Sixth "High-Value" Prisoner Charged at Guantánamo Amidst Disturbing Evidence

On March 31, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian captured after a gunfight in Gujrat, Pakistan in July 2004, would be the fifteenth Guantánamo prisoner to be tried by military commission, in connection with his alleged involvement in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998.

Specifically, Ghailani is charged with "murder in violation of the Law of War, murder of protected persons, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the Law of War and terrorism" -- plus conspiracy to commit all the preceding offenses -- for his alleged role in securing and transporting material used in the Tanzanian bomb, and for helping to purchase the truck that was used in the attack. He is also charged with "providing material support to terrorism," based on allegations that, after the bombing, he fled to Afghanistan, where he continued working for al-Qaeda "as a document forger, physical trainer at an al-Qaeda training camp, and as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden."

Ghailani is the sixth of the 14 so-called "high-value detainees" -- those held in secret, CIA-run prisons, who were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 -- to be put forward for trial by military commission. He joins Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash (plus Mohammed al-Qahtani, a notorious victim of torture in Guantánamo), who were put forward for trial in February, in connection with the 9/11 attacks.

The novel system of "War on Terror" trials, conceived by Dick Cheney and his advisors in November 2001, have yet to secure a conviction (the closest they came was the plea bargain negotiated with the Australian David Hicks last year, who returned home to serve just seven months in prison) and have been plagued by controversy since their inception. Damned by their own military defense lawyers, derailed by their own government-appointed judges, dismissed by the Supreme Court and then resuscitated by a somnambulant Congress, they are currently limping towards trials in the cases of the Canadian Omar Khadr, who was just 15 years old when he was captured, and whose alleged murder of a U.S. soldier is seriously contested by his legal team, and Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who was one of Osama bin Laden's drivers.

The Commissions have stumbled at the arraignment phase in two other cases, those of Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan who was just 16 years old when he allegedly threw a grenade at a vehicle carrying two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator, and Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi who was seized in Azerbaijan and is accused of plotting to attack shipping lanes in the Middle East.

More significantly, the commissions appear to be fatally contaminated by allegations of torture, raising doubts that they can secure a single "clean" conviction that will be regarded as legitimate anywhere beyond the administration itself and its dwindling crowd of cheerleaders.

In this, the case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani appears to be no exception. Ghailani did not allege, during his military tribunal last year, that he was tortured (unlike Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, whose torture by waterboarding was recently admitted by CIA director Michael Hayden), but during my research for The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison, I discovered a piece of information that indicated that, whether under duress, or by some other method, he had made a false allegation against one of the prisoners at Guantánamo.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the gathering of evidence used against the Guantánamo prisoners is the accumulation of allegations from the initial Combatant Status Review Tribunals, convened from July 2004 to March 2005 to assess whether they had been correctly designated as "enemy combatants," through successive rounds of annual Administrative Review Boards, convened to assess whether they still constitute a threat to the United States, or whether they still have ongoing intelligence value.