Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child

By Andy Worthington, AlterNet. Posted January 16, 2009.

A hopeful precedent

Judge Leon then granted El-Gharani's habeas claim, with another statement that soundly trounced the government's basis for holding him, and that ought to have struck fear into those parts of the Pentagon and the Justice Department that are responsible for presenting the government's evidence in the Guantánamo habeas cases. "Simply stated," he wrote, "a mosaic of tiles bearing images this murky reveals nothing about the petitioner with sufficient clarity, either individually or collectively, that can be relied upon by this Court."

While El-Gharani's imminent release demonstrates, however belatedly, that justice is possible for the prisoners at Guantánamo, the fundamental problem with the definition of an "enemy combatant" -- and its implications for those against whom the government manages to establish some sort of a case -- must not be brushed aside because of this latest victory.

However, there is reason to hope that the ruling in El-Gharani's case will lead to the release of other men against whom the government's only evidence of alleged wrongdoing are statements made by other prisoners whose reliability has been called into doubt by government officials. As was revealed in a declaration in November 2007 by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of U.S. intelligence who worked for the organization responsible for compiling the evidence against prisoners, "Most of the information collected … consisted … of information obtained during interrogations of other detainees," because the organization had little or no access to the intelligence agencies. This is worrying enough, as there is ample evidence that prisoners were tortured, coerced or bribed into producing false confessions, but what makes it even more disturbing is that lawyers for the prisoners -- and those who have studied the documentation closely, as I did for my book The Guantánamo Files -- are aware that statements made by a number of "unreliable" prisoners (including the two cited in El-Gharani's case) are being used as evidence in many other cases.

As I have explained in a previous article (drawing on some exemplary research conducted by Corine Hegland for the National Journal), a military official discovered in 2004 that one of these prisoners, described as a notorious liar by the FBI, had made groundless allegations against 60 prisoners in total, which were, nonetheless, being used by the government as evidence, and this is just one example of an infection so widespread that it suggests that Judge Leon's description of the evidence as a murky mosaic of tiles should be replaced by an even more skeptical conclusion: that it is, instead, the tip of a particularly murky iceberg.

As Clive Stafford Smith said to me today, "It is a sad day when patently false information produced by people who have been tortured to inform results in a child being imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay. Mohammed El-Gharani has spent a third of his young life in prison for the most unjustifiable of reasons, and it is my fervent hope, as the habeas cases proceed, that the revelation of other false confessions will be followed by rulings that are as just as the one delivered yesterday by Judge Leon."

See more stories tagged with: supreme court, barack obama, al-qaeda, clive stafford smith, guantánamo, judge richard leon, muaz al-alawi, hisham sliti, mohammed el-gharani

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

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