainees (not enemy combatants after all) are now men without countries. Nobody wants them. China was willing to accept five Uighers, but would try them on terrorist charges. Eventually the Pentagon transferred five Uighurs, an Uzbek, an Egyptian, and an Algerian to Albania.
Someone at the Pentagon who consumes too many strange mushrooms wrote:
Our key objective has been to resettle these detainees in an environment that will permit them to rebuild their lives. Albania will provide this opportunity.
It’s only a rumor that Bush is planning to retire to Albania. What the Pentagon sees as a land of opportunity for former detainees makes USAID shudder.
Impeding Albania’s democratic and economic development is the legacy of communism, crushing poverty, failed institutions, a weak rule of law, poor social conditions, and a large out-migration of people seeking jobs.
Since 2002, about 345 detainees have been released. Meanwhile, other not-combatants-after-all, including 17 Uighurs, remain at Guantanamo, still in limbo. The Defense Department calls them “No Longer Enemy Combatants.” Mushrooms, mushrooms…
To criticism that the Combatant Status Review Tribunals are sham proceedings, Pentagon spokesman Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon responded with a disingenuous defense. “…it is an administrative process … to confirm the status of enemy combatants detained at Guantanamo…”
Grab your socks, Reville, Reville, hear the boatswain’s whistle, Commander. This shabby “administrative process” is the nearest the detainees may come to any trial. As Amnesty International describes it, the government interpretation of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 allows it to hold indefinitely, without trial, a detainee who has been declared an enemy combatant.
Thousands of detainees remain in indefinite detention without charge or trial in US custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. In passing the Military Commissions Act, Congress has failed these detainees and their families.
Those defending human rights should be prepared for a long struggle.
Innocent until proven guilty. Kiss it goodbye.
