|
Who Is at Guantanamo Bay
By Corine Hegland
National Journal
02/03/06 "National
Journal" -- -- As a result of the habeas
corpus petitions filed by attorneys representing Guantanamo
detainees, the Defense Department has had to file court
documents on 132 of the enemy combatants, or just under a
quarter of the prison's population. National Journal undertook a
detailed review of the unclassified files to develop profiles of
the 132 men. NJ separately reviewed transcripts for 314
prisoners who pleaded their cases before Combatant Status Review
Tribunals at Guantanamo. Taken together, the information
provides a picture of who, exactly, has been taken prisoner in
the war on terror and is being held in an anomalous U.S.
military prison on an island belonging to one of America's
bitterest enemies.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
President Bush issued a military order that authorized the
Defense Department to detain noncitizens suspected of having
ties with Al Qaeda or other terrorists. As a result, hundreds of
so-called "enemy combatants" were rounded up and taken to
prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since early 2002, lawyers
working on a volunteer basis have filed papers with U.S. courts
asking the government to explain why it is holding individual
prisoners. These habeas corpus petitions have forced disclosures
by the Defense Department that shed light on some of the details
surrounding the estimated 500 prisoners currently in U.S.
captivity.
The Defense Department declined a request to release comparable
statistics for all of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.
The first thing that jumps out of the statistics is that a
majority of the detainees in both groups are not Afghans -- nor
were they picked up in Afghanistan as U.S. troops fought the
Taliban and Al Qaeda, nor were they picked up by American troops
at all. Most are from Arab countries, and most were arrested in
Pakistan by Pakistani authorities.
Seventy-five of the 132 men, or more than half the group, are --
like Farouq Ali Ahmed, the subject of National Journal's
accompanying story -- not accused of taking part in hostilities
against the United States or its coalition partners. (The 75
include 10 detainees whom the U.S. government "no longer"
considers enemy combatants, although at least eight of the 10
are still being held at Guantanamo.) Typically, documents
describe these men as "associated" with the Taliban or with Al
Qaeda -- sometimes directly so, and sometimes through only weak
or distant connections. Several men worked for charities that
had some ties to Al Qaeda; Farouq lived in a house associated
with the Taliban.
Some of the "associated" men are said to have attended jihadist
training camps before September 11, an accusation admitted by
some and denied by others. The U.S. government says that some of
the suspected jihadists trained in Afghanistan, even though
other records show that they had not yet entered the country at
the time of the training camps. Just 57 of the 132 men, or 43
percent, are accused of being on a battlefield in post-9/11
Afghanistan.
The government's documents tie only eight of the 132 men
directly to plans for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan.
One of the eight, an Australian fundamentalist Muslim, admitted
that he trained several of the 9/11 hijackers and intended to
hijack a plane himself; another of the eight, a Briton, is said
to have targeted 33 Jewish organizations in New York City. Both
men were released to their home governments in January 2005.
Neither one is facing charges at home.
The Australian says he falsely confessed while undergoing
torture in Egypt; the Australian government, which was watching
him well before 9/11, has revoked his passport but has said it
lacks sufficient information to press terrorism charges against
him. The British man was cleared after a few hours of
questioning in London.
The remaining six of the eight were arrested in Sarajevo,
Bosnia, after being accused of planning to attack the American
Embassy there; the charge was investigated and dismissed by a
judge. The country's human-rights chamber issued an order
prohibiting the men from being taken out of the country. The
Americans seized them anyway.
The Defense Department accusations fall into only two categories
-- those who participated in hostilities and those who did not.
But the boundaries between the two categories can be fuzzy. In
the nonhostile category, for example, is a suspected Qaeda
financier picked up in Pakistan. In the hostile group, on the
other hand, are a few men whose most direct link to hostilities
appears to be getting wounded by one of the thousands of
American bombs dropped on Afghanistan.
One hundred and fifteen of the files also note where the
detainees were captured. Only 35 percent of the 115 were
arrested in Afghanistan; 55 percent were captured by Pakistani
forces in Pakistan.
At least 39 of the arrests made in Pakistan came in the border
region, where Qaeda fighters, along with civilian Afghan
refugees and nonfighting Arabs, were stampeding out of the
country in the fall of 2001, desperate to escape the war. Many
of the enemy combatants arrested in that region say they fled
the sudden chaos of Afghanistan without retrieving their
passports and identification papers and that when they asked to
be taken to their embassies, they were taken to prison instead.
Many of the men who detailed their capture described being taken
through one, two, or three Pakistani prisons before they were
delivered to the Americans.
Many, though not all, of the remaining 24 arrests made in
Pakistan came in targeted raids on senior Qaeda leaders between
January and September 2002. The senior suspects captured in
these raids immediately disappeared into CIA custody -- they are
not at Guantanamo. But their lesser companions, or others
arrested in the same town on the same night, were delivered to
Cuba.
Also in this group are at least three men who were picked off
Pakistani buses in apparently random sweeps for foreigners, and
one man who says he answered a knock on the door of the
apartment next to his.
The 314 transcripts released to the Associated Press under a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit give similar results. The 314
men described there included 97 Afghans who were arrested in
Afghanistan. But they also included 211 foreigners, 152 of whom
-- or more than 70 percent -- were arrested outside of
Afghanistan. And 145 of those men were captured in Pakistan.
Copyright 2006 by National Journal Group Inc
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
