[Ppnews] The Afghans of Gitmo
Political Prisoner News
ppnews at freedomarchives.org
Fri May 9 11:37:04 EDT 2008
May 9, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Tricked by the Taliban
The Afghans of Gitmo
By ANDY WORTHINGTON
For the five Afghans who returned home on the
same flight as al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj
and the other three prisoners described in my
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington05072008.html>previous
article, the future is disturbingly uncertain. As
I
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington12222007.html>reported
last December, when 13 of their compatriots were
released from Guantánamo, they, like the other 19
Afghans released in August, September and
November, were not freed outright, as was the
case with the 152 other Afghans previously
released, but were instead transferred to Block
D, a wing of Pol-i-Charki, Kabul’s main prison,
which was recently refurbished by the US authorities.
While some of these 32 men have subsequently been
released from Pol-i-Charki, the whole story of US
involvement in the prison is deeply disturbing,
as are reports that the “trials” of the men
returned from Guantánamo are “closed-door”
affairs, in which, as the Washington Post
explained last month, “they are often denied
access to defense attorneys,” and are,
essentially, tried on the basis of “evidence”
provided by the United States, which they are not
allowed to see; in other words, exactly the same
situation that they faced in the Combatant Status
Review Tribunals at Guantánamo (the military
reviews convened to assess the prisoners’ status
as “enemy combatants,” in which military officers
took the place of lawyers, and secret evidence
was withheld from the prisoners).
As Mohammed Afzal Mullahkeil, a lawyer for the
returned Afghan prisoners explained, “When they
were sent from Guantánamo, they were told, ‘You
are innocent and you will be free once you're in
your country.’ When they got to Bagram, they just
brought them to Block D and said they should have a second trial.”
In common with previous Afghan releases, the
identities of the five men have been difficult to
establish. The Pentagon never discloses the names
of those it frees, and although lawyers
representing the prisoners are informed of their
clients’ departure, the identities of those who
did not have legal representation -- either
because they refused to do so, or had not found
any way of establishing contact with the legal
community -- remain unknown unless the media are
present on their arrival (which has not happened
in Afghanistan for many years), or until further
investigation by lawyers or journalists turn up details of their identities.
Shortly after the men were released, the
identities of only two of the five Afghans had
been established, but over the weekend Sami
al-Haj gave the names of the other three men, all
of whom have now been positively identified. As
with those described above, their stories reveal,
yet again, the wholesale mockery of justice that
defines the regime at Guantánamo: outright
failures of intelligence, the presumption of
guilt, the refusal to seek out witnesses to back
up the prisoners’ stories, and a willingness to
accept confessions from other prisoners as the
truth, regardless of how it was obtained, and
with no attempt made to investigate the veracity of the claims.
Haji Rohullah Wakil, a celebrated anti-Taliban commander
Of the two Afghans identified, by far the most
significant is 46-year old Haji Rohullah Wakil
(also identified as Haji Roohullah), a tribal
leader in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, whose
opposition to the Taliban was such that he fired
the first salvo against the Taliban in Kunar
after the US-led invasion in October 2001. As a
result of his anti-Taliban credentials and his
support for Hamid Karzai, Wakil was rewarded with
an important position in the province's
post-Taliban administration, and was also made a
member of the Loya Jirga, the prestigious
gathering of tribal leaders that elected Karzai
as President in June 2002. His influence was such
that Ghulam Ullah, the head of education in
Kunar, described him as “a national religious leader.”
Seized by US forces in August 2002, with his
military commander Sabar Lal and eleven others,
Wakil was taken to the US prison in Bagram
airbase for questioning. Although the others were
subsequently released, the Americans decided that
both Wakil and Lal had sufficient intelligence
value to be transferred to Guantánamo in August
2003. According to an Associated Press report,
they believed that Wakil “had strong links with
Middle Eastern fighters in Afghanistan,
particularly Saudi Arabians like Osama bin
Laden,” and thought it significant that he was a
follower of the Wahhabi sect of Islam, even
though both Wakil and Lal had had numerous
meetings with senior American officials and had
offered support for the campaign to oust al-Qaeda
and the Taliban from the Tora Bora mountains in November and December 2001.
The outline of Wakil’s story has been reported
before -- both in my book
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington12222007.html>The
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774
Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, and in an
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington10052007.html>article
I wrote last October, when his military
commander, Sabar Lal, was released from
Guantánamo -- but it still appears to be a
disturbing example of the incompetence of
American military intelligence in Afghanistan, as
the primary charge against Wakil -- that he
provided sanctuary to a number of significant
al-Qaeda operatives who had fled from the city of
Jalalabad after it fell to the Northern Alliance
on November 12, 2001 -- was so utterly at odds
with his proven track record as an anti-Taliban
tribal leader who was part of the Northern Alliance and supported Hamid Karzai.
While the full story of Haji Rohullah Wakil
deserves more in-depth treatment than I can
supply at present, there appear to be only two
possible explanations for his capture: either
that he did in fact aid the al-Qaeda members
because he was working as a double agent, or that
he was betrayed by a rival. Personally, I find
the second explanation rather less far-fetched,
particularly as so many other Afghan prisoners in
Guantánamo -- at least two dozen, including Abdul
Razzaq Hekmati, who died in Guantánamo in
December without being given the opportunity to
clear his name -- were actively opposed to the
Taliban, but were betrayed by rivals who had
gained the trust of the Americans.
According to this second version of events, Wakil
was probably betrayed by Malik Zarin, the head of
the rival Mushwani tribe, who had ingratiated
himself with the Americans and was using them for
his own ends. Although Wakil himself did not name
names in Guantánamo, Sabar Lal, who was finally
freed from Pol-i-Charki in February, to return to
his wife and five children, had no doubt that he
had been betrayed. Speaking to the Washington
Post last month, he made it clear that he “was
turned over to US forces by Afghans seeking
revenge for his arrest of Taliban fighters near the Pakistani border.”
At Guantánamo, Lal had been even more forthright,
explaining to his tribunal the injustice of
imprisoning him with members of the Taliban: “The
only thing I want to tell you that is so ironic
here is that I see a Talib and then I see myself
here too, I am in the same spot as a Talib. I see
those people on an everyday basis, they are
cursing at me ... They say, ‘See, you got what
you deserved, you are here, too.’”
Abdullah Mohammed Khan and his dubious friendship
The story of the second Afghan, Abdullah Mohammed
Khan, a 36-year old ethnic Uzbek, shifts the
focus from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and appears
to be another example of dubious intelligence on
the part of the Pakistani and American
authorities. A former mujahid against the
Russians, Khan, mentioned briefly in my book, but
otherwise unknown, was arrested in Peshawar, in
2001, at the house of a Syrian acquaintance
called Musa, who, according to the US
authorities, was an al-Qaeda suspect identified as Abd al-Hamid al-Suri.
Khan denied knowing anything about any connection
that Musa might have had with al-Qaeda, saying
that all he knew was that he came to Pakistan
from Turkey with his family for medical treatment
on his feet, which were “in very bad condition.”
He also denied knowing anything about a CD
containing explosives-making manuals that was
apparently discovered in Musa's house. Released
after being questioned by a Pakistani and an
American, he was arrested a second time in
January 2002, when traces of explosives were
allegedly found on his fingers. Again, he denied
the allegation, saying, “I never touched any kind
of explosives after the Russians [left],” but
this time he was seized and sent to Guantánamo,
on what, it appears, was little more than a whim.
At his Administrative Review Board in Guantánamo
(the successors to the tribunals, convened to
assess whether the prisoners were still a threat
to the US, or had ongoing intelligence value),
Khan ran up against a litany of allegations made
by other prisoners, which are shockingly
prevalent in the transcripts of the hearings,
even though there is no indication of the
circumstances under which the “confessions” were
elicited, and, moreover, no attempt was made to
verify whether or not they were true.
When faced with these allegations, Khan duly
denied a claim that “an al-Qaeda detainee” had
identified him in a photo as Abdul Latif
al-Turki, explaining that this was the name of
the person who had provided him with a false
Turkish passport to enter Pakistan, and adding
that he was always known by his real name, and
that “if you really showed somebody my picture
and they told you my name is Abdul ... he was
lying.” He also denied a similar allegation from
“A Libyan Islamic Fighting Group member,” who
identified him as “al-Turki” and said that he saw
him several times at the al-Ansar guest house in
Pakistan, and an allegation from an Iraqi
detainee who had apparently identified him in a
photo and said that he had seen him at a guest
house on the Taliban front lines in Kabul in 1999 or 2000.
On this point, his response was particularly
revealing, as any detailed research into
Guantánamo reveals that several prisoners -- an
Iraqi and a Yemeni are regularly cited -- have
spread false allegations against other prisoners.
Most startlingly, this came to light in 2006,
when, in an article for the National Journal,
Corine Hegland told the story of an unnamed but
principled Personal Representative for a young
Yemeni prisoner, Farouq Saif (known to the
Pentagon as Farouq Ali Ahmed), at his tribunal.
This officer -- assigned to Saif in place of a
lawyer, and under no obligation to make a stand
on his behalf -- was so shocked at the vehemence
with which Saif denied an allegation that he had
been seen at Osama bin Laden’s personal airport
that he went back to his file and discovered that
the allegation had been made by another prisoner,
who had been specifically identified by the FBI as a liar.
In another case reported by Hegland, another
Personal Representative -- or perhaps the same
man; the details are unclear -- followed a trail
established in the case of a young Syrian,
Mohammed al-Tumani, who denied even being in
Afghanistan when he was alleged to have been at a
training camp. On investigating the file of the
prisoner who made the allegation, the officer
discovered that he had actually made groundless
accusations against 60 prisoners in total.
Despite this, both Farouq Saif and Mohammed
al-Tumani remain in Guantánamo, and no one has
ever established the identities of the other 58
or 59 men who were falsely accused.
Khan’s version was as follows. “About two years
ago,” he said, “I was prepared to be released
from here. At that point I lived with some Iraqi
people and because they disliked me they were
lying, they were throwing some allegations on me
and that's why my process has stopped and that's why I have not been released.”
Shorn of these additional allegations, the case
against Khan was summarized by his Designated
Military Officer (the officer assigned to the
prisoners instead of a lawyer in the ARBs), who
stated, “Detainee argues that he is innocent of
all the charges brought before him other than
that he was associated with Musa,” to which Khan
added, “That's correct. Again, I had some
association with Musa and also I had a bad
passport, that's the only things that occurred.”
Tricked by the Taliban
The other three Afghans -- identified by Sami
al-Haj -- were captured in what appears to have
been a sly act of revenge by a former member of
the Taliban against one of his former colleagues
who had turned against the regime. The story
began when soldiers working for Jan Mohammed, the
governor of Uruzgan province, north of Kandahar,
stopped a car containing two men, Ismatullah, a
25-year old embroiderer, and Nasrullah, his
23-year old cousin, identified by Sami as
Nasrullah al-Rosgani (from Uruzgan), and
Esmatullah, his cousin. Ismatullah apparently
admitted that he had just delivered a letter to a
third man, Mohammed Sangaryar, which was from
Abdul Razaq, the former Taliban Minister of
Commerce. Sami identified the third man as
Mohalim al-Rosgani, which was initially rather
confusing, but on Tuesday his lawyer confirmed
that Mohalim al-Rosgani was indeed Sangaryar, and
that he too had been released.
Ismatullah explained that he had been going to
Uruzgan to sell his car, and added that Razaq had
said that he would pay his petrol if he delivered
the letter. Unable to read, he said that he asked
his 23-year old cousin, Nasrullah, to read it, to
check that there “wasn't any danger in it.”
Nasrullah said that the letter asked Sangaryar to
go to Quetta, but did not mention fighting, even
though the US authorities alleged that Razaq had
asked Sangaryar to report to Quetta “to fight and
avoid capture by the Americans.”
According to Sangaryar, the letter was actually a
trap, designed to punish him for turning his back
on the Taliban and to discredit him by making it
appear that he was still involved with them. He
explained that he was a former deputy commander
of the Taliban, who had fought with them for many
years in an attempt to bring peace to his
country. He added, however, that he and his tribe
had turned against the Taliban before the US-led
invasion, because they had become too enamored of
fighting for its own sake, and, specifically,
because they had dug up the corpse of Asmat Khan,
a prominent tribal leader, and had deposited it
in the street as an affront to his tribe. When
the American-backed warlord Gul Agha Sherzai took
over Kandahar, Sangaryar said that he and his men
handed in all their weapons, and he then returned
to his village to refurbish his home.
What’s particularly bizarre about this story is
the fact that Abdul Razaq (aka Abdul Razak Iktiar
Mohammed), the former Taliban Minister of
Commerce, was himself seized and sent to
Guantánamo, but was transferred to Pol-i-Charki
last August, and fairly swiftly released.
Throughout these men’s imprisonment, there was no
indication that any effort was made to
cross-reference their stories, and this is, I
believe, an appropriate note on which to end
these two surveys of the latest prisoners
released from Guantánamo, in which you’ll have no
doubt observed that not a single one of these
prisoners was actually accused of raising arms
against US forces, let alone of having any
involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001.
Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the
author of
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published
by Pluto Press). Visit his website at:
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk
He can be reached at:
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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