Aafia Siddiqui

In sifting through the avalanche of US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, only the Guardian, in the Western media, has picked up on cables from Islamabad relating to the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who disappeared with her three young children in Karachi on March 30, 2003, and did not reappear until July 17, 2008, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, where she was reportedly arrested by Afghan forces for acting strangely, allegedly carrying a bag that contained a list of US targets for terrorist attacks as well as bomb-making instructions and assorted chemicals.

When US soldiers turned up, Dr. Siddiqui then reportedly seized a gun and shot at them. Although she failed to hit her targets, at point-blank range, she was herself shot twice in the abdomen, and was then rendered to the United States, where she was put on trial for attempted murder, and was convicted and given an 86-year prison sentence in September this year.

Dr. Siddiqui’s supporters, and many commentators — myself included — who have examined her story have, for many years, had reason to doubt the official narrative about her capture in 2008, and her whereabouts for the previous five years.

While both the Pakistani and US authorities repeatedly denied that Dr. Siddiqui was in their custody between 2003 and 2008, and this is reiterated in one of the cables released by Wikileaks, in which US diplomats in Pakistan stated that “Bagram officials have assured us that they have not been holding Siddiqui for the last four years, as has been alleged,” several former prisoners — and one still held — have stated that they saw her in Bagram. The following exchange is an excerpt from an interview conducted by former prisoner Moazzam Begg with Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, after his release from Guantánamo in February 2009:

Moazzam Begg: When you were in the Bagram Detention Facility after being held in the “Dark Prison,” you came across a female prisoner. Can you describe a little bit about who you think she is and what you saw of her?

Binyam Mohamed: In Bagram, I did come across a female who wore a shirt with the number of “650,” and I saw her several times, and I heard a lot of stories about her from the guards and the other prisoners over there.

Moazzam Begg: And these stories said what about her, in terms of her description and her background?

Binyam Mohamed: What we were told first … we were frightened by the guards not to communicate with her, because they feared that we would talk to her and we would know who she was. So they told us that she was a spy from Pakistan, working with the government, and the Americans brought her to Bagram.

Moazzam Begg: So you think they spread the rumour that she was a spy … that would have kept you away from her and apprehensive towards her?

Binyam Mohamed: Basically, nobody talked to her in the facility, and she was held in isolation, where … she was only brought out to the main facility just to use the toilet. But all I knew about her was that she was from Pakistan, and that she had studied, or she had lived in America. And the guards would talk a lot about her, and I did actually see her picture when I was here a few weeks ago, and I would say she’s the very person I saw in Bagram.

Moazzam Begg: And that’s the very picture I showed you of Aafia Siddiqui?

Binyam Mohamed: That’s the very picture I saw.

Moazzam Begg: There have been all sorts of rumours about what happened to her — and may Allah free her soon — but part of those rumours include her being terribly abused. Do you have any knowledge of what abuse she might have faced?

Binyam Mohamed: Apart from her being in isolation — and the fact that I saw, when she was walking up and down, I could tell that she was severely disturbed — I don’t think she was in her right mind — literally, I don’t think she was sane — and I didn’t feel anything at that time, because, as far as I was concerned, she was a hypocrite working with the other governments. But had we known that she was a sister, I don’t think we would have been silent. I think there would have been a lot of maybe even riots in Bagram.

In March 2010, at a rally organized by the Justice for Aafia Coalition, former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes stated that, as well as Binyam Mohamed, Hassan bin Attash (a former child prisoner who is still held in Guantánamo) and Dr. Ghairat Baheer (a former “ghost prisoner” held in various secret prisons in Afghanistan) also described seeing Aafia Siddiqui in Bagram. Omar said, “They told me how she cried and sobbed, how she screamed and cried and banged her head, in despair and sorrow.”

The Justice for Aafia Coalition has also been gathering other testimony about Dr. Siddiqui’s presence in Bagram from other sources, locating the following statement by Abu Yahya al-Libi, who escaped from Bagram in July 2005, which resonates with the recollections of Binyam Mohamed, Hassan bin Attash and Dr. Baheer:

There is a woman from Pakistan. She stayed two complete years in solitary confinement in Bagram prison among more than 500 men. She would go out to the bathroom, led by the Americans, placing his hand on one of her shoulders, and the other hand on her back, and her hands and feet chained together, and she is treated in exactly the same way as a man … even in her clothing, the orange suit that the brothers wear in Guantánamo and the mujahideen in Bagram. This woman stayed there until she lost her mind, until she became insane, hitting the door and screaming, all day and night, and those ones all they do is make it worse by calling her by her number 650, that’s the number she had in the Bagram prison… “What’s the problem?” And she didn’t find a person to talk to. She is in solitary confinement, in front of her is a solitary room belonging to a man, on her side is a solitary room belonging to a man, and next to her is a solitary room belonging to a man, She didn’t find a woman to talk to, she only sees men … so the woman lost her reasoning and her mind and she stayed in this condition for two complete years… probably no one knew anything about her.

In addition, two of Aafia Siddiqui’s three children have stated that they were also held in custody during the period that their mother’s whereabouts are unexplained, adding another chilling dimension to the story. Although it is feared that Suleman, who was just a baby in March 2003, was killed at the time of her capture, her eldest son Ahmed (who was seven at the time) and her daughter Mariam (who was five) eventually reappeared. Ahmed, who was seized with his mother in Ghazni in July 2008, and was released to his mother’s family in October 2009, issued the following statement about his capture and his lost years:

I do not remember the date but it seems a long time ago. I remember we were going to Islamabad in a car when we were stopped by different cars and high roof ones. My mother was screaming and I was screaming as they took me away. I looked around and saw my baby brother on the ground and there was blood. My mother was crying and screaming. Then they put something on my face. And I don’t remember anything.

When I woke up I was in a room. There were American soldiers in uniform and plain clothes people. They kept me in different places. If I cried or didn’t listen, they beat me and tied me and chained me. There were English speaking, Pashto and Urdu speaking. I had no courage to ask who they were. At times, for a long time, I was alone in a small room. Then I was taken to some children’s prison where there were lots of other children.

The American Consular, who came to me in Kabul jail, said, “Your name is Ahmed. You are American. Your mother’s name is Aafia Siddiqui and your younger brother is dead. After that they took me away from the kids’ prison and I met the Pakistani Consular, and I talked to my aunt (Fowzia Siddiqui).”

Mariam did not reappear until April this year, when unidentified men delivered her to her aunt’s house. Now 12 years old, she was identified as Aafia Siddiqui’s daughter (and Ahmed’s sister) through DNA tests. At a press conference, Senator Talha Mehmood, the Chairman of the Senate Committee for the Interior, reported that Mariam “was recovered from Bagram airbase in the custody of an American — in the Urdu language press, an American soldier — called ‘John.’ He also said that she had been kept for seven years in a ‘cold, dark room’ in Bagram airbase.” Although this story has not been independently verified, and it may be that Mariam was held in some other facility, no other explanation has been provided to explain her whereabouts for the previous seven years.

These are just some of the reasons to doubt the assertion made by US diplomats in Pakistan, in one of the cables released by Wikileaks, and also to doubt the conviction with which Declan Walsh followed up on the cable, writing in the Guardian, “Contrary to claims by supporters of Aafia Siddiqui, the controversial Pakistani neuroscientist was never imprisoned at the Bagram military prison in Afghanistan, the embassy cables suggest.”

Other reasons to doubt the assertion include previously reported shadiness on the part of diplomats, who initially told the journalist Yvonne Ridley (who has spent many years doggedly pursuing the truth about Dr. Siddiqui) that no women had been held in Bagram, although it was later revealed that they had lied. Shortly after the incident in Ghazni, Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Greene, a spokesperson for Combined Joint Task Force 101, which manages the Bagram base, “said that a woman had been held at Bagram in 2003, but that woman, identified only as ‘Shafila,’ was released.” This was a fascinating insight, because the timeframe involved — during 2003 — appears to confirm that the witnesses cited above, who saw a woman at Bagram in 2004, were not mistaking Aafia Siddiqui for this other poor woman, whose whereabouts are, of course, unknown.

Even more significant is the well-chronicled failure of senior Bush administration officials to keep State Department officials in the loop about almost anything of substance to do with the “War on Terror.”

In 2009, when I interviewed Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, Wilkerson told me, in no uncertain terms, that the State Department had been excluded from correspondence relating to the conduct of the “War on Terror,” although the team gathered around Dick Cheney — a “War Council” consisting of just six men — had been monitoring the State Department’s responses to the results of Cheney’s activities. Wilkerson said:

I understood that there was a team, I understood it was highly placed and probably under the Vice President, I understood that it was membered in almost every aspect of the interagency group that dealt with national security, I understood they had a strategy, I understood they were ruthless in carrying out that strategy, and I understood that I was a day late and a dollar short, because they’d beaten me to the marketplace. But it took me a while to figure that out. I even figured out that they were reading my emails, but I wasn’t reading theirs.

Another reason for doubting the diplomats’ denials concerns the timing of Dr. Siddiqui’s capture, and its place within the bigger picture of the capture of supposed “high-value detainees” who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture in a variety of secret prisons, including, in many cases, a secret facility within Bagram. Whether accurately or not, it has been claimed that Dr, Siddiqui had remarried, before her capture, and that her second husband was Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi), a nephew of the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Dr. Siddiqui was seized just four weeks after KSM, and four weeks before Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and it is easy, therefore, to see that a confession extracted under torture from KSM — when he was being subjected to waterboarding on 183 separate occasions in a secret prison in Poland — could have led to Dr. Siddiqui’s capture, which, in turn, could have led to the capture — perhaps through information also extracted through the use of torture — of Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.

If this sequence is correct — and it certainly makes a lot of sense — then it is appropriate to conclude that Dr. Siddiqui was held as a “ghost prisoner” in a secret prison, and it does not take too much reflection to realize that, as a result, her mysterious reappearance in Afghanistan in July 2008, the implausible story of her attempts to murder US soldiers (even though no fingerprints were found on the gun), her rendition to the United States rather than facing justice in Afghanistan, the sham of a trial that focused only on the murder attempt, and not on the terrorist materials allegedly found on her at the time of her capture, and the disproportionately large sentence are all part of a cover-up, designed to dispose of a used-up “ghost prisoner,” who knew too much — and was, conceivably, too horribly abused — to be released.

Unlike KSM, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and 12 other “high-value detainees,” for example, Dr. Siddiqui could not be sealed up in Guantánamo (where these men were sent from secret prisons in September 2006), because the presence of a female prisoner would have caused an uproar. In addition, she could not, like prisoners from other countries, be repatriated without that also causing an uproar, unlike a number of Libyan men who were stealthily repatriated from secret prisons in 2006.

These men included Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran a training camp in Afghanistan that was closed down by the Taliban because he refused to work with Osama bin Laden, but after his capture in late 2001 he was sent by the CIA to Egypt, where he was tortured until he falsely confessed that Saddam Hussein had met with members of al-Qaeda to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. That false confession was used a part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq, in March 2003, but once al-Libi was used up — after several years in other secret prisons — he was returned to Libya, where, implausibly but conveniently for the US and LIbya, he died, reportedly by committing suicide, in May 2009.

For Aafia Siddiqui, the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, where she is now held, may not be quite as notorious as Abu Salim prison in Tripoli — where around 1,200 prisoners were killed in a massacre in 1996 — or Bagram, because of its dark fame in the “War on Terror,” but to those in the know, it is, as Yvonne Ridley explained, known as the “Hospital of Horrors,” where more than 100 young women “have died in the last 10 years under ‘questionable circumstances’ with families unable to obtain autopsy reports,” and where there have been numerous cases of sex abuse.

Please write to Aafia at Carswell, not only to let her know that she has not been forgotten, but also because the most effective way to ensure that abusers think twice about their abuse is when they know that the outside world is watching — and is watching in large numbers. The address for the prison is here, and if you’re interested, I urge you to take advantage of the Justice for Aafia Coalition’s pre-printed cards, available here, which can easily be distributed to friends and family.

Originally published on the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Omar Khadr/Photo: Wikimedia

Everything about the last week’s events at Guantánamo has been deeply disturbing. On Monday, in defiance of international obligations requiring the rehabilitation of child prisoners, the US government — under President Obama — fulfilled the deepest wishes of the Bush administration, and persuaded Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, to plead guilty to charges of murder in violation of the laws of war, attempted murder, spying, conspiracy, and providing material support to terrorism, in a plea deal that apparently involves an eight-year sentence, with Khadr serving one more year at Guantánamo before being returned to Canada.

At the heart of the plea deal is a 50-point “Stipulation of Fact” (PDF), signed by Khadr and stating that he “does not have any legal defense to any of the offenses to which he is pleading guilty,” in which, despite his previous protestations to the contrary, he accepted that he threw a grenade that killed Delta Force Sgt. Christopher Speer on the day of his capture, and, moreover, that he was, at the time, an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” who did not have “any legal basis to commit any war-like acts” at all.

As part of the Bush administration’s apparently successful rewriting of international law — facilitated by President Obama and lawmakers in Congress — Khadr was therefore obliged not only to forego further complaints about his age at the time of his capture, and the responsibility of others for indoctrinating him, but also to accept that he had been captured in circumstances in which it was impossible for him to be a legitimate combatant.

He was also required to stay silent in the face of compelling evidence that these dubious-sounding war crimes to which he signed his name were not in fact war crimes at all, and were only invented by Congress in 2006, as former Guantánamo military defense attorney Lt. Col. David Frakt explained last summer. In addition, he also had to overlook the fact that, when the Commissions were revived last year, defense secretary Robert Gates added a new twist to the fictional war crimes so that, as Lt. Col. Frakt explained in April this year, “a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war.”

This was Lt. Col. Frakt’s full explanation of this particular point:

In the new [Military Commissions] Manual the following official comment has been included in explanation of the offense of Murder in Violation of the Law of War: “an accused may be convicted in a military commission … if the commission finds that the accused engaged in conduct traditionally triable by military commission (e.g., spying; murder committed while the accused did not meet the requirements of privileged belligerency) even if such conduct does not violate the international law of war.” Astoundingly, according to the Pentagon, a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war.

However, rather than dwelling on these profoundly disturbing truths about the nature of Khadr’s “crimes,” the significance of his age at the time of his capture, and the pressure he was put under to reverse the implacable opposition to a plea deal that he demonstrated in summer, the media, for the most part, allowed themselves last week to be ushered into the next stage of the game: a week of sentencing hearings, involving witnesses called by the prosecution and the defense, to enable a seven-person military jury to deliver its own sentence, which, bizarrely, will mean nothing unless the jurors deliver a sentence shorter than the one agreed in secret as part of the plea deal.

As I reported in a previous article, the government took full advantage of this platform to summon a purported psychiatric expert, Michael Welner, who in fact delivered an Islamophobic tirade and threw out provocative soundbites that were snapped up by a sensation-hungry journalists — describing Khadr as, amongst other things, “Al-Qaeda royalty” and “highly dangerous” — and also summoned a soldier wounded in the firefight and Tabitha Speer, the widow of Sgt. Speer.

One of the few commentators to pick up on this particularly manipulative choice of witnesses was Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star, who, with reference to Tabitha Speer’s testimony, wrote in his column today, “While heart-wrenching, her testimony glided over the queerest irony of this case — that after a pitched battle between clearly delineated forces, in which soldiers on both sides killed, only one person from one side ended up accused of murder.” (Walkom ended his column by noting that, when Khadr eventually returns to Canada, the government “will ignore, as almost everyone seems to ignore, the absurdity of prosecuting a soldier for killing his enemy in battle”).

Khadr’s defense team managed to secure a few important witnesses, including Navy Capt. Patrick McCarthy, the former top military legal adviser at Guantánamo, who called Khadr respectful, pleasant and friendly, and added, “Fifteen-year-olds, in my opinion, should not be held to the same level of accountability as adults.” In addition, as the Edmonton Journal reported today, his defense team drew on correspondence between Khadr and Arlette Zink, a teacher in Canada. She has corresponded with Khadr for the last two years, and has been encouraging him in his voracious appetite for literature, and, echoing Capt. McCarthy, she described him as a “polite, thoughtful, intelligent person.”

For the most part, however, Khadr’s lawyers were hobbled by their inability to dwell on the fundamental problems with the trial mentioned above, and also by the judge’s refusal to let them discuss another deeply disturbing aspect of Khadr’s story — the torture and abuse to which he was subjected, at least in the first two years of his imprisonment.

Back in May, I discussed some of the claims made by Khadr, as described in an affidavit submitted in February 2008 (PDF), in an article entitled, “The Torture of Omar Khadr, a Child in Bagram and Guantánamo,” in which I explained how

[Khadr] described his mistreatment in detail, explaining how he was unconscious for a week after his capture, when he was severely wounded, and how, in Bagram, where he was taken after just two weeks in a hospital, his interrogations began immediately, at the hands of an interrogator who manipulated his injuries (the exact details were redacted from his affidavit). Crucially, he also explained how, as soon as he regained consciousness, “the first soldier told me that I had killed an American with a grenade,” and how, during his first interrogation at Bagram, “I figured out right away that I would simply tell them whatever I thought they wanted to hear in order to keep them from causing me [redacted].”

As I also explained:

There is much more in the affidavit — casual cruelty, whereby guards made Khadr do hard manual labor when his wounds were not healed, and, significantly, threats “to have me raped, or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped.” He also noted, “I would always hear people screaming, both day and night,” and explained that other prisoners were scared of his interrogator. “Most people would not talk about what had been done to them,” he declared. “This made me afraid.”

Khadr also described what happened to him in Guantánamo, where, as I explained [in a previous article], he “arrived around the time that a regime of humiliation, isolation and abuse, including extreme temperature manipulation, forced nudity and sexual humiliation, had just been introduced, by reverse-engineering torture techniques, used in a military program designed to train US personnel to resist interrogation if captured, in an attempt to increase the meager flow of ‘actionable intelligence’ from the prison.”

At various points in 2003, while the use of these techniques was still widespread, Khadr stated that he was short-shackled in painful positions and left for up to ten hours in a freezing cold cell, threatened with rape and with being transferred to another country where he could be raped, and, on one particular occasion, when he had been left short-shackled in a painful position until he urinated on himself, “Military police poured pine oil on the floor and on me, and then, with me lying on my stomach and my hands and feet cuffed together behind me, the military police dragged me back and forth through the mixture of urine and pine oil on the floor. Later, I was put back in my cell, without being allowed a shower or a change of clothes. I was not given a change of clothes for two days. They did this to me again a few weeks later.”

Crucially, when describing the interrogations that punctuated these experiences at Guantánamo, Khadr explained, “I did not want to expose myself to any more harm, so I always just told interrogators what I thought they wanted to hear. Having been asked the same questions so many times, I knew what answers made interrogators happy and would always tailor my answers based on what I thought would keep me from being harmed.”

Given the well-chronicled accounts of torture and abuse in Bagram and Guantánamo, including two murders in Bagram just months after Khadr was held there, and the official implementation of reverse-engineered torture techniques at Guantánamo in 2002 (which continued until 2004), it was disturbing that the judge in Khadr’s case, Army Col. Patrick Parrish, brushed over allegations of abuse and of rape threats that surfaced in pre-trial hearings in May (which I described in the article mentioned above), for two reasons. The first is because it keeps hidden from view the long and often brutal history of the Bush administration’s detention policies in the “War on Terror,” as experienced by everyone held at Guantánamo and in other Bush-era prisons, and the second is  because it specifically deprived Khadr of the opportunity to remind jurors — and the wider world — of the pressure he was put under to confess to the “crimes” of which he was accused.

On Friday, the defense team finally managed to mention the abusive conditions in which Khadr was held in Bagram, when one of his lawyers, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, read out an unsworn statement by Khadr relating to an exchange he had with Joshua Claus, who, at the time, was a sergeant in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion. Claus later served a five-month prison sentence after pleading guilty in a court martial to the abuse of an unidentified prisoner at Bagram, who was made “to roll back and forth on the floor and kiss the boots of his interrogator,” as Michelle Shephard described it in the Toronto Star, and also for his part in the murder of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver whe died in Bagram in December 2002.

As Claus conceded in May, he had come up with a scenario to terrify Khadr, which involved him being sent to a US prison and gang-raped, and the following statement by Khadr, describing his response to this threat, was the defense team’s last submission on Friday. It remains to be seen if it will sway the jury in any way as the jurors make their deliberations this weekend, deciding between, on the one hand, prosecutor Jeff Groharing’s description of Khadr as “a terrorist and a murderer,” who should be given a 25-year sentence, and, on the other, Lt. Col. Jackson’s description of him as a “child with a bad dad,” who “was radicalized as a child and has matured and changed while in US custody.” In his final words to the jury, Jackson said, “This case is about giving Omar Khadr a first chance because he’s never had it. Send him back to Canada, let him start his education and career. There is no good for him here. Send him home.”

Omar Khadr’s unsworn statement about the rape threat he received in Bagram

I ask that you consider this letter about what happened to me at Bagram in 2002. It is hard for me to talk about. I know it does not change what I did but I hope you will think about it when punishing me.

At first I did not tell them my interrogators what really happened. My main interrogator, Interrogator #1 [Sgt. Claus], told me he knew I was lying. He told me that it was fine if I did not tell him the truth. He told me a story about a young Afghan who lied to him. He told me they thought the Afghan guy had not done anything seriously wrong. But they sent him to an American prison for lying to Americans.

He told me a story about an Afghan getting sent to an American prison, and he said there’s a bunch of, you know, big black guys and, you know, the big Nazis are there, and they noticed this little Afghan who doesn’t speak their language. He, you know, he prays five times a day; he’s got to be a Muslim. Remember, they’re Americans. They’re still kind of upset and mad about the September 11th attacks, so, you know, they’re still patriotic even though they’re inmates. And the guards, they do everything they can to protect this little guy and keep him out of harm’s way, but, you know, nobody could be everywhere at once. Things happen. We don’t want things to happen, especially to anybody, and this poor little kid, we couldn’t clear out. You know, he’s like 20 years old. He’s kind of scared. He’s away from home; kind of isolated, you know, no one can really understand him.

It would be unfortunate that, you know — that apparently one time he was in the shower by himself and these four big black guys, they showed up in prison. They said, hey, we know all about you Muslims. You attacked the country. And we didn’t want anything to happen to this kid. We just wanted him to talk to us, but he decided he wanted to lie and didn’t want to be straight with us. And it’s terrible that something would happen but, you know, they caught him in the shower and they raped him and, you know, it was terrible. This kid got hurt. And we think he ended up dying but we’re not quite sure.

This story scared me very much and made me cry. Interrogator #3 was also there and he saw the whole thing happen.

Signed Omar A. Khadr

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been seeking to force the Pentagon to provide information about all captives it is holding at its huge prison facility at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul in Afghanistan, Federal District Judge Barbara Jones of the Southern District of New York has issued a summary judgment saying that the government may keep that information secret.

The lingering question is: Why does the US government so adamantly want to hide information about where captives were first taken into military custody, their citizenship, the length of their captivity, and the circumstances under which they were captured?

Says Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, “The military says that they can’t release the information because it would be a threat to national security, but they provided that information for the prisoners at Guantanamo.”

And of course, as our leaders informed us repeatedly, those captives at Guantanamo, who hailed from all over the globe, including Afghanistan, were allegedly “the worse of the worst”–at least until it turned out that many of them were wholly innocent of anything. had been framed and turned in for a bounty, or were mere children when picked up, like Omar Khadr, the 24-year old Canadian man who just copped a guilty plea to avoid a sham tribunal before 7 officers and potential life imprisonment, after being captured at 15, tortured at Bagram, and held for nine years at Guantanamo (on a charge of killing an American soldier in battle).

The court ruling keeping the information about the thousands of prisoners held at Bagram secret may be a victory for the government, but it is hardly a victory for America’s image in the world, or for the troops battling in Afghanistan, who will be attacked all the harder by people induced to fight to the death to avoid capture and consignment to the hellhole in Bagram (now known as Parwan Prison), which has become Afghanistan’s Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo rolled into one.

One of the things that concerns the ACLU is that by not even making public the circumstances under which Bagram detainees were brought into the prison, it appears likely that the administration is hiding the reality that many “probably don’t deserve to be there,” says the ACLU’s Goodman. She explains, “There could be plenty of people sitting there who were just caught up in house sweeps in Kabul, for instance.”

To read the rest of this report, please visit ThisCantBeHappening.net

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

In the first of two articles about the Obama administration’s detention policies relating to the US airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan, I examined recent revelations about a secret prison inside the base, apparently run by a shadowy branch of the Pentagon, where Bush-era “enhanced interrogations,” involving sleep deprivation and isolation, are used, as authorized in Appendix M of the US Army Field Manual.

This second article examines the Obama administration’s confusing attempts to bring detention policies at the main prison more in line with international accepted standards regarding the treatment of prisoners seized in wartime, with some spectacular failures — the refusal to accept that foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries should have habeas corpus rights — and some improvements, involving review boards, prisoner releases, and trials, which, nevertheless, betray the kind of confusion that will prevail while the administration insists on accepting its predecessor’s unilateral rewriting of the Geneva Conventions.

A new review process at Bagram — and the Obama administration’s struggle to withhold habeas corpus rights from foreign prisoners

Beyond the growing scandal of the “black prison,” which cries out for further investigation, the US authorities have been attempting, with rather more success, to rebrand the main prison at Bagram, opening a new facility to replace the squalid Russian factory immortalized in the bleak stories of prisoners held there in the early years, releasing the first ever list of prisoners in January, and introducing a new review process designed to release prisoners who, as Max Fisher explained for the Atlantic in March, constitute the “80 to 90 percent” of the prison’s total population — estimated, at the time, as 750 prisoners — who “are non-ideological or ‘accidental’ combatants who pose no long-term threat to the US.”

The introduction of a new review process was initiated for two reasons, one of which was considerably more benign than the other. The first involved the military belatedly learning from mistakes in Iraq, after Gen. David Petraeus, the overall commander in Afghanistan and Iraq, appointed Maj. Gen. Doug Stone to run the detention system in Iraq. As an NPR report explained last August, “He had 21,000 detainees. But he found that most of these Iraqi detainees — as many as two-thirds — were not radicals, but mostly illiterate and jobless young people. Some were innocents and others worked for the insurgency because they just needed the money. And Stone worried that detaining them was only making matters worse, actually turning them into radicals.”

NPR added that, as a result of his success in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus sent Maj. Gen. Stone to review the detention program in Afghanistan, and that he “went to Afghanistan with a team, interviewed detainees, visited detention facilities,” and produced a 700-page report, in which he estimated that “as many as 400 of the 600 held at Bagram can be released,” explaining that “many of these men were swept up in raids” and “have little connection to the insurgency.”

However, the second reason for introducing a new review process was in response to a court challenge in the US, which was regarded with the utmost severity by the Obama administration, as it had been by President Bush. In March 2009, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge John Bates granted habeas corpus rights to three foreign prisoners seized in other countries (including Thailand and Pakistan), transferred to Bagram (via secret CIA prisons), and held for up to eight years.

As Judge Bates recognized, the habeas rights granted to the Guantánamo prisoners by the Supreme Court in June 2008 also extended to foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram because “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same,” because the review process at Bagram “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo,” and because any “practical obstacles” to a court review of their cases were “not insurmountable,” and were, moreover, “largely of the Executive’s choosing,” because the prisoners were specifically transported to Bagram — in an active war zone — from other locations.

Two weeks ago, the Court of Appeals shamefully overturned Judge Bates’ ruling, hurling the foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries back into a legal black hole — and moreover, one which, as Al-Jazeera suggested in April, could be swiftly and decisively resolved by transferring them back to the custody of their home countries, thereby avoiding any further calls for accountability. On April 27, Al-Jazeera reported that, when speaking about the foreign prisoners held at Bagram — 32 in total, according to a New York Times article in March — Vice Admiral Robert Harward, the commander in charge of detention operations in Afghanistan, stated that the authorities were “currently co-ordinating” with the foreign prisoners’ home governments, adding, “We’re working to move them back into the legal systems of their countries.”

Reporting from Kabul, James Bays claimed, “The Afghans wouldn’t want to take control of these detainees when [the prison] came under Afghan control, and that’s why America is talking to some of the governments where these prisoners come from to see if they will take these prisoners.” This explanation may well contain a kernel of truth, but it also conveniently overlooks the fact that disposing of the prisoners will enable the US government to avoid having to explain why it seized the men in the first place and what was done to them in secret CIA prisons before they even arrived at Bagram.

As well as prompting panic regarding the extension of habeas rights to foreign prisoners in Bagram, Judge Bates’ ruling last March also prompted the administration to address one of his particular concerns — the inadequacy of the review process at Bagram — by introducing a new review process, which, rather cynically, the government chose to announce as part of its court appeal last September, no doubt in the hope of persuading the Court of Appeals that significant improvements were being made at Bagram.

As I explained last March, Judge Bates was withering in his criticism of the existing review process at Bagram, noting that the Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Board (UECRB) was both “inadequate” and “more error-prone” than the review process used at Guantánamo in 2004-05 — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which were condemned as nothing more than a rubberstamp for executive detention by former officials who worked on them, including, in particular, Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham.

In an analysis of the UECRB process, Judge Bates noted that prisoners were not allowed to have a “personal representative” from the military in place of a lawyer (as at Guantánamo), and were obliged to represent themselves, and also explained, “In addition, Detainees cannot even speak for themselves; they are only permitted to submit a written statement. But in submitting that statement, detainees do not know what evidence the United States relies upon to justify an “enemy combatant” designation — so they lack a meaningful opportunity to rebut that evidence.” He also noted that, unlike at Guantánamo, where Administrative Review Boards were convened on an annual basis, “Bagram detainees receive no review beyond the UECRB itself.”

In the Detainee Review Boards (DRBs) established to replace the UECRBs, prisoners are now given personal representatives and may call witnesses, which is undoubtedly an improvement. However, even beyond the problems inherent in importing from Guantánamo a system that the Supreme Court found “inadequate,” a more fundamental problem is that the prisoners at Bagram are still not being held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions. If they were, as I also explained recently:

This would have involved them being screened on capture, to determine whether they were combatants or civilians seized by mistake, and would then have involved them being held unmolested until the end of hostilities. It certainly would not have involved them not receiving adequate screening on capture, and then being subjected — at some undetermined point after capture — to a review process conjured up out of thin air.

In March this year, Jonathan Horowitz of One World Research attended five of these hearings, designed to ascertain “whether a detainee should be released, detained until his next review in six months, or transferred to Afghan authorities for prosecution or reconciliation.” He explained how they are indeed an improvement on the UECRBs, but added, “the improvements are relative and the bar was set very low to begin with.”

Horowitz was clearly impressed with the ability to call witnesses, and with the personal representatives’ efforts to act on the prisoners’ behalf, but he worried about the shortage of staff, problems with translators, and a general lack of knowledge about Afghan history and culture, and, in an echo of the problems at Guantánamo, reserved bitter criticism for the use of classified evidence, explaining:

The fact that detainees are not allowed to review classified information seriously jeopardizes the accuracy and legitimacy of the hearings. This classification procedure, though important for protecting identities of informants, makes it nearly impossible for the detainee to effectively challenge the veracity of the allegations. To solve this problem, the US military and intelligence agencies need to end their culture of over-classification and give greater priority to improving their evidence gathering capacity, as opposed to their intelligence gathering capacity. Without a shift from reliance on secret sources to greater transparency, US detention operations and its detainee review system are doomed.

Horowitz also complained about repeated failures in intelligence gathering, which, of course, have plagued US operations in Afghanistan from the very beginning, as was demonstrated repeatedly with the Afghan prisoners in Guantánamo. In his article, he explained that the military “needs to review its intelligence sources and eliminate those who repeatedly provide false and inaccurate information. One of the biggest complaints Afghans have of the US detention policy is that informants aren’t held accountable” — or, he might have added, that the military is all too easily duped by unreliable informants, as the accounts below reveal.

Prisoners released from Bagram

As a result of the DRBs, dozens of prisoners have been released from Bagram since the start of the year. There have been releases before, of course, but the process was devoid of outside scrutiny, and often, it seemed, involved transfers to Afghan custody despite fears that doing so was consigning the prisoners in question to a brutal system where there was even less opportunity for the US rationale for capture to be adequately tested.

In March, as the Associated Press explained, four men were released in an official ceremony — a “shura” — which involved “the provincial governor and dozens of local elders brought in from Logar, the province immediately south of Kabul … pick[ing] at the chocolate cake and fruit laid out for them at [a] conference table,” while listen[ing] to speeches touting a new program to release detainees from [Bagram] if community leaders vouch for them.” As the AP explained, under the program, which began in January, “local Afghan leaders can petition for and win release of Bagram prisoners not deemed a threat if area chiefs pledge to monitor them for signs they are aiding the insurgency.”

Nevertheless, complaints persisted. Haji Katel, a 67-year old (released along with three other men in their 30s), said on his release, “We didn’t do anything wrong, and they arrested us,” but pledged that he would fulfill the conditions attached to his release. “Now I’m free. I don’t care,” he said. “I didn’t do anything against the government before and I won’t do anything now.” However, one of the men who had gathered to greet him, Walir Wakil, a community leader, criticized US policy in a manner that is grimly familiar from the prison’s long history, and which surfaced, again and again, in the accounts of the Afghans transferred to Guantánamo in 2002 and 2003.

“Why were the four men who were being released detained for months at the facility outside Bagram Air Field with no evidence?” he asked. “Why do American soldiers still raid homes without consulting local leaders?” Pouring scorn on Gen. McChrystal’s stated policy of “consult[ing] local representatives as part of a counterinsurgency policy to win hearts and minds away from the Taliban,” he added, “The Afghan people are hearing a lot of talk.”

A week later, the New York Times attended a more stormy release session, which inadvertently revealed the ad hoc nature of US policy in Afghanistan, providing, to those watching closely, an insight into how unilaterally rewriting the Geneva Conventions leads only to chaos

This time around, the tribal elders who had come to vouch for their compatriot were rather less charitable towards the US military. As the release document was read out, “Cmdr. Dawood Zazai, a towering Pashtun tribal leader from Paktia Province who fought the Soviets, thumped his crutch for attention. Along with other elders, he did not like a clause in the document that said the detainees had been reasonably held based on intelligence. ‘I cannot sign this,’ Commander Zazai said, thumping his crutch again. ‘I don’t know what that intelligence said; we did not see that intelligence. It is right that we are illiterate, but we are not blind. Who proved that these men were guilty?’”

As the Times noted, “No one answered because Commander Zazai had just touched on the crux of the legal debate that has raged for nearly a decade in the United States: Does the United States have the legal right to hold, indefinitely without charge or trial, people captured on the battlefield?”

Or, the Times should have added, people who were not even “captured on the battlefield” at all. In interviews with former prisoners, the Times’ reporter, Alissa J. Rubin, actually touched on an even more fundamental problem, noting that a recurring theme was that “the Americans were routinely misled by informants who either had personal grudges against them or were paid by others to give information to the Americans that would put the person in jail.”

By way of explanation, Hajji Azizullah, 54, a leader of the Andar tribe in Ghazni, who had come to sign for two prisoners, said, “The information you had about these men was wrong in the first place. We are confident they were not involved with insurgents. If they were, we wouldn’t be here to sign for them.” One of the released men, Pacha Khan, described as an illiterate baker from Kunar Province, said he was “still puzzled about why he had been detained in the first place, let alone held for three years,” and stated, “I was innocent. Spies took money and sold me to the Americans. The Americans treated us very well, but as you know, jail is a big thing — to be away from your family, your relatives.” His brother, Gul Ahmed Dindar, reinforced the human cost of detention, explaining that he “had to support his brother’s family of eight children and a wife on the meager salary of a local police officer,” and telling the reporter, “They were about to sell their children. They had very little to live on. They sold their one goat, their one sheep and their cow. Then they sold the furniture — it was not much. They have had a very tough life.”

The ad hoc nature of the release process was explicitly revealed at the end of the session. As the Times explained, although Vice Admiral Robert Harward, the commander in charge of detention operations in Afghanistan, “insisted that the American intelligence was good and that these were insurgents,” he swiftly capitulated to complaints from the Afghan elders, who objected to the fact that the release form required them to agree with the US view that the men to be released had a “link to the insurgency.” To nods of assent from the elders, the form was changed to read that the men had “no link to the insurgency.” The Times noted that ‘[t]he new language will be used on future sponsor forms,” and quoted Harward saying, “We learn something every time we do this.”

The most recently reported release session took place on May 15, when ten men were freed, bringing the total this year, according to a McClatchy report, to 200. Again, however, it was a stormy episode for the US military, when Haji Ghulam Farooq (number 1442 on the Bagram prisoner list released in January), who was held for three years, took the opportunity to tell the assembled officials — including Marine Lt. Gen. John R. Allen, the number two at US Central Command in Florida — that “he was afraid he was forever tarnished as a suspect who could be scooped up again at any time,” as McClatchy described it.

Accused of working with Taliban insurgents, Farooq told Lt. Gen. Allen, “I was a mujahideen commander. It didn’t make sense for me to be against this government.” Another of the released men, 38-year old Azzimuddin, a father of four, also complained about his detention. He said that he “spent more than two weeks in the ‘black prison’ where he was held in a small, isolated cell,” and was then sent to the main prison where he was “interrogated every day for nearly three months about accusations that he’d helped arm the Taliban,” and he asked, “Why was I detained? At the end of the day, they said, ‘You are innocent.’”

In response, Capt. Jack Hanzlik, director of public affairs at US Central Command, reiterated the official line about secret prisons, as discussed in Part One of this article. “We don’t operate any secret detention centers,” he said. However, responding to the men’s detention, Lt. Gen Allen, at least, was contrite. “If we detained you unfairly, I am sorry,” he said. “I hope this is a great day for you to return to your families.”

This was some sort of gesture towards reconciliation, but as was explained by tribal leader Dawood Zazai, who had attended the release session in March and was present at this ceremony as well, it may have been too little, too late. Indicating once more that the Americans “were being duped by bad intelligence and being used by malicious Afghans who falsely accused rivals of being Taliban fighters to settle scores,” he pointed out how ruinous false imprisonment was in the struggle to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. “You do an operation, you just made 500,000 enemies,” he said. “One wrong report and you’ve lost an entire district.”

The latest twist: trials begin

While the ongoing program of releases is, in general, to be commended, no review of the current situation would be complete without a mention of the latest front in America’s ongoing attempts to rationalize the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.” On May 26, the Associated Press reported that, as part of its intention to hand over control of the prison facilities at Bagram to the Afghan government by early 2012 at the latest, the US authorities were introducing trials, which would begin on June 1. In these trials, conducted under US supervision, prisoners would appear before Afghan judges and be represented by Afghan lawyers.

As part of what the AP described as a “push to win over a suspicious population by being more open about what happens to the people it captures,” this is seen by some as progress, but it still raises a number of disturbing questions: in particular, whether trials are appropriate at all in a wartime situation, or if they are, yet again, another muddle-headed attempt to dismiss the significance of the Geneva Conventions; whether the Afghan government can be trusted to deal fairly with those subjected to trials; and what input the Americans will maintain regarding the provision of evidence. The extent of these worries — and their very real grounding in demonstrable concerns — can be gleaned from a number of recent reports by Human Rights First. In addition, the timing of the trials — so soon after the Court of Appeals dismissed the foreign prisoners’ habeas petitions — can only strike some observers as suspicious.

It is too early to say whether this latest policy will be successful. As the Associated Press reported on June 1, when the first hearing took place, “the chaotic nature of the first court session … showed that the transition toward an Afghan role will likely be slow and messy.” On trial are four men — 24-year-old Misri Gul, seized in Khost in October 2009; his brother Ghazni, who was detained when he went to visit him at Bagram in March; plus the men’s father, Bismullah, and a third brother, 22-year-old Rahmi, who were seized in a raid on the family home last month.

The men are accused of being involved in bomb attacks. According to the prosecution, their fingerprints matched those found on bombs discovered in Khost province, and Kalashnikov rifles and pistols were found during the raid on their house. However, problems arose immediately, beyond the obvious claim, aired by the four defense lawyers appointed by the government, that “it is common for men in the remote mountains of eastern Afghanistan to keep a stash of weapons to protect their families and not necessarily to fight for the insurgents.”

The hearing was held in Dari, whereas the accused are Pashto speakers, and the men’s lawyers also complained that “they had only had a few days to review the cases.” As the chief judge adjourned the case to give the defense team more time to review the cases, to talk to their clients, and to recruit a translator, no new date was set for the hearing, and it is unclear how smoothly — or openly — the trials will proceed. As the AP explained, “The trials present challenges. Detainees are blocked from hearing some of the evidence against them when it is classified. It’s unclear how much access lawyers and judges will have to this information.”

In addition, other comments — that some of those held “will likely be too high of a security threat or too valuable as intelligence assets to relinquish to the Afghan system” — cast a shadow over the whole operation, and should remind us, once again, how, in the “War on Terror” inherited by the Obama administration, the Geneva Conventions are not only Missing in Action, but behind every attempt to provide transparency and to win hearts and minds lurks a secret detention system in which “security threats” and “intelligence assets” are still held outside the law.

Originally published on Cageprisoners.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

For eight and a half years, the US prison at Bagram airbase has been the site of a disturbing number of experiments in detention and interrogation, where murders have taken place, the Geneva Conventions have been shredded and the encroachment of the US courts — unlike at Guantánamo — has been thoroughly resisted.

In the last few months, there have been a few improvements — hearings, releases, even the promise of imminent trials — but behind this veneer of respectability, the US government’s unilateral reworking of the Geneva Conventions continues unabated, and evidence has recently surfaced of a secret prison within Bagram, where a torture program that could have been lifted straight from the Bush administration’s rule book is still underway.

From December 2001 to November 2003, the US prison at Bagram airbase was used by the US military to process prisoners for Guantánamo, and in those early days it played host to a murderous regime that, in the last half of 2002, led to the deaths of at least two — and possibly as many as five — prisoners. Throughout this period, and after the transfer of regular prisoners to Guantánamo came to an end, Bagram — or, in some cases, a facility within Bagram — was where prisoners regarded as more significant than the general population, who had mostly passed through a number of other secret prisons run by the CIA, were also held, and for the last six and a half years Bagram has, in addition, been the US military’s frontline prison in the Afghan war zone.

Shining a light on these stories has been immensely difficult, of course. From time to time, reports surfaced of Afghan prisoners released from the facility, who described the abusive regime at the prison, but the stories of the prisoners regarded as more significant have remained mostly hidden, surfacing only in reports from those who were transferred to Guantánamo, through information released by their lawyers (after passing the Pentagon’s censors), and, on the odd occasion, through other means — as, for example, in a handful of habeas corpus petitions, in this report on the multiple renditions of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was finally returned to Libya, where he died in a prison last May, and in the leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross on the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret prisons in September 2006 (PDF).

Last August, the New York Times brought Bagram’s secret prison to light, reporting that Special Operations forces were running secret prisons, known, perhaps euphemistically, as “temporary screening sites,” at Bagram, and also in Balad, Iraq (a replacement for the notorious Camp Nama, where abuse was rife). The Times explained that, according to three military officials, “As many as 30 to 40 foreign prisoners have been held at the camp in Iraq at any given time, adding that “they did not provide an estimate for the Afghan camp but suggested that the number was smaller.”

The Times report coincided with an apparent shift in US policy, with the Pentagon announcing that the military would be allowing representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross to have access to prisoners held in the secret prisons at Bagram and Balad. As the Times described it, “the military must notify the Red Cross of the detainees’ names and identification numbers within two weeks of capture, a notification that before happened only after a detainee was transferred to a long-term prison.”

Under previous rules, those imprisoned in the Special Operations prisons could be held incommunicado for up to two weeks, in defiance of internationally agreed standards governing the detention of prisoners. As the Times explained, “Formerly, the military at that point had to release a detainee; transfer him to a long-term prison in Iraq or Afghanistan, to which the Red Cross has broad access; or seek one-week renewable extensions from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates or his representative.” Announcing the new policy, a senior Pentagon official added that the “option to seek custody extensions” had been eliminated.

Voices from Bagram’s secret prison

Although the New York Times report was important, it was largely overlooked at the time, and it was not until November that the existence of the secret prison burst out of the shadows, when both the New York Times and the Washington Post interviewed former prisoners. The Times spoke to Hayatullah, a 33-year old pharmacist, who was seized from his shop in Kandahar in July 2007, and released in October 2009; Gulham Khan, a 25-year old sheep delivery man, who was seized by US forces in three helicopters at a village in the desert outside Ghazni in late October 2008, and released in early September 2009; and Hamidullah, a 42-year old spare auto-parts dealer, who was seized from his house in Kandahar in a midnight raid in June 2009 and released in late October. All told similar stories, and this was Hayatullah’s description of the secret prison:

They took me to a place that was completely dark except for one bulb. It was hard to know whether it was night, day or afternoon, I had no idea when to pray because I could not tell the time. There are no windows. That was the Tor jail. I was there for 40 days. At that Tor jail everybody was separate. Each in a concrete room. The walls and ceilings were concrete, but the detainees who had been there a long time told me it had been made of black wood before it was concrete and that’s why they called it the black jail. It’s difficult to know how many of us there were in that place. When you are taken to the interrogation office, you are blindfolded and there is a hood on your head. No one has permission to come to Tor jail. Neither the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] or others.

The Post spoke to three teenagers — 17-year old Issa Mohammad, Abdul Rashid, “who said he is younger than 16,” and Sayid Sardar Ahmad, also 17 — at “the Afghan-run Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Kabul, where they were transferred after their detention at Bagram and a brief stay in … Pul-i-Charkhi,” the main Afghan prison in Kabul. Rashid, a woodcutter from Khost province, told the Post that he was “arrested in the spring with his cousin and father during a US military raid,” and said of his interrogation, “That was the hardest time I have ever had in my life. It was better to just kill me. But they would not kill me.” He also explained that he “lived in a small concrete cell that was slightly longer than the length of his body. Food was tossed in a plastic bag through a slot in the metal door.” Mohammad, a vegetable farmer from Kandahar province, told the Post that he was also arrested during a US military raid, and spent two weeks in the secret prison, where “interrogation sessions lasted hours, with one man ‘yelling at me and also punching and slapping my face.’”

Both Mohammed and Rashid also explained that, “when they tried to sleep, on the floor, their captors shouted at them and hammered on their cells,” and the Post also spoke to two other former prisoners, Malik Mohammad Hassan, a tribal elder from the Jalalabad area, and Mohammad Mukhtar, a former teacher, who were held “for some time” in the prison, and who described “[s]imilar living conditions, particularly the lengthy sleep deprivation and intense cold.” Hassan told the Post, “This is something nobody can bear. It’s extraordinary. They treated us like wild animals.”

New revelations about the secret prison

On April 15 this year, the BBC followed up on these reports, speaking to a number of former prisoners who confirmed that the prison consists of windowless concrete cells, permanently illuminated, and that prisoners are subjected to sleep deprivation. A man called Sher Agha, who spent six days in the prison in autumn 2009, told the BBC, “They call it the Black Hole,” adding, “When they released us they told us we should not tell our stories to outsiders because that will harm us.” Like all the men interviewed by the BBC, he also explained that the cells were “very cold.”

Describing the process of sleep deprivation, another former prisoner, Mirwais, who said he was held for 24 days in the secret prison, stated, “I could not sleep, nobody could sleep because there was a machine that was making noise. There was a small camera in my cell, and if you were sleeping they’d come in and disturb you.”

On May 11, the BBC explained that the existence of the prison had been confirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. An ICRC representative also confirmed the change implemented in August 2009, as described above. Asked about the status of prisoners held “in a separate structure at Bagram,” the spokesman explained, “The ICRC is being notified by the US authorities of detained people within 14 days of their arrest. This has been routine practice since August 2009 and is a development welcomed by the ICRC.”

Despite this, the BBC reported that, although the existence of the facility had been disclosed in the New York Times report last August, a military spokesperson maintained that the main prison at Bagram, now identified as “the Detention Facility in Parwan,” was “the only detention facility on the base.” However, the day after, in a detailed article in the Atlantic, Marc Ambinder thoroughly demolished this claim.

Ambinder began by explaining how it had been previously reported that the secret prison, which is “beige on the outside with a green gate,” was “operated by members of a Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) group,” which was allegedly outside of the jurisdiction of Vice Admiral Robert Harward, the commander in charge of detention operations in Afghanistan. However, he added, “JSOC, a component command made up of highly secret special mission units and task forces, does not operate the facility. Instead, it is manned by intelligence operatives and interrogators who work for the … Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC),” a branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s main military intelligence department.

Complicating matters further, Ambinder also explained that DCHC “perform interrogations for a sub-unit of Task Force 714, an elite counter-terrorism brigade,” which, last year, was described to Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent by a National Security Council staffer as “‘small groups of Rangers going wherever the hell they want to go’ in Afghanistan and operating under legal authority granted at the end of the Bush Administration that President Obama has not revoked.”

Describing the process through which prisoners end up at the “black prison,” Ambinder added, “Usually, captives are first detained at one of at least six classified Field Interrogation Sites in Afghanistan, and then dropped off at the DIA facility — and, when the interrogators are finished, transferred to the main prison population at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility.” This provides an additional insight into the web of other secret, frontline facilities feeding into Bagram that I touched upon in an article earlier this year entitled, “Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions,” and which were also exposed in an article by Anand Gopal for TomDispatch.com.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman attempted to dismiss Ambinder’s claim, stating that “DoD does operate some temporary screening detention facilities which are classified to preserve operational security,” but that “both the [Red Cross] and the host nation have knowledge of these facilities.” However, Ambinder’s report painted a bleaker picture, involving torture techniques contained in a little-known appendix to the current Army Field Manual.

Although President Obama issued an executive order on his second day in office, in January 2009, requiring interrogations to conform to the Army Field Manual (PDF), which prohibits physical violence and “enhanced interrogation,” Ambinder reported that, in the “black jail,” prisoners are subjected to sleep deprivation and isolation based on the Field Manual’s Appendix M (which Jeff Kaye has been writing about since last January), and which, under controlled circumstances, allows a range of Bush-era “enhanced interrogation techniques” to be used, including sleep deprivation and isolation. Ambinder also explained that when Appendix M techniques are being used, the man responsible for overseeing them is Gen.James Clapper (Ret.), the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Underscoring the difference between the general prison population at Bagram and those held by the DIA’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, Ambinder added that prisoners “designated as prisoners of war cannot be subjected to Appendix M measures.” To be strictly accurate, Marc Ambinder should have referred to prisoners “held in conditions that vaguely approximate those of prisoners of war,“ because President Obama has maintained the Bush administration’s unilateral reworking of the Geneva Conventions.

This will be discussed in the second part of this article, but for now the distinction between the general population of Guantánamo and those subjected to torture techniques in Bagram’s “black prison” — based on Marc Ambinder’s disturbing revelations about Appendix M and the activities of the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center — should be sufficient to rouse progressive critics of President Obama’s policies to demand transparency regarding the “black prison,” and to call for an end to this disturbing continuation of the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies.

Originally published on Cageprisoners.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Ruling in the case of three foreign prisoners — Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian seized in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002, Amin al-Bakri, a Yemeni gemstone dealer seized in Bangkok, Thailand in 2003, and Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni seized in 2004 — who were seized outside Afghanistan and transferred to Bagram via a number of secret CIA prisons, the Court of Appeals reversed a ruling last March by District Judge John D. Bates, granting the men the right to ask a US court why they were being held.

In January 2009, during a hearing before he delivered his final ruling, Judge Bates had recognized that Bagram was “a ‘black hole’ for detainees in a ‘law-free zone,’” and in his ruling he concluded — correctly — that the habeas rights granted by the Supreme Court to the Guantánamo prisoners in June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, also extended to foreign prisoners seized in other countries and rendered to Bagram, because, as he explained succinctly, “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same.”

My own understanding was that it was only an administrative accident — or some as yet unknown decision that involved keeping a handful of foreign prisoners in Bagram, instead of sending them all to Guantánamo — that prevented these three men (and several dozen other foreign prisoners) from joining the 779 men in the offshore prison in Cuba.

This should have been the end of the story, especially as Judge Bates made no suggestion that similar rights should extend to foreign prisoners captured in Afghanistan, and also because, in June 2009, he accepted that a fourth man who had submitted a habeas petition — Haji Wazir, an Afghan seized in the United Arab Emirates — had no right to access a US court. Although there was undoubtedly a case to be made that an Afghan rendered to Afghanistan from another country was in same position as a foreigner when it came to asking why they were being held, Judge Bates accepted the government’s argument that granting habeas rights to any Afghan would cause “friction” with the Afghan government, because of ongoing negotiations regarding the transfer of Afghan prisoners to the custody of their own government, and refused to grant Haji Wazir’s habeas petition.

However, this was not the end of the story. As soon as Judge Bates delivered his ruling last March, the government announced that it would appeal, and, in September, submitted a 76-page argument (PDF), which, as a sweetener to the Court of Appeals, also addressed a problem that Judge Bates had highlighted, even though it was beyond his remit to suggest any remedy.

The problem highlighted by Judge Bates was the review process at Bagram, and in making his ruling about the foreign prisoners rendered to the prison, he had compared it unfavorably to the review process in operation at Guantánamo, noting that the Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Board (UECRB) at Bagram was both “inadequate” and “more error-prone” than the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo (which were condemned as nothing more than a rubberstamp for executive detention by former officials who worked on them, including, in particular, Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham), and concluding that the US military’s control over Bagram “is not appreciably different than at Guantánamo.”

In an analysis of the UECRB process, Judge Bates noted that prisoners were not allowed to have a “personal representative” from the military in place of a lawyer (as at Guantánamo), and were obliged to represent themselves, and also explained, “In addition, Detainees cannot even speak for themselves; they are only permitted to submit a written statement. But in submitting that statement, detainees do not know what evidence the United States relies upon to justify an “enemy combatant” designation — so they lack a meaningful opportunity to rebut that evidence.” He also noted that, unlike at Guantánamo, where Administrative Review Boards were convened on an annual basis, “Bagram detainees receive no review beyond the UECRB itself.”

It was no wonder that Judge Bates concluded that this process “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo,” but in highlighting the review process at Bagram, he also touched on the biggest problem of all — that everyone at Bagram was held with less rights than the largely powerless “enemy combatants” of Guantánamo, and that they were, in particular, not being held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions. This would have involved them being screened on capture, to determine whether they were combatants or civilians seized by mistake, and would then have involved them being held unmolested until the end of hostilities. It certainly would not have involved them not receiving adequate screening on capture, and then being subjected — at some undetermined point after capture — to a review process conjured up out of thin air.

When the government appealed Judge Bates’ ruling, the Justice Department’s submission included an attachment from the Defense Department, announcing that the UECRB process at Bagram was being replaced with a system that closely matched the tribunal process at Guantánamo — the one that, as Judge Bates noted, was “found inadequate” by the Supreme Court.

Under this new system, prisoners are assigned personal representatives (as at Guantánamo), are allowed to call witnesses (as at Guantánamo, although not a single witness from outside the prison was ever located by the officials in charge), and have their cases reviewed every six months. This certainly addressed the main problems identified by Judge Bates, although, as I explained at the time, by importing the CSRT process to Bagram and refusing to reinstate the Geneva Conventions, Obama and his administration “have, essentially, accepted the Bush administration’s aberrant changes regarding the detention of prisoners in wartime as a permanent shift in policy, with profound implications for the Conventions in general.”

On Friday, sadly, none of these concerns registered with the three judges responsible for reviewing the government’s appeal. Instead, Chief Circuit Judge David B. Sentelle, supported by Senior Circuit Judge Harry T. Edwards and Circuit Judge David S. Tatel, discarded Judge Bates’ ruling, after disagreeing with his interpretation of three tests required to ascertain the extent to which Boumediene applied beyond US territory. As SCOTUSblog explained, the three tests involved “the process for deciding who is to be detained, the nature of the site where detention occurs, and practical problems of having courts decide the validity of detention.”

On the first test, the Circuit Court agreed with Judge Bates that the review process at Bagram “afford[s] even less protection to the rights of detainees in the determination of status than was the case with the CSRT.” However, on the second and third tests, the Circuit Court ruled that the nature of the site — leased from the Afghan government, but not under long-established US control like Guantánamo — “weighs heavily in favor of the United States,” and also ruled that, because “[i]t is undisputed that Bagram, indeed the whole nation of Afghanistan, remains a theater of war,” the right of the courts to interfere was not appropriate, and the balance of the argument therefore tipped “overwhelmingly” in the government’s favor.

This was noticeably different from Judge Bates’ interpretation of the potential obstacles to habeas review. As he stated in his ruling last March, although Bagram is “located in an active theater of war,” and this may pose some “practical obstacles” to a court review of their cases, these obstacles “are not as great” as the government suggested, are “not insurmountable,” and are, moreover, “largely of the Executive’s choosing,” because the prisoners were specifically transported to Bagram from other locations.

This latter point ought to have been significant, but it was played down in the Circuit Court, where the judges stated that, although they were not ignoring the prisoners’ argument that “the United States chose the place of detention and might be able ‘to evade judicial review of Executive detention decisions by transferring detainees into active conflict zones, thereby granting the Executive the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will,’” this is “not what happened here.”

The judges did throw a warning shot the government’s way, suggesting that a review might be appropriate if a case arises “in which the claim is a reality rather than a speculation,” but remained adamant that this had not happened, because it would have required a decision to hold prisoners deliberately at Bagram, rather than at Guantánamo, knowing that, in the future, the Boumediene decision would occur.

This was an interesting point, but looking at it the other way, the judges’ argument actually fails to explain why, when “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same,” as Judge Bates explained, those at Guantánamo, who were deliberately moved to a place where the Executive hoped to “switch the Constitution on or off at will,” but were then granted the right to judicial review, differ from those at Bagram, who have been denied the right to a judicial review and seem, therefore, to be very much in a place where the Executive has been able to “switch the Constitution on or off at will.”

What will happen next is at present unknown, although it is probable that lawyers for the men will approach the Supreme Court. However, with the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, who played a crucial role in swinging the Court in favor of the the Guantánamo prisoners in a series of important rulings between 2004 and 2008, culminating in Boumediene v. Bush, it is uncertain whether a majority would rule in the Bagram prisoners’ favor — especially as Elena Kagan, if confirmed as his replacement in the Court, would have to recuse herself from the case, having represented the government in the litigation to date as Solicitor General. Moreover, there is no guarantee that the Supreme Court will even take the case, as the Court of Appeals ruling was unanimous, and also covered a broad political spectrum, with the judges comprising a conservative (Sentelle) and two liberals (Edwards and Tatel).

Alarmingly, then, the prisoners at Bagram may have just found themselves consigned once more to the legal black hole that the Bush administration intended for them when they were first seized, with no hope of ever challenging the basis of their detention. For anyone who has understood the reasons behind Judge Bates’ ruling last March, this is disgraceful, and those who defend it should recall the words of the Supreme Court in Boumediene, when the justices’ majority opinion made clear how habeas rights were a necessary check on the kind of unfettered Executive power that the Court of Appeals has just attempted to justify at Bagram. “At its historical core,” the opinion stated, “the writ of habeas corpus has served as a means of reviewing the legality of Executive detention, and it is in that context that its protections have been strongest.”

If this ruling is allowed to stand, the Supreme Court will have abdicated its responsibility to ensure that no one can be kidnapped anywhere in the world and held indefinitely, without charge or trial, and with no way of challenging the basis of their detention in a satisfactory manner, either in Bagram, or, for that matter, in any other US facility in a foreign land. Moreover, the Bush administration, from beyond the electoral grave, will have won its most significant battle, which was supposedly lost; namely, maintaining that people can, in fact, be seized anywhere in the world and held without any means of judicial review, and without the obligation to face either a criminal trial or detention as a prisoner of war according to the Geneva Conventions.

This is a dark day indeed for America.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Omar Khadr at the age of 14

Are we so inured to the implementation of torture by the Bush administration that we no longer recognize what torture is? Torture, according to the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, is “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person.”

Under President Bush, however, John Yoo, an ideological puppet in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to objectively interpret the law as it applies to the executive branch, purported to redefine torture, in two memos that have become known as the “torture memos,” as the infliction of physical pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” or the infliction of mental pain which “result[s] in significant psychological harm of significant duration e.g. lasting for months or even years.”

I ask this question about torture — and our attitude to it — because of what took place last week, in pre-trial hearings at Guantánamo preceding the trial by Military Commission of the Canadian prisoner Omar Khadr, who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002. A number of witnesses revealed details of Khadr’s mistreatment, in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, which hinted at his inclusion in an abusive program that, before the 9/11 attacks, before Yoo’s memos and before a general coarsening of attitudes towards abuse and the mistreatment of prisoners, would have led to calls for that mistreatment to be thoroughly investigated, and, very possibly, for it to be regarded as torture or as cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.

In Khadr’s case, these questions should not even need raising, for a number of other compelling reasons. The first concerns his age. Under the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which the US is also a signatory, juveniles — defined as those under the age of 18 when the crime they are accused of committing took place — “require special protection.” The Optional Protocol specifically recognizes “the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities,” and requires its signatories to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”

Instead, however, the US government is attempting, for the third time, to prosecute Khadr for war crimes in a special trial system for foreign terror suspects — the Military Commissions — which were first ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 2006, were then revived by Congress but abandoned by President Obama on his first day in office (after they had succeeded in delivering just three dubious results), and were then revived again by President Obama, with the support of Congress, last summer.

Compounding the dark absurdity of Khadr’s proposed trial is an uncomfortable truth that has been particularly noted by Lt. Col. David Frakt, a former military defense attorney for the Commissions, who has regularly pointed out that the Military Commissions are fundamentally flawed because they contain “law of war offenses” invented by Congress, including “Providing Material Support to Terrorism” and “Murder in Violation of the Law of War.” Lt. Col. Frakt has recently expressed even graver concerns about how the new Military Commissions Act includes a passage which claims that “a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war.”

As I also explained in an article last week, “critics of Khadr’s trial have, from the beginning, recognized that there is something horribly skewed about redefining the internationally accepted laws of war so that one side in an armed conflict — the US — can kill whoever it wants with impunity, whereas its opponents are viewed as terrorists, or, when brought to trial, as those who have committed ‘Murder in Violation of the Law of War.’”

Nevertheless, as the Obama administration has decided to press ahead with Khadr’s trial, pre-trial hearings were held over the last two weeks in an attempt to address concerns raised by Khadr’s defense team. These largely skirted the issues discussed in the paragraphs above, but focused unerringly on Khadr’s alleged mistreatment, through a “Motion to Suppress Statements Procured Using Torture, Coercion and Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment” (PDF), in which his lawyers argued that any self-incriminating statements that Khadr may have made should be ruled out because of the manner in which they were extracted.

The Torture of Omar Khadr

Over the years, and in an affidavit submitted in February 2008 (PDF), Khadr has described his mistreatment in detail, explaining how he was unconscious for a week after his capture, when he was severely wounded, and how, in Bagram, where he was taken after just two weeks in a hospital, his interrogations began immediately, at the hands of an interrogator who manipulated his injuries (the exact details were redacted from his affidavit). Crucially, he also explained how, as soon as he regained consciousness, “the first soldier told me that I had killed an American with a grenade,” and how, during his first interrogation at Bagram, “I figured out right away that I would simply tell them whatever I thought they wanted to hear in order to keep them from causing me [redacted].”

There is much more in the affidavit — casual cruelty, whereby guards made Khadr do hard manual labor when his wounds were not healed, and, significantly, threats “to have me raped, or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped.” He also noted, “I would always hear people screaming, both day and night,” and explained that other prisoners were scared of his interrogator. “Most people would not talk about what had been done to them,” he declared. “This made me afraid.”

Khadr also described what happened to him in Guantánamo, where, as I explained last week, he “arrived around the time that a regime of humiliation, isolation and abuse, including extreme temperature manipulation, forced nudity and sexual humiliation, had just been introduced, by reverse-engineering torture techniques, used in a military program designed to train US personnel to resist interrogation if captured, in an attempt to increase the meager flow of ‘actionable intelligence’ from the prison.”

At various points in 2003, while the use of these techniques was still widespread, Khadr stated that he was short-shackled in painful positions and left for up to ten hours in a freezing cold cell, threatened with rape and with being transferred to another country where he could be raped, and, on one particular occasion, when he had been left short-shackled in a painful position until he urinated on himself:

Military police poured pine oil on the floor and on me, and then, with me lying on my stomach and my hands and feet cuffed together behind me, the military police dragged me back and forth through the mixture of urine and pine oil on the floor. Later, I was put back in my cell, without being allowed a shower or a change of clothes. I was not given a change of clothes for two days. They did this to me again a few weeks later.

Crucially, when describing the interrogations that punctuated these experiences at Guantánamo, Khadr explained, “I did not want to expose myself to any more harm, so I always just told interrogators what I thought they wanted to hear. Having been asked the same questions so many times, I knew what answers made interrogators happy and would always tailor my answers based on what I thought would keep me from being harmed.”

Until two weeks ago, these claims — though well-known to those who have followed Khadr’s case — had, for the most part, not been aired in a courtroom. In response to the defense motion, however, the government attempted to refute Khadr’s claims, calling a female interrogator who stated that Khadr had voluntarily admitted that he threw the grenade that killed US Sgt. Christopher Speer, during sessions after his arrival at Guantánamo in October 2002 that were perfectly amicable, and an FBI agent, Robert Fuller, who stated that his interrogations of Khadr at Bagram earlier in October 2002 were also “conversational” and “non-confrontational,” and that Khadr had freely admitted to throwing the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer.

Whilst it was possible — if not probable — that both interrogators were telling the truth about interrogating Khadr non-coercively, the problem remains that Khadr has stated that, from the time of his very first interrogation, he regarded telling his interrogators what they wanted to hear as the best way of avoiding mistreatment, and so may not have been telling them the truth. As a result, last week’s witnesses were more significant because they shed light on the early days after he recovered consciousness in US custody, and, in particular, on his first interrogation and his subsequent interaction with that interrogator. Along the way, further witnesses cast shadows on the government’s otherwise clean picture of interrogations conducted in a non-coercive environment.

It would have remarkable had this not happened, as countless witnesses — including soldiers as well as current and former Guantánamo prisoners — have described the brutality at Bagram at the time Khadr was held there between August and October 2002, which led, just over a month after Khadr’s departure for Guantánamo, to the murder of two prisoners — and, very possibly, to other murders at the time he was held.

The Medic’s Testimony –- and “Palestinian Hanging”

The first to reveal a glimpse of the regime at Bagram was, ironically, a medic called as a witness by the prosecution. “Mr. M,” as he was identified, who testified by video link from Boston, countered Khadr’s claims that, while he was at Bagram, “five people in civilian clothes would come and change my bandages,” and that they “treated me very roughly and videotaped me while they did it,” stating that he alone changed his bandages twice a day, and that no rough treatment was involved.

He did, however, note that, on one occasion, he found Khadr hooded and chained to a cage by his wrists with his arms “just above eye level,” and that when he lifted the hood, Khadr was visibly upset. The medic added, as Carol Rosenberg described it in the Miami Herald, that “he didn’t object to Khadr’s treatment, because chaining was an approved form of punishment” at Bagram, ”adding that he didn’t know the reason for the punishment nor how long Khadr had been chained.”

This rather nonchalant description of “chaining” may not have shocked the medic, especially as the chains were apparently “slack enough to allow Khadr’s feet to touch the floor,” but the only reason for this was because of the severity of his wounds, as Khadr explained in his affidavit, in which he also stated that he was chained up “several times.” Otherwise, like numerous other prisoners, including Dilawar (the subject of “Taxi to the Dark Side”) and Mullah Habibullah, the two prisoners who were killed at Bagram in December 2002, he would have been fully suspended by his wrists, in a torture technique more commonly known as the “strappado” technique or “Palestinian hanging.”

Nevertheless, as Barry Coburn, Khadr’s lead lawyer, explained, the medic’s testimony provided “critically important validation” of statements in his client’s affidavit, and another of his lawyers, Kobie Flowers, added, “Had this been an American soldier in North Korea, people would be outraged. Here we have a 15-year-old individual who was nearly killed with bullets in his back who was left up there to hang as punishment.”

“Interrogator No. 2” and Khadr’s First Interrogation –- On a Stretcher

However, while this was significant in establishing some context for the general and well-chronicled brutality at Bagram, which will no doubt emerge in unprecedented detail should Khadr’s trial proceed, it was not until Tuesday last week that previously unknown information emerged regarding Khadr’s first interrogation on arrival at Bagram, which, according to a master sergeant in the US Army, identified as “Interrogator No. 2,” who appeared in person, took place on the same day that Khadr was moved from the hospital to what Carol Rosenberg described as “the crude, putrid Bagram Air Base detention center.”

The interrogator, who was an observer at Khadr’s first interrogation on August 12, 2002, revealed that “the questioning took place while Khadr was on a stretcher — he couldn’t remember if Khadr was shackled to it — and that his notes included this detail: ‘Clarification was difficult due to the sedation and fatigue of the detainee.’” He also explained that no coercion was used on him, but just two approved techniques from the Army Field Manual: “fear down,” which is designed to play down a prisoner’s anxieties, and “fear of incarceration,” which encourages prisoners to tell the truth by pointing out that otherwise they may face extended imprisonment.

It is hard to tell if this controlled line of questioning strictly reflects reality, but even so, as one of Khadr’s military lawyers, Army Lt. Col. Jon Jackson noted, the testimony showed that Khadr “was first questioned within just 12 hours of his transfer from the US field hospital to the detention center.” Kobie Flowers was more forceful in his criticism. “You got a guy who is 15, seriously wounded, who has had multiple surgeries, and that’s the first time the United States government takes a statement from him to use in his prosecution,” he said, adding, “Now whether it is torture, cruel, inhumane, degrading treatment or simply involuntary … I don’t think any federal judge in the United States would allow that type of conduct.”

The Testimony of Damien Corsetti

On Wednesday, a peripheral figure in Khadr’s story — but one who has achieved a certain notoriety — testified by video link from Arlington, Virginia. Damien Corsetti, who was known as “Monster” at Bagram, based on a tattoo on his chest, and also as “The King of Torture,” described himself as “a disabled veteran suffering post traumatic stress disorder as a result of his interrogation work in both Afghanistan and Iraq,” and explained how, on seeing Khadr on July 29, 2002, just two days after his capture, he was struck by how he was an injured “child” detained in “one of the worst places on Earth.” He added, “More than anything, he looked beat up. He was a 15 year-old kid with three holes in his body, a bunch of shrapnel in his face. That was what I remember. How horrible this 15 year-old child looked.”

Corsetti, who was cleared in 2005 of abuse charges relating to his conduct in Bagram and, later, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, explained, back in 2007, how he was still haunted by “the cries, the smells, the sounds” of those whose torture he witnessed, when he was called upon to attend sessions in the basement of Bagram in which “high-value detainees” were tortured. “[T]hey are with me all the time,” he said.

On May 5, Corsetti told the court that he was “not one of Khadr’s interrogators” but had befriended him in Bagram. He explained that the guards and interrogators, who identified all the prisoners as “BOB” (which stood for “Bad Odor Boys”), named Khadr “Buckshot BOB,” due to his injuries. He added that “there was the sound of screaming and yelling ‘continuously,” and also confirmed that threats were made to send prisoners to countries where they would be tortured, or raped. He specifically mentioned Israel and Egypt, but added, as Michelle Shephard explained in the Toronto Star, that he “did not know if Khadr had been told this.” As Khadr stated in his affidavit that he was indeed threatened with being sent to Israel or Egypt (or Syria or Jordan), Corsetti’s testimony therefore endorsed another of Khadr’s claims.

“Interrogator No. 1” and the Rape Threat

If Corsetti’s testimony, for the most part, did little more than add some more color to the story of Khadr’s early months in US custody, Thursday’s witness, Joshua Claus, provided potent testimony regarding the kind of threats to which Khadr was subjected, and also provided a disturbing link to the kind of violence in Bagram that led to the murders of Dilawar and Mullah Habibullah in December 2002. Claus, formerly a sergeant in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion (of which Corsetti was also a member), was identified in court as “Interrogator No. 1,” and was Khadr’s main interrogator at Bagram, the “skinny blond” man with glasses (just 21 years old at the time) who also interrogated him while he was on a stretcher, on the day that he was moved to Bagram from the field hospital, and who, according to Khadr, mistreated him in an unknown manner (because the details are redacted) during his first interrogation.

Testifying by video link from Arizona, Claus recalled, in particular, using the technique described as “fear up harsh” in interrogations of Khadr, during which he would kick the furniture and scream at the young prisoner. He also admitted that he invented a rape story to scare him, explaining, as Spencer Ackerman described it in the Washington Independent:

“I told him a fictitious story we had invented when we were there,” Interrogator #1 said. It was something “three or four” interrogators at Bagram came up with after learning that Afghans were “terrified of getting raped and general homosexuality, things of that nature.” The story went like this:

Interrogator #1 would tell the detainee, “I know you’re lying about something.” And so, for an instruction about the consequences of lying, Khadr learned that lying “not so seriously” wouldn’t land him in a place like “Cuba” — meaning, presumably, Guantánamo Bay — but in an American prison instead. And this one time, a “poor little 20-year-old kid” sent from Afghanistan ended up in an American prison for lying to an American. “A bunch of big black guys and big Nazis noticed the little Afghan didn’t speak their language, and prayed five times a day — he’s Muslim,” Interrogator #1 said. Although the fictitious inmates were criminals, “they’re still patriotic,” and the guards “can’t be everywhere at once.”

“So this one unfortunate time, he’s in the shower by himself, and these four big black guys show up — and it’s terrible something would happen — but they caught him in the shower and raped him. And it’s terrible that these things happen, the kid got hurt and ended up dying,” Interrogator #1 said. “It’s all a fictitious story.”

Perhaps so, but as Ackerman also noted, every other interrogator who spoke to Khadr did so “after he heard a ‘fictitious story’ about a young Afghan who lied to US interrogators and as a result was raped and killed in jail.”

In many ways, the events of the last two weeks were inconclusive, and it remains to be seen how the judge, Army Col. Patrick Parrish, will interpret them. Certainly, there was much worse abuse at Bagram and at Guantánamo than that experienced by Omar Khadr, but he was just a child during his time at Bagram and the early years of his abuse at Guantánamo, and it may well be that, as his lawyers assert, any self-incriminating statements that he made (especially regarding the throwing of a grenade that may have taken place when he was face down and unconscious under a pile of rubble) were produced because rape threats and physical violence based primarily on exploitation of his wounds was enough to terrify him into acquiescence with whatever his captors wanted.

The Pentagon Shoots Itself in the Foot: Four Reporters Banned

Ironically, the biggest story in Guantánamo last week was not the reports of Khadr’s treatment but the banning of four reporters (including Michelle Shephard and Carol Rosenberg), after they revealed Claus’ name in newspaper reports. The Pentagon alleged that this violated an order stipulating that Claus’ real name was protected information, but this was patently ridiculous, because his name was already in the public domain, and, in 2008, he had even conducted an interview with Michelle Shephard.

Instead of protecting Claus, the Pentagon’s heavy-handed response served only to make other reporters wonder if the Pentagon was trying to prevent anyone from working out that, unlike Damien Corsetti, Claus served five months in prison for pleading guilty in a court martial to the abuse of an unidentified prisoner at Bagram, who was made “to roll back and forth on the floor and kiss the boots of his interrogator,” as Michelle Shephard described it, and for the assault of Dilawar. In Shephard’s words, “He admitted to forcing water down the throat of Dilawar and twisting a hood over the Afghan’s head.” Moreover, as another soldier explained in a military report into Dilawar’s death, “I had the impression that Josh was actually holding the detainee upright by pulling on the hood. I was furious at this point because I had seen Josh tighten the hood of another detainee the week before. This behavior seemed completely gratuitous and unrelated to intelligence collection.”

In his interview in 2008, Claus insisted that he wanted to set the record straight. “They’re trying to imply I’m beating or torturing everyone I ever talked to [at Bagram],” he said, adding that, with Khadr, “I spent a lot of time trying to understand who he was and what I could say to him or do for him, whether it be to bring him extra food or get a letter out to his family … I needed to talk to him and get him to trust me.”

Responding last Thursday to a question about his conviction posed by Barry Coburn, Claus insisted that he “lost control at a very slight moment. You’re talking about two-and-a-half minutes of my life.” This may not technically be correct, as there was clearly more than one incident, but it is obvious that his actions were part of an abusive program sanctioned at the highest level of the Bush administration, and moreover, as Damien Corsetti explained, “the pressure to get information from prisoner at Bagram was intense.” He told Col. Parrish, “This was less than a year after 9/11 so we’re all still pretty heated up about that. This was life and death stuff we were supposedly dealing with. There was just a ton of pressure on us to get information to save lives and generate reports.”

By banning the four reporters, the Pentagon has only succeeded in drawing attention to something it presumably wanted to hide: that Omar Khadr’s mistreatment in Bagram took place at time when the violence in the prison, sanctioned by the Bush administration, was so intense that prisoners died, and that his first interrogator was implicated in the murder of one of these men. It doesn’t prove that Khadr wasn’t coerced into making false confessions, but it doesn’t augur well for claims that everything about his treatment was “conversational” and “non-confrontational.”

The Obama administration has until July, when Khadr’s trial is scheduled to start, to extricate itself from a public relations disaster of its own making, by formulating an acceptable plea deal for Khadr and arranging his return to Canada. Too much about this story — from the trumped-up war crimes charges, to the doubts about Khadr’s guilt, to his age and the abuse to which, on occasion, he was undoubtedly subjected — makes proceeding with the trial an unpalatable and essentially pointless exercise. It is, I believe, time, after nearly eight years, for his punishment to come to an end, and for his long-delayed rehabilitation to begin.

Originally published on Cageprisoners.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Hilary Anderson at BBC has been following the Bagram prison story closely. This week, she reports that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has confirmed the existence of a second prison site at Bagram. The presence of a second site has long been suspected, a prison the Afghans call Tor Prison, or the “Black” Prison.

The US military says the main prison, now called the Detention Facility in Parwan, is the only detention facility on the base.

However, it has said it will look into the abuse allegations made to the BBC.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that since August 2009 US authorities have been notifying it of names of detained people in a separate structure at Bagram.

Obama Tortures, Too

Last month, BBC reported on conditions at the main Parwan facility. The scenes as described were right out of the iconography of Guantanamo. Prisoners in handcuffs and leg shackles, “moved around in wheelchairs” with blackout goggles and headphones “to block out all sound.” This was the treatment for a prison population that even the U.S. military admits is far and away not made up of serious terrorists. Meanwhile, the number held at Bagram has swelled to approximately 800 prisoners.

But we don’t know how many are in the other, “the Black Hole.” We don’t know because the U.S. still insists that no second prison exists. Prisoners held at Tor, according to investigations by BBC, are tossed into cold concrete cells, where the light is kept on 24 hours. Noise machines fill their cells with constant sound, and prisoners are sleep deprived as a matter of policy, with each cell monitored by a camera, so the authorities will know when someone is falling asleep and come to wake them.

Prisoners are beaten and abused. According to BBC’s article last month, one prisoner was “made to dance to music by American soldiers every time he wanted to use the toilet.”

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times reported late last year on conditions at the black-site prison, believed to be run by U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Each of these reports noted that prisoners were subjected to abuse. One prisoner, a 42-year-old farmer named Hamidullah told the New York Times about his stay in the Tor prison, June through October 2009:

I can’t remember the number of days I spent there because it’s hard to tell days from nights in the black jail, but I think every day they came twice to ask questions.

They took me to their own room to ask the questions. They beat up other people in the black jail, but not me. But the problem was that they didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn’t sleep….

The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place. It is a place where everybody is afraid. In the black jail, they can do anything to detainees.

Together with the BBC investigation and the ICRC confirmation, we can see that the military is lying through their teeth when they claim there is no second Bagram facility, or that no abuse takes place at Bagram. (For more on Bagram and the issue of indefinite detention, see this recent diary by Jim White.)

The presence of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, brutality, isolation and the like at the U.S. prison complex has not been a matter of protest among U.S. progressives, many of whom still support the administration of President Barack Obama. Many liberals have been in denial over the poor record of President Obama on the issue of torture and detention policies. The President began his administration with a big series of presidential orders that supposedly ended the Bush administration’s policy of torturing prisoners, and shut down the CIA’s black site prisons.

But as we know now, not all the black site prisons were shut down. Nor was the torture ended. Whether it’s beatings and forced-feedings at Guantanamo, or the kinds of torture described at Bagram, it’s obvious that torture has not been rooted out of U.S. military-intelligence operations. In fact, by way of the Obama administration’s recent approval of the Bush-era Army Field Manual on interrogations, with its infamous Appendix M, which allows for much of the kind of torture practiced at Bagram, the White House has institutionalized a level of torture that was introduced by the previous administration, but which has been studied and devised over the last fifty or sixty years.

Furthermore, in a June 2009 Air Force document reported on last July, it was noted that the personnel responsible for some of the torture program deriving from the SERE schools were still allowed “psychological oversight of battlefield interrogation and detention.” Are SERE psychologists involved in the Special Operations at torture at Tor and Parwan? Given the close relationship between SERE’s parent group, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, and JSOC, I think there’s a high possibility of just such involvement.

A question hangs heavily over the U.S. political scene: how long will denial exist among liberals and progressives over the persistence of an aggressive military policy and the concomitant crimes against humanity that come with it? How long will the supporters of Barack Obama maintain their studied indifference to the crimes against humanity done in their name? The shine is off this new president, and underneath it all we can discern the same old game of lies covering for crimes. Enough is enough.

Originally published at Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com

In the hope of making the list more readily accessible — and searchable — than it is through a poorly photocopied Pentagon document, I reproduce it as a separate web page here, with commentary on some the prisoners I have been able to identify. This is very much a work-in-progress, of course, as the state of knowledge regarding Bagram is akin to that regarding Guantánamo back in 2005, before the prisoner lists and 8,000 pages of documents were released that allowed me to research and write my book The Guantánamo Files, and to begin a new career as a full-time journalist on Guantánamo and related issues.

In an article accompanying this post, “Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List,” I examined what the list — which contains only the prisoners’ names, and not their nationalities or the date and place of their capture — revealed about the small number of foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries, three of whom are currently waiting to see if the Court of Appeals will overturn the right to habeas corpus that was granted to them by Judge John D. Bates last March, and raised questions about the whereabouts of other known “ghost prisoners” who do not appear to have been included on the list.

In an article to follow, I’ll examine how the list reveals not only that around 3,000 prisoners have been held at Bagram in the last six years, but also how the majority of the prisoners listed were seized in 2008 and 2009 — and I’ll examine what this means with regard to the US administration’s detention policies and the Geneva Conventions, which were discarded by George W. Bush and have clearly not been reintroduced by Barack Obama.

Although I believe that I have had some success tracking down the stories of some of the 100 or so prisoners on the list who have been held at Bagram for between three and seven years, I have found few clues as to the identities of the majority of those listed, who, as mentioned above, were seized in the last two years. Most reports — by the US military or the media — of raids or skirmishes that led to the capture of those held have not furnished the names of those seized, and on the rare occasion that names have been provided it has tended to be because they are regarded as significant figures.

I have no idea whether the allegations against these men are true, but, more importantly, I have not failed to notice that the majority of the prisoners (often men identified by only one name) are clearly not significant figures at all, and my fear — which, I have no doubt, will be confirmed when more information emerges — is that many of them will be revealed to be victims of the same chaotic approach to the capture of prisoners that has done so much to lose the battle for the “hearts and minds” of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq for the last eight years, and which, with regard to the 218 prisoners seized in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2003 and sent to Guantánamo, I chronicled in The Guantánamo Files.

One sign that this is indeed the case was reported on NPR last August, when NPR’s Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman explained how Maj. Gen. Doug Stone had recently been sent to Afghanistan by Gen. David Petraeus, the overall commander of Afghanistan and Iraq, because he “liked the way Stone revamped the detention centers in Iraq, how he changed them for the better.” Bowman explained that Stone “went to Afghanistan with a team, interviewed detainees, visited detention facilities,” and produced a 700-page report, in which he estimated that “as many as 400 of the 600 held at Bagram can be released,” explaining that “many of these men were swept up in raids” and “have little connection to the insurgency.”

Bowman added that Maj. Gen. Stone “wants to focus on rehabilitation, just like he did in Iraq where he ran the detention system there. He had 21,000 detainees. But he found that most of these Iraqi detainees — as many as two-thirds — were not radicals, but mostly illiterate and jobless young people. Some were innocents and others worked for the insurgency because they just needed the money. And Stone worried that detaining them was only making matters worse, actually turning them into radicals.”

As Stone explained to NPR at the time:

Now you’ve got a bunch of moderates who really shouldn’t be in there in the first place. And I can hold them forever, but eventually they’re going to say, “Why are you holding me? What’s the fairness in this?” And eventually they’ll say something about America that we don’t want to hear. They’re going to say, “Wait a minute, you’re not here to better the population, you’re here to conquer us and you’re taking me hostage.”

If you have any further information about any of the men on this list, please feel free to email me, and I will incorporate the information into the list.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.