Innocent, wrongly siezed and incarcerated in Gitmo

“They are among the most dangerous, best-trained vicious killers on the face of the earth. They are not POW’s.” These are the words of Donald Rumsfeld. And like so many of the his words, they contain little in the way of truth. As we are continually finding out, many of the "enemy combatants" were neither enemies nor in combat against anyone. This story from the National Journal looks at the issue:

... [I]f proximity implies culpability, how do you justify the detention of so many others in Cuba who were arrested far from any Afghanistan front? How about the aid worker sleeping at home in Karachi, Pakistan? How about the men arrested in Sarajevo and sent by the Americans to Guantanamo even though they were clutching their exoneration-from-terrorism papers issued by the judge who had reviewed their cases? How about miscellaneous Arabs -- some fighters, some not -- who together with other refugees passed through Afghanistan's borders as war arrived? How about two British Muslims arrested as they stepped off a plane in Gambia?... The law of war has come far in a century of genocides and massacres and nuclear bombs. But has it come so far that when Al Qaeda made the entire world a battlefield, all of the world's population fell under the law of war?

As the U.S. government started putting its cards on the table, explaining why the men described above, and others like them, were still behind bars, the habeas lawyers started to ponder more deeply what happens to justice -- even in a wartime setting -- when you strip away due process and the presumption of innocence.

The government told the lawyers that their clients were all well-trained liars. But as the lawyers read the files, they started to wonder whether they were facing an impossible paradox: After all, if a well-trained liar looks like an innocent man, what does an innocent man look like, if not a well-trained liar?

Detainee 032

Back before everything happened, before the world came unhinged, Detainee 032 was a boy of 16 living in Yemen with his mother, his father, his four sisters, and his five brothers. His name was Farouq Ali Ahmed, and he studied Islamic law in high school.

One day, the boy made a solemn vow before God: If it was God's will that Farouq commit the Koran to memory, more than 6,000 verses in all, he would spend a year, before he went off to college, teaching the holy texts, in Afghanistan. A man who did this thing, he'd been told, would be rewarded by God.

Such was Allah's will that in the spring of 2001, Farouq, then 17, set off for Afghanistan. He took a little room in a big house in Kabul and began teaching 7- and 8-year-olds, gathering four or five of them together and reciting Allah's words until the children had them memorized. It wasn't easy work. The Koran is always taught in Farouq's native language, Arabic, which the Afghan children didn't understand, and Farouq didn't speak their language. But he had made an oath to Allah. After a few months, he moved to the city of Khost, where he continued to teach out of a mosque until the Taliban fell and the cities were no longer safe for Arabs. One day, his host told him that if he stayed any longer, his life would be in danger. He had left his passport in Kabul for safekeeping, but he was told there was no time to get it back. He was taken to Pakistan, where Afghans have long sought haven from their never-ending wars.

Once across the border, Farouq encountered the Pakistani military. "One of the soldiers pointed a weapon toward me," Farouq told his Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The Defense Department established the tribunals after the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees could challenge their imprisonment. "The Pakistani officer took me and said, don't be mad at him, we are Muslim, we will take care of you. He asked me about my parents. He said, you are a kid, you are going to the Yemen Embassy, and you shouldn't have any problems getting back to Yemen. After that, they took me to a jail, and there were lots of people. They put handcuffs on our hands."

Farouq spent time in two Pakistani prisons before the government handed him over to American forces in Afghanistan. As a foreigner without a passport, he met the U.S. criteria for Guatanamo, and he was quickly whisked onto a plane headed for the sunny Caribbean jail that most military people refer to simply as "The Bay." In the chaos of post-9/11 Afghanistan, military leaders say, there wasn't time for much consideration of anomalies like Farouq. The United States was pulling Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis, Chinese into detention centers, some tens of thousands in all. U.S. intelligence agents weren't able to debrief every prisoner; just keeping them secure was difficult, as Afghans gathered outside temporary holding facilities and clamored for blood. They had never much liked the foreigners, whose idea of Islamic law was sometimes harsher than even the Taliban's.

Regarding the single Guantanamo detanee who claimed Farouq was involved with al Qaeda:

By late November 2002, an FBI agent wrote, Detainee 063, Mohamed al-Kahtani, was "evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to nonexistent people, reporting hearing voices, cowering in a corner of his cell covered with a sheet for hours on end.)"

Think about it. Whether you know something or not, whether you did something or not, you know what the interrogators want you to say. You know what another has said about you, because that is the information being presented to you. Was it the truth? Was it a lie? Did you simply have the bad luck to be the mug shot under a finger when another inmate wanted to end the endless questions?

You've been told that the truth will set you free, but while interrogators come and go, you don't know anyone from your home country who has been released. Say one thing, and you might have a cigarette and a night's sleep. Say nothing, and you might spend the night shackled to the floor with Metallica ringing in your ears. Stay neutral, and it's more endless days of monotony, washing on command, exercising on command, eating on command, losing your mattress and blanket if you argue with the men in command.

What would you do?