Read Online My Guantanamo Diary by Mahvish Khan - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mahvish Khan
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to the Pakistani border, where locals welcomed them.
“They killed a sheep and cooked the meat and we ate,” Adel Abdul-Hakim told Willett. Then, that night, Hakim said, they were driven to a local prison and, from there, handed over to the U.S. military.
Theoretically, a bounty program for terrorism suspects could be effective—if there were an actual investigation to determine who was al-Qaeda and who had been swept up inadvertently. But the U.S. military conducted no investigations.
“America is a strong, powerful country,” Haji Nusrat Khan told me. “I know that my own people turned me in for money, but the Americans can find anything out. They should have investigated these wrongly made accusations about me.”
I don’t believe that the military arrested and detained innocent men maliciously. I know that September 11 sparked great fear and that the military is charged with protecting U.S. national security. But in pursuit of that goal, the U.S. government abandoned the most fundamental legal principles and failed to conduct the most basic inquiries. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that the most insidious threats to liberty come from well-meaning people of zeal who act without understanding. There was a lot of zeal after September 11. In keeping Guantánamo Bay in operation, the DOD has dismissed the notion that innocent men may have been sold and brought there. Rumsfeld called the Guantánamo detainees there “the worst of the worst.” White House officials echoed his sentiments and said that the detainees had been trained to lie based on al-Qaeda manuals.
But in response to an Associated Press lawsuit brought in March 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act, the Pentagon was forced to declassify information pertaining to the detainees. The numbers tell another story. A statistical analysis of DOD documents relating to 517 current and former Guantánamo detainees shows that only 5 percent of the detainees had been captured as a result of U.S. intelligence work. The report, by Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux and his son, attorney Joshua Denbeaux, also shows that 86 percent of the prisoners at Guantánamo were captured not by American forces but by Pakistani police and Afghan warlords at a time when the U.S. military was passing out cash rewards for turning over al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.
Some of the detainees were accused and seized because they owned a Kalashnikov. That’s actually fairly common inAfghanistan. The report also found that detainees were commonly held because they stayed at guesthouses in Afghanistan or wore Casio watches, which were thought to be used by al-Qaeda to detonate bombs.
Afghan detainee Abdul Matin was a science teacher who was arrested wearing a Casio watch. Matin thought someone was having a good laugh as they wrote up reasons to hold him. At his combatant status review tribunal, the military asked him to explain his “possession of the infamous Casio watch.”
Matin admitted that he had one—just as women, children, and old men in Afghanistan and elsewhere do. But he argued that wearing an ordinary black plastic watch didn’t make him a terrorist. Many of the guards at Guantánamo wore the same watch.
The Denbeaux study concluded that the vast majority of detainees aren’t connected to al-Qaeda, and most aren’t even accused of engaging in hostilities against the United States. When I read it, I thought about many of the men I had met. No doubt there are some terrorists at Gitmo. But it’s just as likely that there are good and innocent people. They’ve all been swept together without due process. Because there were no investigations, most of Guantánamo’s men are being held in a stateless black hole, an eerie Neverland where American laws and justice don’t exist. They’ve been presumed guilty without having a fair shot at proving their innocence. They’re numbered and kept away from journalists, while the Bush administration touts
“They killed a sheep and cooked the meat and we ate,” Adel Abdul-Hakim told Willett. Then, that night, Hakim said, they were driven to a local prison and, from there, handed over to the U.S. military.
Theoretically, a bounty program for terrorism suspects could be effective—if there were an actual investigation to determine who was al-Qaeda and who had been swept up inadvertently. But the U.S. military conducted no investigations.
“America is a strong, powerful country,” Haji Nusrat Khan told me. “I know that my own people turned me in for money, but the Americans can find anything out. They should have investigated these wrongly made accusations about me.”
I don’t believe that the military arrested and detained innocent men maliciously. I know that September 11 sparked great fear and that the military is charged with protecting U.S. national security. But in pursuit of that goal, the U.S. government abandoned the most fundamental legal principles and failed to conduct the most basic inquiries. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that the most insidious threats to liberty come from well-meaning people of zeal who act without understanding. There was a lot of zeal after September 11. In keeping Guantánamo Bay in operation, the DOD has dismissed the notion that innocent men may have been sold and brought there. Rumsfeld called the Guantánamo detainees there “the worst of the worst.” White House officials echoed his sentiments and said that the detainees had been trained to lie based on al-Qaeda manuals.
But in response to an Associated Press lawsuit brought in March 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act, the Pentagon was forced to declassify information pertaining to the detainees. The numbers tell another story. A statistical analysis of DOD documents relating to 517 current and former Guantánamo detainees shows that only 5 percent of the detainees had been captured as a result of U.S. intelligence work. The report, by Seton Hall law professor Mark Denbeaux and his son, attorney Joshua Denbeaux, also shows that 86 percent of the prisoners at Guantánamo were captured not by American forces but by Pakistani police and Afghan warlords at a time when the U.S. military was passing out cash rewards for turning over al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.
Some of the detainees were accused and seized because they owned a Kalashnikov. That’s actually fairly common inAfghanistan. The report also found that detainees were commonly held because they stayed at guesthouses in Afghanistan or wore Casio watches, which were thought to be used by al-Qaeda to detonate bombs.
Afghan detainee Abdul Matin was a science teacher who was arrested wearing a Casio watch. Matin thought someone was having a good laugh as they wrote up reasons to hold him. At his combatant status review tribunal, the military asked him to explain his “possession of the infamous Casio watch.”
Matin admitted that he had one—just as women, children, and old men in Afghanistan and elsewhere do. But he argued that wearing an ordinary black plastic watch didn’t make him a terrorist. Many of the guards at Guantánamo wore the same watch.
The Denbeaux study concluded that the vast majority of detainees aren’t connected to al-Qaeda, and most aren’t even accused of engaging in hostilities against the United States. When I read it, I thought about many of the men I had met. No doubt there are some terrorists at Gitmo. But it’s just as likely that there are good and innocent people. They’ve all been swept together without due process. Because there were no investigations, most of Guantánamo’s men are being held in a stateless black hole, an eerie Neverland where American laws and justice don’t exist. They’ve been presumed guilty without having a fair shot at proving their innocence. They’re numbered and kept away from journalists, while the Bush administration touts
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