Memo to Obama: Closing Guantanamo Can't Wait

By Andy Worthington, AlterNet. Posted November 19, 2008.

Moreover, doubts about the quality of the information that was presented as evidence by the government were spectacularly confirmed in June 2007, when Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of U.S. intelligence who had worked on the tribunals, denounced them for being nothing more than a front to confirm the prisoners' prior designation as "enemy combatants." In detailed analyses of the tribunals' failings (available here and here), Abraham explained, unambiguously, how the body set up to administer the tribunals, OARDEC (the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants), was staffed for the most part by people with no expertise of analyzing intelligence, was not empowered to seek evidence from the intelligence agencies, and was obliged, for the most part, to rely on information "of a generalized nature -- often outdated, often 'generic,' rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals' status," and on other information drawn from the interrogations of the prisoners themselves, in which their "confessions" about their own activities and those of other prisoners may have been -- and frequently were -- obtained through torture, coercion or bribery.

A hallmark of the Bush administration has been its refusal to concede that it has ever made any mistakes in the "War on Terror," and this was also made clear during the CSRTs. Because of what one tribunal member called the "low evidentiary hurdle" for deciding that prisoners were "enemy combatants," only 38 of the 558 prisoners held at the time were cleared for release, even though it has subsequently become apparent that many more innocent men were actually held. What makes this situation even more disturbing, however, is the knowledge that the administration insisted on reconvening tribunals on several occasions when it was not satisfied with the initial result.

This happened to Lt. Col. Abraham after he was asked to take part in a tribunal, when he and his fellow officers refused to conclude that Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, a Libyan shopkeeper with an Afghan wife and a small child, was an "enemy combatant." Abraham and his colleagues were dismissed, and a second, secret tribunal duly reversed their opinion. It also happened on other occasions, including the cases of two of Guantánamo's 22 Uighurs (Muslims from the Xinjiang province of China, who had fled to Afghanistan to escape persecution by the Chinese government).

Forever tainted as "enemy combatants"

Moreover, as one of Lt. Col. Abraham's colleagues noted last summer, the refusal to concede that any of the prisoners were innocent meant that, "after several detainees were found to be 'not an enemy combatant,' DoD took away that option and we had to start using the term 'no longer an enemy combatant' for those held for no apparent reason."

By the time of the CSRT's successors, the annual Administrative Review Boards (ARBs), whose stated aim was to determine whether the prisoners still constituted a threat to the United States, the authorities rapidly dispensed with the claim that prisoners were "no longer enemy combatants." Of the 207 prisoners approved to leave Guantánamo after the first three rounds of the ARBs, only 14 were regarded as "no longer enemy combatants," and the rest were still explicitly regarded as "enemy combatants," who were only approved for transfer from Guantánamo -- to the custody of their home country, or to a third country.

In a second article, I will demonstrate the effects of this cynical semantic maneuvering on the 50 prisoners still held at Guantánamo who have been cleared for release or "approved for transfer," but cannot be repatriated because of international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture. I will suggest how Barack Obama can break this deadlock, and will also examine the gulf between rhetoric and reality concerning the Military Commissions, proposals to transfer prisoners to the U.S. mainland, and what the new president should do with the prisoners considered "too dangerous to be released, but not dangerous enough to prosecute."

See more stories tagged with: barack obama, military commissions, guantánamo, the guantánamo files

Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files.

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