[Ppnews] The Guantánamo Whistleblowers

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington07022007.html

July 2, 2007


Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham is not the First Insider 
to Condemn the Kangaroo Tribunals


The Guantánamo Whistleblowers

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Jostling for media space in the last week--and 
largely losing out to spurious claims that 
Guantánamo is about to close--is the story of Lt. 
Col. Stephen Abraham, an army intelligence 
officer with 26 years' experience, who has 
bravely spoken out against the Guantánamo regime. 
In 
<http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/Al%20Odah%20reply%206-22-07.pdf>an 
affidavit filed with an Appeal Court petition on 
behalf of Kuwaiti detainee Fawzi al-Odah, Abraham 
delivered a damning verdict on the legitimacy of 
the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which ran 
from July 2004 to March 2005, and were set up to 
determine whether the Guantánamo detainees had 
been correctly designated as "enemy combatants."

Currently an army reservist and an attorney in 
California, Abraham worked at Guantánamo, from 11 
September 2004 to 9 March 2005, in the Office for 
the Administrative Review of the Detention of 
Enemy Combatants (OARDEC) as "an agency liaison, 
responsible for coordinating with government 
agencies, including certain Department of Defense 
(DoD) and non-DoD organizations, to gather or 
validate information relating to detainees for 
use in CSRTs." He also served as a member of a 
CSRT, and, as he described it, "had the 
opportunity to observe and participate in the 
operation of the CSRT process," and he concluded 
from his experience that the gathering of 
materials for use in the tribunals was severely 
flawed, and that the whole system was geared 
towards rubber-stamping the detainees' prior designation as "enemy combatants."

Specifically, Abraham complained that the OARDEC 
personnel--mostly from the military reserves--who 
were responsible for compiling the information 
used in the "Unclassified Summary of Evidence" 
against each detainee were woefully 
inexperienced, and that few of whom "had any 
experience or training in the legal or 
intelligence fields." He also complained that the 
tribunals' Recorders were similarly 
inexperienced, and were "typically relatively 
junior officers with little training or 
experience in matters relating to the collection, 
processing, analyzing, and/or dissemination of 
intelligence material," and that those who 
actually aggregated the information--the case 
writers--"in most instances" had "the same 
limited degree of knowledge and experience 
relating to the intelligence community and 
intelligence products." Given the shortcomings of 
the majority of the personnel involved, Abraham 
also noted that, although "large amounts of 
information" were received, the workers "often 
had no context for determining whether the 
information was relevant," and frequently 
discarded information because it was "considered 
to be ambiguous, confusing or poorly written," as 
well as "reject[ing] some information arbitrarily 
while accepting other information without any articulable rationale."

Abraham expressed a similar disdain for the 
quality of the information produced by the 
various government agencies, which the largely 
unqualified workers were required to collate and 
aggregate. This information, he wrote, frequently 
consisted of intelligence "of a generalized 
nature--often outdated, often 'generic,' rarely 
specifically relating to the individual subjects 
of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to 
those individuals' status," and additional 
information, contained within the Detainee 
Information Management System and other 
databases, was equally "deficient," typically 
"excluding information that was characterized as 
highly sensitive law enforcement information, 
highly classified information, or information not 
voluntarily released by the originating agency." 
Neither the case writers nor the Recorders, 
Abraham asserted, had "access to numerous 
information sources generally available within the intelligence community."

Further proof that the gathering of information 
for the tribunals was not geared towards justice 
and transparency came when, as "one of only a few 
intelligence-trained and suitably cleared 
officers," Abraham was tasked with investigating 
aspects of the "evidence," to confirm "in a 
statement to be relied upon by the CSRT board 
members that the organizations did not possess 
'exculpatory information' relating to the subject 
of the CSRT." When he approached the various 
agencies involved, however, he discovered that he 
was only allowed "limited access to information, 
typically prescreened and filtered," was not 
permitted to request additional searches for 
information, and was rebuffed when he asked for 
written statements confirming that there was no 
exculpatory information. His experience confirmed 
that the agencies were largely providing or 
withholding information at their own discretion, 
without any process of outside scrutiny being available.

His bitterest experience, however, occurred when 
he was chosen--along with an Air Force colonel 
and an Air Force major--to take part in a CSRT. 
After reviewing the evidence, all three men 
"found the information presented to lack 
substance," noting that supposedly specific 
factual statements "lacked even the most 
fundamental earmarks of objectively credible 
evidence," that statements made by alleged 
witnesses "lacked detail," and that generalized 
statements were presented "in indirect and 
passive forms without stating the source of the 
information or providing a basis for establishing 
the reliability or the credibility of the 
source." In addition, Abraham wrote that 
statements by the interrogators, which were 
presented to the panel, "offered inferences" from 
which they were "expected to draw conclusions" 
that the detainee was an "enemy combatant," but 
that when they subjected these statements to even 
the most cursory of questions, the Recorder's 
only response was, "We'll have to get back to you."

Based on the "paucity and weakness of the 
information provided both during and after the 
CSRT hearing," Abraham and his colleagues duly 
determined that there was "no factual basis" for 
concluding that the detainee was an "enemy 
combatant," but that was not the end of the 
story. The director and deputy director of OARDEC 
"immediately questioned the validity" of the 
decision, ordering the tribunal members to 
prepare statements containing the specific 
questions they had raised to enable the Recorder 
to provide "further responses," and reopening the 
hearing to allow the Recorder to "present further 
argument." Refusing to bow to the pressure, 
Abraham and his colleagues failed to change their 
determination, and as a result, as he declared in 
a pithy conclusion to the affidavit, "I was not 
assigned to another CSRT panel." He pointed out, 
however, that OARDEC's response to the decision 
was "consistent with the few other instances" 
when the rigged system had been bucked. In 
meetings attended by Abraham that followed the 
sporadic decisions that detainees were not "enemy 
combatants"--there were only 38 in total, out of 
558 CSRTs--he wrote that the focus of inquiry was always "what went wrong."

Speaking after the affidavit was first 
publicized, Abraham said that he had first raised 
his concerns about the tribunals during his time 
at Guantánamo, but had decided to submit the 
affidavit because "the issues were not adequately 
addressed." He told the Associated Press, "I 
pointed out nothing less than facts, facts that 
can and should be fixed," adding that he had a 
responsibility to point out that officers "did 
not have the proper tools" to determine whether a 
detainee was in fact an "enemy combatant," and 
explaining, "I take very seriously my 
responsibility, my duties as a citizen." David 
Cynamon, one of al-Odah's lawyers--who was put in 
contact with Abraham by his sister, after she 
attended a public lecture on Guantánamo given by 
Cynamon and his colleagues--described Abraham's 
affidavit as "prov[ing] what we all suspected, 
which is that the CSRTs were a complete sham," 
while adding that he feared that his courage was 
"probably an assurance of career suicide." 
Cynamon's colleague, Matthew J. MacLean, who 
pointed out that Abraham was the first CSRT 
member who has been identified, let alone been 
willing to criticize the tribunals in the public 
record, declared, "It wouldn't be quite right to 
say this is the most important piece of evidence 
that has come out of the CSRT process, because 
this is the only piece of evidence ever to come 
out of the CSRT process. It's our only view into the CSRT."

In fact, MacLean's comments were not entirely 
accurate. Whilst it's certainly true that Abraham 
was the first ex-tribunal member to criticize the 
CSRT process in public, his is not the first 
reported example of dissent amongst tribunal 
members. In September 2006, 
<http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/08/31/detentions_over_charity_ties_questioned/>in 
a Boston Globe article, Detentions over charity 
ties questioned , Farah Stockman reported on the 
case of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese hospital 
administrator, who was captured in May 2002 in 
Pakistan--where he had been working for 17 
years--and sold to the American forces. In his 
CSRT, Hamad was judged to be an "enemy combatant" 
because of exactly the kind of "generic" 
allegations described by Lt. Col. Abraham. The 
Saudi charity he worked for, the World Assembly 
of Muslim Youth, was described as an organization 
that "supports terrorist ideals and causes," even 
though it has never appeared on a terrorism 
watchlist (despite being investigated by the US 
Senate), and was one of the favored projects of 
the late Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, and 
another organization that he had worked for 
previously, the Kuwait-based Lajanat Dawa 
Islamiya (which also does not feature on any US 
terrorism watchlist), was described as "one of 
the most active" Islamic NGOs "providing 
logistical and financial support" to mujahideen 
operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which "may 
be" associated with Osama bin Laden.

An exasperated Hamad refuted all the allegations, 
at one point telling his tribunal, "arresting 
employees like myself [who] is not capable of 
supporting terrorists financially, is this 
justice? I am an employee who works for a living 
and I have no connection to the [organization's] 
political views or its financial resources, so 
why do you punish me for a crime I did not 
commit. Why don't you arrest the charities' 
presidents or the people who support [them] 
financially instead of arresting a simple 
employee with no informational value?" 
Predictably, his tribunal judged that he had been 
correctly designated an "enemy combatant," but 
although his pleas appeared to have been ignored, 
Stockman, who was allowed to examine the CSRT 
documentation, noted that one of the tribunal 
members--an unidentified army major, whose name 
was redacted--had issued a dissenting opinion. 
Taking into account the fact that neither WAMY 
nor LDI appears on the State Department's list of 
terrorist organizations, he argued that, "even 
assuming all the allegations... are accurate, the 
detainee does not meet the definition of enemy 
combatant." He added, "These NGOs presumably have 
numerous employees and volunteer workers who have 
been working in legitimate humanitarian roles. 
The mere fact that some elements of these NGOs 
provide support to "terrorist ideals and causes" 
is insufficient to declare one of the employees 
an enemy combatant." Stockman noted, however, 
that the major was overruled by his colleagues, 
one of whom--in a single line that discredits the 
whole tribunal process as effectively as Lt. Col. 
Abraham's affidavit--wrote that the case "passed 
the 'low evidentiary hurdle' set up by the rules of the hearings."

In two other cases, the dissenting officer was 
not a tribunal member, but the detainees' 
Personal Representative. In a majority of the 
CSRTs, the Personal Representative fulfilled his 
intended function as a pale shadow of a 
legitimate defense counsel, failing to 
"participate in any meaningful way," as Lt. Col. 
Abraham noted of the Personal Representative in 
his tribunal. In February 2006, however, in two 
articles for the National Journal, 
<http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0203nj1.htm>Guantánamo's 
Grip and 
<http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0203nj4.htm>Empty 
Evidence , Corine Hegland reported the story of 
an unidentified lieutenant colonel in the army 
(whose name was also redacted), who fought a 
brave, if unsuccessful battle for two of his 
detainees. Along the way, however, he demolished 
the tribunals' legitimacy even more 
comprehensively than either Lt. Col. Abraham or Adel Hamad's dissenting major.

The first case--that of Farouq Saif, a young 
Yemeni who went to Afghanistan to teach the 
Koran--is particularly noteworthy because Saif 
was judged as an "enemy combatant" because of two 
false allegations. The first--that he was a 
bodyguard of Osama bin Laden--was directed at 30 
detainees in total, and was made under duress, 
and later retracted, by Mohammed al-Qahtani. One 
of several purported "20th hijackers" for the 
9/11 attacks, al-Qahtani made the allegations 
during a seven-week period, from November 2002 to 
January 2003, when he was subjected to 
Pentagon-approved "extreme interrogation 
techniques" (otherwise known as torture). The 
second allegation--that Saif had been seen at 
Osama bin Laden's private airport in Kandahar, 
where he was "wearing camouflage and carrying an 
AK-47"--proved so intolerable to his Personal 
Representative that he submitted a written 
protest, in which he stated that the government's 
sole evidence that Saif had been at bin Laden's 
airport was the statement of another prisoner, 
who, according to an FBI memo that he presented 
to the tribunal, was a notorious liar. According 
to the FBI, he "had lied, not only about Farouq, 
but about other Yemeni detainees as well. The 
other detainee claimed he had seen the Yemenis at 
times and in places where they simply could not 
have been." The Personal Representative wrote, "I 
do feel with some certainty that [the accuser] 
has lied about other detainees to receive 
preferable treatment and to cause them problems 
while in custody. Had the tribunal taken this 
evidence out as unreliable, then the position we 
have taken is that a teacher of the Koran (to the 
Taliban's children) is an enemy combatant 
(partially because he slept under a Taliban roof)."

The "notorious liar" actually made false 
allegations against 60 prisoners in total, as was 
revealed after the tribunal of Mohammed 
al-Tumani. A young Syrian economic migrant, who 
had traveled to Afghanistan with other family 
members to join his father in Kabul, where he was 
working as a cook, al-Tumani and his father were 
captured in Pakistan after fleeing the chaos of 
post-invasion Afghanistan. In his tribunal, he 
denied an allegation that he had attended the 
al-Farouq training camp with such vigor that his 
Personal Representative decided to investigate 
the matter further. When he looked at the 
classified evidence, however, he found that only 
one man--the same detainee mentioned 
above--claimed to have seen him at al-Farouq, and 
had identified him as being there three months 
before he arrived in Afghanistan. As Corine 
Hegland described it, "The curious US officer 
pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw 
that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly 
skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the 
accuser had placed at the one training camp. None 
of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time 
the accuser said he saw them at the camp."

The identity of the other 58 detainees falsely 
accused by the "notorious liar" are unknown, as 
the dissenting officer involved in unveiling this 
monstrous injustice--perhaps unwilling to risk 
"career suicide"--has not come forward to 
elaborate, but in my forthcoming book, The 
Guantánamo Files , I report on numerous other 
examples of patently false allegations 
masquerading as "evidence," which were ignored by 
compliant tribunal members accepting the "low 
evidentiary hurdle" of the process. While I wait 
to see if Lt. Col. Abraham's principled stand 
will encourage other insiders to speak out, it's 
worth pointing out that Adel Hamad, Farouq Saif 
and Mohammed al-Tumani remain in Guantánamo. 
Hamad has finally been judged to be "No Longer an 
Enemy Combatant" and is awaiting release, but 
Saif and al-Tumani are still damned by the false 
confessions of a "notorious liar."

Andy Worthington 
(<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk) 
is a British historian, and the author of 'The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (to be 
published by Pluto Press in October 2007).
He can be reached at: 
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk




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