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Guantanamo Whistleblower Launches New Attack on Rigged Tribunals
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Counterpunch - Nov 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington11202007.html
Lt. Col. Abraham's Damning Verdict
Guant!namo Whistleblower Launches a New Attack on Rigged Tribunals
By ANDY WORTHINGTON
The media -- both mainstream outlets and the blogosphere -- have spent
the last week consumed by the story of a leaked operating manual from
Guant!namo. This is understandable in some ways. The prison's Standard
Operating Procedures have never been revealed to the public before,
and, while it takes some dedication to stay awake through the numbing
and pedantic attention to detail that drags on through 238 pages, there
is something genuinely shocking about the stark admission that all
incoming detainees are to be held in isolation for the first 30 days
"to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by
a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process," which
"concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the
detainee on the interrogator." At least as worrying is the additional
directive that, during this period, the detainees are to be prevented
from having contact with representatives of the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC). What makes these admissions particularly
disturbing, of course, is that they were brazenly committed to paper in
an official do***ent, even though the conduct that they endorse -- the
establishment of an offshore interrogation camp, and denying access to
ICRC representatives -- is illegal.
These are not, however, facts that were previously unknown. A copious
amount of evidence (discussed in the majority of the books published
about Guant!namo, including my own, The Guant!namo Files: The Stories
of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison) attests to the fact
that the prison's major focus was the illegal interrogation of
detainees, and the denial of access to ICRC representatives has also
been re****ted in detail, particularly in the cases of Abdallah Tabarak,
a supposed bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, who was mysteriously released
in 2004, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian accused of aiding the
9/11 hijackers in Germany, who is still held in Guant!namo.
More noticeably, the manual, published in March 2003, is nearly five
years old, and, although there are good reasons to be wary of the
administration's claims that it is completely out of date, it is, to a
large degree, ancient news, whose domination of the media has
overshadowed other, more contem****ary issues of considerable im****tance.
A case in point is a new statement by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, an Army
reservist who worked at Guant!namo in 2004-05, which was submitted to
the Wa****ngton DC Circuit Court as part of a brief in the continuing,
and long-running struggle to secure justice for Sudanese detainee Adel
Hamad. A hospital administrator for a large Saudi charity, Hamad had
lived in Pakistan for 17 years, working on various humanitarian aid
projects, when he was captured by Pakistani and American intelligence
operatives in July 2002, based on spurious or non-existent
"intelligence," and sent to Guant!namo.
Lt. Col. Abraham, an Army reservist with 20 years experience in
military intelligence, first came to prominence in June this year, when
his criticisms of the tribunal process at Guant!namo -- the Combatant
Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), convened to *****s whether, on
capture, the detainees had been correctly designated as "enemy
combatants" -- were widely credited with persuading the justices of the
Supreme Court to reverse themselves for the first time in 60 years,
agreeing to review the detainees' right to challenge the basis of their
detention in a case that is scheduled to start on December 5.
In an affidavit filed in the case of Fawzi al-Odah, a Kuwaiti detainee,
Lt. Col. Abraham delivered a damning verdict on the tribunal process,
which he described as severely flawed, relying on intelligence "of a
generalized nature -- often outdated, often 'generic,' rarely
specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the
cir***stances related to those individuals' status." In addition, he
insisted that the process was designed to rubber-stamp the detainees'
prior designation as "enemy combatants."
His latest statement is no less explosive. After giving a little more
of his background, pointing out that his last assignment before
Guant!namo, from November 2001 to November 2002, was as "the Lead
Counterterrorism Analyst for the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific
Command," for which he received the Defense Meritorious Service Medal,
Abraham explains that he has been asked by Adel Hamad's lawyer, the
Federal Public Defender for the District of Oregon, to provide
"additional information about the manner in which OARDEC [the Office
for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants]
operated during my assignment there, from September 11, 2004 until
March 9, 2005," and also "to comment upon certain declarations provided
by the directors of the national intelligence organizations," which
were filed in an attempt to prevent the courts, and, in some cases, the
detainees' lawyers, from having access to supposedly sensitive
government information about the detainees.
After revisiting previously aired complaints about OARDEC --
specifically that most of the staff "were volunteer reserves forces
with little or no experience with intelligence or legal matters," who
were ill-equipped to deal with OARDEC's "extraordinary and historic
mission" -- Lt. Col. Abraham launches a blistering attack on the
woeful, and deliberately narrow parameters of OARDEC's capabilities,
which, by extension, refutes the national intelligence directors'
claims that there was any information worth concealing.
Noting that the mission, as established in the Combatant Status Review
Tribunal Procedures, in July 2004, mandated OARDEC to request
"reasonably available information in the possession of the US
government bearing on the issue of whether the detainee meets the
criteria to be designated as an enemy combatant," he points out that,
in reality, "the facilities and systems utilized by OARDEC precluded
access to or use of information that OARDEC needed in order to perform
its primary mission effectively," and that the mission was additionally
hampered because there was "no systematic method for requesting the
government information relating to specific detainees," and because the
largely unskilled staff "rarely selected the most promising sources of
information and failed effectively to identify and pursue leads if any
developed."
The specific problems relating to the collection of evidence centered
on the fact that OARDEC was only permitted access to material that was
"classified SECRET and below"; in other words, that access to "TOP
SECRET information," which might have been particularly useful, was
denied across the board. This lack of access was compounded by the
administration's insistence that all 558 CSRTs were completed within
120 days, and, even more critically, by the fact that OARDEC was
"entirely dependent on indulgences from external organizations," having
"no organic intelligence assets, no collection capabilities, no
dissemination authority, and no direct tasking authority" of its own.
"As a result," he adds, requests for information were "very rarely"
sent to the CIA, were never sent to the NSA (National Security Agency)
or the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and were only sent to the US
Army Intelligence and Security Command when Abraham himself "mentioned
this fairly obvious and fertile source of information." Compounding
these failures, OARDEC's lack of any "tasking authority" meant that any
responses to the limited number of requests that were actually made
were "largely dependant on whether anyone at the agency was inclined to
do so." In most instances, he concludes, "OARDEC received either a
negative response (no information available) or no response at all."
Abraham also notes that, even on the databases available to OARDEC,
"access to much information was confined to particular individuals or
groups, called communities of interest (COIs)," and adds that, "In
order to access COI-restricted information, individuals either had to
be members of the COI or obtain special access." However, "Even if an
OARDEC member had the appropriate clearance and access to the overall
system, without a password and authorization, he or she would be denied
access to COI information." As a result, he explains that most of the
OARDEC staff lacked access to COI-restricted information to such an
extent that, "If there were information about a detainee in those other
systems, the OARDEC researchers could not find it." His conclusion is
bleak. Given these obstacles, and the fact that most of the staff "had
little if any understanding of the nature of, or even the existence of
the myriad of intelligence components They literally did not know what
they were missing."
Shorn of almost all genuine sources of intelligence, Abraham writes
that OARDEC "relied primarily upon information provided by Joint Task
Force Guant!namo" -- the organization running the prison itself --
"which consisted primarily of post-detention custodial and
interrogation re****ts"; or, in rather clearer language, "Most of the
information OARDEC collected consisted of information obtained during
interrogations of other detainees."
Describing a typical scenario, he notes that the compilation of
material for the tribunals effectively began and ended with the file
received from Guant!namo, which contained little more than
post-detention summaries of interrogations, and incident re****ts
relating to the detainee's behavior. On some occasions, do***entation
relating to the detainee's initial detention, "including notes on the
contents of items in the detainee's possession" might also be in the
file, "but this was not so in every case." He then explains that, even
with this evidence, the researchers failed to investigate it
rigorously, preferring, instead, to search their "limited databases"
and "cast broad nets for any information, no matter how marginal, no
matter how tenuous, no matter how dated, no matter how generic, no
matter how dubious the source, so long as it could be connected to the
detainee."
The result of this slap-dash approach was obvious, and, looked at in
conjunction with the lack of access to genuine classified information
(if, indeed, any existed) explains some of the more egregious and
well-do***ented failures of the tribunal process. "Where no information
was obtained about an individual," Abraham explains -- adding,
crucially, that this "was the case for nearly all detainees except
individuals of prominence" -- the search "would ****ft to more broadly
based themes, such as the region from where the individual came, his
ethnic group or nation of origin, or any organization denominated as
being associated with terrorist activities, with which the individual
was alleged to have been associated." For the last of these
allegations, Abraham notes, pointedly, that OARDEC personnel "presumed
that having an alleged association with an organization was a
sufficient basis for attributing all research relating to that
organization to the individual. As Mark and Josh Denbeaux of Seton Hall
Law School realized through their analysis of the CSRT do***ents, and
as I write about in depth in The Guant!namo Files, what this meant in
practice was not only that a significant number of detainees were
tarred as terrorists through the most tangential associations with
organizations proscribed by the US government, but also that
organizations that were not included on the government's blacklists --
like the World Association of Muslim Youth, for which Adel Hamad worked
as a hospital administrator -- were labeled as entities associated with
terrorism.
Furthermore, Abraham notes that "information relating to the
credibility of a source was omitted, making sources appear
authoritative even when they were suspect," and he uses, as an example,
an allegation against a particular group that "would be repeated
without disclosing that it originated with one of the groups' political
opponents or some government overtly hostile to it" (as happened, in
particular, with detainees from China, Libya and Tunisia). He also
points out that, using the time restraints as a deliberate cover,
"independent evidence from the detainee's life before his arrest" was
never investigated, even though the detainees' "claims of innocence
often could have been corroborated or disproved by a few simple
inquiries," and in this instance he uses, as an example, that, "if a
detainee told interrogators that he had worked at a hospital in
Afghanistan, OARDEC could have requested that an agency with regional
or functional purview locate and obtain records from the hospital and
interview personnel there." In addition, he notes that "Beyond
impractical discussions about bringing villagers to the nearest video
conference facility," he was "not aware of any realistic attempts" to
"identify or even attempt to bring before the Tribunal [outside]
witnesses [requested by the detainee] or their statements," and
concludes that OARDEC "was designed to conduct Tribunals without
witnesses other than the accused detainee." This, too, is a topic that
I discuss at length in The Guant!namo Files, particular in relation to
many of the Afghan detainees, who begged their tribunals to make a few
phone calls to confirm their innocence, and in June 2006 the journalist
Declan Walsh proved how easy it was to contact witnesses that the US
government claimed to be unable to find, locating, in just 72 hours,
three witnesses, in Wa****ngton, Kabul and Gardez, who were able to
verify the story told by a wrongly imprisoned pro-US Afghan commander,
Abdullah Mujahid (who is still in Guant!namo, even though he has now
been cleared for release).
After this comprehensive demolition of the tribunals' claims to
competency, Abraham turns his attention to the claims made by the
directors of the national intelligence organizations that granting the
courts access to government information about the detainees "might risk
disclosure of highly sensitive national intelligence information, such
as source or method information." He notes in the first instance that
OARDEC's systems were so primitive that the staff were unable to
communicate electronically with major organizations including the CIA
and the NSA, and also had no way of retaining or utilizing highly
classified information. "This limitation," he writes, "precluded any
possibly that such sensitive information could be incor****ated into
materials presented to the Tribunals."
Moreover, Abraham points out that "the kinds of sensitive national
intelligence information discussed by the intelligence directors is not
normally shared between intelligence agencies except in the rarest of
cir***stances," and specifically rebuts a statement made by General
Michael Hayden, the current director of the CIA, and the director of
the NSA from 1999 to 2005 -- that disclosure of government information
would reveal details of "clandestine intelligence operations, including
counterterrorism operations, foreign intelligence information and
assistance, information provided by sensitive sources, and technical
collection activities" -- by insisting that this kind of information
would not have been disclosed to OARDEC, or to the tribunal members,
"under any cir***stances." He adds that, "in the few cases where the
concerns might apply, there are adequate mechanisms in place to provide
for in camera review of any critical information, the nature of which
precludes disclosure beyond the court."
In a damning aside (which he cannot prove, though I too infer that it
is correct, based on my extensive research into the detainees'
stories), Abraham explains that, even assuming OARDEC had been able to
conduct an exhaustive search for information, "what it would have
likely discerned from the exercise is that there is little information
to be obtained on people that have never before been considered let
alone determined to be persons of interest." As long ago as February
2002, this was effectively admitted by Brigadier General Mike Lehnert
of the Marines, who was in charge of Guant!namo in the early days, when
he stated, "A large number [of the detainees] claim to be Taliban, a
smaller number we have been able to confirm as al-Qaeda, and a rather
large number in the middle we have not been able to determine their
status. Many of the detainees are not forthcoming. Many have been
interviewed as many as four times, each time providing a different name
and different information."
The administration's response to this failure to extract information
from the detainees (who, in 95% percent of cases, were not actually
captured by the Americans themselves, but were handed over or sold by
their Afghan or Pakistani allies) was to instigate the grotesque system
of punishments and rewards, partly chronicled in the leaked manual from
March 2003, whereby, to put it bluntly, torture became a substitute for
the skilled gathering of intelligence. A later component of the regime,
as Lt. Col. Abraham has described in such shocking detail, was to rig
the tribunals to make it appear that the "rather large number in the
middle" -- many of whom were completely innocent, or had nothing useful
to offer -- were a grave and continuing threat to US security. As many
of the 310 detainees still in Guant!namo were effectively condemned by
this corrupt process, I contend that Lt. Col. Abraham's latest
statement (which was only previously re****ted on the Supreme Court's
SCOTUSblog) is actually far more im****tant than a leaked operating
manual.
*
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