With the apparent suicides of three detainees followed by the Pentagon’s clampdown on reporting at Guantanamo Bay last week, the United States’ war-on-terror detention facility in Cuba is again in the spotlight.
In its lead story Sunday, the Boston Globe approached the legal black hole that is Guantanamo from an important fresh angle, reporting that “The U.S. government routinely failed to give detainees at Guantanamo Bay access to witnesses who might have helped them prove their assertions of innocence, saying it could not locate the vast majority of the witnesses the terror suspects requested at special military hearings” held in late 2004 and early 2005.
Deciding to determine just how difficult it might be to find such witnesses, the Globe easily tracked down three witnesses whose testimony had been requested by one prominent Afghan detainee, Abdullah Mujahid. While “U.S. officials said they could not locate the four witnesses” Mujahid named, the Globe found the three still living “within a three-day span,” thereby producing strong corroborating accounts that indicate Mujahid is being held at Guantanamo by mistake.
First, some background. As the Globe explains it, a 2004 Supreme Court ruling forced the U.S. military to give hearings to hundreds of prisoners being held without charge at Guantanamo, the facility where suspected terrorists and Taliban fighters have been detained since 2002. “At the time, the military pledged to try to locate defense witnesses to give testimony for those hearings,” wrote the Globe‘s Farah Stockman and Declan Walsh (with Charlie Savage contributing), “but later routinely reported that they could not be found.”
Looking at recently released transcripts of the hearings, the newspaper “identified 34 detainees who convinced tribunal officials that their overseas witnesses would provide relevant testimony” — but the U.S. government “found” none of them. Added the Globe, “Nearly all of those 64 approved witnesses were deemed ‘unavailable’ because the governments of the country where the witnesses lived did not respond to a State Department request for help in locating them.”
In one egregious case, “the State Department said that it could not locate Ismail Khan, the well-known minister of energy in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet, who meets frequently with American diplomats.”
The U.S. effort to find witnesses could generously be described as perfunctory; often only a short time period was allowed for finding witnesses. The State Department’s role was simply “to pass information to host governments,” said department spokesman Tom Casey, while an anonymous State official said “The U.S. government did not physically go out and try to locate these witnesses.”
And so, with the absence of credible witnesses at the hearings — “the only opportunity for the vast majority of detainees to call witnesses to try to prove contentions of mistaken identity or misinformation” — just “38 managed to win their release” out of almost “380 detainees who participated in the process,” said the Globe. (Meantime, only 10 Guantanamo prisoners have formally been charged with crimes.)
That brings us back to the case of Mujahid, “a former Afghan provincial police commander arrested by U.S. troops in July 2003.” According to the U.S. military, Mujahid “was fired from his appointed position due to suspicions of collusion with anti-government forces” and later attacked U.S. troops. Mujahid claims “that he was promoted to a highway security job, not fired, and that he had always been friendly to American forces.”
The Globe found one of Mujahid’s witnesses by calling President Karzai’s office, quickly leading them to Shahzada Masoud, a Karzai adviser who led an official delegation in May 2003 to Mujahid’s hometown of Gardez “to persuade him to step down as police chief.” “Although Mujahid did not want to leave his post, and initially prevented his successor from entering the city, he eventually accepted and was given a lavish transfer-of-power ceremony attended by government dignitaries, Masoud said” to the Globe.
An official in Gardez gave the Globe the number of a second witness, Gul Haider (part of Masoud’s delegation), who “confirmed Masoud’s account. He said that Mujahid had been promised a job protecting the highways in Kabul as a reward for leaving his post.”
One call to Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry produced the e-mail address for a third witness, former Interior Minister Ahmed Ali Jalali — who, given his current teaching duties at the National Defense University in Washington, could also have been quickly located via a Google search. Jalali “said he had been on the verge of appointing Mujahid chief of a regiment of highway police, but that he changed his mind after he learned that Mujahid had stolen some police equipment” and “said he wanted him ousted because of corruption and ‘bullying,’ not sympathies with the Taliban or Al Qaeda.”
A videotape of the transfer-of-power ceremony and interviews with other senior Afghan officials also supported Mujahid’s account.
And voila, one newspaper had gathered crucial testimony that the U.S. government supposedly could not — strong evidence that Mujahid, while not a model citizen, is wrongly being held at Guantanamo.
Haider, a former commander in the Northern Alliance, said it was probably false accusations from tribal and political rivalries that landed Mujahid in Guantanamo, not anti-American activity.
“Afghanistan has many problems — between tribes, communists, the Taliban,” he said. “That’s why people like Abdullah [Mujahid], who are completely innocent, end up in jail.”
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.