Detainees sit around the exercise yard in Camp 4, the medium security facility within Camp Delta at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In Camp 4, highly compliant detainees live in a communal setting and have extensive access to recreation. Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood

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When it comes to dealing with the thorny question of how to close Guantánamo, the remaining prisoners have been caught between two competing systems since President Obama took office last January, and the result, to put it mildly, has been confusing.

Under President Bush, prisoners were cleared for release by military review boards, established to review the supposed evidence against them, and to determine whether they constituted an ongoing threat to the US. This appeared to be a maddeningly arbitrary system, but it led to the release of hundreds of the prisoners.

In June 2008, the Supreme Court added a second layer of review, of a more substantial nature, when it gave the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to challenge the basis of their detention in a US court. This right had been established by the Supreme Court in June 2004, leading to the filing of habeas petitions on behalf of the majority of the prisoners, but these were all stalled when Congress submitted to the President’s wishes and passed legislation that purported to strip the prisoners of these rights, in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Guantánamo and habeas corpus under George W. Bush

Following the Supreme Court ruling in June 2008, District Court judges began hearing the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, and the prisoners secured, for the first time, an objective review of what the government claimed to be evidence proving that they were connected to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. The result was a disappointment for the government, although it came as no surprise to those who had been studying Guantánamo closely, and who knew that the majority of the prisoners had been seized by America’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when substantial bounty payments were being offered, and that the majority of the supposed evidence against the men came from their own interrogations, or those of other prisoners, which were often conducted in conditions where torture, coercion or bribery were prevalent.

From October 2008 to January 2009, 23 prisoners won their habeas petitions, and just three cases were won by the government. In the case of 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), the government gave up all pretense that they were “enemy combatants,” having established, soon after they were seized in December 2001, that their only enemy was the Chinese government, and having suffered a humiliating court defeat shortly after the Supreme Court ruling last June. A judge also dismissed the government’s claims against five Algerian-born Bosnian citizens, who had been kidnapped by US agents from Sarajevo in January 2002, in connection with a non-existent plot to bomb the US embassy, and the case against a Chadian national, who was a child at the time of his capture by Pakistani police in a raid on a mosque in Karachi.

In both cases, the judge — Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush — dismissed the government’s supposed evidence by ruling, in the case of the Bosnians, that a supposed informer was unreliable, and in the case of the former child prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, that unreliable witnesses in Guantánamo (whose unreliability was known to the authorities) had concocted a fictional story about him.

Judge Leon also ruled that the government had established a case against one of the Bosnians — in connection with purported plans to recruit men to fight in Afghanistan — and against two other prisoners with supposed connections to the Taliban or al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but it was a poor start for the government’s defense of its rationale for holding men for seven years without charge or trial, and these same problems resurfaced under Barack Obama.

Guantánamo and habeas corpus under Barack Obama

In Obama’s first year in office, nine prisoners won their habeas petitions, and six lost. Those who won included a Syrian who had been tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy, an Afghan (also a child at the time of capture) whose confessions were tainted by threats of torture, and a Kuwaiti businessman who had been tortured in Guantánamo until he came up with false confessions that were only finally exposed by a judge last September. In all these cases, false confessions and unreliable witnesses fatally undermined the government’s case.

Moreover, in the majority of cases that the government won, the fault lines in the Bush administration’s rationale for defining men as “enemy combatants” became apparent: most were, at best, peripheral characters in the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance that preceded al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and should, by any objective measure, have been held as enemy prisoners of war, and protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Although the majority of the nine prisoners who lost their habeas petitions were cast back into the unprecedented world of indefinite detention conceived by the Bush administration, awaiting a substantial overhaul of the very basis of detention policies in the “War on Terror” that has not yet happened, it was clear that the courts provided the first objective review of the Bush administration’s policies. It muddied the waters, therefore, when President Obama established an interagency Task Force to review all the prisoners’ cases, and to come up with its own conclusions about who should be released, and who should be put on trial.

Obama’s Task Force muddies the waters

The Task Force struggled to pull together information about the prisoners that was scattered throughout various department and agencies, and took until January this year to complete its findings, advising the President that 35 prisoners should be put forward for trials, that 47 should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and that the rest — around 110 prisoners at the time — should be released.

The announcement revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses of the review process. It was, of course, heartening that only 35 prisoners would face trials, as this figure corresponded to analyses revealed by intelligence officials over the previous eight years, demonstrating that less than 5 percent of the 779 prisoners held throughout Guantánamo’s history had any meaningful connection to al-Qaeda, the Taliban leadership or international terrorism. Similarly, the decision to release 110 men was a swifter judgment than the courts were able to achieve — although it should be noted that the progress of the habeas petitions was severely obstructed by the Justice Department, where lawyers dragged their heels providing necessary information to the defense, and also that an executive decision to release a prisoner did not carry the weight of a court verdict, and did not, crucially, remove the stigma of having been held for years as an “enemy combatant.”

However, the biggest disappointment was the Task Force’s recommendation that 47 men be held indefinitely without charge or trial. “Preventive detention” was at the heart of the Bush administration’s baleful experiment in holding prisoners neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trial on charges related to terrorism, and it was profoundly disturbing to hear President Obama explain, as he did in May last year, that the men in question were those who “cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.” Essentially, what this statement revealed was that the administration was prepared to rely on information obtained through torture as a reason for continuing indefinite detention without charge or trial.

Moreover, the Task Force’s announcement in January — and Obama’s apparent endorsement of it — also ignored the role of the courts, for the simple reason that the majority of these men had outstanding habeas corpus petitions, and that, as a result, it was up to the District Court judges, and not the executive, to decide whether the supposed evidence against them was at all reliable.

Such is the muddle created by the Task Force — and such is the secrecy surrounding its decisions — that it is impossible to know whether the nine men consigned to indefinite detention after losing their habeas petitions in the courts are included in the 47 men that the Task Force advised should be held indefinitely. I can only presume that this is the case, but, as events last week showed, we are now in a position where rulings on prisoners’ habeas petitions no longer stand independently, but are actively compared to the results reached by a Task Force whose findings are secret.

The latest habeas corpus rulings

Last week, judges ruled on the habeas petitions of three Yemeni prisoners. The unclassified opinions have not yet been released, so the judges’ reasoning is not yet available, but in two cases the prisoner’s habeas petitions were denied, and in the third case the petition was granted. The two men who lost their petitions are Suleiman al-Nahdi and Fahmi al-Assani, and the man who won was Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman. To confuse matters further, both al-Nahdi and al-Assani had been cleared by a Bush-era military review board, while Uthman had not. It is, of course, not known what decision had been reached by the Task Force regarding these men.

Although the judges’ unclassified opinions are not yet available, a glance at these men’s stories, as available through publicly accessible Pentagon documents, indicates how the decisions may have been made. As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, Othman, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, “said that he had traveled between Kabul and Khost teaching the Koran from March to December 2001.” Although he “admitted that he had stayed at a Taliban house in Quetta, Pakistan, which was the normal entry point for volunteers who had come to fight with the Taliban,” he stated that this was “only because he had been told that it was the only way for him to enter Afghanistan.”

If Othman had a plausible argument that he had traveled to Afghanistan as a missionary, this was not the case with al-Nahdi and al-Assani. Both had been seized in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan (where a major showdown between al-Qaeda and the US military’s Afghan proxies had taken place in November and December 2001), and, although it is clear from the cases of many of the men held at Guantánamo that passing through Tora Bora to escape the chaos of Afghanistan did not prove that they were involved in any kind of military activity (because thousands of civilians were also trying to escape), both men came up with accounts which suggested that they were at least peripherally involved in the conflict.

As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, al-Assani, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture:

was a recent recruit to the Taliban cause, a foot soldier in an inter-Muslim civil war that had suddenly gone global. He traveled to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001, trained briefly at al-Farouq [a training camp established by an Afghan warlord but associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before the 9/11 attacks] and ended up in Tora Bora, but only, he said, because “I was fleeing for my life with many other people to avoid the bombing that was imminent,” and not, as was alleged, because he “was assigned to augment Taliban and al-Qaeda forces already in defensive positions in Tora Bora.” He added that he was with a group of Pakistanis, trying to get to Pakistan, when they were bombed by US forces and he was “the sole survivor.”

He was then taken by Afghan forces to a hospital in Jalalabad, and delivered to US forces some months later.

Al-Nahdi, who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, explained that he had been inspired to assist the Taliban through a fatwa issued by a notorious cleric, and had spent a month at al-Farouq. He added that:

[He] saw Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, when he “talked about the jihad for approximately one hour and then a senior al-Qaeda operative [identified as Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s No. 2] made a few comments,” and then went into the mountains, where he took turns guarding a foxhole with 15 other people. Responding to an allegation that he “may have fought in Tora Bora,” he said, “I never fired a weapon. I was only sitting,” and, when asked if he would have shot at Americans, he [said]: “I did not see any Americans. If I had seen any Americans, I would not have shot at them. I would have only shot at them if they had shot at me first, to defend myself.”

Guantánamo’s continuing existence as a legal black hole

Over eight years after Guantánamo opened, it is clear from these three rulings that the fate of the men in question is still dictated more by the disgraceful innovations of the Bush administration than it is by any objective notions of justice. Othman may be released, but only when the Obama administration decides that it is politically safe to free any cleared Yemeni prisoners (having capitulated to unprincipled criticism following the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt by suspending all releases to Yemen until further notice). Moreover, it is impossible to know whether any of these three men were cleared for release by Obama’s Task Force, and, if so, what it means if a prisoner loses his habeas petition, when the Task Force had recommended his release.

Behind all this, of course, lies the problem that I have been highlighting ever since Judge Leon ruled, last January, that Ghaleb al-Bihani, another Yemeni, could continue to be held indefinitely because he had worked as a cook for Arab forces supporting the Taliban, and had not magically spirited himself out of Afghanistan on the day that the US-led invasion began, in October 2001. Absurdly, it seems to me, this was when the Taliban’s civil war with the Northern Alliance suddenly became a “War on Terror,” in which US forces, who hooked up with the Northern Alliance after years of indifference to their cause, were conventional soldiers, but those who opposed them were terrorists.

If there were truly any justice, Ghaleb al-Bihani — and Suleiman al-Nahdi and Fahmi al-Assani — would have been held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions, and not as special “War on Terror” prisoners whose detention was endorsed by Congress in the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which empowered the President to seize and hold anyone he regarded as having a connection to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. Crucially, this would mean that they could continue to be held until the end of hostilities (whenever that may be), but it would also mean that they would not have been subjected to the abusive innovations of the “War on Terror,” and would have been shielded from coercive interrogations and “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

I have serious doubts about whether it is acceptable to continue holding peripheral figures seized during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 for longer than the duration of the Second World War, but even if this were the case, no one in the Executive branch, Congress or the judiciary has fully addressed the fact that, instead, they are still effectively in the black hole dreamed up by the Bush administration when the President accepted, in February 2002, that he had the right to hold a new category of human being — “enemy combatants” without rights — outside the Geneva Conventions.

This story was originally publishe on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

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.

As is universally recognized, Kuwait is a close and faithful ally of the United States. The United States liberated Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion of 1990. More recently, Kuwait provided critical support as a staging area for the U.S. military during the Iraq War.

To be fair, the Emir of Kuwait has sought the return of the Kuwaiti detainees in face-to-face meetings with both President Bush and President Obama. The Emir has also sent a letter to the U.S. government requesting that all Kuwaiti citizens detained at Guantanamo be returned. Other Kuwaiti officials have repeated that request to their counterparts in the U.S. government.

The Government of Kuwait has also fulfilled all of the conditions the U.S. government established for the return of the Kuwaiti detainees. Perhaps most significantly, Kuwait established a state-of-the-art rehabilitation center that provides access to education, medical care, group discussions, and physical exercise to help detainees recover from their long ordeal in Guantanamo.

But while Kuwait has clearly made an effort to secure the return of its citizens, these efforts have not been strong enough. Contrast Kuwait’s quiet, diplomatic approach with that of Saudi Arabia, which openly criticized the U.S. government and demanded its citizens back. As a result, more than 100 Saudi detainees were transferred from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia.

Despite the close ties between the United States and Kuwait, the United States does not appear eager to send Kuwaitis home. For example, on September 17, 2009, a U.S. federal judge ordered the immediate release of Fouad Al Rabiah, an innocent Kuwaiti who was interrogated in “enhanced” ways at the hands of his U.S. captors. Rather than immediately returning him to Kuwait, the U.S. government delayed and stalled Mr. Al Rabiah’s transfer, forcing his attorneys to ask that U.S. officials be held in contempt of court.

It was not until December 9, 2009, almost three months after the judge’s order, that Mr. Al Rabiah was finally released from Guantanamo and returned to Kuwait. Still, even with a Federal judge’s opinion that the United States had no authority to detain Mr Al Rabiah, the Kuwaiti government refused to demand his return.

If the United States was reluctant to release a demonstrably innocent man, it most certainly will be in no rush to repatriate my client, Fayiz Al Kandari, whose habeas case is still pending despite Fayiz having spent more than eight years in Guantanamo.

At this critical time, the United States is turning its back on its faithful ally. The United States may be legitimately reluctant to return detainees to countries such as Tunisia or Libya where former prisoners may face further torture or persecution. But there are no such concerns about Kuwait. To the contrary, Kuwait treats its returned detainees humanely and helps reintegrate them into society with a rehabilitation program modeled after the successful Saudi program.

No one likes to tell their friends they are wrong. But there comes a time in every relationship when a little push back is necessary. And the friendship survives. Now is the time for the Government of Kuwait to take a stand. It might be outside its comfort zone, but it is the right thing to do for its two citizens still imprisoned at Guantanamo.

Lt. Col. Barry Wingard represents Fayiz al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti who has spent seven and a half years in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay without trial.

Detainees sit around the exercise yard in Camp 4, the medium security facility within Camp Delta at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In Camp 4, highly compliant detainees live in a communal setting and have extensive access to recreation. Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood

On Wednesday, four prisoners were released from Guantánamo: an Egyptian, a Libyan and a Tunisian arrived in Albania, and a Palestinian arrived in Spain. All four had been cleared by military review boards at Guantánamo under the Bush administration, and had then been cleared by President Obama’s interagency Task Force, but, like dozens of prisoners in Guantánamo, they could not be repatriated because of fears that they would be tortured if returned to their home countries or subjected to other ill-treatment, or because they were effectively stateless.

The Spanish government, which declared last week that it would take up to five cleared prisoners from Guantánamo, announced that the first of these men arrived in Spain on Wednesday. The Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba told reporters that the man is Palestinian, but would not give his name, citing privacy concerns.

According to the press agency dpa, Rubalcaba explained that he “would get a residence permit, the possibility to work and freedom of movement in Spain, though Guantánamo prisoners taken by European countries could not leave those countries.” He added that Spain would only accept prisoners “with no criminal charges in the European Union, the United States or their countries of origin.”

As well as accepting the Palestinian, the newspaper Periódico reported that other prisoners, “believed to include a Syrian and a Yemeni citizen,” were “expected to arrive in Spain shortly,” adding that they will be “placed in different locations under the care of NGOs,” and will also be “placed under surveillance not only to protect the Spanish public, but also to protect the individuals from al-Qaeda reprisals over their possible revelations to US intelligence services.”

Cementing its role as America’s closest ally when it comes to clearing up “the mess” that is Guantánamo (to quote President Obama’s words from last May), the Albanian Ministry of Interior announced on Wednesday that it had accepted three cleared prisoners, who could not be repatriated because of the fears outlined above. Albania has now taken eleven cleared prisoners from Guantánamo, having accepted eight in 2006, when no other country in the world was prepared to do so (five Uighurs, an Algerian, an Egyptian and an ethnic Uzbek from the former Soviet Union).

Announcing the arrival of three prisoners in Albania, the Ministry of the Interior stated, “This transfer is a result of the engagement of the Albanian government in backing the Obama administration’s policy to close the detention center in Guantánamo and transfer prisoners to friendly and safe third countries.” In a press release, the US Justice Department identified the three men as: Abdul Rauf Omar Mohammad Abu al-Qusin, a Libyan; Sharif Fati Ali al-Mishad, an Egyptian; and Saleh bin Hadi Asasi, a Tunisian.

Their stories, like those of the majority of the 584 prisoners released from Guantánamo, demonstrate, yet again, that, behind the blustering rhetoric of former Vice President Dick Cheney and his swarming acolytes, the majority of the men held at Guantánamo had no involvement with terrorism, and that a disturbingly large number of them were innocent men seized by mistake.

Of the three men rehoused in Albania, for example, one was a businessman, living in Europe, who had traveled to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid, one was a veteran of Afghanistan’s war against the Soviet Union, who had married an Afghan woman, and was seized in a house in Lahore, Pakistan, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, and the other man, as was common in 2001, before the 9/11 attacks, had been persuaded to travel to Afghanistan to help the Taliban defeat their enemies, the Northern Alliance, in a long-running civil war that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism, and had not raised a finger against US forces.

Sherif El-Mashad: An Egyptian businessman and humanitarian aid worker

Sharif al-Mishad (also identified as Sherif El-Mashad) is an Egyptian, born in 1976. A talented athlete and carpenter in his youth, he enrolled in a technical school to learn woodworking, cabinetmaking, painting, tiling, plumbing and roofing, and, after graduating, spent three years working in Sinai at some of Egypt’s largest beach resorts. There, he began to learn Italian from the tourists, and in 1997, after his father died, decided to travel to Italy, to stay with his uncle, an Italian citizen who lived in Como, in the hope of finding better paid work to provide for the family.

Once he had secured a work permit, he worked in a restaurant and a bar, but soon found that his skills as a craftsman would pay better. After working as an apprentice with two painting companies, he obtained a license from the Chamber of Commerce in Como to work as an independent contractor, and set up his own company, “Sherif El-Mashad,” running the business out of his home.

In the spring of 2001, he met a wealthy Kuwaiti businessman, who encouraged him to travel to Afghanistan to do charity work. As he explained to his lawyers, at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, he saw this as “a dual opportunity,” allowing him not only to network with a well-connected businessman, but also to help those less fortunate than himself by distributing humanitarian aid — food, clothes, and blankets. Providing an analogy to his lawyers, he explained that the plan was akin to “organizing a charity gala with a prospective business partner.”

As a result of this meeting, El-Mashad booked a round-trip ticket, intending to stay in Afghanistan for a couple of months, before returning home to work. It was obvious that he had no intention of staying any longer, because, as his lawyers, explained, two days before he left Italy in July 2001, he had billed a customer almost €15,000 for painting services to be collected on his return.

His mother, who is the deputy principal of a school in Egypt, explained in 2006 how she had advised her son against traveling to Afghanistan. “I never wanted him to go on that trip”, she said, “because I knew that the region was unstable and so many events were taking place there, but he was stubborn. He was very kind and grateful to his family, though.” A week after his arrival, according to his mother, “he called his uncle, who lives in Italy, and told him that he arrived and asked him to reassure me.”

After that, he effectively disappeared off the face of the earth, until his uncle called to say that he had received a postcard from Guantánamo (via the International Committee of the Red Cross), in which he wrote that “he had been visiting a friend in Afghanistan and subsequently enlisted in a ‘rescue organization’ that offered ‘humanitarian aid to the Afghani people.’” Although he ended up staying in Afghanistan for longer than he intended, helping his friend, who, as he explained in Guantánamo, “passed out donations to help the Afghani people,” they remained safe in Kabul until November 2001, when, with the Northern Alliance approaching, and rumors spreading that Arabs were no longer safe, they set off for the Iranian border, intending to return home. As he also explained, “I had a valid visa to Iran and a return ticket with an Iranian airline.” However, when they discovered that the border crossing was closed, they realized that they would have to leave via Pakistan, but were detained by Pakistani soldiers after crossing the border and arriving in a small village. El-Mashad then spent three weeks in a Pakistani prison in Peshawar, and was then flown to the US prison at Kandahar airport, where he spent several more months before being transferred to Guantánamo.

There seems to be no reason to dispute this story, and El-Mashad clearly explained it at length to his interrogators in Guantánamo, telling them how he traveled to Kabul, how he met up with the Kuwaiti businessman, how he “heard of the attacks in America while listening to the radio,” how he and “all who were present with him were sorrowful and none of them were happy,” and how he fled from Afghanistan and was seized.

However, once he was in US custody, he became the victim of patently false allegations made by other prisoners, either through coercion or torture, or through the promise of preferential treatment, of the kind that are disturbingly familiar to those who have studied closely the rulings in the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions over the last year and a half.

One of these allegations was made by a prisoner who was rescued by US forces from a prison in Afghanistan, and then transported to Guantánamo, even though he had been imprisoned as a spy by al-Qaeda and had been subjected to horrendous torture. This prisoner claimed that, in early 2000, El-Mashad  “participated in torturing him through beatings and electric shocks”, even though, as El-Mashad pointed out, he was in Italy in early 2000 and had the documents to prove it.

He also told his lawyers that, in the early days of his imprisonment, “I was first accused of aiding the Arabs in Bosnia. Then they changed the accusation that I was there just for training. In both cases, it’s impossible that I was in Bosnia at the time of the war in 1991, simply because at that date I was 14 years old! From 1991-1997 (the duration of the Bosnian war) I was studying at my school and I never left my country to anywhere. I have the proving documents.” He also explained that another set of false allegations came about because the US authorities mistook him for a significant figure in al-Qaeda, which led to a number of other false allegations, including claims that he trained recruits in urban warfare at a military training camp. Another false allegation, made by an unnamed “source”, was that he sold videotapes of the bombing, in 2000, of the USS Cole.

“Throughout my life, I was never involved in any banned or illegal activities by any means,” he told Cori Crider of Reprieve in August 2008, during his first visit with a lawyer from the legal action charity, adding, “I don’t have any file with any police office or any bad record with any authority.” He also explained that Italian agents had visited him in Guantánamo and had confirmed that there was no case against him. “They told me they knew I was innocent and they would ask the United States to release me,” he said, adding, “My case is very clear. I have physical evidence to defend myself against these charges.”

Abdul Ra’ouf al-Qassim: A Libyan seized in Pakistan

Abdul Rauf al-Qusin (also identified as Abdul Ra’ouf al-Qassim, and named in court documents as Abu Abdul Raouf Zalita) is a Libyan, born in 1965, who was cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2006. A soldier in the Libyan army from 1983 to 1989, he had then deserted, traveling to Afghanistan “to immigrate and to start a new life,” as he explained to his military review board in Guantánamo in May 2005. After fighting with the mujahideen until 1993, when the last remnants of the Soviet regime fell, he “traveled back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan” — at one point studying at university in Quetta — and also met and married an Afghan woman, Rahima, with whom he had a daughter, Khiria, who has spent the whole of her young life without her father.

Al-Qassim was captured in Lahore in May 2002, at the house of a Pakistani, after escaping from war-torn Afghanistan with his pregnant wife, but although it was clear that he had not taken up arms against the Americans, it was far less clear that he would not be regarded as a threat by the government of his home country. At his review in 2005, he explained (via a military officer assigned to him instead of a lawyer) that he had received military training at two Libyan camps in Afghanistan, but only because he was living there, and also admitted that he had joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group — exiled opponents of the Gaddafi regime — but only “out of desperation — he was broke, had no place to go, was hungry, unemployed and had no way to support himself.” He added that his family “did not receive monetary support from the [LIFG], but he received food, shelter and an allowance for clothes.” He also agreed with previous statements he had made: that he “did not believe in violence,” and that he “angrily defined [al-Qaeda’s] leadership and members as ‘savages’ who twist the meaning of Islam, thereby hurting all Muslims.”

Although al-Qassim stated that a Libyan delegation, who visited Guantánamo in 2004 (and were actually flown there by the CIA), told him that they “knew he was with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group only by name,” that he was “obligated to be with them,” and that they would “take care of him,” he repeatedly told his Assisting Military Officer that he was “afraid of returning to Libya.” His AMO reported, “He said he does not want to go to Libya because he feels he cannot trust them and because they put people in prison for no reason. He said he feels that if he returns to Libya, even after being released by the United States, he would be sent back to prison.” Such was his concern that the Presiding Officer noted, “For the record, make sure that we put in our report that the Detainee is afraid of returning to Libya.”

In spite of this, the US government sought to repatriate al-Qassim, and his lawyers — at the Center for Constitutional Rights — fought a legal battle for over three years to prevent his forcible return. In a court filing in December 2008 (PDF), they noted his ongoing legal limbo:

The Government has cleared him for transfer from Guantánamo, and has twice attempted to repatriate him to Libya, the country from which he fled to Afghanistan more than a decade ago in order to avoid religious persecution. Petitioner has a credible fear that he will be subject to imprisonment, torture and possible summary execution if he is forcibly returned to Libya, and he has resisted all attempts to repatriate him to that country. He remains detained in Camp 6, an isolation facility, more than six years after his detention and nearly two years after the Government’s first notice of intent to transfer him out of Guantánamo.

Saleh Sassi: An insignificant adventurer

The third man released in Albania, Saleh bin Hadi Asasi (more commonly known as Saleh Sassi, and also identified in Guantánamo as Sayf bin Abdallah) is a Tunisian, born in 1973, who, like the two men described above, was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration, and by President Obama’s Task Force.

A welder and a skilled laborer, he moved to Italy in 1998, hoping to find work and a better life, and settled in Turin, where he secured a work permit and found employment in the construction industry. Apparently persuaded to travel to Afghanistan during a vacation from work, he reportedly spent some time at a mountain outpost north of Kabul, and was later wounded when a truck he was traveling in was shot at. Hospitalized, first in Kabul, and then in Khost, he was transported to the Pakistani border, where he was seized by the Pakistani authorities.

In Guantánamo, as his lawyers at Reprieve noted, he was often held “in brutal conditions.” The vast majority of his imprisonment was spent in isolation, which caused him to suffer clinical depression. In discussions with his lawyers, he explained that his imprisonment was “a long and unending nightmare.” He was also visited by teams of foreign interrogators — both Italian and Tunisian. In late 2002, Tunisian agents came to Guantánamo and left no doubt about what awaited him if he were to be returned to Tunisia, which included “water torture in the barrel.”

What now, and what next?

With the release of these four men, 188 prisoners remain in Guantánamo, but while the Albanian and Spanish governments are to be congratulated for offering homes for men who would otherwise rot in Guantánamo for the rest of their lives, the Italian government, which is only interested in taking prisoners who can be put on trial in Italy (as demonstrated with the transfer of two Tunisians in December) ought to be ashamed that it did not accept Sherif El-Mashad, who was so clearly seized by mistake, and who, with family in Italy and viable skills that he could use once more, has, essentially, been betrayed by the country which he once called home.

Above all, though, the greatest shame must settle on the United States, which still refuses to accept its own responsibility to provide new homes for cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated. The exact number of prisoners in this category is difficult to establish, because the Obama administration has not provided details of the nationalities of these prisoners (who now number 106). When the Task Force announced its final decisions about the prisoners last month, it was reported that around 60 of the 106 are Yemenis. These men will not be released until the Obama administration finds some spine, having capitulated to fearmongering about Yemen after the failed plane bomb at Christmas, and suspending all further releases to Yemen. Back in October, it was reported that three others are Saudis (who, in theory, could be returned tomorrow), which means that around 42 of the cleared prisoners are awaiting new homes.

Two of these, who have been offered a new home in Switzerland, are amongst the remaining seven Uighurs, another is an Uzbek who has been offered a new home in Latvia, and three others (plus one of the Yemenis) are, as mentioned above, expected to arrive in Spain shortly. However, that still leaves 36 men waiting for new homes, and it seems probable that the countries of Europe, which, before Wednesday, had taken 12 cleared prisoners (with Bermuda and Palau also taking another ten of the Uighurs), will run out of largesse before all 36 are rehoused, leaving the US government — and its people — with a stark choice: hold them forever, or, as was planned last April (before Obama scuppered the proposal), bring some of them to live in the United States.

This is not only the right thing to do; it will also demonstrate to the American people — and to its surplus of hysterical pundits and politicians — that not everyone who was held at Guantánamo was a terrorist, bent on the destruction of the United States. Why is it, I wonder, that Europeans — in Albania, Belgium, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland — can understand that between 90 and 95 percent of the men held at Guantánamo had no connection to terrorism, and that many of these men are still imprisoned, awaiting an end to their long and lawless ordeal, but Americans cannot?

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.

Shaker Aamer photographed with his two children

On Friday, it emerged in a UK court that the Metropolitan Police is investigating allegations that MI5 was complicit in the torture, in US custody in Afghanistan, of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held at Guantánamo. In the High Court, Richard Hermer QC, counsel for Aamer, told Mr. Justice Sullivan that Met officers had visited his solicitors, Birnberg Peirce, on Wednesday.

“It became apparent they are now investigating allegations raised by Mr. Aamer into the alleged complicity of the UK security service in his mistreatment,” he said, adding that the police had made an application to the court “for release of relevant documents” relating to Aamer’s allegations that the confessions he made in US custody were obtained through torture.

This is another blow for the government, which recently gave up a short-lived struggle to prevent the release of the documents to Shaker Aamer’s lawyers, following a High Court ruling in his favour. Expressing  dissatisfaction with the government, Mr. Justice Sullivan stated on Friday, “These whole proceedings have been a gigantic waste of time and money,” and ordered the government to pay the costs of Aamer’s lawyers, granting an interim payment of £25,000 ($38,794).

As I have explained before, the emergence of torture allegations against Shaker Aamer — and his lawyers’ pursuit of relevant documents in the possession of the British government, allied to the claims that MI5 was complicit in the torture — reflects the case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was freed from Guantánamo last February, after both the British and American governments realized that releasing him would, at least, take the edge off a mounting torture crisis that showed no sign of going away.

In Mohamed’s case, the High Court judges refused to back down, leading to an extraordinary ruling two weeks ago, in the Court of Appeal, ordering the government to release information revealing how US agents had tortured Mohamed in Pakistan, and how the British government knew about it, which foreign secretary David Milband had been trying to suppress for 18 months.

The police investigation into Shaker Aamer’s allegations is the third such case to be pursued by the Metropolitan Police, which is investigating claims relating to the interrogation of Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan by an agent identified only as “Witness B,” and also to allegations against MI6 that have been made by another unidentified man. There is, moreover, an overlap between two of these cases, because Shaker Aamer is a key witness in the allegations made by Binyam Mohamed.

In Shaker Aamer’s case, there is no guarantee that releasing him will do much to ease the discomfort of the security services and the government in light of increasing calls for an independent investigation into the full extent of British complicity in torture. These now have a momentum of their own, unprecedented in any country that was deeply involved in the “War on Terror,” and in marked contrast to the recent whitewash in the US of the Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing the use of torture.

On Saturday, it was reported that the British government’s human rights watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, had become involved, and that the Commission’s Chair, Trevor Phillips, had written to Justice Secretary Jack Straw, stating, as the Times described it, that “it can no longer ignore the growing body of allegations against MI5 and MI6.” In the letter, Phillips wrote that the government’s “blanket denials” were “an inadequate response,” and that “Not enough has been done to reassure the commission and the public that these allegations are unfounded.”

Entering into territory that has previously been almost the exclusive preserve of the Guardian (whose reporter, Ian Cobain, has worked tirelessly to expose evidence of British complicity in the torture of British citizens abroad), the Times added, “A dossier of 25 cases has now been built up, including complaints of ill treatment, illegal detention and torture.” The Times also devoted a two-page spread to these cases, and added that the Equality and Human Rights Commission was “concerned about mounting evidence that these actions were condoned by British agencies.”

Trevor Phillips explained, “Given the UK’s role as a world leader on human rights, it would be inexplicable for the Government not urgently to put in place an independent review process to assess the truth, or otherwise, of these allegations.” He also told the Times that he found it “inexplicable” that the government was a year late in providing a report to the United Nations Committee against Torture.

Given these developments, the plight of Shaker Aamer is unlikely to be a show-stopper. However, securing his release would certainly blunt some of the criticism, and would, moreover, demonstrate that the government is still capable of doing something right.

Shaker Aamer has been cleared for release from Guantánamo since 2007, but has not been freed, despite British requests for his return. The US authorities have cited ongoing security concerns, which makes a mockery of the whole process of clearing someone for release. However, beyond this obvious hypocrisy there are also fears that it suits both the British and the Americans to keep holding, for as long as possible, a man routinely described as the most influential prisoner in Guantánamo — not because he has any terrorist connections, but because he is extraordinarily eloquent and charismatic, and a passionate advocate for justice who has resisted the lawlessness and brutality of the “War on Terror” from the first day that he was sold to US forces by bounty hunters in December 2001. As a result, he may well know more about the dark workings of Guantánamo than any other prisoner, and this — added to his eloquence and outspokenness — undoubtedly makes him a threat.

Last September, former prisoner Moazzam Begg, one of Shaker Aamer’s closest friends, captured something of his personality in an excerpt from the last letter received by his wife in 2008, in which he wrote:

Yes I lost a lot of weight, yes I have a lot of sicknesses, yes I’ve got short sight, yes my bones are aching, yes I got white hair, yes I got old, but my heart is still young, my mind still strong — a lot stronger than ever. My soul’s got the biggest wings to fly and help others to fly. I am a lot wiser, a lot [more] patient, a lot [more] knowledgeable, a lot [more] merciful, a lot [more] loving and caring, a lot [more] helpful. I feel I can change the world to be a better place. I feel I can restore justice so we can have peace and love amongst each other.

Clearly, holding onto Aamer is not a delaying tactic that can prevail forever, and it would, therefore, make sense for the British government to exert the kind of pressure on its closest ally that it is undoubtedly capable of when necessary, and demand Shaker Aamer’s immediate return to the UK, to rejoin his British wife and his four children.

As his solicitor, Gareth Peirce, explained on Friday, “Mr. Aamer is a victim and key witness in [the police] investigation — and yet where is he? He is in Guantánamo where the police can’t go to interview him.”

She added, “It is of central importance that everything is done to have him returned to this country,” and also explained that, although the British government claimed that it was making “strenuous efforts” to have him returned, “There is no diplomatic pressure being exerted. There is none. The Americans are saying: ‘What pressure?’”

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.

Guantanamo detainee Fayiz al-Kandari

As evidenced by the recent outpouring of generous support for the people of Haiti, America remains a caring and compassionate nation. But when it comes to human rights and the rule of law, the United States falls woefully short, trailing behind the rest of the civilized world. Case in point, the U.S. government is seriously considering indefinite detentions for some Guantanamo detainees.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said last weekend that the White House may support a new law that would allow the indefinite detention of some terrorism suspects. Meanwhile, last month the Guantanamo Detainee Review Panel finally recommended which detainees should be released and which ones should face trials. It came as little surprise that more than 100 detainees were cleared for release while about 35 will be tried either by federal court or military commission. Yet surprisingly, approximately 50 detainees have been recommended for indefinite detention without trial. The administration claims they are considered too dangerous to be released but too difficult to prosecute even in the conviction-friendly Commission System.

These 50 detainees present a perplexing situation for the United States. The United States prides itself on being a world leader on human rights and the rule of law, and has been consistently outspoken in its criticism of human rights abuses by other nations. But in its zeal to demonstrate a “tough on terrorism” stance, the United States has failed to live up to these values.

One of the hallmarks of the American judicial system is the presumption of innocence. If arrested for an alleged crime, we have the right to a trial, to confront our accusers, and to present evidence in our defense. Indefinite detention bypasses these rights, short circuits due process, and turns the presumption of innocence on its head. In short, it presumes guilt and offers no remedy to challenge that presumption.

It is tempting to assume the decision to hold detainees indefinitely is based on a review of credible evidence. But if the evidence is so persuasive, why not introduce it in a court of law and secure a legitimate conviction? Time and again, federal courts have proven fully capable of handling terrorism cases. In fact, the Bush administration successfully prosecuted at least 319 terrorism or terrorism-related cases in civilian courts.

If the evidence is not reviewed by a court of law, who does review the evidence and determine the fates of individual suspects? The evidence is classified and the identities of those making the determinations are closely guarded. This process is entirely secret and inherently un-American. A system that authorizes indefinite detention based on secret evidence can only result in distrust and suspicion.

I represent Fayiz al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti citizen who has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for more than eight years without a trial. In my July 2009 letter to the Washington Post, I explained how every time I visit my client he asks whether I have news of justice for him. Each time, I am forced to answer “I have no justice today.” Assuming Fayiz would someday have his “day in court,” I prepared him for the probability that “justice” would come in the form of a military commission – a second-rate judicial system largely designed to permit rumor as evidence. Unfortunately, I am now left to wonder whether Fayiz will ever be afforded any semblance of justice.

Admittedly, under the laws and customs of war, a nation may detain “enemy combatants” for the duration of an armed conflict. But in an “armed conflict” as ambiguous as the War on Terrorism, can this same standard possibly apply? If so, when can we expect the armed conflict to end? Terrorism dates back to the 14th century or earlier and has been employed throughout history. If the “War on Terrorism” will not end until terrorism no longer exists on Earth, Fayiz will never breathe free.

We are at a key juncture in our nation’s history. We can give in to political expediency and fear, or we can restore the rule of law and uphold our country’s founding principles. Let’s not go down the slippery slope of indefinite detentions.

Lt. Col. Barry Wingard represents Fayiz al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti who has spent seven and a half years in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay without trial.

Shaker Aamer photographed with his two children

In December, lawyers for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, won an important court case in which judges ordered the British government to release information in its possession regarding claims that MI5 agents were present in the US prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when Shaker Aamer was subjected to torture, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo.

Paul Cahalan of the Wandsworth Guardian, covering the borough that Shaker Aamer once called home (and where his British wife and four children live), wrote about this story at the time, and on Thursday he provided important updates, speaking to Shaker’s US lawyer, Brent Mickum and his London-based lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal action charity Reprieve.

Speaking about the recently released files, Brent Mickum told Cahalan that “nothing in those documents has changed my mind” about the torture to which Shaker was subjected in Afghanistan, and the false confessions that he made as a result. In fact, he said, the information “reinforced” Shaker’s claims.

Mickum also made reference to an extraordinary article by the US law professor Scott Horton, published in this month’s Harper’s Magazine, which thoroughly undermines the official narrative regarding the deaths of three prisoners in Guantánamo on June 9, 2006, who reportedly committed suicide. Following up on a report by the Seton Hall Law School, which revealed that the official report was, literally, incredible, and full of glaring omissions and a plethora of contradictions, Horton drew on accounts given by several US military personnel stationed in the guard towers that night, who were able to see into the cell block where the men reportedly hanged themselves, and who all stated that they saw no one hanging, and saw no bodies being moved from the cell block to the clinic, where they were pronounced dead. Instead, one of the men, Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, reported the movements of a vehicle that traveled from the prison to a secret facility outside the perimeter fence — known to the Guantánamo personnel as “Camp No” — which returned shortly before the men’s deaths were announced.

Shaker Aamer’s role in this story — which appears to involve a chilling and far-reaching cover-up — concerns statements he made to his lawyers, describing how, on the night that the three men died with gags stuffed in their mouths, he too was gagged and beaten so mercilessly that he was lucky to survive.

Brent Mickum told Cahalan that Shaker Aamer was, effectively, being silenced to cover up “wrongdoing,” and referred to the Harper’s article, which, as Cahalan put it, said that “US government officials may have conspired to conceal evidence three Guantánamo detainees could have been murdered during interrogation,” by being suffocated. Cahalan also noted that the Harper’s article indicated that this “may explain why the US is reluctant to release Mr. Aamer, who has claimed he was part-suffocated while being tortured the same evening,” an explanation that I have also proposed.

Mickum also told Cahalan that “he had been denied basic access his client, who, after years of solitary confinement, has failing health,” and added that the recent release of the documents relating to Shaker’s torture in Afghanistan “compelled the UK Government to act” to secure his immediate release. He also said:

Before I saw these documents I stated unequivocally that the British Government is complicit in so far as it was present during his torture. Nothing that I have seen in those documents changes my mind. Generally speaking, and without revealing any detail from the documents, my overall impression of the documents is that they are exculpatory in nature, period [in other words, that they prove Shaker's innocence]. The documents are helpful to Shaker’s defense, in so far as they describe the general allegations against Shaker, which we are in a position to refute almost unequivocally, and they show that he was tortured. What I have seen confirms my position that there is no legitimate evidence against him and confirms my continuing belief that he is being held by the Americans to cover up my government’s wrongdoing.

He added:

And unfortunately I have to, at this point, believe the British are not really advocating strongly enough for their return. As long as he is in Guantánamo he can’t talk and I can’t talk. He is still being tortured down there. And if he ends up dying down there I have to say there is blood on the British hands. The British can only sit back for so long and say, “We did everything we could.” He never posed a threat and he doesn’t pose one now. What this is, is a PR problem for both of them. The British need to do the right thing.

Turning to the Harper’s article, Mickum said, “I have no reason to doubt the information provided by the sergeant [Joe Hickman] is true and what we know is that my client was subjected to being tortured by maybe seven individuals at the same time as three people were alleged to have committed suicide.” He added that he thought that it was “likely” that Shaker was also subjected to torture in “Camp No,” like the three men who died. “That account appears to square with what happened to my client,” he said. “They choked his airway and put a mask over him.”

Despite representing Shaker, Mickum explained that he had not been allowed to see him since May 2009, and expressed concerns about his health. “Anyone who has been kept in the conditions he has been maintained in has to be suffering and laboring highly,” he said, adding, “My client wants to meet with me and he wants to talk to me, he is not being allowed to meet me or not being allowed to talk to me.”

Just last month, Mickum tried to call Shaker, but was told that Shaker didn’t want to speak to him. “Based on my conversations with him when I was able to talk to him, I just know he wants to meet with me and wants to talk to me,” he said, adding, “This is a convenient way to keep this story from coming out, that’s all it is.”

Clive Stafford Smith gave a similar appraisal, explaining, as Cahalan described it, that the Harper’s article “added to his belief the US government was afraid of what Mr. Aamer may reveal.”

Stafford Smith added:

This is merely confirmation, fairly stark confirmation, that the reason they wanted not to send him home to his family in England, but rather to send him to [his native] Saudi Arabia was simply to gag him. I have known Shaker for some time, and because he is so eloquent and outspoken about the injustices of Guantánamo he is very definitely viewed as a threat by the US. Not in the sense of being an extremist but in the sense of being someone who can rather eloquently criticize the nightmare that happened there.

With reference to the particular nightmare that took place in June 2006, it may be that the authorities at Guantánamo have refused to allow Shaker to meet with Brent Mickum or even to speak with him since May 2009 because that was when they first got wind that a former insider — Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, a man with a faultless 17-year record in the military, and experience in military intelligence — had decided to come forward to explain why the official suicide story was a cover-up.

To date, the US media has paid little attention to these startling and profoundly troubling allegations, and it is clear, from a Justice Department investigation that was started, and then abruptly halted, that the desire to maintain the official line extends far beyond Guantánamo itself.

As it is, frankly, beyond rational dispute that, whatever occurred on the night on June 9. 2006, the official story is fatally flawed, and an independent investigation should be opened, it therefore remains deeply troubling, as those scrutinizing Shaker’s case recognize, that he has been held incommunicado for the last nine months, and that there is still no sign of when he will be freed, even though a military review board under the Bush administration approved his release in 2007.

Take action for Shaker Aamer

Shaker Aamer features prominently in the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington. The film is showing at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre on Tuesday February 16, and the National Film Theatre on Saturday February 27, and is then touring the UK. To book tickets for the Amnesty screening, see here, for the NFT see here, and see this page for details of the UK tour.

At the screenings, the speakers (including released prisoners Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg, plus Andy, Polly and other guests) will discuss what steps we can all take to put pressure on the British government to demand the return of Shaker Aamer to the UK, to be reunited with his family. To get involved now, please visit this Amnesty International action page, to find details of how you can write to David Miliband and Gordon Brown, asking them to demand Shaker’s return. Please also visit this page for a video of Shaker’s daughter Johina handing in a letter to Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street on January 11, 2010.

The Wandsworth Guardian is also pressing for Shaker Aamer’s release. In another article in the paper on Thursday, readers were requested to join the Facebook group Save Shaker Aamer, to write to the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, demanding that he meets the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign to discuss a way forward (write to: David Miliband, Foreign Office, King Charles Street, SW1A 2AH), and to write to their MPs asking them to sign the Early Day Motion (EDM) put forward in Parliament by Martin Linton MP, Shaker’s local MP. Readers can contact their MPs via WriteToThem.

Linton’s EDM (EDM 547) is available here, and currently has 57 MP’s signatures, which, as Mr. Linton told the Wandsworth Guardian, “needed to be 100 to send out a strong message.” He also said that he and the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign were not only pressing for a meeting with the Foreign Office, but planned to take Shaker’s case to Washington D.C., in a visit with Amnesty International, that is planned for March.

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.

Moazzam Begg before he spoke at a meeting about civil liberties hosted by the Respect party in Manchester. Photo: JK the Unwise/Wikicommons

Just when it seemed that Republicans in America had a monopoly on Islamophobic hysteria, the Sunday Times prompted a torrent of similar hysteria in the UK by running an article in which an employee of Amnesty International — Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at the International Secretariat — criticized the organization that employed her for its association with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg.

Before getting into the substance — or lack of it — in Sahgal’s complaints, it should be noted first of all that her immediate suspension by Amnesty was the least that should have been expected. What other organization would put up with an employee badmouthing them to a national newspaper on a Sunday, and then allow them to return to work as usual on Monday morning?

That Sahgal’s many defenders have all chosen to ignore this point suggests that they believe that her allegations were so significant — the actions, indeed, of a self-sacrificing whistleblower — that this blatant unprofessionalism was acceptable, whereas, in fact, it was no such thing.

That Sahgal also chose to air her complaints in the Sunday Times, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, is also significant, particularly because the Times first attempted to smear Begg and Cageprisoners a month ago, in connection with the failed plane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in an article by the normally reliable Sean O’Neill, entitled, “Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had links with London campaign group.” To me, this suggests that Sahgal may have been used as part of an ongoing attempt to vilify Begg that was part of a specific editorial policy.

It is also significant that Sahgal confided in Richard Kernaj, a reporter who, as Rick B explained at Ten Percent, enjoys his work “specialising in exposing shortcomings, crime and corruption in the Muslim community” to such an extent that, when he exposed child abuse in an Australian Islamic council in 2006, he boasted afterwards — using a distinctly inappropriate analogy — that being handed the documents that led to his scoop “was like a journalist’s wet dream.”

So what of the allegations? According to Kernaj’s article, Sahgal stated her belief that collaborating with Begg “fundamentally damages” Amnesty’s reputation. Kernaj added that, in an email “sent to Amnesty’s top bosses,” she suggested that “the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his ‘jihadi’ group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.” He also explained that she described Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban.”

Kernaj also claimed that Sahgal had “decided to go public because she feels Amnesty has ignored her warnings for the past two years about the involvement of Begg in the charity’s Counter Terror With Justice campaign,” and quoted more extensively from the email written on January 30, which stated:

I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights. To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.

Right-wingers — and other thinly-disguised right-wingers described, laughably, as the “decent left” — seized on the article with glee, and responded to Sahgal’s inevitable suspension not with recognition of her lamentable lack of professionalism, but by providing her with a platform for further misplaced allegations, and by writing opinion pieces drawing on their rarely submerged hostility towards Islam.

In the Spectator, Martin Bright posted a statement by Sahgal on his blog, David Aaronovitch followed up with an article in the Times, Nick Cohen set up a ridiculous Facebook group, “Amnesty International You Bloody Hypocrites Reinstate Gita Sahgal,” and even the Guardian allowed a friend of Sahgal’s, Rahila Gupta, to write an opinion piece that failed to justify the descriptions of Begg and Cageprisoners, and that also failed to address the question of why Sahgal should keep her job after criticizing her employers in a national newspaper. Gupta also suggested, erroneously, that Amnesty International had “filtered out” negative comments responding to a statement that the organization issued on its website, whereas, in fact, a cursory glance at the comments should convince anyone that Islamophobia is as alive and well in Amnesty’s supporters as it is in the world of Kernaj, Bright, Aaronovitch, Cohen et al.

On Cageprisoners, Begg defended himself admirably, asking Kernaj why, after discussing his planned article with him, and asking him detailed questions, he chose to ignore all his responses. Begg also criticized Sahgal for not talking to him first, noting, “Whilst it gives me no personal pleasure to hear of the suspension of Ms. Sahgal for holding her view, the newspapers were not the right place to air them without first putting them to Cageprisoners or me.”

In key passages addressed to Kernaj, he wrote:

When asked specifically about the Taliban I told you my view: that I have advocated for engagement and dialogue with the Taliban well before our own government took the official position of doing the same — only last week — although I did not say, like the government, we should be giving them lots of money in order to do so.

I also clearly told you, though you deliberately chose to ignore, that I had actually witnessed what I believe were human rights abuses under the Taliban and have detailed them in my book, from which you conveniently and selectively quote. I added that the US administration had perpetrated severe human rights abuses against me for years but that didn’t mean I opposed dialogue with them.

I even told you that Cageprisoners and I have initiated pioneering steps in that regard by organising tours all around the UK with former US guards from Guantánamo and men who were once imprisoned there. Cageprisoners is the only organisation to have done so. One of these soldiers, in response to your article, sent this message to me: “They are attacking you and your causes … don’t forget you have real support by some of us ex-soldiers who have seen the light.” […]

Had you — and Ms Sahgal no doubt — done your homework properly you’d have discovered also that I was involved in the building of, setting up and running of a school for girls in Kabul during the time of the Taliban, but of course, that wouldn’t have sat well with the agenda and nature of your heavily biased and poorly researched article.

Cageprisoners, for whom I write on a regular basis, describes itself, accurately, as an organization that “exists solely to raise awareness of the plight of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror.” In his letter to Kernaj, Begg also mentioned that Cageprisoners would not “be forced into determining a person’s guilt outside a recognised court of law.” This happens to be a view that I share, and it has motivated me for the last four years as I have assiduously chronicled the stories of the men and boys — all Muslims, in case anyone has overlooked this particular point — who have been redefined as a category of human beings without rights in a post-9/11 world of hysteria in which apparently intelligent non-Muslims regard the indefinite detention without charge or trial of Muslim “terror suspects” as somehow appropriate.

I know from personal experience that Moazzam Begg is no extremist. We have met on numerous occasions, have had several long discussions, and have shared platforms together at many events. He also features in the new documentary about Guantánamo, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” directed by Polly Nash and myself, talking about Afghanistan, and his hopes, in 2001, that civilized intervention from other Muslims would help the country to engage with the modern world.

Along with other representatives of Cageprisoners, Moazzam and other released prisoners have all welcomed me — a non-Muslim — with nothing less than friendship, support and openness at all times, as they have with numerous other non-Muslim supporters of universal human rights. Is this really what we should expect from extremists or supporters of the Taliban?

I also know, from my conversations with Moazzam, that he is capable of far more open-minded discussions than many of his critics mentioned above (of the kind that sustained him in his conversations with guards throughout his long ordeal in US custody), and that his calm and considered response to the treatment he received is a far more moderating and moderate influence than that of his divisive critics.

It also seems clear to me that the manner in which this story has been stirred up by the media actually has less to do with Moazzam and Cageprisoners than it does with illiberal attempts to smear Amnesty International’s reputation, and to advance an all too prevalent anti-Islamic agenda.

This is supposedly disguised through the purported defense of an Amnesty employee who had no excuse for speaking to the press as she did, but instead, I would suggest, Gita Sahgal is largely being used by those whose only aim is to stir up hostility towards a man who was imprisoned without charge or trial for three years, who has never been charged with a crime, and who dares to defend the rights of other Muslims not to be held without charge or trial.

Editor’s note: Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes and Andy Worthington will attend a screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre in London on Tuesday February 16, at 6.30 pm, and will take part in a Q&A session following the screening, moderated by Sara MacNeice, Amnesty’s Campaign Manager for Terrorism, Security and Human Rights. For further details, see here. Tickets are free, but booking is required. Please visit Amnesty’s site for booking details, and see here for details of other UK tour dates for the film.

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.

Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security John Brennan. Photo/Pete Souza

What is to be done about the idiocy that has spread, like a poisonous but imperceptible gas, from the Pentagon to Congress, and is now wafting through the White House, deranging all it touches? As it travels, this dismal infection transforms statistical impossibilities into magic numbers, which appear, to the uninformed observer, to confirm the most shameless lies of former Vice President Dick Cheney: that Guantánamo was teeming with hardcore terrorists, who couldn’t wait to “return to the battlefield.”

Only last month, I tore into the mainstream media for abandoning all its fabled fact-checking and objectivity, when the Pentagon claimed, without producing any evidence whatsoever, that 1 in 5 prisoners freed from Guantánamo had “engaged in terrorist activity after their release,” and these claims were repeated as facts by numerous supposedly reputable media outlets.

As I explained at the time, this was just the latest installment in a campaign of misinformation, which, in May last year, led to humiliation for the New York Times, when its editors allowed a front-page story to run, claiming that 1 in 7 released prisoners (74 in total) had “returned to terrorism,” even though only 27 names were provided, and, of those, independent experts could only verify somewhere between 13 and 20 of them.

Last May, the Pentagon at least provided names, but last month’s fact-free assertions have now found their way to the White House, and were repeated on February 1 by John Brennan, the assistant to President Obama for homeland security and counterterrorism, in a letter to House Leader Nancy Pelosi, which was obtained by ABC News (PDF).

Brennan wrote that:

[T]he Intelligence Community assesses that 20 percent of detainees transferred from Guantánamo are confirmed or suspected of recidivist activity. This includes 9.6 percent of detainees who have been confirmed as having returned to terrorist activities, and 10.4 percent whom the Intelligence Community suspects, but is not certain, may have engaged in recidivist activities.

Brennan attempted to use these spurious figures to score points, asserting that all of the largely unidentified prisoners had been released by the Bush administration. Defending the Obama administration’s careful and thorough interagency review of the remaining prisoners’ cases, he wrote:

I want to underscore the fact that all of these cases relate to detainees released during the previous administration and under the prior detainee review process. The report indicates no confirmed or suspected recidivists among detainees transferred during this Administration, although we recognize the ongoing risk that detainees could engage in such activity.

Despite this, it frankly beggars belief that a spokesman for an administration that has pledged to close Guantánamo would publicly cleave to the kind of wretched propaganda that will make that task all but impossible.

So who are these approximately 116 men (out of the 532 prisoners released from Guantánamo under George W. Bush) who have allegedly “engaged in recidivist activities”?

We know, from earlier Pentagon claims, that this “recidivism” has included — and may well still include — publishing houses, the offices of newspapers, TV studios and film sets, because the Pentagon admitted (in a press release that was subsequently deleted from the Pentagon’s website, but is mirrored here) that it included former prisoners, like the Tipton Three — three young men from the West Midlands — who appeared in a film, “The Road to Guantánamo,” which dramatized their experiences, and the five Uighurs sent to Albania in 2006, after tribunals at Guantánamo cleared them of being “enemy combatants.” In the latter case, this was apparently because one of them, Abu Bakker Qassim, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he urged US lawmakers to defend habeas corpus.

In the years since, many more ex-prisoners have written books, newspaper articles and op-eds, and have appeared on TV and in films. Perhaps Omar Deghayes, the British resident (released in 2007), who appeared in the Guantánamo documentary that I co-directed, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” has now joined this ever-expanding group of “recidivists” who have dared to use their words and their voices to “attack” the United States for what it did to them in its brutal, experimental prisons in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere.

Clearly, however, the main thrust of this propaganda is directed not at these men, but at others — 70, 80, 90 men, perhaps — who have supposedly engaged in terrorism since their release.

Is this plausible? In a word, no.

Even the most rampant apologists for the lawless regime created by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have never realistically tried to claim that more than a dozen or so Saudis slipped through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program with their burning hatred of America still intact. Moreover, once a handful of other regularly cited names have been dealt with, and it becomes apparent that no “recidivists” have emerged from a vast array of countries — throughout Europe, North Africa and the Gulf — the only conclusion that a logical analyst can reach is that this vast and largely undefined number of “recidivists” must include as many as 1 in 3 of all the Afghans who were ever held.

This, to be honest, is no less preposterous, as only a handful of Taliban commanders (released through the Pentagon’s own ineptitude) were mistakenly freed from Guantánamo, but it at least has the benefit of a certain amount of logic, in that men repatriated to a country still occupied by a foreign army that is as useless at rounding up “terrorists” as it was eight years ago, may find a reason to resist the occupier on their doorstep, even if they have never been near a “battlefield” before.

Even this, however, presupposes that the Pentagon’s “facts” and “suspicions” are remotely accurate, and as researchers — particularly those at the Seton Hall Law School, who have relentlessly analyzed the repeated claims of recidivism — have demonstrated time and again (PDF), the propaganda does not stand up to any form of scrutiny. John Brennan may be at liberty to talk about a few dozen released prisoners who have “engaged in recidivism,” but entertaining the prospect that this figure could be as high as 116 is, to put it frankly, either a dereliction of duty, or a sign that he has fallen under the sway of Dick Cheney’s still malevolent influence.

To understand how easy it is for credulous officials to fall for this propaganda, I’d like to take you back to last month, when Senator Dianne Feinstein, who, laughably, is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, falsely claimed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “about a third of former inmates at the US naval base who have returned to fight against US interests come from Yemen,” as AFP described it. “If you look at Yemen, and we’re taking a good look at Yemen,” Feinstein said, “what you see is, I think, at least 24 or 28 are confirmed returned to the battlefield in Yemen, and a number are suspected. If you combine the suspected and the confirmed, the number I have is 74 detainees have gone back into the fight, and I think that’s bad.”

It was a poor day for the Senate’s “intelligence” when Feinstein (drawing on the May report) made this ridiculous statement. Its most baleful effect was to add a deceptive veneer of acceptability to the pressure exerted on President Obama to suspend the release of any more cleared Yemeni prisoners at Guantánamo, for one simple reason: only 16 Yemeni prisoners were released from Guantánamo between 2004 and November 2009, and only one of these men allegedly became involved in terrorism.

But in this new world of groundless hysteria, which seems to reveal only how the baleful reach of the Pentagon’s scaremongering has finally engulfed the White House, no one cares that Feinstein couldn’t even get her facts straight.

With John Brennan embracing the lie that 116 of the 532 men released from Guantánamo between 2002 and January 2009 have “engaged in recidivist activities” — and with a compliant and complacent mainstream media happy to regurgitate such rubbish without asking for facts — it may as well be true, as Feinstein claimed, that 28 of the 16 Yemenis returned from Guantánamo have become terrorists.

Once upon a time, we used to pride ourselves on making policy decisions based on facts, rather than on the propaganda that was so prevalent in totalitarian regimes. Now, however, we might as well give up all pretense that this is the case. Just as people were tortured in Guantánamo to produce false confessions that could be used in show trials, like every other totalitarian regime, representatives of the US government now attempt to scare and intimidate the American public with “facts” about “recidivism” that have no basis in reality. In 2010, fear blinds reason, and the truth, it seems, is irrelevant.

This report was originally published on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

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.

Detainees sit around the exercise yard in Camp 4, the medium security facility within Camp Delta at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In Camp 4, highly compliant detainees live in a communal setting and have extensive access to recreation. Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood

Congratulations to the Swiss Canton of Jura, which recently accepted the asylum claims of two Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, and to the Swiss federal government for agreeing to accept Jura’s decision on Wednesday.

The two men in question — Arkin Mahmud, 45, and his brother Bahtiyar Mahnut, 32 — were seized with 20 other Uighurs in December 2001. The US authorities realized almost immediately that all of these men, who are Turkic Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and had been seized (or bought) by mistake. However, although the majority of the men were cleared for release by 2005, the Bush administration accepted that it could not return them to China, because of fears that they would face torture or other ill-treatment, but then struggled to find another country that would take them instead.

In May 2006, Albania was persuaded to take five of these men, but the other 17 had to wait until October 2008, when Judge Ricardo Urbina, a US District Court judge, ruled on their long-delayed habeas corpus petitions, and ordered their release into the United States, because no other country had been found that would take them, and because their continued detention was unconstitutional.

Predictably, the Bush administration appealed, and in February 2010 the Obama administration, to its eternal shame, followed suit, backing a ruling by the Court of Appeals, which overturned the lower court ruling, and hurled the Uighurs back into limbo.

In June 2009, the State Department managed to find new homes for four of these men in Bermuda, and in November the Pacific island of Palau took another six. As a result, seven Uighurs remained in Guantánamo, but by taking the brothers, the Swiss government has not only dared to take on the might of the Chinese government, which threatens any country that dares to entertain the prospect of taking any of the men from Guantánamo, but has also helped President Obama out of what appeared to be an intractable problem.

In a statement, the Swiss Justice Ministry said, “Today the Federal Council decided to admit for humanitarian reasons two Uighurs with Chinese citizenship, who have been imprisoned in Guantánamo for years by the United States without being charged with a crime nor [convicted].” Brushing aside the threats that the Chinese government had made last month, when Chinese officials warned that Switzerland should avoid damaging “overall Sino-Swiss relations,” the Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf added that Switzerland has a “stable, good relationship with China, and we want to keep it that way.”

Not mentioned publicly was the fact that, until Jura accepted the men’s asylum claims, one of them, Arkin Mahmud, appeared to stuck at Guantánamo, his only way out being to hope that the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the Uighurs’ case last year, would overturn last February’s appeals court ruling, and allow cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated into the United States.

The problem is that Palau had refused to take Arkin Mahmud, because, as the Washington Post noted in an editorial in October, he “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement.” As a result, Bahtiyar Mahnut turned down Palau’s offer of a new home for himself, in order to stay with his brother, and, as the Post noted, “Unless another country accepts the brothers, they could remain in custody indefinitely — a prospect that is unconscionable and that no doubt informed the justices’ decision to hear the matter.”

As I explained in an article at the time:

[T]he Supreme Court was faced with a tricky legal decision, because the justices will be considering whether, in defense of habeas corpus, and in reference to the unique position in which the Guantánamo prisoners are held, they are being asked to decide whether a judge has the power to order the release of prisoners into the US, when all the precedents, as the Court of Appeals made clear, establish that the admission of foreigners into the US is a matter for the executive and legislative branches of government.

At the time, the Post reached a principled conclusion with profound implications for the government, arguing that the “moral and ethical imperatives” were “clear and compelling,” and that the government should introduce “narrowly crafted legislation that would allow Mr. Mahmud and Mr. Mahnut into the United States, where they could remain together and Mr. Mahmud could get the medical help he needs.”

This “narrowly crafted legislation” will not now be needed, but it remains to be seen if the imminent release of Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut will affect the Supreme Court’s planned deliberations about the remaining five Uighurs.

The Supreme Court has scheduled argument for March 23 to decide whether to overturn the precedents regarding the admission of foreigners into the US, when, as in the cases of the Uighurs, these men are held in Guantánamo because it is not safe to repatriate them, and no other nation will take them.

The men’s lawyers will argue, as they have consistently, that the Supreme Court ruling in June 2008, granting constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights to the prisoners, is meaningless if a judge cannot actually order prisoners to be released.

As the Associated Press explained on Wednesday, the government could now try to argue that the Supreme Court should drop the case, because the remaining Uighurs were apparently offered new homes in Palau but turned down the offer. Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel at The Constitution Project, told the AP that she feared this outcome. “I would not be surprised,” she said, “if the administration says that the Uighurs themselves are at fault that they have not been resettled to Palau.”

However, Sabin Willett, an attorney who has represented the Uighurs for many years, was more hopeful, telling the AP by email that he “expects the case to go forward.” I tend to share Willett’s optimism, but not, of course, if the remaining five men are miraculously resettled in some other country, perhaps just days before the March 23 deadline.

If there is one thing we have learned from the Obama administration, since the President shelved plans made last April by his counsel, Greg Craig, to bring the Uighurs to live in the US, it is that, regardless of whether senior officials may agree in private that resettling the Uighurs in the US would be the right thing to do, they are not prepared to tackle their critics — and the Bush administration’s poisonous legacy — head-on. Instead, senior officials prefer not only to avoid confrontation, but also, sadly, to avoid doing anything that would demonstrate to the American public that enormous mistakes were made at Guantánamo, and that the rhetoric of Dick Cheney and his thriving acolytes is disturbingly mistaken.

I can think of no finer way to demonstrate this than to allow the Uighurs to walk free on the streets of, say, Washington D.C., but it remains clear that this is not something that the administration will undertake willingly, and in the meantime, the people of Bermuda and Palau have been learning this instead, and are soon to be joined by the people of Switzerland.

President Obama is fortunate to have such kind allies, but he himself is the loser, the longer he refuses to tackle those who insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that everyone who was held at Guantánamo was a “terrorist,” and that it is somehow appropriate to continue to deprive innocent men of their liberty in Guantánamo, rather than giving them new homes in the country that, through cruelty and incompetence, deprived them of so many years of their lives.

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.

Citizens submitted questions during and after Obama’s the State of the Union. People cast more than 640,000 votes for 11,000 questions from around the world, and YouTube selected a few dozen of the highest rated questions in a various topics – jobs, environment, immigration, etc.

Obama answered 12 questions. The interview went on nearly an hour, starting at 1:47 pm and ending at 2:23 pm.

Newsy items:

Obama addressed the conflict in Sudan, which actually wasn’t in his State of the Union. Obama said the US, UN and other countries are working to broker a series of agreements to stabilize the country and allow refugees back into their homes. “We continue to put pressure on the Sudanese government. If they are not cooperative in these efforts, then it going to be appropriate for us to conclude engagement doesn’t work,” he said.

A Texas questioner asked why the health care debate hasn’t been on C-SPAN like candidate Obama promised. He admitted it’s hard to film all the different health care meetings in and out of Congress. And Obama said he is “making sure that in this last leg, this last five yards before we get to the goal line, that everybody understands exactly what’s going on in the health care bill, that there are no surprises, no secrets.”

The rundown:

The interviewer Steve Grove (grey suit, blue tie with red dots), YouTube’s news and political director and former Boston Globe reporter, and Obama (darker grey suit, blue tie) sat on either side of a flat screen TV.

There were two cameras filming, plus a computer off to the side monitoring the live comments coming over YouTube and Twitter (though the interview didn’t incorporate this live feedback). Grove used a silver MacBook pro.

You pooler seemed to be sitting in the war corner of the room … two framed swords, portraits of Native American chiefs and shelves of books on old battles.

Obama last did a YouTube interview as a presidential candidate. “It went ok the first time,” he joked to Grove, before the cameras rolled.

Grove asked about the budget. Obama said, “I announced the budget and no one threw rotten eggs.” He added, “Budget day is like tax day.”

Question 1: A Silver Spring resident asked if the 40 million uninsured will get insurance this year. Obama said, “We are calling on our Republican colleagues to get behind a serious health reform bill.”

Question 2: Health care debate on C-SPAN. (see above)

Question 3: YouTube showed two videos from small businesses that are having trouble growing in this economy. Obama laid out his most recent plan for a hiring tax credit and how health care reform will greatly unburden small business.

Question 4: A Floridian man asked why banks are slow to modify home loans. Obama agreed that banks need to do more and he’ll put more pressure on them.

Question 5: Obama enters the lightening round. Grove asked, good idea or bad idea?

- The privatization of government agencies like the post office? Bad idea.

- Lowering your insurance premiums if you take health and wellness classes? Good idea, as long as insurance companies don’t discriminate against the old and sick.

- Installing solar panels on all federal and state buildings? Good idea.

Question 6: Does the president believe in a free and open Internet? “I’m a big believer in net neutrality,” he said.

Question 7: A college student told Obama he has 14 credits and 3 part time jobs. “College tuition costs are crushing a lot of folks,” Obama said. He then outlined his recent plan to cut down student debt.

Question 8: A math teacher asked Obama what it means to be an educated person. Obama said “creative teaching” is so important to learning how to learn and think. He said he wants Sasha and Malia to know how to poke holes in arguments and work around problems.

Question 9: A citizen asked how Obama can withdraw troops and effectively combat terrorism at the same time. Obama emphasized that al Qaeda is his main target and that the 30,000 troop surge will be training Afghan forces.

Question 10: Sudan. (see above)

Question 11: Why close Guantanamo? Obama noted that the prison has been a huge recruiting tool for terrorists. Yet he’s had some push back from Congress. “Unfortunately there’s been a lot of political resistance and frankly some of it is politically motivated,” he said.

Question 12: Why does the government continue to invest in dirty coal, drilling and nuclear reactors? Obama said he is pushing for clean alternative energies. “Unfortunately no matter how fast we ramp up those energy sources we’re still going to have enormous energy needs that will be unmet by alternative energy,” he said.

Obama ends by saying, “This was terrific” and “I hope we can do this on a more regular basis.” To the viewers, he said he hoped to answer their questions next time. To Grove, he said he liked the “way the technology is structured.”