In Shadow of 9/11 Arraignment, an Afghan Fantasist Faces Trial

Now here's a weird one to ponder as the arraignments at Guantánamo commence of five prisoners -- including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- who are charged with facilitating the 9/11 attacks.

I've always thought that there was something particularly perverse about charging minor Afghan insurgents in specially conceived "terror courts" at Guantánamo, as though there was any case whatsoever to be made that a national of a country at war with the United States could, by resisting foreign occupation, be regarded as a terrorist rather than as a soldier in a war.

I have my doubts about the entire Military Commission process, of course (which was conceived both in haste and as a blatant attempt to rewrite international law), as well as having doubts about some of the other cases put forward for trial by Military Commission, such as those of the Canadian child Omar Khadr and the British resident Binyam Mohamed (charged last week), who was flown around the world to have "confessions" extracted from him through torture, but the charges against the Afghans -- Mohamed Jawad, Mohammed Kamin and Abdul Zahir (charged in the first aborted incarnation of the Commissions, and not yet charged for a second time) -- have always struck me as even more ridiculously unjust and stupid.

Mohamed Jawad, who was also a teenager at the time of capture, is accused of throwing a grenade that wounded two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan interpreter in a U.S. military vehicle, Abdul Zahir was accused of throwing a grenade at a vehicle containing foreign journalists, and, most feebly of all, Mohammed Kamin is accused of firing rockets at the city of Khost while it was occupied by US forces.

However, even with these precedents, the case of the latest Afghan to face a trial by Military Commission -- which was announced with so little fanfare that it was almost overlooked -- appears to plumb new depths of misapplied zeal. In its charge sheet, the Pentagon announced that it was charging 32-year old Mohammed Hashim with "providing material support for terrorism" and "spying," based on allegations that, from December 2001 to October 2002, having been "schooled at terrorist training camps," he "provide[d] material support and resources to al-Qaeda," by "conducting reconnaissance missions against U.S. and coalition forces, and by participating in a rocket attack venture on at least one occasion against U.S. forces for al-Qaeda." It is also claimed that he "wrongfully collect[ed] or attempt[ed] to collect information by clandestine means or while acting under false pretenses, for the purpose of conveying such information to an enemy of the United States, or to one of the co-belligerents of the enemy."

While the charges against Hashim appear, on the surface, to line up with those against the other alleged Afghan insurgents, a glance at the transcript of his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (held in 2004 to establish that he had been correctly detained as an "enemy combatant" without rights) reveals that he is either one of the most fantastically well-connected terrorists in the very small pool of well-connected terrorists at Guantánamo, or, conversely, that he is a deranged fantasist. From the resounding silence that greeted his comments at his tribunal, I can only conclude that the tribunal members, like me, concluded that the latter interpretation was the more probable.

Hashim began by explaining that he had been with the Taliban for five years before his capture, but added that he only did it "for the money," and then declared, "What evidence was brought against me, I admit to. I've been telling the same story and I'm not lying about it. I helped out [Osama] bin Laden." After this attention-grabbing start, he claimed that he knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance, because a man that he knew, Mohammad Khan, "used to tell me all these stories and all the details about how they were going to fly airplanes into buildings. He didn't tell me the details, that it was New York, but he said they had 20 pilots and they were going to orchestrate the act." What rather detracted from the shock value of this comment was Hashim's absolutely inexplicable claim that his friend Khan, who had told him about the 9/11 plan, was with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban's opponents, who were also implacably opposed to al-Qaeda.