Andy Worthington: Judge Orders Release From Guantanamo Of Al-Qaeda Torture Victim

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Andy Worthington

Journalist and author of "The Guantanamo Files"
Posted: June 24, 2009 08:05 AM

Judge Orders Release From Guantanamo Of Al-Qaeda Torture Victim

In over three years of researching and reporting about the prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, I learned early on to expect, as one of Guantánamo's first commanders, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey explained, that many of the men were "Mickey Mouse" prisoners, with no connection to terrorism whatsoever, and, in hundreds of cases, not even a tangential involvement in the Taliban's inter-Muslim civil war with Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, which preceded the 9/11 attacks, but morphed into a war against the U.S. after "Operation Enduring Freedom" -- the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan -- began on October 7, 2001.

I learned about how the wrong people had ended up in Guantánamo not just from Maj. Gen. Dunlavey, but also from a former interrogator at the US prisons in Kandahar and Bagram, which were used to process the prisoners for Guantánamo. Using the pseudonym Chris Mackey, he wrote a book about his experiences, The Interrogators, in which he explained that the military commanders on the ground in Afghanistan received instructions from the highest levels of government that every Arab who ended up in U.S. custody was to be transferred to Guantánamo, even if those on the front line had concluded that they had been seized by mistake.

The dismay that this instilled in me was only heightened when I learned from my own research, for my book The Guantánamo Files -- and from research conducted by the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, based on documents released by the Pentagon (PDF) -- that 86 percent of the prisoners were not seized by US forces "on the battlefield," as senior officials alleged, but were picked up by their Afghan and Pakistani allies and handed over -- or sold -- at a time when the U.S. military was offering bounty payments of $5000 a head -- equivalent to about $250,000 in the U.S. -- for "al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects"; in other words, any Muslim with a beard who could be passed off as a terrorist.

Even so, some of the stories I came across revealed such depths of incompetence that I was repeatedly surprised: by the stories of the Afghan schizophrenic who ate his own excrement; the boys who were no more than 12 or 13 years old when they were captured; the 88-year old who was seized when his house was bombed; and another old man who was seized because he was deaf and couldn't hear what the U.S. soldiers who came to his house in the middle of the night were saying to him.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/judge-orders-release-from_b_219959.html

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1. 86 percent.

"The dismay that this instilled in me was only heightened when I learned from my own research, for my book The Guantánamo Files -- and from research conducted by the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, based on documents released by the Pentagon (PDF) -- that 86 percent of the prisoners were not seized by US forces "on the battlefield," as senior officials alleged, but were picked up by their Afghan and Pakistani allies and handed over -- or sold -- at a time when the U.S. military was offering bounty payments of $5000 a head -- equivalent to about $250,000 in the U.S. -- for "al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects"; in other words, any Muslim with a beard who could be passed off as a terrorist."

Here's another current US court case (and one he has also written about in the recent past)
It's mind-blowing what is still happening under the present US government legal apparatus.

U.S. Relies on Tortured Evidence in Habeas Case
Government Submits Evidence Tossed in 2008 War Crime

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5907553

Mohammed Jawad may have been as young as 12 years old when he was seized.

K & R.

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