[Ppnews] No Escape From Guantánamo

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington09102009.html

September 10, 2009


The Latest Habeas Corpus Rulings

No Escape From Guantánamo

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

A month ago, rulings made by District Court 
judges in the habeas corpus appeals of prisoners 
held at Guantánamo seemed, for the most part, to 
confirm that the courts were uniquely placed to 
deliver justice to the prisoners after their long 
years of imprisonment, largely without charge or 
trial. Even more crucially, the judges’ rulings 
were allowing justice to be seen to be done, 
unlike the secretive interagency Task Force 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington01232009.html>established 
by Barack Obama on his second day in office, 
whose deliberations are, sadly, as 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/07/21/obamas-failure-to-deliver-justice-to-the-last-tajik-in-guantanamo/>inscrutable 
as those of Obama’s predecessor, even though the 
Task Force has at least taken the time to consult 
with lawyers and other experts.

As I recently reported in a series of three 
articles 
(<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/07/14/guantanamo-and-the-courts-part-one-exposing-the-bush-administrations-lies/>here, 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/08/11/guantanamo-and-the-courts-part-two-obamas-shame/>here 
and 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/08/18/guantanamo-and-the-courts-part-three-obamas-continuing-shame/>here), 
despite persistent obstruction from the Justice 
Department, where Bush-era officials have been 
behaving as though 
<http://www.antiwar.com/worthington/?articleid=13952>Dick 
Cheney is still breathing down their necks, 
judges had, by the end of July, reviewed 33 
cases, and in 28 of those had ruled that the 
government had failed to establish, “by a 
preponderance of the evidence,” that it was 
justified in holding the men. The judges 
concluded that, amongst other failings, the 
government was relying on information provided by 
dubious informers, on multiple levels of hearsay 
that failed to stand up to outside scrutiny, and 
on a supposed “mosaic” of evidence from various 
sources that was also unconvincing.

Nevertheless, although these rulings confirmed 
what those, like myself, who have been studying 
Guantánamo in depth for many years, have always 
maintained -- that the majority of the prisoners 
are either innocent men seized for bounty 
payments (or through the incompetence of U.S. 
forces and other government agencies) or 
low-level Taliban foot soldiers recruited to help 
the Taliban defeat Afghanistan’s Northern 
Alliance in an inter-Muslim civil war that had 
nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks 
-- the courts still face a number of peculiar problems.

These problems have arisen not only because 
almost all of the government’s supposed evidence 
consists of the inherently dubious statements of 
informers, of multiple levels of hearsay and of 
feeble “mosaics” of intelligence (as mentioned 
above), but also because when 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington06132008.html>the 
Supreme Court granted the prisoners 
constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights 
in June 2008, the justices failed to provide a 
clear definition of the extent to which prisoners 
were required to be involved in al-Qaeda and/or 
the Taliban to have their habeas appeals refused.

The “gossamer thin” case against Adham Mohammed Ali Awad

The resultant confusion was on full display in 
August, when three rulings were made. In the 
first, on August 12 
(<file://localhost/cgi-bin/show_public_doc>PDF), 
Judge James Robertson denied the habeas appeal of 
Adham Mohammed Ali Awad, a Yemeni prisoner, even 
though he conceded that “The case against Awad is 
gossamer thin,” and added, “The evidence is of a 
kind fit only for these unique proceedings and has very little weight.”

This was Robertson’s first habeas ruling, and in 
the hands of another judge, the ruling may well 
have tipped the other way. Certainly, the case 
was as “gossamer thin” as Robertson declared. 
Awad, who was just 19 years old at the time, was 
seized in Mirwais Hospital in Kandahar, 
Afghanistan in late 2001. According to his own 
account, he had “traveled to Afghanistan in 
mid-September 2001 in order to visit another 
Muslim country for a few months,” but in early 
November 2001 “was injured and knocked 
unconscious during an air raid while walking 
through a market in Kandahar.” When he woke up in 
the hospital, he said, he discovered that he had 
lost his right foot, “that he was heavily 
medicated, floated in an out of consciousness, 
slept constantly, and could barely sit up.” He 
added that he “remained in this condition until his capture.”

Over the long years of his detention, as I 
explained in 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/the-guantanamo-files-website-extras-8-captured-in-afghanistan/>a 
profile of Awad last year, the US authorities 
have claimed that he “stated he went to 
Afghanistan to become a fighter,” have suggested 
that he received injuries “in a two-car 
collision, involving ten individuals, while 
trying to avoid coalition air strikes,” and have 
also claimed that he, “along with seven other 
Arabs suspected of being al-Qaeda, were 
reportedly armed with weapons and used a hospital 
as a safe haven to elude coalition forces.” These 
allegations, which surfaced in the Unclassified 
Summary of Evidence during Awad’s Combatant 
Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004, 
formed the basis of the government’s case in 
court, even though, by 2006, in a review board at 
Guantánamo, the authorities had dropped all 
mention of the car crash, Awad’s supposed 
al-Qaeda associates, and his involvement in the 
siege, and, instead, suggested only that he was 
“captured on 2 November 2001 when he was injured near the airport in Kandahar.”

Judge Robertson perceived that Awad’s case 
“relie[d] mostly on weaknesses and holes in the 
government’s evidence,” which, as noted above, he 
was swift to condemn for its “gossamer thin” 
nature, but although he noted that the government 
“relie[d] mostly on newspaper articles” for 
background information about the hospital siege, 
which took place from early December to late 
January and ended with the deaths of the seven 
al-Qaeda fighters, and although he gave “no 
weight” to the “only first hand evidence offered 
by the government” -- an interview with a man 
(whose name was redacted), who “claimed that he 
led the group that had taken Awad into custody”, 
whose report he dismissed as “internally 
inconsistent” and “completely unreliable” -- he 
nevertheless concluded that “it appears more 
likely than not that Awad was, for some period of time, ‘part of’ al-Qaeda.”

To reach this conclusion, Judge Robertson was 
required to accept the government’s supposed 
evidence that Awad had attended Osama bin Laden’s 
Tarnak Farms training camp, an allegation that 
was based on a variation of his name, ”Waqas” (he 
was sometimes listed by the Pentagon as Waqas 
Mohammed Ali Awad), being found on a list 
associated with the camp. Although Judge 
Robertson refused to accept the government’s 
claim that Awad trained at the camp, finding it 
to be “unsupported,” noting, “we do not know the 
purpose of the list or when it was written,” and 
adding that the translator “claimed only that it 
was ‘possibly’ a list of trainees,” he returned 
to the allegations of Awad’s presence at Tarnak 
Farms to substantiate his conclusion that “it 
appears more likely than not that Awad was, for 
some period of time, ‘part of’ al-Qaeda.” He 
noted that the names of the other men killed in 
the siege and Awad’s purported alias, “Waqas,” 
were closely grouped together on the list, and 
inferred from statements provided by another man 
who was present in the hospital and was also 
taken to Guantánamo (a Saudi released in 2007) 
that Awad and “Waqas” were one and the same.

Missing throughout all this analysis was any 
reflection on whether it was true that Awad only 
arrived in Afghanistan in mid-September 2001, and 
if, therefore, it was likely that he would have 
been immediately recruited for training at an 
advanced facility in the few weeks before the 
U.S.-led invasion began, which strikes me as 
close to impossible. Also missing was any 
recognition that, as the government claimed in 
2006, Awad was seized before the siege began, or, 
if that was a typographical error (as was 
indicated in court), that he was injured on 
December 2, when the siege began, and that he was 
booted out of the hospital by the al-Qaeda 
fighters inside (or, as the government put it, 
“Awad’s comrades gave him up because they could 
not care for his severely injured [redacted]”).

Even with the government’s spin, there is 
something suspicious about would-be al-Qaeda 
martyrs sending one of their own to be captured, 
rather than staying and being martyred instead, 
but rather than examining these questions, Judge 
Robertson ruled that “At the very least Awad’s 
confessed reasons for traveling to Afghanistan 
and the correlation of names on the list 
[redacted] clearly tied to al-Qaeda make it more 
likely than not that he knew the al-Qaeda 
fighters at the hospital and joined them in the barricade.”

Quite where this leaves Awad is unknown, as the 
government does not seem to have enough evidence 
for a trial, and may, therefore, consider him a 
suitable candidate for its proposal to legislate 
for 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/06/30/guantanamo-charge-or-release-prisoners-say-no-to-indefinite-detention/>new 
powers of “indefinite detention,” to be reviewed 
by Congress and judges, which are supposed to 
provide an acceptable veneer to what is nothing 
more than a continuation of the Bush 
administration’s despised policies. To this end, 
what may disappoint Awad the most is that, 
although Judge Robertson described him as a 
“marginally literate” young man, who “has spent 
more than seven of his twenty-six years -- since 
he was a teenager -- in American custody,” and, 
moreover, stated, “It seems ludicrous to believe 
that he poses a security threat now,” he added, 
limply, “but that is not for me to decide.”

In doing so, he ignored an earlier ruling 
(<file://localhost/cgi-bin/show_public_doc>PDF), 
in which Judge Ellen Segan Huvelle noted that the 
<http://news.findlaw.com/wp/docs/terrorism/sjres23.es.html>Authorization 
for Use of Military Force (the legislation passed 
in the week after 9/11 which authorized the 
President “to use all necessary and appropriate 
force” against those “he determines” to have been 
involved in any way in the 9/11 attacks) “does 
not authorize the detention of individuals beyond 
that which is necessary to prevent those 
individuals from rejoining battle,” and ignored 
another ruling, in the case of a Syrian prisoner, 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington06242009.html>Abdul 
Rahim al-Ginco, in which Judge Richard Leon ruled 
that whatever relationship al-Ginco may have had 
with al-Qaeda was “utterly destroyed.” In 
al-Ginco’s case, this was because he had been 
tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy, but it was also 
noteworthy that Judge Leon stated that al-Ginco’s 
prior experience of al-Qaeda -- “five days at a 
guest house in Kabul combined with eighteen days 
at a training camp -- does not add up to a longstanding bond of brotherhood.”

Instead, however, Judge Robertson raised and 
dismissed a little-voiced question -- whether it 
is appropriate to continue holding men who were 
seized in connection with a specific conflict 
(the overthrow of the Taliban and the 
installation of a new government, which came to 
an end years ago) -- by stating, “Combat 
operations in Afghanistan continue to this day 
and -- in my view -- the President’s ‘authority 
to detain for the duration of the relevant 
conflict’ which is ‘based on long-standing 
law-of-war principles’ has yet to ‘unravel.’”

Mohammed al-Adahi and the al-Qaeda mirage

One judge who may have dealt more robustly with 
the “gossamer thin” evidence in the case of Adham 
Mohammed Ali Aawad is Judge Gladys Kessler, who, 
on August 21, granted the habeas appeal of 
Mohammed al-Adahi, a Yemeni who was 39 years old 
when he was seized on a bus in Pakistan 
(<http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Al-Adahi-opinion-8-21-09.pdf>PDF). 
I described the broad outline of al-Adahi’s story 
in my book 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo Files as follows:

Married with two children, al-Adahi had never 
left the Yemen until August 2001, when he took a 
vacation from the oil company where he had worked 
for 21 years to accompany his sister to meet her 
husband ... As he told his tribunal, “In Muslim 
society, a woman does not travel by herself.” 
After flying to Karachi, they traveled to 
Kandahar, where his brother-in-law was living. 
Al-Adahi stayed in Afghanistan for a month, “to 
ease his sister’s transition to life in 
Afghanistan,” and then made his way back to 
Pakistan, where he was arrested by soldiers while 
traveling on a bus. “They were capturing 
everybody with Arabic features,” he said. “I gave 
them my passport and that shows that I'm an Arab. 
They said, ‘why don't you follow us, we need you 
at the Center.’ From that point on they brought us over here.”

However, while this was a fair précis, the 
government believed that it could establish a 
case that al-Adahi was actually a member of 
al-Qaeda, for a number of reasons that appeared, 
on the surface at least, to be plausible. As 
Judge Kessler explained, “There is no question 
that the record fully supports the Government’s 
allegation that Petitioner had close familial 
ties to prominent members of the jihad community 
in Afghanistan.” The brother-in-law, it appears, 
was “a prominent man in Kandahar,” who had fought 
the Russians in Afghanistan, and Judge Kessler 
also noted that it was “undisputed” that Osama 
bin Laden “hosted and attended [the] wedding 
reception in Kandahar,” that al-Adahi “was 
briefly introduced to bin Laden,” and that “A few 
days later, al-Adahi met bin Laden again and the 
two chatted briefly about religious matters in Yemen.”

However, Judge Kessler refused to accept the 
government’s contention that these familial ties 
and the two brief meetings with bin Laden proved 
that al-Adahi “was part of the inner circle of 
the enemy organization al-Qaeda,” and accepted 
instead that there was no reason to doubt that 
al-Adahi’s visit was, as he stated, to accompany 
his sister to her wedding (and also to receive 
medical treatment for a back problem). She noted 
also that he had not tried to hide the fact that 
he had met bin Laden, and that he had, in 
addition, stated that it was “common for visitors to Kandahar” to do so.

As in May, when she granted the habeas appeal of 
another Yemeni, 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington05142009.html>Alla 
Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, Judge Kessler had serious 
doubts about the manner in which the government 
established its case, which focused primarily on 
its claim that its various allegations should be 
considered as part of a “mosaic” of intelligence, 
to be viewed as a whole, rather than being 
examined in isolation. Dismissing this approach, 
she stated that, although she understood that 
“use of this approach is a common and 
well-established mode of analysis in the 
intelligence community 
 at this point in this 
long, drawn-out litigation the Court’s obligation 
is to make findings of fact and conclusions of 
law which satisfy appropriate and relevant legal 
standards as to whether the Government has proven 
by a preponderance of the evidence that the 
Petitioner is justifiably detained.”

She proceeded to stress that “the mosaic theory 
is only as persuasive as the tiles which compose 
it and the glue which binds it together,” and 
that, “if the individual pieces of a mosaic are 
inherently flawed or do not fit together, then 
the mosaic will split apart.” Having dealt with 
the government’s first “tile,” she methodically 
dismantled the others, refuting a claim that 
al-Adahi had “stayed at al-Qaeda and/or Taliban 
guesthouses during his stay in Afghanistan,” and 
demolishing the government’s “central 
accusation”: that al-Adahi’s brief attendance at 
al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs, 
associated with Osama bin Laden in the years 
before 9/11) helped to confirm that he occupied 
“some sort of ‘structured’ role in the ‘hierarchy’ of the enemy force.”

Noting his claim that he “pursued training at 
al-Farouq to satisfy ‘curiosity’ about jihad, and 
because he found himself in Afghanistan with idle 
time,” she took particular exception to the 
government’s claim because, “After seven to ten 
days at al-Farouq, the camp leaders expelled 
al-Adahi for failing to comply with the rules.” 
Referring, incredibly, to the case of Abdul Rahim 
al-Ginco, the Syrian who was tortured by al-Qaeda 
(and whose case the Justice Department had 
pursued in the habeas courts until it was 
thoroughly humiliated by Judge Richard Leon in 
June), the government’s lawyers attempted to 
claim that, because al-Adahi was not imprisoned 
and tortured as a spy after he was expelled (like 
al-Ginco), this proved that he was being given 
preferential treatment because of his ties to 
al-Qaeda. However, Judge Kessler concluded 
instead that it was more likely that he “was 
being protected by a concerned family member” 
with considerable influence, and that “it most 
certainly is not affirmative evidence that 
al-Adahi embraced al-Qaeda, accepted its 
philosophy, and endorsed its terrorist activities.”

She was also dismissive of an allied claim -- 
that al-Adahi was an instructor at al-Farouq in 
February 2000 -- noting that the only source for 
this allegation was another prisoner at 
Guantánamo, for whom “the record contains 
evidence that [he] suffered from ‘serious 
psychological issues,’” and dismissed another 
claim -- that al-Adahi was a bodyguard for bin 
Laden -- by pointing out that this claim had been 
made by another prisoner who “suffers from 
serious credibility problems that undermine the 
reliability of his statements.” It seems 
probable, from references to a “report of torture 
by the Taliban” in the case of this witness, that 
he was Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, who, as Judge 
Kessler noted, admitted in August 2005 that he 
had “lied in the past.” She also noted that 
“interrogators had expressed concern that he was 
being manipulated by another detainee,” and 
quoted from a report stating that “before being 
placed next to that detainee [he] had never made 
any of the claims that he made to interrogators, 
including the accusation against al-Adahi.”

With the bulk of the government’s claims 
dismissed, it remained only for Judge Kessler to 
destroy the rest of the “mosaic” by noting that, 
with reference to the rest of al-Adahi’s time in 
Afghanistan after being expelled from al-Farouq, 
it was “only speculation” on the part of the 
government that injuries he received to his arm 
and leg in Kandahar were the result of combat, 
and not, as he stated, because of a motorcycle 
accident. She also pointed out that, although the 
government attempted to pin “associational 
evidence” of militancy on a claim that al-Adahi 
“was captured while traveling in the company of 
Taliban fighters” on a bus in Pakistan, the only 
source for this was something al-Adahi himself 
had been told after his capture, when he “heard 
that there were members of the Taliban on the 
bus.” Noting, in addition, that he was “unarmed” 
at the time of his capture, she concluded that 
“He appeared to be attempting to escape the chaos 
of that time by any means he could,” and granted 
his habeas appeal (although, as with all the 
cases of prisoners whose habeas appeals have been 
granted, the ruling provides no guarantee that he will actually be released).

Fawzi al-Odah: the Kuwaiti who trained for one day

On August 24, the government secured another 
shallow victory when Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly 
denied the habeas petition of Fawzi al-Odah, a 
Kuwaiti prisoner, agreeing with the government 
that it was “more likely than not” that he 
“became part of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in 
Afghanistan” 
(<http://www.scotusblog.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Al-Odah-ruling-by-CKK-8-24-091.pdf>PDF). 
Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling was based on a 
dubious assemblage of information that relied 
more on inconsistencies in al-Odah’s account of 
his activities than it did on anything resembling 
concrete evidence, as she herself admitted, when 
she wrote that there were “significant reasons 
why the Government’s proffered evidence may not 
be accurate or authentic.” She explained that 
some of it was produced “in circumstances that 
have not allowed the Government to ascertain its 
chain of custody, nor in many instances even to 
produce information about the origins of the 
evidence,” that other evidence was “based on 
so-called ‘unfinished intelligence,” information 
that has not been subject to each of the five 
steps in the intelligence cycle (planning, 
collection, processing, analysis and production, 
and dissemination),” and that other evidence was 
“based on multiple layers of hearsay (which 
inherently raised questions about reliability), 
or is based on reports of interrogations (often 
conducted through a translator) where translation 
or transcription mistakes may occur.”

The basic facts of the case, as I explained in 
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7120713.stm>an 
article for the BBC’s website in December 2007, 
are as follows. Al-Odah, a 24-year old primary 
school teacher, whose father, a retired air force 
pilot, fought with U.S. forces during the Gulf War in 1991,

took a short holiday from work and traveled to 
Afghanistan in August 2001 to teach the Koran and 
provide humanitarian aid. This was something he 
had done before, in other countries, and his 
family had had a history of providing 
humanitarian aid, establishing libraries and 
wells in various countries in Africa.

After establishing contact with the Taliban, 
which he said “was necessary because that was the 
government in Afghanistan at that time,” Mr. Odah 
said he had been “touring the schools and 
visiting families,” teaching the Koran and 
handing out money, until his activities had been curtailed following 9/11.

He said that in Kandahar the Taliban 
representative “told me that was a dangerous 
place because it was the capital for the 
Taliban,” and had advised him to go to Logar, in 
the east of the country, where he had stayed with 
a family for a month, and left his passport and 
belongings for safekeeping. “If the Afghans saw I 
had a passport indicating I was an Arab, and they 
saw the money and the camera I had, I would have been killed,” he added.

He had then moved to Jalalabad, where he had 
stayed with another family, who had given him an 
AK-47 assault rifle to protect himself, Mr. Odah 
said. He had then joined other people crossing 
the mountains to Pakistan, where he had handed 
himself in to the border guards, he added. Mr. 
Odah said he expected to be escorted to the 
Kuwaiti embassy, but had instead been handed over to U.S. forces.

In dissecting al-Odah’s story, Judge 
Kollar-Kotelly took exception to apparent 
inconsistencies in his account of his journey to 
Afghanistan, suggestions that he had lied about 
his plans to teach, and about the length of time 
he intended to stay. She concluded, by comparing 
his route -- to Dubai, and then to Karachi, 
Quetta, Spin Boldak and Kandahar -- with the same 
route taken by jihadists that the record 
“supports a reasonable inference that al-Odah may 
have also been traveling to Afghanistan to engage 
in jihad, and not to teach the poor and needy for two weeks.”

She followed up by casting doubts on his claim 
that he innocently “sought to contact a Taliban 
official upon reaching Afghanistan and that he 
subsequently moved around the country at the 
direction of this official,” and on his 
explanation that he visited a training camp 
“supervised by the Taliban, where “he took one 
day of training on an AK-47 rifle.” Following the 
government’s lead, she suggested that it was 
“more likely than not” that the camp was in fact 
al-Farouq, and that al-Odah arrived there on 
September 10, 2001, the day before the 9/11 
attacks, when the camp was closed down.

She also took exception to al-Odah’s apparent 
inability to explain why he had not left 
Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, why there was 
at least a month’s gap in his account of what 
happened afterwards, and why, three months after 
the attacks, he was captured, armed with an 
AK-47, having crossed the border into Pakistan 
from the Tora Bora region (where al-Qaeda and the 
Taliban had been engaged in combat with Afghan 
and U.S. forces), in the company of a group of 
armed men who, according to “credible evidence” 
provided by the government, included one man “who 
had substantial ties to al-Qaeda.”

To be fair, it was understandable that Judge 
Kollar-Kotelly drew the inferences she did from 
the information provided, as her summing up made 
clear, when she explained that al-Odah “has 
admitted that he sought to meet with a Taliban 
official upon his arrival in Afghanistan; that he 
was subsequently brought by a Taliban official to 
a Taliban-operated training camp near Kandahar, 
Afghanistan; that he took one day of training 
with an AK-47 at this camp: that the Taliban 
official sent him to stay with an associate in 
Logar, Afghanistan, after September 11, 2001; 
that he surrendered his passport and other 
possessions to this individual; that he met with 
individuals who were armed and appeared to be 
fighters; that he accepted an AK-47 from these 
individuals; and that he traveled with his AK-47 
into the Tora Bora mountains, remained there 
during the battle of Tora Bora, and was captured 
shortly thereafter by border guards while still carrying his AK-47.”

 From this outline of events, the government 
certainly had a stronger case than it did with 
Adham Mohammed Ali Awad, but even if this 
analysis is correct, the end result is that, 
nearly eight years after the 9/11 attacks, the 
United States is still asserting that it has the 
right to hold a young man who spent just one day 
at a training camp, who did not flee Afghanistan 
after the 9/11 attacks (perhaps because he feared 
reprisals if he was found escaping), who traveled 
with other men to Kabul, and then to Logar and 
then to Tora Bora and his eventual capture, with 
no evidence that he ever used the weapon he was 
given, and no evidence that his training involved 
anything more than firing a few rounds from an AK-47 in a practice session.

The long shadow of Salim Hamdan’s freedom

Back in January, when Judge Leon refused the 
habeas appeal of 
<http://counterpunch.org/worthington01302009.html>Ghaleb 
al-Bihani, a Yemeni who had worked as a cook for 
Arab forces supporting the Taliban, I made a 
comparison with the case of another prisoner, 
Salim Hamdan, which demonstrated to me that, 
although justice was finally within reach for 
some of the prisoners at Guantánamo, seven years 
after the prison opened, it was both farcical and 
unjust that Hamdan, a man who had worked as a 
driver for Osama bin Laden, had been 
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/08/06/a-critical-overview-of-salim-hamdans-guantanamo-trial-and-the-dubious-verdict/>tried 
in a Military Commission in which he was 
convicted of material support for terrorism, had 
served 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington08082008.html>a 
five-month sentence delivered by a U.S. military 
jury, and was 
<http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/682069>now 
a free man in Yemen, while al-Bihani, who had 
never even met bin Laden, and who had, instead, 
worked as a cook before the 9/11 attacks and had 
subsequently failed to teleport himself out of 
the country after the U.S.-led invasion began, 
continued to languish in Guantánamo, with no end to his detention in sight.

As the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks 
approaches, I, like all those who oppose 
Guantánamo and everything it stands for, still 
hope that the small number of prisoners involved 
in the attacks, or in other terrorist attacks 
against the U.S., can be brought to justice, but 
I fail to see how rulings like those delivered 
last month in the cases of Adham Mohammed Ali 
Awad and Fawzi al-Odah contribute to that end. I 
believe that, with just four months to go until 
President Obama’s deadline for closing Guantánamo 
expires, all concerned would do well to direct 
their attention towards the few dozen prisoners 
at Guantánamo who are alleged to have been 
directly involved in terrorism, and to stop 
trying to defend the detentions of all the other 
men still held; men who, at best, were foot 
soldiers in a specific conflict that, in contrast 
to Judge Robertson’s words, came to an end no 
later than November 3, 2004, when Hamid Karzai 
was elected as the President of post-Taliban Afghanistan.

When Salim Hamdan was freed from Guantánamo, I 
wrote that his release spelled the end of the 
Bush administration’s justification for holding 
prisoners who had no meaningful connection to 
al-Qaeda or international terrorism. Ten months 
on, I stand by those words, and note that, 
although judges have now granted the habeas 
appeals of 29 of the 36 prisoners whose cases 
they have considered, nothing about the cases of 
the other seven men prevents Hamdan’s freedom 
from casting a longer and longer shadow over their continued detention.

Andy Worthington is a British journalist and 
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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