GUANTANAMO BAY
U.S. held wrong detainees for years
Many innocent men among terror suspects, probe shows
Sunday, June 15, 2008 4:06 AM
By Tom Lasseter
McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
Mohammed Akhtiar spent three years at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was abused by other detainees because they knew he wasn't an enemy of the United States.
GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
They shouted Allahu Akbar -- God is great -- as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.
American troops dragged Akhtiar out of his home in Gardez, Afghanistan, in May 2003, flew him to Guantanamo in shackles that July and held him there for more than three years. The tribal leader from eastern Afghanistan belonged to an insurgent group and had taken part in rocket attacks on U.S. forces, American officials said.
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects who were imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. They are, the Bush administration has said, "the worst of the worst."
The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed infidel, spat at Akhtiar and assaulted him, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.
"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer said.
Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.
An eight-month investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens and perhaps hundreds of men whom the United States has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees along with a number of local officials, primarily in Afghanistan, and reviewed available U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
Most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals, the McClatchy investigation found. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials.
Of course, Guantanamo also houses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attack, who along with four other high-profile detainees faces military commission charges.
Cases also have been opened against 15 other detainees for assorted offenses, such as attending al-Qaida training camps.
But because Guantanamo was set up under special rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges, it's impossible to know how many of the 770 men who've been held there were terrorists.
The McClatchy investigation concluded, however, that many of the detainees there posed no danger to the United States or its allies and were imprisoned because U.S. officials were fearful of mistakenly letting a militant go free.
McClatchy's interviews are the most ever conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee backgrounds has been reported on previously by other media outlets, but not as comprehensively.
McClatchy also in many cases did more research than either the U.S. military at Guantanamo, which often relied on secondhand accounts, or the detainees' lawyers, who relied mainly on the detainees' accounts.
The investigation found that although U.S. forces often didn't know whom they were holding or how to obtain credible intelligence from them without enough trained interrogators and skilled linguists, prisoners were beaten and abused by military police, prison guards and intelligence officers.
A series of White House directives placed "suspected enemy combatants" beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions' protections for prisoners of war.
Instead of making America safer, the administration's detainee policies have radicalized detainees, fueled support for extremist Islamist groups, troubled even America's closest allies and turned Guantanamo into a school for jihad, Islamic holy war.
The administration even might have inadvertently sabotaged its ability to prosecute the terrorists it has imprisoned, because evidence gained from interrogations that in some cases bordered on torture might not be admissible in military courts.
After the Supreme Court ruling last week that detainees in the war on terrorism have a right to challenge their detentions in U.S. courts, the entire legal edifice the administration has invented since 9/11 could collapse.
The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren't "the worst of the worst." From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn't belong there.
Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.
Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al-Qaida's leadership, and it isn't clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.
The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy's findings. The defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, refused to speak with McClatchy.
The Pentagon's only response to a series of written questions from McClatchy, and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.
"These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of innocent civilians," Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided no examples.
Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said McClatchy's conclusions squared with their own observations.
"As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless," a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail, using the military's slang for the Guantanamo base.
Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the "War Council" devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected "enemy combatants" indefinitely with few legal rights.
The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.
The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves and that U.S. soldiers -- along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush -- should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.
The Bush administration didn't launch a formal review of the detentions until a 2004 Supreme Court decision forced it to begin holding military tribunals at Guantanamo.
So far, the military commissions have publicly charged only six detainees -- less than 1 percent of the more than 770 who've been at Guantanamo -- with direct involvement in the 9/11 attack. About 500 detainees -- nearly two out of three -- have been released.
During a military review board hearing at Guantanamo, Mohammed Akhtiar had some advice for the U.S. officers seated before him.
"I wish," he said, "that the United States would realize who the bad guys are and who the good guys are."
Read profiles of the 66 detainees interviewed by McClatchy at
http://detainees.mcclatchydc.com/detainees.
The "War Council" said the terrorist threat allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law.
