“The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust,” Hersh writes in the November 16th issue of The New Yorker magazine.

“Many Pakistanis believe that America’s true goal is not to keep their weapons safe but to diminish or destroy the Pakistani nuclear complex,” he writes. The arsenal is a source of great pride among Pakistanis, “who view the weapons as symbols of their nation’s status and as an essential deterrent against an attack by India.”

Pakistan keeps its nuclear warheads separate from their triggers to prevent anyone from launching a warhead without at least pausing to put it together. A U.S. rapid-response team of terrorism and nonproliferation experts is stationed at the ready at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, is at the ready to fly to Pakistan if the security of any of its 80-plus nukes is threatened.

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari “spoke with derision” in an interview about U.S. concern over the vulnerability of his country’s nuclear arsenal, Hersh said. “In your country, you feel that you have to hold the fort for us. The American people want a lot of answers for the errors of the past, and it’s very easy to spread fear. Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security? A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan.”

Moreover, an unnamed senior Pakistani official said to have close ties to Zardari added, “you’d like control of our day-to-day deployment. But why should we give it to you? Even if there was a military coup d’etat in Pakistan, no one is going to give up total control of our nuclear weapons. Never. Why are you not afraid of India’s nuclear weapons?”

The official answered his own question with, “Because India is your friend, and the longtime policies of America and India converge. Between you and the Indians, you will fuck us in every way. The truth is that our weapons are less of a problem for the Obama Administration than finding a respectable way out of Afghanistan.”

A former senior U.S. intelligence official told Hersh the Pakistanis gave the U.S. intelligence about their warheads, some of the warheads’ locations, and their command-and-control system. However, a U.S. military spokesman for Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “I am not aware of our receipt of any such information.”

In the July/August issue of Arms Control Today, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former director of the Department of Energy’s intelligence operation, warned of the “lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders” in Pakistan. “Purely in actuarial terms, there is a strong possibility that bad apples in the nuclear establishment are willing to cooperate with outsiders for personal gain or out of sympathy for their cause. Nowhere in the world is this threat greater than in Pakistan…” He added, “Anything that helps upgrade Pakistan’s nuclear security is an investment” (in America’s security).

The question of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is made more perplexing by U.S. efforts to pursue its Afghan enemies on Pakistani soil and involve that country’s military in its operations. Sultan Amir Tarar, a retired Pakistani intelligence official, told Hersh that the U.S. campaign will backfire. “The Americans are trying to rent out their war to us.” If Obama persists, he added, “there will be an uprising here, and this corrupt government will collapse.” Tarar is further quoted as saying, “The longer the war goes on, the longer it will spill over in the tribal territories, and it will lead to a revolutionary stage.”

Tarar believes the U.S. has to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban, even if that means direct talks with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, Hersh reported. He noted that stepped-up fighting in the tribal areas of Pakistan could further “radicalize” that nation.

How respect for the U.S. is declining in Pakistan was reflected by a source described as “a retired senior Pakistani intelligence officer” who told Hersh, “My belief today is that it’s better to have the Americans as an enemy rather than as a friend, because you cannot be trusted. The only good thing the United States did for us was to look the other way about an atomic bomb when it suited the United States to do so.”

And in India, which has been at loggerheads with Pakistan since the 1947 partition, an official told Hersh, “They like us better in Pakistan than you Americans. I can tell you that in a public-opinion poll we, India, will beat you.”

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, currently living in exile in London, told Hersh that he is troubled by U.S.-controlled Predator drone attacks on targets inside Pakistan, which began in 2005. “I said to the Americans, ‘Give us the Predators.’ It was refused. I told the Americans, ‘Then just say publicly that you’re giving them to us. You keep on firing them but put Pakistan Air Force markings on them.’ That, too, was denied.”

Speaking of Predator attacks, Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai told Hersh, “What the (Pakistani) Army did not understand, and what the Americans don’t understand, is that by demolishing the house of a suspected Taliban or their supporters you are making an enemy of the whole family.”

The issue of nuclear weapon instability in Pakistan reflects on the series of historic American decisions to (a)manufacture and use atomic weapons in World War Two in the first place, and (b) to spend literally trillions of taxpayer dollars over the years to increase their numbers and lethality and (c)to help nations such as Israel, India and Pakistan to build their nuclear arsenals over the objections of the international authority. The U.S. (d) has also sold warplanes capable of carrying nuclear bombs both to hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, further increasing the possibility of their use.

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes”. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

This July 2005 file photo originally provided by the Army Corps of Engineers shows an aerial view of two causeways built on the northeast coast of the island of Babeldoab, the largest of Palau's more than 300 islands. The U.S. had built a 53-mile road on the largest of Palau's islands in 2005, fulfilling a promise Washington made when the Pacific nation gained independence in 1994. It was announced Saturday that Palau agreed to accept six Chinese Muslims who have languished in legal limbo at Guantanamo Bay.

As first reported by the Associated Press, six of the remaining 13 Uighurs in Guantánamo have just arrived on the Pacific island of Palau, where they have been given new homes. The AP’s source said that, overnight, police were guarding the house where the men will live, in the heart of the capital, Koror.

This partly solves one of President Obama’s outstanding problems at Guantánamo, as there were 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) at Guantánamo when Obama took office, and they had already been waiting for three and a half months to be released, after District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina ordered their release into the United States in October 2008. Judge Urbina did so because the government had failed to contest the Uighurs’ habeas corpus petition (after a devastating court defeat in June 2008), because they could not be returned to China, where they were at risk of ill-treatment or worse, because no other country had been found that would take them, and because their continued detention was unconstitutional.

The Bush administration appealed, and, when President Obama took office, he followed the same line, failing to take the opportunity to bring the Uighurs to the States, which would have demonstrated to the American people that they were not terrorists. Bringing the men to the United States would also have demonstrated that the Bush administration made some horrendous mistakes when, as with the Uighurs and countless other prisoners at Guantánamo, it offered bounty payments to its Afghan and Pakistani allies, and failed to provide any screening whatsoever for the prisoners who subsequently ended up in US custody, maintaining, instead, that they were all “enemy combatants,” because the President said they were.

Having backed down at a crucial time — allowing his right-wing detractors to seize the initiative on Guantánamo, reviving Dick Cheney’s unsubstantiated claims that all the Guantánamo prisoners were terrorists — President Obama then went fishing for other nations who were able to resist the wrath of China. In June, four of the Uighurs moved to Bermuda (which is too rich to care about China), and now another six have arrived in Palau (which, conveniently, refuses to recognize the People’s Republic of China, and has diplomatic dealings with Taiwan instead).

Any time innocent men are freed from Guantánamo, the United States claws back a little more of the luster it lost so spectacularly under the Bush administration, but this latest release still leaves seven Uighurs in Guantánamo — not to mention the 60 or so other prisoners who have been cleared for release — and amongst those seven, as the Washington Post reported On October 20, is one man that Palau refused to take. Arkin Mahmud “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement,” and his brother, Bahtiyar Mahnut, turned down Palau’s offer of a new home for himself, in order to stay with him.

This, of course, means that the two men “could remain in custody indefinitely,” a situation that the Post described as “unconscionable,” and it led to the editors proposing that, because the US “has complete control over the fate of these men and should take full responsibility in righting the situation,” the President 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.”

Following up on the story of the men’s release, the New York Times noted that the six men “are expected to remain [in Palau] while seeking a permanent home elsewhere.” Wells Dixon, who represents three of the men at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Times, “Palau is courageous to offer our Uighur clients a temporary home. We are hopeful that other countries like Australia and Germany will resettle them permanently.”

And, he could have added, the United States.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in StockholmSupport for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), A Letter To Barack Obama From A Guantánamo Uighur (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Real Uyghur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda? (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Uighurs In Bermuda: Interviews And New Photos (June 2009), Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now! (June 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China? (July 2009), Chair Of The American Conservative Union Supports The Guantánamo Uighurs (July 2009), Three Uighurs Talk About Chinese Interrogation At Guantánamo (July 2009), House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo (July 2009), A Profile of Rushan Abbas, The Guantánamo Uighurs’ Interpreter (August 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

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.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. Photo credit: Wikipedia

Last week, Molly Corso, a freelance journalist based in Tbilisi, Georgia, got in touch with me regarding rumors that the Georgian government was considering accepting a number of cleared prisoners from Guantánamo, in connection with an article that was published this week. In September, in an interview with Fox News, President Mikheil Saakashvili explained that Georgia was “absolutely” willing to host prisoners from Guantánamo. “You know, whatever we can do to help America in its war on terror, we will do,” he said.

Although officials have been cagey about the rumors — Corso reported that National Security Council Secretary Eka Tkeshelashvili stated only that negotiations were “ongoing,” and refused to elaborate — she wanted to know what I thought about the rumors. I explained, as she described it, that “Many countries are unwilling to take the dozens of prisoners cleared for release because the United States itself has refused to resettle the inmates on US soil. The restriction has sent a mixed message about the prisoners and the security risk they would pose for host countries,” and, as a result, the US government is “trying to get anybody who will promise to treat these people humanely to take them.”

This was a fair précis, and appropriate for a news article, but to provide more background I’d like to explain that I had also elaborated on the “mixed messages” provided by the US government, pointing out, as I explained in a recent article, “Finding New Homes For 44 Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners”:

Recently, for example, when Swiss officials visited Guantánamo to investigate the cases of four men cleared for release, in an attempt to work out if they would be prepared to accept any of these men, they returned, not with an honest appraisal, but with weighted conclusions that could only have been presented to them by the US military. [Officials] had, in effect, opened up their files and shown them material which purported to be evidence, but which, in other prisoners’ habeas petitions, has been demonstrated, time and again, to be nothing more than false allegations made by other prisoners (under duress or as a result of bribery) or by the prisoners themselves, multiple levels of unacceptable hearsay, and “mosaics” of intelligence that do not stand up to independent scrutiny.

According to reports in the Swiss media, the government representatives concluded that, of the four men they investigated, two Uighurs were “low-risk,” even though they are no risk at all, having persuaded the Bush administration to drop its claims that they were “enemy combatants,” and having been cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, by a US District Court, and by the Obama administration’s Task Force, and two other men, an Uzbek and a Palestinian — also cleared by Bush-era military review boards and by Obama’s Task Force — were considered “medium-risk” and “high-risk.”

These mixed messages — involving omissions and misrepresentation — remain disturbing, and suggest that, even with just two months remaining until Obama’s deadline for closing Guantánamo, the administration is still not doing all in its power to send out a coherent message about cleared prisoners — and to explain clearly, as I also said to Molly Corso, that the men in question do not pose any kind of threat.

As a result, a significant thrust of Corso’s article — how host countries are chosen — is revealed not as involving a specific policy, but, as I stated in my interview, involves the US government “trying to get anybody who will promise to treat these people humanely to take them.” Corso noted that “US State Department officials did not respond to requests to explain the Guantánamo Bay prisoner release program,” and she also spoke to Polly Rossdale, who monitors the resettlement program for the British legal charity Reprieve, who noted that, while some countries are “definitely a no-go,” the US government’s human rights criteria for potential host countries is not “clear.”

Georgia may well prove to be amenable to accepting cleared prisoners, because, as Eka Tkeshelashvili explained, “We try to be a cooperative partner in every way that we can: we do not only ask for the help of the United States. We try to be a contributing partner.” Lincoln Mitchell, an assistant professor in international politics at New York’s Columbia University, was more forthright, explaining that he saw “the decision to take on the prisoners as a chance for [President] Saakashvili to underscore his strong relationship with the White House — a crucial part of the Georgian leader’s domestic image.” He told Corso, “If a big part of [the government’s message] is we have a special relationship with the United States, you have to be able to demonstrate that. This is one way to demonstrate it.”

It was reassuring that Eka Tkeshelashvili also stated, as Molly Corso described it, that “the Georgian government believes that housing terrorism suspects would pose no enhanced domestic security threat” — as this ought to be the crucial issue — but in fact, the dithering and double standards from the US regarding the rehousing of prisoners who have been cleared for release from Guantánamo means that, ultimately, what it comes down to is politics, and whether, as in Georgia’s case, helping the US out of a hole of its own making will enhance Georgia’s relationship with the US.

As ever with Guantánamo, it appears that the legacy of the “War on Terror” is not honesty, but expediency.

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.

Afghan employees from the Independent Election Commission load election materials into a truck to be sent to provinces on Oct. 22, 2009. Afghanistan's presidential rivals are reigniting their campaigns for a second vote, but two previously unreleased audits produced by U.N. investigators raise questions about the integrity of the elections commission. (Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images)

This report was prepared by ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller and Dafna Linzer

The United Nations cannot account for tens of millions of dollars provided to the troubled Afghan election commission, according to two confidential U.N. audits and interviews with current and former senior diplomats. (Read both audits.)

As Afghanistan prepares for a second round of national voting, the documents and interviews paint the fullest picture to date of the finances of the election commission, which has been accused of facilitating election fraud and operating ghost polling places. The new disclosures also deepen the questions about the U.N.’s oversight of money provided by the United States and other nations to ensure a fair election in Afghanistan.

“Everybody kept sending money” to the elections commission, said Peter Galbraith, the former deputy chief of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan. “Nobody put the brakes on. U.S. taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a fraudulent election.” Galbraith, a deputy to the senior U.N. official in Afghanistan, was fired last month after protesting fraud in the elections.

The audits come as President Barack Obama is struggling to craft a war policy for Afghanistan that would establish a stable government in a country with few democratic traditions. Senior aides have made clear that Obama will not commit to sending additional troops until there is a legitimately elected government in Kabul. On Wednesday, insurgents stormed a housing compound primarily occupied by U.N. election officials, killing eight people, including two election workers.

Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission initially reported that President Hamid Karzai had won the majority of votes in the August election. A recount was ordered after another U.N.-backed panel uncovered evidence of widespread fraud. After weeks of prodding from the Obama administration, Karzai agreed last week to a runoff.

The U.N. audit reports, which are near completion but still in draft form, are likely to fuel debate over the Afghanistan election commission’s ability to carry out the new round of voting. Karzai’s challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, has suggested he may boycott the elections unless Karzai dismisses the chairman and two other commissioners.

In interviews, senior U.S. and U.N. officials said that U.N. leaders had ignored warnings as far back as 2007 that the election commission was a pro-Karzai body with few internal controls.

Another top official in the U.N.’s Afghanistan mission, Robert Watkins, acknowledged in an interview that some commission employees had contributed to the fraud in the first round of voting.

“It’s clear that some of the people” working for the commission at the polling centers “were complicit in fraud,” Watkins said. “Some of the staff hired were not working in the best interests of impartial elections.”

But Watkins said the United Nations is working to improve the commission’s performance in the runoff. He said the U.N. planned to slash the number of poll workers and blackball any that may have been implicated in fraud in the August elections.

As of April 2009, the U.N. had spent $72.4 million supporting the commission, with $56.7 million of that coming from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the audit said. Total election costs are now estimated at greater than $300 million, with the U.S. providing a third to half the total funding, according to one senior U.N. official familiar with the elections process.

The draft audit reports indicate that as many as one-third of payroll requests from the Afghan commission to the United Nations included “discrepancies,” such as incorrect names or amounts.

In another instance, the U.N. Development Program paid $6.8 million for transportation services in areas where no U.N. officials were present. Auditors found that the development agency had “inadequate controls” over U.S. taxpayer money used to fund the commission.

A UNDP spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said he could not comment on specific findings in the audits, since they were still in draft form. However, he said the agency strived to rigorously account for spending despite operating in a war zone.

“The insecurity, the lack of infrastructure, the pervasive corruption and harshness of the terrain make the implementation of any project extremely difficult,” Dujarric said. “That being said, those challenges in no way absolve us of constantly doing our utmost to ensure that monies given to us by donors are properly spent and accounted for.”

Watkins acknowledged that the U.N. had concerns about the commission as elections approached. The development agency works closely with the commission, paying salaries, buying supplies and handling logistical questions.

However, he said no evidence had surfaced that money flowing to the commission had been used to buy votes or bribe officials. “The indications were that (the commission) did not have sufficient controls in place. I can’t jump to the conclusion that the money was misappropriated.”

Watkins said he was “much more confident” about the commission’s spending practices after the U.N. tightened controls this summer. “I think we have a good partner” in the commission, Watkins said.

The U.N., he said, had suggested cutting the number of polling workers from 160,000 to 60,000 for the runoff election, in part to ensure better-trained workers. The smaller work force also reflects an effort by the U.N. to have fewer polling stations and fewer workers per station. He also said the U.N. would blackball at least 200 workers who had been linked to voting centers where fraud was alleged.

In public statements, commission officials have not yet committed to reducing staff or polling stations. A commission spokesman did not return a request for comment.

The confidential reports are being written by two U.N. audit agencies to examine charges that the U.N. had failed to safeguard $263 million in money from the U.S. Agency for International Development that was channeled through the development agency to fund the elections and rebuilding projects. USAID money accounted for about 40 percent of U.N. spending in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2009, the audits said.

Overall, the audits found that U.N. monitoring of U.S. taxpayer funds was “seriously inadequate.” Auditors could not find receipts, work plans or documentation to back up costs for projects such as roads and bridges. U.N. officials did not conduct site visits to confirm work and did not prepare financial reports for donor countries like the U.S., the audits found.

The main focus for criticism, however, was U.N. support of the election commission, a seven-member board whose members were appointed by Karzai. Using U.S. money, the U.N. development agency paid for commission salaries, helped contract out services and was supposed to train the commission to carry out its election responsibilities independently.

But the audit found that the development agency project was “not well managed” and contained several “weaknesses.”

Auditors found that the U.N. development agency had sent more than $7 million to the elections commission — including cash payments to temporary staff — without proof of expenditures.

The commission also failed to send any financial reports to the U.N. between September 2008 and June 2009, despite a requirement for monthly statements. The U.N. sent $9 million in total to the commission without ever receiving a financial report, the audit said.

The auditors made no findings as to whether the money that flowed to the commission was implicated in the fraudulent vote counting. Auditors said that they had hired an outside audit firm to conduct a more detailed review.

Harry Edwards, a spokesman for USAID, said the agency had not seen the audits and could not comment.

Galbraith cautioned against drawing conclusions as to whether U.N. oversight of financial issues played a significant role in the voting fraud. He blamed Kai Eide, the Norwegian diplomat who is the senior U.N. official in Afghanistan and his former boss, as well as himself, for not flagging problems with the commission earlier. Eide has denied any effort to cover up evidence of fraud in the elections process.

“The flaw was not a management flaw,” Galbraith said. “It was a political flaw to put all this money into an institution that was not as advertised. It was a political judgment not to say, ‘if you want us to pay for these elections, then we insist you do them in this way.’”

One former U.N. official with knowledge of the elections process said that the allegations of financial mismanagement were not surprising. The official, who did not want to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic, said that neither the U.N. nor the elections commission had a well-developed accounting program.

The commission “had no control over their financial management side,” the U.N. official said. “It was chaotic. There was no outside oversight.”

Instead, this official said that senior U.N. and U.S. diplomats pushed for the U.N. development agency to “deliver” the election by working with the elections commission — despite warnings that the commission was not truly independent.

“Nobody was paying attention. Nobody wanted to do anything about” the problems at the election commission, the official said.

The draft audits are the latest sign of problems with U.N. oversight of U.S. money in Afghanistan. Last year, the USAID inspector general issued a report charging that the U.N. had failed to complete U.S.-funded rebuilding projects and stonewalled an investigation into the $25.6 million program. USAID’s inspector general continues to investigate Gary K. Helseth, who headed the U.N. Office for Project Services between 2003 and 2006, in connection with the rebuilding program, a spokeswoman said. Helseth’s attorney did not return a request for comment.

The U.N. audits, however, also criticized the work of USAID’s inspector general. The USAID report, for instance, contained allegations that Mark Oviatt, the senior UNOPS official who replaced Helseth, had used USAID money to renovate a guest house for himself. Instead, the audit found that the U.N. had paid $35,000 out of its own pocket to conduct the renovation. Oviatt declined comment.

The U.N. audits also chastised the inspector general’s report for attempting to shirk USAID’s responsibility for problems with the development projects.

Donna Dinkler, a spokeswoman for USAID’s inspector general, said, “They can say what they want, but we stand by our findings.”

Depleted uranium, despite its rather benign-sounding name, is not depleted of radioactivity or toxicity. The term “depleted” refers only to its being depleted of the U-235 isotope needed for fission reactions in nuclear reactors. The nuclear waste material from nuclear power plants, DU as it is known, is what is removed from the power plants’ spent fuel rods and is essentially composed of the uranium isotope U-238 as well as U-236 (a product of nuclear reactor fission, not found in nature), as well as other trace radioactive elements.

Once simply a nuisance for the industry, that still has no permanent way to dispose of the dangerous stuff, it turns out to be an ideal metal for a number of weapons uses, and has been capitalized on by the Pentagon. 1.7 times heavier than lead, and much harder than steel, and with the added property of burning at a super-hot temperature, DU has proven to be an ideal penetrator for warheads that need to pierce thick armor or dense concrete bunkers made of reinforced concrete and steel. Once through the defenses, it burns at a temperature that incinerates anyone inside (which is why we see the carbonized bodies of bodies in the wreckage of Iraqi tanks hit by US fire).

Accordingly it has found its way into 30 mm machine gun ammunition, especially that used by the A-10 Warthog ground-attack fighter planes used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as Kosovo). It is also the warhead of choice for Abrams tanks and is also reportedly used in GBU-28 and the later GBU-37 bunker buster bombs, each of which can have 1-2 tons of the stuff in its warhead.

DU is also used as ballast in cruise missiles, and this burns up when a missile detonates its conventional explosive. Some cruise missiles are also designed to hit hardened targets and reportedly feature DU warheads, as does the AGM-130 air-to-ground missile, which carries a one-ton penetrating warhead. In addition, depleted uranium is used in large quantities in the armor of tanks and other equipment. This material becomes a toxic source of CU pollution when these vehicles are attacked and burned.

While the Pentagon has continued to claim, against all scientific evidence, that there is no hazard posed by depleted uranium, US troops in Iraq have reportedly been instructed to avoid any sites where these weapons have been used—destroyed Iraqi tanks, exploded bunkers, etc.—and to wear masks if they do have to approach. Many torched vehicles have been brought back to the US, where they have been buried in special sites reserved for dangerously contaminated nuclear materials. (Thousands of tons of DU-contaminated sand from Kuwait, polluted with DU during the US destruction of Iraq’s tank forces in the 1991 war, were removed and shipped to a waste site in Idaho last year with little fanfare.)

Suspiciously, international health officials have been prevented or obstructed from doing medical studies of DU sites in Iraq and Afghanistan. But an excellent series of articles several years ago by the Christian Science Monitor described how reporters from that newspaper had visited such sites in Iraq with Geiger-counters and had found them to be extremely “hot” with radioactivity.

The big danger with DU is not as a pure metal, but after it has exploded and burned, when the particles of uranium oxide, which are just as radioactive as the pure isotopes, can be inhaled or ingested. Even the smallest particle of uranium in the body is both deadly poisonous as a chemical, and over time can cause cancer—particularly in the lungs, but also the kidneys, testes and ovaries.

There are reports of a dramatic increase in the incidence of deformed babies being born in the city of Fallujah, where DU weapons were in wide use during the November 2004 assault on that city by US Marines. The British TV station SKY UK, in a report last month that has received no mention in any mainstream American news organization, found a marked increase in birth defects at local hospitals. Birth defects have also been high for years in the Basra area in the south of Iraq, where DU was used not just during America’s 2003 “shock and awe” attack on Iraq, but also in the 1991 Gulf War.

Further, a report sent to the UN General Assembly by Dr Nawal Majeed Al-Sammarai, Iraq’s Minister of Women’s Affairs since 2006, stated that in September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 babies born, 24 percent of which died within their first week of life. Worse yet, fully 75 percent of the babies born that month were deformed. This compares to August 2002, six months before the US invasion, when 530 live births were reported with only six dying in the first week, and only one deformity. Clearly something terrible is happening in Fallujah, and many doctors suspect it’s the depleted uranium dust that is permeating the city.

But the real impact of the first heavy use of depleted uranium weaponry in populous urban environments (DU was used widely especially in 2003 in Baghdad, Samara, Mosul and other big Iraqi cities), will come over the years, as the toxic legacy of this latest American war crime begins to show up in rising numbers of cancers, birth defects and other genetic disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, as in the case of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the toxic effects of this latest battlefield use of toxic materials by the US military will also be felt for years to come by the men and women who were sent over to fight America’s latest wars. As with Agent Orange, the Pentagon and the Veterans Affairs Department have been assiduously denying the problem, and have been just as assiduously denying claims by veterans of the Gulf War and the two current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who claim their cancers and other diseases have anything to do with their exposure to DU.

The record on Agent Orange should lead us to be suspicious of the government’s claims.

The deformed and dead babies in Iraq should make us demand a cleanup of Iraq and Afghanistan, medical aid for the victims, and a ban on all depleted uranium weapons.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Department of Defense (DOD) file photo shows an unmanned Predator surveillance plane. Sources close to the jirga said the latest Predator strike, and reports that Washington was intensifying its aerial bombardment, were likely to reinforce sentiment in favour of the militants and make it even more difficult to achieve peace.

Since taking office, President Obama has sanctioned at least 41 Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them, critics say, “innocent bystanders, including children,” according to a published report.

“Even if a precise account is elusive,” writes Jane Mayer in the Oct. 26 The New Yorker, “the outlines are clear: the C.I.A. has joined the Pakistani intelligence service in an aggressive campaign to eradicate local and foreign militants, who have taken refuge in some of the most inaccessible parts of the country.”

Based on a study just completed by the non-profit, New America Foundation of Washington, D.C., “the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President,” Mayer reports.

In fact, the first two strikes took place on Jan. 23, the President’s third day in office and the second of these hit the wrong house, that of a pro-government tribal leader that killed his entire family, including three children, one just five years of age.

At any time, the C.I.A. apparently has “multiple drones flying over Pakistan, scouting for targets,” the magazine reports. So many Predators and its more heavily armed companion, the Reaper, are being purchased that defense manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, of Poway, Calif., can hardly make them fast enough. The Air Force is said to possess 200.

Mayer writes, “the embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.” Today, Mayer writes, “there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.” And according to Gary Solis, who teaches at Georgetown University’s Law Center, nobody in the government calls it assassination. “Not only would we have expressed abhorrence of such a policy a few years ago; we did,” Solis is quoted as saying.

David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency warfare authority who co-authored a study for the Center for New American Security, of Washington, D.C., has suggested the drone attacks have backfired. As he told The New Yorker, “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”

And because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, Mayer writes, “there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war.”

The New Yorker further reports the Obama Administration has also expanded the sphere of authorized drone assaults in Afghanistan. An August Senate Foreign Relations Committee report said the Pentagon’s list of approved terrorist targets held 367 names and included some 50 Afghan drug lords “who are suspected of giving money to help finance the Taliban,” Mayer reports. She quotes the Senate report as stating, “There is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds goes to Al Qaeda.”

It is the military’s version of the drone assaults that operates in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the C.I.A.’s drones hunt terror suspects in countries where U.S. troops are not based and is “aimed at terror suspects around the world,” Mayer writes. The C.I.A. effort was launched by Obama’s predecessor, and a former aide to President George W. Bush says Obama has left nearly all the key personnel in place.

Running the C.I.A. program is a team of operators that handle Predator flights off runways in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once aloft, the Predators are passed over to controllers at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., who maneuver joysticks and monitor events from a live video feed from the drone’s camera.

The magazine article reports the government plans to commission “hundreds more” of the drones, including “new generations of tiny ‘nano’ drones, which can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.”

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes”. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood.

In a recent article, I examined the implications of an announcement that 75 of the remaining 223 prisoners in Guantánamo have been cleared for release. This came by way of a list posted in the prison, identifying the prisoners by nationality, and a statement by a military spokesman, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, who explained, “It was an opportunity to just provide better communication. There’s a lot of information out there and you get a lot of things from a lot of different angles. It helps put it in a more succinct context for them [the prisoners].”

The list is based on the deliberations of an interagency Task Force, established by President Obama on his second day in office, to determine who should be released, and who should continue to be held, and in my article I looked at the cases of 31 of the prisoners (26 Yemenis, three Saudis and two Kuwaitis, one of whom has since been released), pointing out that, in theory, there was no reason for them not be released immediately.

However, I also pointed out that members of Obama’s own administration had told the New York Times that the government was afraid of releasing the Yemenis (even though they had been cleared for release), because Guantánamo itself might have radicalized [them], exposing [them] to militants and embittering [them] against the United States,” and I should also have added, as former military defense attorney Maj. David Frakt pointed out to me in an email, that the men’s release is also dependent on the whims of Congress, where lawmakers “passed a law this summer that requires the administration to give Congress 15 days notice before releasing anyone from Guantánamo.”

Nevertheless, although Congressional obstruction may well be an additional complication (which I discussed in another article last week, “Lawyer Blasts ‘Congressional Depravity’ On Guantánamo”), it remains apparent that the route out of Guantánamo for these 30 men ought to be easier than it is for the other 44 prisoners cleared for release, as these are men who cannot be repatriated either because of fears that they will face torture or other ill-treatment (including arbitrary detention and show trials) on their return, or because (in the cases of two Palestinians) they are, effectively, stateless refugees.

Who are the 44 prisoners?

Of these 44 prisoners, 15 had their release ordered by judges in US District Courts, as a result of the habeas corpus petitions that were authorized by the Supreme Court in an extraordinarily important ruling in June 2008. 13 of these men are Uighurs — Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province, whose release was ordered by Judge Ricardo Urbina a year ago, and whose plight I have written about extensively (particularly here and here) — and the others are an Algerian, Sabir Lahmar, whose release was ordered last November, and Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, a young Syrian, tortured and imprisoned by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, whose release was ordered in June this year.

The other 29 are as follows: nine Tunisians, six more Algerians, three more Syrians, two Egyptians, two Uzbeks, two Palestinians, an Azerbaijani and a Tajik. Although their names have not been provided, the identities of the majority of these men can be deduced by a process of elimination (there are, for example, only two Egyptians, two Uzbeks, and one Azerbaijani in Guantánamo), and, in addition, the decision to release the Tajik prisoner, Umar Abdulayev, is known about because it was announced in July.

As I explained at the time, this decision was distressing to Abdulayev and his lawyers for two reasons: firstly, because when government lawyers announced that they would “no longer defend his detention,” they also announced that they “want[ed] US diplomats to arrange to repatriate him,” even though Abdulayev is terrified of returning to Tajikistan, because he was threatened by Tajik agents who visited him in Guantánamo.

Secondly, because the Task Force’s decision also led the Justice Department to ask a judge to drop Abdulayev’s habeas petition, prompting his lawyers to point out that the Task Force’s decision was “not a determination that [Abdulayev’s] detention was or was not lawful,” and that it therefore “does nothing towards removing the stigma of being held in Guantánamo or being accused of being a terrorist by the United States.”

This is actually a widespread problem for those cleared for release who fear repatriation, not only because recent rulings by the Court of Appeals have removed a number of judicial safety nets established by judges to prevent the enforced repatriation of a number of prisoners in Guantánamo (for whom the “stigma” of “being accused of being a terrorist by the United States” is of grave importance). But also because, in a wider sense, the Obama administration is unwilling to state openly that any prisoner was seized by mistake (as one of the prisoners’ lawyers recently explained to me, no lawyer would advise admitting responsibility, as it would open the floodgate to compensation claims). As a result, the administration is doing nothing to facilitate the work of Daniel Fried, the senior diplomat employed in March 2009 as the Special Envoy to Guantánamo, whose unenviable task it is to persuade other countries to accept released prisoners from Guantánamo.

Even putting aside for a moment the difficulties caused by the refusal of the Court of Appeals and Congress to accept cleared prisoners into the United States (which fuels a reluctance to help in European countries, as Fried acknowledged in a recent interview with the BBC), there are disturbing signs that this reticence on the part of the administration to state openly and categorically that colossal mistakes were made by the Bush administration is also undermining the very decisions made by Obama’s own Task Force.

Recently, for example, when Swiss officials visited Guantánamo to investigate the cases of four men cleared for release, in an attempt to work out if they would be prepared to accept any of these men, they returned, not with an honest appraisal, but with weighted conclusions that could only have been presented to them by the US military, who had, in effect, opened up their files and shown them material which purported to be evidence, but which, in other prisoners’ habeas petitions, has been demonstrated, time and again, to be nothing more than false allegations made by other prisoners (under duress or as a result of bribery) or by the prisoners themselves, multiple levels of unacceptable hearsay, and “mosaics” of intelligence that do not stand up to independent scrutiny.

According to reports in the Swiss media, the government representatives concluded that, of the four men they investigated, two Uighurs were “low-risk,” even though they are no risk at all, having persuaded the Bush administration to drop its claims that they were “enemy combatants,” and having been cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, by a US District Court, and by the Obama administration’s Task Force, and two other men, an Uzbek and a Palestinian — also cleared by Bush-era military review boards and by Obama’s Task Force — were considered “medium-risk” and “high-risk.”

What has the Task Force been doing for eight months?

Beyond these absurd discrepancies, which do nothing to help Obama’s cause, the other conclusion I draw from an analysis of the Task Force’s figures is that, after eight months of reviewing the prisoners’ cases, it has made very little progress, despite detailed consultations with lawyers and other experts, despite detailed searches for information relating to the men, which was scattered throughout numerous departments and agencies in a disturbingly incoherent manner, and despite the establishment of a database bringing all the available information together in one place.

Although exact numbers are impossible to work out, it is clear that, of the 29 men cleared by the Task Force, all but nine (at most) were actually approved for transfer, between 2006 and 2008, by Administrative Review Boards at Guantánamo. When Obama came to power, eight Tunisians, five Algerians, four Uzbeks, three Palestinians, an Egyptian, a Libyan, and Umar Abdulayev, the Tajik, had all been approved for transfer. Some tweaking has taken place — a Palestinian has been removed from the list, and the Azerbaijani, Poolad Tsiradzho, has been added, plus an Algerian, an Egyptian, two Libyans and three Syrians — and, in addition, it is possible that the Task Force has shifted position on a few of those approved for transfer under Bush.

However, when added to the 14 or so Yemenis discussed in the last article, this figure of 25 or so prisoners is hardly a triumph for the Task Force, and indicates, yet again, that when it comes to Guantánamo, the President’s bold start in January, when he issued his executive order regarding the closure of the prison, has been steadily eroded by confusion, extreme caution and indecision.

If this damned icon of the dark years of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their close advisors is ever to close, it is time for Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Robert Gates to regroup and to accept that confusion plays only into the hands of those haunted by the ghost of Dick Cheney, and that clarity is required. Moreover, despite lawyers’ fears of new waves of litigation, this clarity has to involve the nation’s leaders acknowledging why the District Courts have ruled, in 79 percent of the habeas petitions before them, that the men in question are neither terrorists nor soldiers and should be released.

The truth is out there — and I am only one of many writers who have been explaining it for the last four years — but I will spell it out again: the majority of the prisoners were seized for bounty payments by US allies, were never screened according to the Geneva Conventions to determine whether or not they were combatants of any kind, and are held not because of anything resembling evidence, but through a shamefully poor attempt to build up a case against them in the isolation of Guantánamo, through a combination of torture, coercion and bribery, and the use of raw intelligence masquerading as facts.

Everyone in Guantánamo deserves better than this: both the few dozen men who are genuinely accused of involvement with al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks and other acts of international terrorism, who should face trials for their alleged crimes, and the majority of the prison’s population, whose release is still being prevented, or made horrendously complicated, by both the Executive and the lawmakers in Congress — some innocent men, and others who were soldiers in a now almost forgotten civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, whose ongoing detention is based not on any notions of justice, but on the lingering legacy of the Bush administration’s mistaken decision to equate al-Qaeda with the Taliban.

Note: For more information on the prisoners cleared for release, see my article, “Guantánamo’s refugees,” and also see the following profiles on the Reprieve website: Ahmed Belbacha (Algeria), Nabil Hadjarab (Algeria), Said Farhi (Algeria), Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar (Egypt), Sherif El-Mashad (Egypt), Ayman al-Shurafa (Palestine), Adel Hakeemy (Tunisia), Hedi Hammamy (Tunisia) and Saleh Sassi (Tunisia).

This report was first 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.

Lt. Col. David Frakt

In a recent article, “On Guantánamo, Lawmakers Reveal They Are Still Dick Cheney’s Pawns,” I spelled out my despair and disgust at lawmakers from both parties (their names can be found here, here and here), who, since May, have voted for legislation severely curtailing President Obama’s ability to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba by his self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, and who, as a result, have sent just one resounding message to the American people and the wider world: the ghost of Dick Cheney still stalks the corridors of power.

In the article, I ran through these disturbing developments, explaining how, in May, the Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009, which eliminated $80 million from planned legislation intended to fund the closure of Guantánamo, and specifically prohibited the use of any funding to “transfer, relocate, or incarcerate Guantánamo Bay detainees to or within the United States,” and how, in June, the House of Representatives followed up by passing a spending bill turning down the administration’s request for $60 million to close Guantánamo, which also prohibited funds from being used to release detainees from Guantánamo into the United States.

The spur for my article came just last week, when Representatives voted overwhelmingly for a nonbinding motion proposed by Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ken.), “clearly prohibiting” the transfer of any Guantánamo prisoner to the United States “for whatever reason”; in other words, even for federal court trials, or some revision of the horribly flawed Military Commission trial system favored by the Bush administration.

I’m pleased to say that I was not alone in my despair. On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder stated, “The restrictions that we’ve had to deal with on the Hill give me great concern,” adding, as the Associated Press described it, that he “disputed the claim, made often by Republican lawmakers, that Guantánamo Bay detainees are simply too dangerous to be brought to US soil.” “I don’t see how that in fact is accurate,” Holder said, adding, “You can go through a litany of very, very dangerous people who are safely housed in facilities that pose no dangers to the communities that surround them.” Citing the examples of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, he stated, “I think we have a good track record.”

In combating the fearmongering in Congress that, on last week’s showing, threatens to completely derail the administration’s ability to close Guantánamo at all, Holder was echoing important points made by President Obama in a major national security speech in May, when he stated:

[W]e will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue. Listening to the recent debate, I’ve heard words that are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country … [B]ear in mind the following fact: nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal “supermax” prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists. As Senator Lindsey Graham said: “The idea that we cannot find a place to securely house 250-plus detainees within the United States is not rational.”

Over the last few days, following intense negotiations, it appears that the administration has managed to persuade Democratic senators and congressmen to accept that prisoners can be brought to the US to face trial, although, as Reuters added, the measure added by the Senate stipulated that the administration “would be required to present a risk assessment and give 14 days’ notice before bringing any of the 223 detainees remaining in the facility to the United States to face charges in American courtrooms.”

Moreover, although Democrats in the House of Representatives also added an amendment to their bill — less generously demanding that the president provides a “comprehensive disposition plan” at least 45 days before any proposed transfer — these measures still “face a tough vote” before the full Senate and the House of Representatives (as Reuters explained), especially after the widespread capitulation last week to Rep. Rogers and his paranoid talk about “the American people” and their fears of “terrorists in their hometowns, inciting fellow prisoners, abusing our legal system, and terrorizing their communities.”

However, although this is progress of a sort, it should not be forgotten that the nation’s lawmakers persistently failed to call a halt to the excesses of the Bush administration, and, in fact, played a decisive role in propping up a lawless regime by endorsing two pieces of dreadful legislation (the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006), which purported to strip the prisoners of the habeas corpus rights they were granted by the Supreme Court in 2004, revived the Commissions after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal, and also sought to grant immunity for any wrongdoing to the entire Bush administration.

For these lame apologies for legislative scrutiny, lawmakers were severely chastised by the Supreme Court in June 2008, when the nation’s senior judges restored the prisoners’ habeas corpus rights and ruled that the habeas-stripping aspects of the DTA and MCA had been unconstitutional, but as Lt. Col. David Frakt, law professor and former military defense attorney for Guantánamo prisoner Mohammed Jawad explained to me in an email this week, Congress is still behaving unconstitutionally with regard to the right of the Executive branch and the Judiciary to order the release of prisoners from Guantánamo who have won their habeas corpus petitions.

Drawing on the experience of Mohammed Jawad — just one of the 30 prisoners (out of 38 in total) whose release has been ordered by a judge after finding that the government had failed to establish, “by a preponderance of the evidence,” that they had any connection to either al-Qaeda or the Taliban — Lt. Col. Frakt pointed out, with reference to an article I had written suggesting that 31 cleared prisoners in Guantánamo could be released immediately, that I had neglected to mention that an impediment to their immediate release had been established by Congress, which, in summer, “passed a law that requires the Administration to give Congress 15 days notice before releasing anyone from Guantánamo.” Lt. Col. Frakt added, “This was why, when Mohammed Jawad was ordered released, it still took 22 days to release him. The Department of Justice said they needed a week to prepare the notice and then he couldn’t be released until 15 days after that.”

Crucially, Lt. Col. Frakt explained:

I consider this Congressional notification requirement to be blatantly unconstitutional as a violation of the separation of powers. In Jawad’s case, it meant that after the Executive Branch and the Judiciary had concluded there was no lawful basis for the military to detain Mohammed Jawad (after the Department of Justice ultimately conceded the habeas corpus petition), the military was required to continue to detain him at Guantánamo at the order of the legislature, Congress. As I explained in Federal District Court, this placed Jawad in the status of “Congressional prisoner,” a status for which there is no Constitutional authority.

After explaining that Jawad’s defense team “chose not to challenge this ridiculous provision, because a challenge would have likely taken months to work its way through the courts,” Lt. Col. Frakt concluded:

It may be that, if the US is contemplating releasing a detainee that it has the lawful basis to detain under the laws of war, that Congress can legitimately condition the expenditure of US funds to effectuate the release on the provision of this notification to Congress, but for those detainees determined to be unlawfully held, this law simply arbitrarily extends their unlawful stay at Guantánamo. This provision, coupled with the refusal to authorize funds for detainees to be resettled in the United States — even those determined to be innocent of any wrongdoing who should qualify for political asylum — shows the extent of Congressional depravity on any issues related to detainees.

These are tough words, but no less than lawmakers deserve, and as the battle over Guantánamo’s future continues throughout the fall, I hope that officials in the Obama administration will be able to make good use of them. As Lt. Col. Frakt so ably points out, it is completely unacceptable that, on Guantánamo, both the Executive and the Judiciary are now at the mercy of Congress, where lawmakers are not only continuing to endorse Dick Cheney’s evidence-free rationale for arbitrary detention, but have also seized arbitrary detention powers for themselves.

Note: Regular readers will recall that Lt. Col. Frakt was formerly Maj. Frakt, and I’m delighted to announce that he was promoted on Oct. 1 — and that there are, therefore, some rewards for military lawyers who defend the principles they have sworn to uphold.

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

Last week, the Obama administration finally admitted that it might not be possible to close Guantánamo by the President’s self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, when defense secretary Robert Gates told ABC News’ “This Week” that it was “going to be tough” to meet the deadline. The announcement followed what appeared to be strategic leaks by administration insiders, which were designed to blame White House Counsel Greg Craig for the government’s woes.

Why it has taken so long to clear 75 prisoners for release?

It was Craig who had pushed for the deadline, but although the Washington Post, in a joint article with ProPublica, reported several critical comments from current officials, claiming that Craig’s drive to set a deadline flew in the face of conflicting advice — in particular, a claim by “a senior government lawyer” that “the entire civil service counseled him not to set a deadline” — others were more supportive.

The Post closed its article with a comment from an administration official who was “more effusive,” and who stated, “Greg Craig is a hero. He took responsibility for this policy from the beginning, and he has guts and character. If we can’t get it done by the deadline, then at least we’ll have done as much as we can as smoothly as we could have.” In addition, in his interview with ABC News, Secretary Gates also declared his support for the initiative:

When the president elect met with his new national security team in Chicago on December 7th … last year, this issue was discussed, about closing Guantánamo and executive orders to do that and so on. And the question was, should we set a deadline? Should we pin ourselves down? I actually was one of those who said we should because I know enough from being around this town that if you don’t put a deadline on something, you’ll never move the bureaucracy.  But I also said and then if we find we can’t get it done by that time but we have a good plan, then you’re in a position to say it’s going to take us a little longer but we are moving in the direction of implementing the policy that the president set. And I think that’s the position that we’re in.

Moreover, the lion’s share of the blame for delays in the closure of Guantánamo actually lies with lawmakers and with other officials in the Obama administration. After the President issued executive orders on his second day in office, which included the Guantánamo deadline, the administration then dithered, failing to support Guantánamo’s most celebrated innocents, the Uighurs, whose release into the United States was ordered by District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina last October, by backing the Court of Appeals in its decision to overturn that ruling in February this year.

This cowardice then allowed paranoid and opportunistic right-wingers to seize the initiative, reviving the Bush administration’s deceitful claims that Guantánamo is “full of terrorists” (as particularly promoted by former Vice President Dick Cheney), and encouraging both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives to pass legislation preventing the transfer of prisoners to the United States and withholding funding for the prison’s closure.

In addition, the government’s decision to support the Court of Appeals in the Uighurs’ case was not the only example of the Justice Department’s distressing failure to confront the many injustices inherited from the Bush administration. Since Obama came to power, those charged with preparing the government’s opposition to other prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions — apparently functioning without adequate insight from above — have persistently failed to recognize the weaknesses in the government’s case against a large number of the prisoners, and have repeatedly humiliated themselves in court, challenging habeas corpus petitions that they have not only lost, but that have been accompanied by withering criticism from the judges involved (see the cases of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco and Fouad al-Rabiah for the most severe examples).

The only apparent explanation for this lack of oversight is that, rather than focusing on the supposed evidence — or lack of it — in the habeas cases, the administration has focused instead on its own alternative to the court reviews, an interagency Task Force that has been reviewing the cases independently.

Last week, amidst the general gloom, some good news emerged from the Task Force, when a military spokesman announced that the interagency review had, to date, cleared 78 of the remaining prisoners. Three were released on the eve of the announcement (a Yemeni, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, who was repatriated five months after a judge ordered his release, and two Uzbeks, Oybek Jabbarov and Shakhrukh Hamiduva, cleared by military review boards under the Bush administration, who were sent to Ireland), but the information released in connection with the remaining 75 prisoners provides a fascinating snapshot into the workings of the Task Force and some of the difficulties of dealing with the toxic legacy of the Bush administration, even though, in other ways, the announcement also confirms the existence of an unnerving paralysis on the part of the Obama administration when it comes to actually releasing prisoners, and also raises questions about what the Task Force has actually been doing for the last eight months.

The 31 prisoners who could be released today

Of the 75 prisoners cleared for release, 18 had their release ordered by the courts, after successful habeas petitions, and of the remaining 57, at least 21, and probably as many as 36, were, like the Uzbeks mentioned above, cleared for release between 2006 and 2008 by Bush-era military review boards. For the first time, the Obama administration identified prisoners cleared for release by their nationalities, and although no names were given — to protect those who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they would face torture on their return, for whom delicate negotiations are ongoing with third countries who might take them — it is readily apparent from the list that, in the cases of 31 of these prisoners — from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — the need for anonymity is unnecessary, as none of these men have any reason to fear being returned to their home countries.

More significantly, there is no reason for any of these men to be held at Guantánamo for one minute longer, and no reason why they should not be put on a plane and flown home today, but such is the taint of Guantánamo that the administration has found reasons to delay releasing these men, even though they have been cleared for release by a combination of Bush-era military review boards, the US courts, and the Obama administration’s own interagency Task Force.

Of these 31 men, two — Khalid al-Mutairi and Fouad al-Rabiah — are Kuwaitis, who secured resounding victories in their habeas cases (especially Fouad al-Rabiah, whose extraordinarily story of torture and false confessions was mentioned above). Inexplicable delay forms part of their story too, as al-Mutairi was cleared two months ago and is still held, but I am optimistic that both men will soon be repatriated.

Three others are Saudis, and although their identities have not been revealed, and it is uncertain if they are the three remaining Saudis who were cleared for release during the Bush administration, there appears to be no good reason for their continued detention, as I explained in an article in March, when six cleared Saudis were held, and before three were released (see here and here).

Paranoia regarding the Yemenis

However, the biggest story by far, when it comes to prisoners cleared for release who are still held, concerns the Yemenis, who make up 26 of the 75 prisoners cleared for release (and around 95 of the 223 prisoners still held in Guantánamo). They include Yasim Basardah, who was cleared for release by a District Court judge in April, and Ayman Batarfi, a doctor whose release was approved by the Task Force that same month, essentially to head off a humiliating defeat in court. The others have not been identified, although it seems likely that they include some, if not all of the 12 Yemenis approved for release between 2006 and 2008 by Bush-era military review boards. And yet, despite the fact that some of these men have been cleared twice over the last three years, and despite the fact that, in April, the judge in Ayman Batarfi’s case, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, criticized the government’s behavior in the strongest possible terms, these 26 men are still imprisoned in Guantánamo.

To understand quite how severely the courts regard the continued detention of men who have been cleared for release, it is worth recalling that, back in April, when Judge Sullivan accepted the government’s sudden decision to release Batarfi, he made a point of publicly stating that he hoped it was not “another ploy not to return Dr. Batarfi to his country of origin but to continue with his deprivation of his fair day in court,” and requested status reports every 14 days. He also stated:

I’m not going to continue to tolerate indefinite delay on the part of the United States government. I mean, this Guantánamo issue is a travesty. It ranks up there with the internment of Japanese-American citizens years ago. It’s a horror story in the American system of jurisprudence, and quite frankly, I’m not going to buy into an extended indefinite delay of this man’s stay at Guantánamo, or anyone else on my calendar.

That was six months ago, and I take it that, as a result, Judge Sullivan has now had to endure twelve status reports explaining why the government has not yet been able to free Dr. Batarfi (which must have pushed his patience to its limits). However, as an article in Sunday’s New York Times explained, the fear of releasing Yemenis is so deep-seated that the administration will resort to the most ludicrous claims to prevent their release.

The Times article discussed Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, the man freed last weekend, five months after District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ordered his release, but although the author, Scott Shane, spelled out that Ali Ahmed, a teenager seized in a guest house in Pakistan, was cleared by Judge Kessler, who “ruled that his incarceration had never been justified and ordered the government to get to work ‘forthwith’ on his release,” and although he added that his lawyer, Brent N. Rushforth, stated that his client was known as “the sweet kid” to other prisoners in Guantánamo, this was not enough for the government, and it appears that Ali Ahmed may only have been released because Judge Kessler was on the verge of openly criticizing the government. As the Times described it, she “appeared to be losing patience with the delay in complying with her May 11 release order,” and this coincided with Ali Ahmed’s release.

For some time now, the government has been trying to persuade the Saudi government to extend its successful rehabilitation program — which processed over a hundred Saudi ex-prisoners in 2006 and 2007 — to the Yemenis, because it fears that, even though cleared for release, they might still constitute a threat. Negotiations have proven to be thorny — in particular, it seems, because the Saudi model relies upon strong family support that would not be available for the Yemenis in Saudi Arabia — but when the administration’s fears are spelled out, as they were in the Times on Sunday, it is clear that they are, to put it bluntly, completely unreasonable. In Scott Shane’s words, Obama administration officials explained that, “Even if Mr. Ahmed was not dangerous in 2002 …Guantánamo itself might have radicalized him, exposing him to militants and embittering him against the United States.”

The officials have valid fears about political instability in Yemen, and the existence of terrorist groups, even though the Yemeni authorities have stated that none of the 16 Yemenis returned from Guantánamo “have joined terrorist groups,” but whatever their fears, they do not seem to have reflected that, if their rationale for not releasing any of the Yemenis from Guantánamo was extended to the US prison system, it would mean that no prisoner would ever be released at the end of their sentence, because prison “might have radicalized” them, and also, of course, that it would lead to no prisoner ever being released from Guantánamo.

To me — and to many other readers, I hope — this is simply unacceptable, but it demonstrates yet again that only at Guantánamo can fear trump justice to such an alarming degree.

In a second article to follow soon, I’ll look at the cases of the other 44 prisoners cleared for release by the Guantánamo Task Force, from countries including Algeria, China, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, who cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will face torture on their return, and ask why the Task Force’s decisions so closely mirror those already taken by Bush-era military review boards, and whether the administration is doing all it can to mitigate the taint of Guantánamo and to find new homes for these men in other countries.

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.

The letter also included a statement by his lawyer, Michael J. Mone Jr., to a Committee of the US House of Representatives, in which Mone explained that Jabbarov was a refugee, living in northern Afghanistan with his pregnant wife, infant son, elderly mother and other Uzbek refugees at the time of the US-led invasion in October 2001, and that he ended up in US hands “after he accepted a ride from a group of Northern Alliance soldiers he met at a roadside teahouse who said they would give him a ride to Mazar-e-Sharif. Unfortunately, instead of driving him to Mazar-e-Sharif, the soldiers took Oybek to Bagram Air Base where they handed him over to US forces, undoubtedly in exchange for a sizeable bounty.”

On Monday, the Irish Times revealed the identity of the second man, and although I respect his desire for privacy, and the chance to begin rebuilding his life after his long ordeal, as much as I recognize Oybek Jabbarov’s right to the same courtesies, I believe that, as with his countryman, it is useful to point out what is known of his story, as it is yet another example of an innocent man losing nearly eight years of his life in a cruel and experimental prison designed to hold human beings without any rights whatsoever.

As I explained in my article on Oybek Jabbarov, men like these two Uzbeks, just two of the many hundreds of innocent men who have been held in Guantánamo over the last seven years and nine months, were “mostly seized by the Americans’ opportunistic allies at a time when bounty payments for ‘al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects’ were widespread, and were then presumed guilty without any screening process by an administration drunk on its own exercise of unfettered executive power.”

The story of Shakhrukh Hamiduva

Unlike Oybek Jabbarov, whose lawyer fought tenaciously to establish his client’s innocence, and actively courted the media, Shakhrukh Hamiduva, the other man freed in Ireland, did not register on the media’s radar during his detention, although I mentioned him in my book The Guantánamo Files.

Nevertheless, his story — as accepted by a military review board that cleared him for release from Guantánamo in 2006 — bears striking similarities to that of his fellow countryman: a vulnerable refugee, preyed upon by unscrupulous Afghans following the US-led invasion, when substantial bounty payments were on offer for foreigners who could be presented to gullible US forces as “al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects.”

All that is known publicly of Shakhrukh Hamiduva is that he was born in Kokand, Uzbekistan in December 1983 (and that he was, therefore, probably under 18 years of age at the time of his capture), that he was one of the first prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo in January 2002, and that he gave the following account in December 2004 to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (the one-sided military boards established to review — and largely endorse — the administration’s contention that everyone who had ended up in US custody was an “enemy combatant” who could be held without rights).

In his tribunal, Hamiduva explained that he left Uzbekistan because of religious persecution, and added that his father and five uncles had been jailed, and that another uncle had been killed. Nevertheless, he had to contend with a number of allegations whose provenance was not disclosed, but which were almost certainly produced as a result of the interrogations of other prisoners (or of Hamiduva himself), in circumstances that may well have involved coercion or bribery.

One allegation was that he had spent a year and a half in a training camp run by the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan, but he explained that he had spent that time at a refugee camp, which contained around 300 refugees. He also denied an allegation that he “willingly became a soldier in the Mujahideen Army,” and that he traveled to Afghanistan to “participate in jihad against the Russians and the Northern Alliance.”

In a statement provided to his Personal Representative (a military officer assigned to the prisoners for the tribunals instead of a lawyer), he explained that he had initially wanted to go to Turkey, but that he couldn’t get a passport because he was too young, so he decided to work with the Tajik authorities at the refugee camp instead.

This, he said, involved helping the refugees, and he added that the Tajik government then provided transportation to take him and other refugees to Afghanistan (actually deporting them, as they did with hundreds of Uzbek refugees in 1999, including Oybek Jabbarov and his family), where he helped some of them “to fix up things like cars or roofs” at a place in Kabul.

He also explained that, after five or six months, he hooked up with an Afghan “mentor,” who owned a garage and taught him to drive, and added that, after working for him for a while, he bought a car and started to work as a taxi driver, which was his occupation when he was captured.

Speaking of his capture, he said that he went to the United Nations in Pakistan (as there was no office in Afghanistan) to get help in returning to Uzbekistan. “They promised me they would be able to help me and send me back to my homeland, but nothing would happen to me and that I would be protected,” he said. “He [a UN official, presumably] gave me a piece of paper. I guess it was some kind of travel document so I would be able to travel along with.”

He explained that, after this visit, he returned to Afghanistan in his car with five or six Afghans from Mazar-e-Sharif, and added that he didn’t want any money from them; he just wanted them to give him directions. However, in the mountains he was stopped by armed Afghans who let his passengers go, but who took his car and handed him over to “the American general” — probably General Rashid Dostum, the Afghan Uzbek warlord who was working with US forces — at Mazar-e-Sharif.

He also explained to the tribunal that he told the Americans his story, and added that they saw his travel document and promised him that they would help him get home, but, after keeping him imprisoned for a month “in some kind of house” with about 15 Pakistanis, they were all transferred to the US prison in Kandahar, and after about a month and a half he was sent to Guantánamo.

Speaking of the nearly three years he had spent in the prison by the time of his CSRT, he told his tribunal, “They said that they were through with me and promise[d] to send me back to my homeland, that’s why I’m confused. When they brought me here for interrogation, I didn’t want to talk a lot to them … They didn’t treat me well here, that is why I didn’t tell them anything.” He added, “I just want to let you know that they torture me a lot here at the camp. They would not let me sleep through the night; they were tak[ing] me to interrogations. I saw them beating other detainees, breaking their arms and legs.”

When the tribunal asked why he was wearing orange (which meant he was uncooperative, as, by 2004, white uniforms had been introduced for “cooperative” prisoners, and tan for those who were somewhere in between), he explained, “I know that there are four levels of discipline. Every time I try to go one level up, they will do something to keep you in the level. I know that there are a lot of detainees who don’t want to talk to the interrogators and no matter what you tell them they are not going to change your level or change your clothes for that matter.

“I know that a lot of people have been tortured here at the camp … When I don’t exercise I feel very weak, that [is] why I try to exercise inside my cell but MPs don’t like it. That is the only [way] I can keep myself healthy here is by doing some exercise because when you get sick you don’t get any appointments here so what should I do? Every prison detainee should be allowed to exercise; I don’t understand why they don’t allow us.”

As with the story of Oybek Jabbarov, this is a disturbing account on a number of levels. With such limited information available, I have no idea if Shakhrukh Hamiduva, like Jabbarov, was threatened by Uzbek intelligence agents who were allowed to visit Guantánamo (although it seems likely), but enough information is readily available to demonstrate, yet again, that the phrase “the worst of the worst,” as used by senior Bush administration officials to refer to the supposed terrorists in Guantánamo, is more accurately applied to the kind of mistakes made by the administration, which in its myopic arrogance, was more than happy to detain randomly seized foreigners in Afghanistan, and to deprive them of any rights, even if they were under 18 years-old, and should, as juveniles, have been rehabilitated rather than being subjected to sleep deprivation, punished for trying to exercise in their cells, and forced to watch as other prisoners were beaten until they were hospitalized.

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.