The Gitmo Guard Who Converted to Islam - Newsweek.com

Image via Wikipedia

Terry Holdbrooks stood watch over prisoners at Gitmo. What he saw made him adopt their faith.

By Dan Ephron | NEWSWEEK

Published Mar 21, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Mar 30, 2009

Army specialist Terry Holdbrooks had been a guard at Guantánamo for about six months the night he had his life-altering conversation with detainee 590, a Moroccan also known as "the General." This was early 2004, about halfway through Holdbrooks's stint at Guantánamo with the 463rd Military Police Company. Until then, he'd spent most of his day shifts just doing his duty. He'd escort prisoners to interrogations or walk up and down the cellblock making sure they weren't passing notes. But the midnight shifts were slow. "The only thing you really had to do was mop the center floor," he says. So Holdbrooks began spending part of the night sitting cross-legged on the ground, talking to detainees through the metal mesh of their cell doors.

He developed a strong relationship with the General, whose real name is Ahmed Errachidi. Their late-night conversations led Holdbrooks to be more skeptical about the prison, he says, and made him think harder about his own life. Soon, Holdbrooks was ordering books on Arabic and Islam. During an evening talk with Errachidi in early 2004, the conversation turned to the shahada, the one-line statement of faith that marks the single requirement for converting to Islam ("There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet"). Holdbrooks pushed a pen and an index card through the mesh, and asked Errachidi to write out the shahada in English and transliterated Arabic. He then uttered the words aloud and, there on the floor of Guantánamo's Camp Delta, became a Muslim.

When historians look back on Guantánamo, the harsh treatment of detainees and the trampling of due process will likely dominate the narrative. Holdbrooks, who left the military in 2005, saw his share. In interviews over recent weeks, he and another former guard told NEWSWEEK about degrading and sometimes sadistic acts against prisoners committed by soldiers, medics and interrogators who wanted revenge for the 9/11 attacks on America. But as the fog of secrecy slowly lifts from Guantánamo, other scenes are starting to emerge as well, including surprising interactions between guards and detainees on subjects like politics, religion and even music. The exchanges reveal curiosity on both sides—sometimes even empathy. "The detainees used to have conversations with the guards who showed some common respect toward them," says Errachidi, who spent five years in Guantánamo and was released in 2007. "We talked about everything, normal things, and things [we had] in common," he wrote to NEWSWEEK in an e-mail from his home in Morocco.

Holdbrooks's level of identification with the other side was exceptional. No other guard has volunteered that he embraced Islam at the prison (though Errachidi says others expressed interest). His experience runs counter to academic studies, which show that guards and inmates at ordinary prisons tend to develop mutual hostility. But then, Holdbrooks is a contrarian by nature. He can also be conspiratorial. When his company visited the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York, Holdbrooks remembers thinking there had to be a broader explanation, and that the Bush administration must have colluded somehow in the plot.

But his misgivings about Guantánamo—including doubts that the detainees were the "worst of the worst"—were shared by other guards as early as 2002. A few such guards are coming forward for the first time. Specialist Brandon Neely, who was at Guantánamo when the first detainees arrived that year, says his enthusiasm for the mission soured quickly. "There were a couple of us guards who asked ourselves why these guys are being treated so badly and if they're actually terrorists at all," he told NEWSWEEK. Neely remembers having long conversations with detainee Ruhal Ahmed, who loved Eminem and James Bond and would often rap or sing to the other prisoners. Another former guard, Christopher Arendt, went on a speaking tour with former detainees in Europe earlier this year to talk critically about the prison.

Holdbrooks says growing up hard in Phoenix—his parents were junkies and he himself was a heavy drinker before joining the military in 2002—helps explain what he calls his "anti-everything views." He has holes the size of quarters in both earlobes, stretched-out piercings that he plugs with wooden discs. At his Phoenix apartment, bedecked with horror-film memorabilia, he rolls up both sleeves to reveal wrist-to-shoulder tattoos. He describes the ink work as a narrative of his mistakes and addictions. They include religious symbols and Nazi SS bolts, track marks and, in large letters, the words BY DEMONS BE DRIVEN. He says the line, from a heavy-metal song, reminds him to be a better person.

Holdbrooks—TJ to his friends—says he joined the military to avoid winding up like his parents. He was an impulsive young man searching for stability. On his first home leave, he got engaged to a woman he'd known for just eight days and married her three months later. With little prior exposure to religion, Holdbrooks was struck at Gitmo by the devotion detainees showed to their faith. "A lot of Americans have abandoned God, but even in this place, [the detainees] were determined to pray," he says.

Holdbrooks was also taken by the prisoners' resourcefulness. He says detainees would pluck individual threads from their jumpsuits or prayer mats and spin them into long stretches of twine, which they would use to pass notes from cell to cell. He noticed that one detainee with a bad skin rash would smear peanut butter on his windowsill until the oil separated from the paste, then would use the oil on his rash.

Errachidi's detention seemed particularly suspect to Holdbrooks. The Moroccan detainee had worked as a chef in Britain for almost 18 years and spoke fluent English. He told Holdbrooks he had traveled to Pakistan on a business venture in late September 2001 to help pay for his son's surgery. When he crossed into Afghanistan, he said, he was picked up by the Northern Alliance and sold to American troops for $5,000. At Guantánamo, Errachidi was accused of attending a Qaeda training camp. But a 2007 investigation by the London Times newspaper appears to have corroborated his story; it eventually helped lead to his release.

In prison, Errachidi was an agitator. "Because I spoke English, I was always in the face of the soldiers," he wrote NEWSWEEK in an e-mail. Errachidi said an American colonel at Guantánamo gave him his nickname, and warned him that generals "get hurt" if they don't cooperate. He said his defiance cost him 23 days of abuse, including sleep deprivation, exposure to very cold temperatures and being shackled in stress positions. "I always believed the soldiers were doing illegal stuff and I was not ready to keep quiet." (Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said in response: "Detainees have often made claims of abuse that are simply not supported by the facts.") The Moroccan spent four of his five years at Gitmo in the punishment block, where detainees were denied "comfort items" like paper and prayer beads along with access to the recreation yard and the library.

Errachidi says he does not remember details of the night Holdbrooks converted. Over the years, he says, he discussed a range of religious topics with guards: "I spoke to them about subjects like Father Christmas and Ishac and Ibrahim [Isaac and Abraham] and the sacrifice. About Jesus." Holdbrooks recalls that when he announced he wanted to embrace Islam, Errachidi warned him that converting would be a serious undertaking and, at Guantánamo, a messy affair. "He wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting myself into." Holdbrooks later told his two roommates about the conversion, and no one else.

But other guards noticed changes in him. They heard detainees calling him Mustapha, and saw that Holdbrooks was studying Arabic openly. (At his Phoenix apartment, he displays the books he had amassed. They include a leather-bound, six-volume set of Muslim sacred texts and "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam.") One night his squad leader took him to a yard behind his living quarters, where five guards were waiting to stage a kind of intervention. "They started yelling at me," he recalls, "asking if I was a traitor, if I was switching sides." At one point a squad leader pulled back his fist and the two men traded blows, Holdbrooks says.

Holdbrooks spent the rest of his time at Guantánamo mainly keeping to himself, and nobody bothered him further. Another Muslim who served there around the same time had a different experience. Capt. James Yee, a Gitmo chaplain for much of 2003, was arrested in September of that year on suspicion of aiding the enemy and other crimes—charges that were eventually dropped. Yee had become a Muslim years earlier. He says the Muslims on staff at Gitmo—mainly translators—often felt beleaguered. "There was an overall atmosphere by the command to vilify Islam." (Commander Gordon's response: "We strongly disagree with the assertions made by Chaplain Yee").

At Holdbrooks's next station, in Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., he says things began to unravel. The only place to kill time within miles of the base was a Wal-Mart and two strip clubs—Big Daddy's and Big Louie's. "I've never been a fan of strip clubs, so I hung out at Wal-Mart," he says. Within months, Holdbrooks was released from the military—two years before the end of his commitment. The Army gave him an honorable discharge with no explanation, but the events at Gitmo seemed to loom over the decision. The Army said it would not comment on the matter.

Back in Phoenix, Holdbrooks returned to drinking, in part to suppress what he describes as the anger that consumed him. (Neely, the other ex-guard who spoke to NEWSWEEK, said Guantánamo had made him so depressed he spent up to $60 a day on alcohol during a monthlong leave from the detention center in 2002.) Holdbrooks divorced his wife and spiraled further. Eventually his addictions landed him in the hospital. He suffered a series of seizures, as well as a fall that resulted in a bad skull fracture and the insertion of a titanium plate in his head.

Recently, Holdbrooks has been back in touch with Errachidi, who has suffered his own ordeal since leaving the detention center. Errachidi told NEWSWEEK he had trouble adjusting to his freedom, "trying to learn how to walk without shackles and trying to sleep at night with the lights off." He signed each of the dozen e-mails he sent to NEWSWEEK with the impersonal ID that his captors had given him: Ahmed 590.

Holdbrooks, now 25, says he quit drinking three months ago and began attending regular prayers at the Tempe Islamic Center, a mosque near the University of Phoenix, where he works as an enrollment counselor. The long scar on his head is now mostly hidden under the lace of his Muslim kufi cap. When the imam at Tempe introduced Holdbrooks to the congregation and explained he'd converted at Guantánamo, a few dozen worshipers rushed over to shake his hand. "I would have thought they had the most savage soldiers serving there," says the imam, Amr Elsamny, an Egyptian. "I never thought it would be someone like TJ."

With Dina Fine Maron in Washington

Detainees Face Severe Conditions if Moved to U.S. - washingtonpost.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 4, 2009

For up to four hours a day, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, can sit outside in the Caribbean sun and chat through a chain-link fence with the detainee in the neighboring exercise yard at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Mohammed can also use that time to visit a media room to watch movies of his choice, read newspapers and books, or play handheld electronic games. He and other detainees have access to elliptical machines and stationary bikes.

At Guantanamo, such recreational activities interrupt an otherwise bleak existence, according to a Pentagon report of conditions at Camp 7, which houses 16 high-value detainees. But even those privileges may soon vanish.

The Justice Department has begun to hint in court filings that at least some of the defendants in the Sept. 11, 2001, case, as well as other prominent suspects, will be transferred to federal custody in the United States. While lawmakers and activist groups have been consumed with a debate over such a move, little attention has been paid to the conditions that Mohammed and other high-value detainees would face in the United States.

And those conditions, it turns out, would be vastly more draconian than they are at Guantanamo Bay.

"Where demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders," President Obama said in a speech at the National Archives in May. "Bear in mind the following fact: Nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal supermax prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists."

Based on what is known about restrictions in the country's highest-security federal prisons, Mohammed and other terrorism suspects would face profound isolation in the United States.

If sent to a facility such as the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo., they would be sealed off for 23 hours a day in cells with four-inch-wide windows and concrete furniture. If they behave, and are allowed an hour's exercise each day in a tiny yard, they will do so alone. They will have little or no human contact except with prison officials. And the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outside group with access to Camp 7, will no longer have contact with them.

"You will die with a whimper," U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema told Zacarias Moussaoui, before the Sept. 11 conspirator was taken to the supermax facility in Florence to serve a life sentence. "You will never again get a chance to speak."

The 490-bed prison, formally known as the Administrative Maximum Facility, holds some of the country's most infamous prisoners, including Mohammed's nephew Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski; FBI agent-turned-Soviet mole Robert P. Hanssen; and Terry L. Nichols, who was convicted in the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building. Thirty-three international terrorists are held there.

Advocates for and against closing the Guantanamo Bay facility say the specter of hard time in Florence or elsewhere in the federal prison system is tangential to larger issues involved in Obama's decision to shut down the military prison.

The detention center at Guantanamo Bay "now provides the highest standard of security and humane detention of terrorists consistent with the standards of the Geneva Conventions," said Kirk S. Lippold, who served as the commander of the USS Cole and is now a senior military fellow at Military Families United, an advocacy group. "Unless the administration plans on spending millions of taxpayer dollars on drastically changing the conditions at the supermax facility, then moving the detainees to a prison like Florence would result in less humane conditions for detainees and less security for all Americans."

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is assisting military defense lawyers at Guantanamo Bay, said its principal goal is to get detainees tried in federal court, where the group believes it has a better chance of preventing a death sentence in the event of any conviction.

"Protections in the federal system are vastly superior," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "The absence of due process at Guantanamo makes it more of a black hole than Florence."

Although the Pentagon says that it has abided by the Geneva Conventions at Camp 7, Romero said he remains unconvinced that conditions there are as liberal as officials suggest. Attorneys for some of the detainees at Camp 7 have expressed concern about their clients' mental health -- describing in a court filing, for instance, the desire of one detainee to plead guilty and receive the death penalty as the manifestation of his "depression, hopelessness and despair."

The experience of Moussaoui, who was tried in federal court in Alexandria, offers an idea of the conditions Guantanamo detainees might face if transferred to the United States.

Moussaoui spent 23 hours a day alone in an 80-square-foot cell, according to officials at the Alexandria jail where he was held. The cell had a cement floor, bare white walls, a toilet and a mattress atop concrete. An entire unit of six cells and a common area was sealed off just for him. He was monitored on a closed-circuit security camera, and he never saw other inmates.

He spent most of his time quietly reading the Koran and praying on the floor on a blanket, officials said. One hour each day, he was escorted from his cell for a shower and exercise. If he was moved even one floor inside the jail -- always in shackles -- both of those floors were locked down.

Two terrorism suspects in Britain have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to stop their extradition to the United States, arguing that conditions at Florence, where they assume they would be sent, are so severe that they amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Various studies have found that the isolation experienced at supermax prisons can cause or exacerbate mental illness.

At Florence, inmates deemed high-security risks are in almost permanent lockdown and have a small black-and-white television, a radio and books to pass the time.

Bernard Kleinman, a lawyer who represented Yousef, said his client told him he rarely exercised at the prison because he refused to submit to the body-cavity search required every time he returned to his cell. When he was moved, he was always shackled in leg irons and black-box handcuffs.

Attempts by prisoners and their attorneys to challenge in court the conditions of confinement in Florence have repeatedly failed.

Said Kleinman, who has represented Yousef since 1998: "It's effectively solitary confinement for life."

Meanwhile, at Guantanamo, some officials argue that the military should create more liberal conditions for detainees.

The Pentagon review of conditions there, led by Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, recommended that Camp 7 detainees should be given opportunities for group prayer with three or more fellow prisoners. He also said recreation should be expanded to groups of three or more, with rotating partners.

It is unclear whether Walsh's recommendations were implemented. Military officials at Guantanamo Bay, despite repeated requests, did not provide information on current conditions at Camp 7.

Staff writer Jerry Markon contributed to this report.

Yemeni’s Case Shows Hurdles to Leaving Guantánamo - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — To understand how hard it is proving for President Obama to close the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, consider the case of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, Internee Security No. 692. His long-delayed departure last week leaves 97 Yemenis at the complex in Cuba, by far the largest remaining group.

It was seven years ago that Mr. Ahmed, then 18, was swept up by Pakistani security forces in a raid on a Faisalabad guesthouse and taken to the prison. It was five months ago that a federal judge, after reviewing all the government’s classified evidence, ruled that his incarceration had never been justified and ordered the government to get to work “forthwith” on his release.

But Obama administration officials were worried. Even if Mr. Ahmed was not dangerous in 2002, they said, Guantánamo itself might have radicalized him, exposing him to militants and embittering him against the United States. If he returned to his troubled homeland of Yemen, the officials feared, he might fall in with the growing contingent of Al Qaeda there, one more Guantánamo survivor to star in their propaganda videotapes.

So American officials first sought to route him to a rehabilitation program for militants in Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis would take him only if he wanted to go — and he did not.

Last weekend, as Judge Gladys Kessler of United States District Court in Washington appeared to be losing patience with the delay in complying with her May 11 release order, an American military jet finally delivered Mr. Ahmed to the Yemeni capital, Sana. “Seven years are gone from his life and can never be gotten back,” said the brother, Wagdi Ahmed, a surgeon’s assistant in the port city of Aden, speaking through a translator. “The feeling of the family is his detention at Guantánamo was not rightful. But nonetheless, we just say, praise God.”

Alla Ahmed, now 26, was expected to spend a week or more in the custody of Yemeni security officials, who were questioning him about other Yemenis at Guantánamo and about his views and plans. Then, his brother said, he will join his family in Aden and decide whether to look for work or try to resume his education.

Mr. Ahmed is the first Yemeni to depart Guantánamo since Mr. Obama’s promise, the day after his inauguration, to close the prison complex in Cuba within a year — a deadline that aides now say may not be met. Since Yemenis now make up nearly half of the 220 remaining prisoners, an exit route for them is critical.

For Mr. Obama, Guantánamo has become both a security challenge and a political headache. A group of retired generals and admirals who stood behind him when he signed the closing order were back in Washington last week to make sure the administration did not renege on its pledge. Meanwhile, the House approved a nonbinding recommendation that no Guantánamo detainee be brought to American soil, even for trial.

The public file on Mr. Ahmed suggests a highly ambiguous case that typifies many at Guantánamo. He told a review board that he had traveled to Pakistan to study “religion and science” — but he said one reason he wanted to attend an Islamic university was that religious schools accepted students with lower grade point averages.

The guesthouse where he was captured was used by both students and terrorist operatives. Four fellow prisoners later reported having seen him fighting or undergoing training in Afghanistan, but Judge Kessler found their accounts unpersuasive, flawed by inconsistencies, contradictions and mental illness.

She rejected the government’s so-called mosaic theory, which asserted that the pattern of indications of terrorist ties added up to a strong case. “If the individual pieces of a mosaic are inherently flawed,” she wrote, “then the mosaic will split apart.” Ultimately, the government may not have had much faith in its own case, since it chose not to appeal Judge Kessler’s order.

Brent N. Rushforth, a lawyer in Washington who represents Mr. Ahmed, said his client never supported terrorism and was known as “the sweet kid” to other prisoners. “Alla has never exhibited any bitterness,” he said.

Yemen, with a population of 24 million, is a fragile state plagued by a separatist insurgency and a growing presence from the group called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. American officials say the government is weak and does not control parts of the country; the escape of 23 terrorism suspects in 2006 shook confidence in Yemen’s counterterrorism capabilities. That is why, even as 117 Saudis and 197 Afghans have left Guantánamo, only 16 Yemenis have been transferred.

Yemeni authorities say that none of those have joined terrorist groups, and that Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver, who spent nearly seven years at Guantánamo and whose legal challenge led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling, is leading a quiet life as a cabby in Sana.

But given the instability, some experts say, the administration is right not to simply send most of the Yemenis home. “Right now, there’s no comprehensive program to integrate these guys back into Yemeni society,” said Christopher Boucek, who studies Yemen as an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

John O. Brennan, a presidential adviser on counterterrorism and a former C.I.A. station chief in Saudi Arabia, has made repeated trips there and to Yemen, trying to persuade the Saudis to accept a large number of Yemenis in their rehabilitation program. But Saudi officials have balked, in part because of the negative publicity when 11 of the program’s graduates turned up on a Saudi list of most-wanted terrorists in February.

American officials still have a high opinion of the Saudi program. But Mr. Boucek said it depended on the involvement of relatives, who participated with the former militants and helped police their behavior.

That means that the Saudi program might work for the roughly 20 Yemenis at Guantánamo who grew up in Saudi Arabia or have relatives there. For the rest, he said, the Saudi program is “a catastrophically bad idea.”

American and Yemeni officials are now discussing how Yemen might build its own version of the Saudi program.

“It won’t be quick, and it will cost some money,” Mr. Boucek said. “But I think it may be the best choice among a bunch of not very good alternatives.”

Overdue Process

Adam Serwer | August 17, 2009

The cavernous room in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., was nearly empty, except for a few journalists holding yellow legal pads. A small parade of government lawyers marched in and rested their briefcases on their desks before approaching the trio of lawyers representing Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan national who was detained in 2002 after being accused of throwing a grenade at an American convoy, injuring several American soldiers. He was between 12 and 17 years old at the time and has been in U.S. custody for seven years. The hearing, held in June, was not related to Jawad's guilt or innocence. Rather, it was his habeas corpus proceeding -- the legal challenge to the government's ability to hold him in the first place.

It is widely believed that Jawad's confession, offered to Afghan authorities shortly after his capture, was coerced through torture. Jawad is illiterate, and the confession was written in a dialect he didn't speak, accompanied by a separate page bearing only his thumbprint. His military defense attorney, Maj. Eric Montalvo, says that as soon as Jawad was asked about the incident in a language he could understand, he denied everything. Then, Montalvo says, Jawad was handed over to American interrogators who tortured him ("They did things that were classified"). After Jawad attempted suicide in his Guantánamo cell in 2003, he was subjected to the government's "frequent flyer" program, in which the detainee is moved from cell to cell every few hours for days or weeks on end, in order to deny him sleep.

Because Jawad was technically captured "on the battlefield," he appeared before a military commission in 2007. At the hearing, the presiding judge threw out the coerced confessions and the original prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned in disgust, penning a letter in which he denounced the commissions as a travesty. Jawad has been denied a criminal trial, where his culpability might be determined according to the high standards of federal courts. "Under the Bush administration, there was this attempt to blur the criminal-justice system and the military-justice system and create this hybrid system that lacked due-process safeguards," says Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for Human Rights Watch. "We hoped that during the Obama administration we'd be able to put those pieces back where they belong. That doesn't seem to be happening."

At the habeas hearing in June, the Department of Justice was scheduled to submit a series of documents regarding Jawad's detention that had been collected by an Obama administration task force investigating Guantánamo and U.S. detention policy. But Justice Department attorney James Gilligan informed Jawad's lawyers that the department was unable to provide the documents on the grounds that the information was "protected." When Maj. David Frakt, one of Jawad's lawyers, asked when the documents would be ready, Gilligan just chuckled. An uncomfortable silence fell on the group as Frakt stared at Gilligan. "I don't know," Gilligan finally said.

Watching the proceedings, Montalvo, shrugged and said, "The government has no case. They know it. They're stalling."

The story is an old one for Jawad's lawyers -- they believe the government knows it cannot justify holding him, but it doesn't want to let him go. More galling to Jawad's defense counsel is the fact that the government sought to include Jawad's confessions to Afghan authorities, obtained through torture, as evidence against his release. In July, his lawyers filed a motion to suppress the confessions, which made up about 90 percent of the evidence against him. This time, the government chose not to challenge the motion -- but failed to commit to his release. Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle eviscerated the government for having little cause to continue holding him. "This guy has been there seven years -- seven years," Huvelle said. "Without his statements, I don't understand your case. I really don't."

At the core of the dispute over the detention of suspects like Jawad is whether or not there are, as President Barack Obama claims, "detainees at Guantánamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people." This is the so-called "fifth category" of detainees -- exactly how many there are, the government has yet to determine. (Assistant Attorney General David Kris told Congress in July that half of the Guantánamo detainees' cases had been reviewed, and none had yet been put into the "fifth category.") "There will be some, who we have picked up and who are in Guantánamo ? who for a variety of reasons can't be prosecuted," says former CIA counsel Jeff Smith. "We have convincing intelligence information, but it is not enough to prosecute them."

Frakt isn't buying the administration's assertion about the necessity of preventive detention -- the practice of imprisoning suspected terrorists even in cases where the government cannot prove they have committed crimes. "When you look at the minimal amount of evidence required to convict someone of something like material support for terrorism, and they don't even have that much, how is it that we know that these people are so dangerous?" he asks. Frakt's concerns likely have a great deal to do with the way the government has treated his client -- and not only because it tried to get his coerced confession admitted as evidence.

Montalvo says government officials "believe they have a guilty guy who tried to hurt Americans." But after seven years of failing to justify his detention, the government agreed on July 29 to release Jawad to return home to Afghanistan -- though it implied he might still be subject to criminal prosecution.

In his inauguration speech, Obama declared, "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." And in his first weeks in office, he took some important first steps to that end. He outlawed the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (the Bush administration's euphemism for torture), suspended military commissions, and ordered Guantánamo closed within a year. But when it came to detainees like Jawad, Obama found that Bush had set a precedent that was difficult to break. "It ultimately comes down to a question of risk aversion," says Matthew Waxman, who was the deputy secretary of defense for detainee affairs from 2004 to 2005. "How much risk is the government willing to take in releasing someone who is believed to pose a continuing danger?"

***

In a different era, Mohammed Jawad might have had his day in federal court -- he would have been able to face his accusers, to hear the evidence against him, and to be tried by a jury rather than by a panel of military judges. Prior to September 11, 2001, the federal government's approach to terrorist suspects tasked the CIA with intelligence-gathering, while the FBI's responsibility was to take that intelligence and build prosecutable cases. But the Bush administration, fearing that the FBI's approach was too expensive and time consuming, and therefore unsafe, began relying on the CIA's determinations alone. "For wide swaths of counterterrorism policy that were now being conducted under a law-of-war framework, the FBI's role relative to the Defense Department and the CIA was probably diminished," Waxman says. The administration began apprehending people on the basis of intelligence, and the information implicating the captured, no matter how reliable, would often be inadmissible in court because of its origin.

For Bush administration officials, that didn't really matter; they didn't intend to bring many terrorists to trial. Their new framework treated most terrorist suspects not as criminals, as they had originally been classified, but as "enemy combatants" -- akin to soldiers in a conventional war, in which detainees are released after a peace accord is signed. But because the war against terrorism has no definable end point, the Bush administration asserted the authority to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects -- including those whose confessions had been wrung out of them through torture. The detainees would be tried, the Bush administration announced in 2002, in military tribunals that required less evidence than civilian courts do to convict defendants, therefore increasing the possibility of conviction.

Legal experts declared the administration's actions unconstitutional, and the left set out to prove it in court. In a series of high-profile cases, individual lawyers and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union scored one victory after another in establishing due-process rights for detainees. In 2004, Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal filed a brief on behalf of detainees in Rasul v. Bush, in which the Supreme Court found that U.S. courts had jurisdiction over deciding whether or not detainees were wrongfully imprisoned. In 2005, Congress, prompted by media reports detailing the Bush administration's torture policies, passed the Detainee Treatment Act, which further clarified the government's obligation to abide by prohibitions against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. The following year, Katyal was the lead counsel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which established that the Bush military tribunals were unconstitutional. The lawsuit also forced the Bush administration to go to Congress for the authority to detain "enemy combatants" and try them in military courts. (That authority was granted by the 2006 Military Commissions Act.) In the series of rulings, the Supreme Court established that the government's obligation to the Constitution did not end at American shores.

Yet these legal victories created few changes for the detainees the government was intent on keeping. Real reform -- a whole new approach to fighting terrorism -- would have to wait for a new administration, one as concerned with preserving the rule of law as protecting the country. For the civil-liberties left, a young senator from Illinois -- a former constitutional-law professor -- seemed like he was just the man for the job. On the campaign trail, candidate Barack Obama was fearless in the face of conservative demagoguery on national security -- he even said that if he managed to capture Osama bin Laden, he would subject him to a jury trial to avoid making him a martyr. He pledged to institute a system for trying detainees based on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which has rules similar to those in federal courts. Some civil-liberties advocates dared to hope that if Obama was elected their fight would be over.

As the Bush years drew to a close, however, a rift began to open on the intellectual left. There was still near-unanimous agreement that torture was deplorable and that detainees had a right to due process, but the coalition was divided on the issue of preventive detention. While some groups, like the ACLU, continue to advocate for a "charge or release" policy in all circumstances, independent legal experts are engaged in a vigorous debate about how -- and when -- it is constitutionally permissible to hold suspects against whom we have scant evidence.

An early sign of the split came in 2007 when Katyal, one of the legal heroes in the fight for detainee rights, co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times with former Bush lawyer Jack Goldsmith, who was responsible for retracting the legal rationale for the "enhanced interrogations." Katyal and Goldsmith argued that Congress should "establish a comprehensive system of preventive detention that is overseen by a national security court composed of federal judges with life tenure." The national-security courts would resemble the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts that grant the government wiretap authority -- they would have access to classified information and be able to grant or reject the government's authority to detain an individual, based on the evidence presented. This, according to Katyal and Goldsmith, would help the executive branch cope with those detainees who are being held on the basis of solid intelligence, while preventing the government from holding others based on tenuous evidence.

Civil-liberties groups criticized Katyal's proposal, saying it resembled the policies they had been fighting against for the past six years. They were even more surprised when, in December 2008, another longtime champion of civil liberties, Katyal's Georgetown University colleague David Cole, published a series of articles calling for a statute permitting preventive detention of members of groups that have declared war against the United States. "Terrorism ? is a crime. Just like murder is a crime, just like rape is a crime. We don't have preventive detention for those crimes. So terrorism ought to have nothing to do with whether you have a preventive detention statute or not," Cole says. "But war should have something to do with it." The government, Cole argues, should be able to indefinitely detain members of al-Qaeda or a similar organization, whether they're captured in a combat zone or not.

"Is this the same David Cole who appeared on panels with me over the last few years and who didn't seem in those years to have any daylight between him and the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, or Human Rights First on the principle of try-or-release?" asked American University law professor Kenneth Anderson on the legal blog Opinio Juris in December 2008. If preventive detention "is sensible and legal now," he continued, "why wasn't it sensible and legal during the Bush years?"

Others warned that limiting preventive detention to al-Qaeda members would prove impossible. "Al-Qaeda is not like the German army, not like the Japanese army. There are no membership requirements," says Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer with the ACLU who represented Jawad. "It is a diffuse organization and can spin into or become other organizations."

Some of the debate boils down to where a suspect is captured. Most civil-liberties advocates, including groups like Human Rights Watch, concede that the military has the authority to detain those it captures in a zone of combat, treating them as though they were enemy soldiers. Indeed, that authority is already granted by Congress under the 2001 law that authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan. But they believe that individuals captured away from combat zones should be tried in civilian courts. And suspects like Jawad, who were captured in a combat zone and tortured into implicating themselves, should be released.

Jawad's case is not just a test of how the Obama administration will handle the suspects detained during the Bush era. It's an indication of how the administration intends to detain and try terrorist suspects in the future. The Obama administration has been struggling with a fundamental question that the fractured intellectual left is finding difficult to answer: Is it possible to fight terrorism without abandoning the law?

***

At the American Constitution Society's annual convention in June, Noel Francisco, a former Bush lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel, appeared on a panel alongside several longtime critics of Bush policy who had recently been hired by the Obama administration. Francisco noted with a hint of smugness that the issues surrounding terrorist suspects were not as simple as the left once implied. "What about the detainees that you really don't have any admissible evidence against, or the ones that frankly, you don't think committed crimes but if you release, you're pretty sure will take up arms against you again? There's not a good answer to that question," he said. "Guantánamo Bay, for better or for worse, was the best thing that we could come up with. And what you're all struggling with now is, what is the best thing you could come up with? And it's not that easy."

In a May speech on national security, Obama declared, "I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al-Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture -- like other prisoners of war -- must be prevented from attacking us again." He then sparked outrage from some civil-liberties advocates when he went on to say that he would revive the Bush administration's military commissions with some modifications -- such as the exclusion of evidence obtained through torture -- to ensure due process.

What makes Obama's embrace of military commissions so strange is that the government hasn't had any trouble trying terrorists in federal courts -- indeed, administration officials have said they will attempt to try most terrorist suspects that way. A Human Rights First study showed that since the 1990s, 91 percent of terrorist suspects tried in civilian courts have been convicted, and the remaining 9 percent were later imprisoned on lesser charges. This is a conviction rate more suited to Vladimir Putin's Russia than to the United States -- something civil-liberties groups would likely be protesting if they weren't so busy trying to get terrorist suspects their day in court in the first place.

With that kind of record, who needs preventive detention? Obama does, his defenders argue, explaining that the president has inherited an untenable situation. Even if he changes the policy so that, in the future, the United States only detains those against whom we have solid evidence, we are still left with the detainees whose cases were bungled by the Bush administration. Those who were tortured into implicating themselves probably can't be tried at all. But at least thus far, the administration has made an effort to treat suspects as if it intends to bring them to trial. After a federal judge issued a ruling in April granting habeas rights to prisoners at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan who were captured away from the battlefield, the administration sent in the FBI to read the prisoners their Miranda rights. "These are cases where they are looking at potential criminal charges," said Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command. "We're comfortable with this."

Cole says the notion that the Obama administration is simply continuing Bush's counterterrorism policies isn't true. "The important difference is that Obama is saying we will be guided and governed by the rule of law," Cole says. "Bush was saying quite the opposite." The distinction is a legalistic but important one: The Bush administration believed that there were simply no limits to the president's power in wartime. By insisting that its power to detain suspects is granted by Congress, the Obama administration has conceded that such authority is subject to oversight from other branches of government -- and can ultimately be taken away. And unlike the Bush administration's dismissal of civil libertarians and human-rights advocates, the Obama administration has been actively soliciting their views as it figures out how to proceed with the detainees in custody.

The administration has said it is working to come up with a constitutional preventive-detention policy. In the meantime, federal courts have been hashing out the finer points of preventive detention, implicitly accepting that some form of detention is constitutional. Ben Wittes, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, argues that now is the time for civil-liberties advocates to step up and define what a preventive-detention policy should look like. "Human-rights groups are very quick to denounce proposals for what I think of as framework legislation to govern detentions that we are already doing," Wittes says.

As the clock ticks closer to the deadline for closing Guantánamo and deciding the fate of the detainees there, many left-leaning legal and national-security experts have weighed in. Most believe preventive detention should remain confined to the battlefield. "If this is where the administration is headed -- as opposed to seeking some broad new preventive detention authority," Deborah Pearlstein, a national-security expert who teaches at Princeton University, wrote at Opinio Juris, "I'm prepared to wait a few extra months to get there."

In late July, the day after the government agreed to release Jawad, Judge Huvelle's once-empty courtroom was packed with buzzing reporters. Government lawyers refused to say for certain whether Jawad might actually make it home to Afghanistan or whether they would criminally indict him before his transfer. Huvelle seemed to discourage the government from pushing for prosecution, here or in Afghanistan. "Enough has been imposed on this young man to date," she said. "I hope the government will succeed in getting him sent back home."

The lawyers closest to the detainees are still pushing Obama to reject preventive detention entirely. Now that Jawad may have found some small measure of justice, they have a renewed sense of hope in the administration. "The pendulum is swinging back, the rule of law is being restored," Frakt says. "They're trying to make change in a very thoughtful, deliberate way." Pointing out that detainees have won 29 out of the last 34 habeas cases, Frakt is cautiously optimistic that the Obama administration will do the right thing on preventive detention. "If these are the 'worst of the worst' then we were all misled as a country. And I think that's what they're finding."

Bin Laden's Driver Talks

Salim Ahmed Hamdan opens up to the Star about putting his past lives — as an Al Qaeda insider and Guantanamo's most famous detainee — behind him and starting over as a taxi driver raising two young daughters in Yemen

August 17, 2009

Michelle Shephard
National Security Reporter

SANA'A, YEMEN–Salim Ahmed Hamdan opens the arched blue door to his home, sending a shaft of light outside that illuminates the evening street life of stray cats and young boys kicking stones.

The electricity has just come back on following the regular blackouts that occur after sunset.

Ducking inside, Hamdan slips off his sandals as two girls in identical outfits, thick red plastic belts cinching their tiny waists, step forward, extending their hennaed hands. The youngest, Selma, tries to keep her mouth closed to hide the gap where a baby tooth just fell out.

Hamdan smiles: "These are my daughters."

It is odd to see Guantanamo's most famous prisoner, the former chauffeur to terrorist Osama bin Laden, in such a prosaic domestic setting. Captured in Afghanistan in 2001, the former Al Qaeda insider who rubbed shoulders with those plotting to bomb Western targets is now simply a father of two young girls and husband to Umm Fatima.

Over three days last week, Hamdan gave a Star reporter and photographer a glimpse into his new life and talked about his desire to move past his former ones – with Al Qaeda and as the Gitmo prisoner who appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and won.

He doesn't want to talk about working for bin Laden and would prefer to stay out of the headlines. "Hamdan this, Hamdan that, Hamdan all the time," he says in English with a wave of his hand.

But the 39-year-old knows that the international focus on Gitmo prisoners like him will not fade while closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base remains an issue for the Obama administration. And he agreed to talk publicly for the first time since being captured in November 2001 and shipped off to Cuba, because he says he cares about many of the nearly 230 remaining detainees, including Toronto-born captive Omar Khadr and the Yemenis he befriended while in custody.

They need a chance to rebuild their lives as he is trying to do, he says.

As he talks, reclining on cushions in his sitting room, his gaze often lingers on Selma. She's almost 8 years old but didn't get to know her father until he was released from prison eight months ago.

HAMDAN LEFT Guantanamo the way he had arrived – as a captive, handcuffed and shackled, his eyes covered with goggles and his ears with headphones. The military aircraft flew him directly from the Caribbean naval base to this southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, refuelling midflight. When he finally landed, an immigration official asked for his passport. Hamdan turned to his American escort and said, "Ask him."

Of the nearly 800 detainees who have been held at Guantanamo, only a few cases or names have gained international recognition like Hamdan's. Aside from Khadr, there is Australian David Hicks, the kangaroo skinner turned Talib, who returned home two years ago after his government lobbied for his release. In Britain, former prisoner Moazzam Begg has become a well-known human rights advocate and public speaker. Then there are the four Uighur detainees who were sent to Bermuda and are now working on a golf-course grounds crew.

But when Guantanamo recedes into history, it is the legal case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that will be remembered as the beginning of the end for the notorious prison. The landmark ruling concluded that president George W. Bush had abused his executive power and that Guantanamo was not beyond the reach of the U.S. courts.

The case was fodder for a bestselling book. George Clooney is reportedly planning a film in which he will play former navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Hamdan's Pentagon-appointed defence lawyer.

Hamdan's military commission last year also made history as the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II. A panel of six military officers convicted him of providing material support to terrorism, but acquitted him of the more serious charge of conspiracy. His lawyers depicted him as a lowly foot soldier who needed a job but felt "betrayed by bin Laden" when he learned of the 9/11 attacks.

A psychiatrist testified Hamdan was disturbed by the images of the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon being attacked by planes manned by his Al Qaeda colleagues. It "was hard on his soul," the psychiatrist recalled him saying. Hamdan told her he felt "that his head was going to explode."

SO HOW did a man with such seeming empathy end up as a chauffeur for Osama bin Laden?

Hamdan's indoctrination into Al Qaeda began when he was 26. He was poor and had nothing to do, so he left his home in picturesque Wadi Hadramaut and sought work in the capital, Sana'a. One day, lingering outside a mosque, he was asked if he would travel and was seduced by stories of jihad. Along with about 35 others, he agreed to go fight the Soviet occupation of Tajikistan but was eventually turned away at the border and travelled instead to Afghanistan in 1996, where bin Laden was bolstering Al Qaeda's ranks.

With his fourth-grade education and little promise of a decent life at home, Hamdan embraced becoming a holy warrior. As the years went on, he began scouting locations for meetings or driving bin Laden for a salary of $200 a month.

At his military trial his lawyers contended he was never fully committed to the life of a terrorist, or part of the inner group that knew of the 9/11 attacks. And once in Al Qaeda, it was hard to get out. He was part of the brotherhood.

Prosecutors countered that Hamdan was nonetheless a cog in Al Qaeda's machine and they repeatedly invoked the victims of the 9/11 attacks to persuade the military jurors. The Pentagon wanted Hamdan imprisoned for a minimum of 30 years. Instead, he was sentenced to 5 1/2 years with credit for time served.

The judge, navy Capt. Keith Allred, told Hamdan: "I hope the day comes that you return to your wife and daughters and your country, and you're able to be a provider, a father and a husband in the best sense of all those terms."

Hamdan replied, "Inshallah" – God willing.

CONSIDERING YEMEN is one of the most desperate countries in the Middle East, with a 35 per cent unemployment rate, a Shiite rebellion raging in the northwest and a separatist movement in the south, Hamdan is fortunate.

Of the 15 Guantanamo detainees repatriated in Yemen over the past seven years, Hamdan is surviving better than most. He gets by with the only skill he knows well – driving.

It's not easy. Tourism has all but dried up due to the recent violence and it is rare to see a foreigner who isn't an embassy official with restrictions on where he or she can travel due to security concerns. Some days Hamdan's taxi fares do not cover the 3,000 Yemeni rials (roughly $15 U.S.) he pays for the car's use.

But he is a good taxi driver – an essential asset here in the late afternoons when the effects of the leafy narcotic khat take hold and the streets morph into what seems a violent video game with glazed-eyed masters at the controls. The Star paid him $70 to pick up another interviewee because so many people testified to his superb driving skills.

Recently, Hamdan's team of lawyers came here to visit him, along with the defence team's Baltimore translator, Towson University professor Charles Schmitz. ("He's Yemeni, not American," Hamdan says of his U.S. advocate and friend Chuck).

As the team emerged from the airport, they recognized Selma and her older sister Fatima from pictures Hamdan had shown them in Guantanamo. The girls ran to hug them before Hamdan strolled across the street. "You don't get many moments like that," said Harry Schneider, a lawyer with Seattle firm Perkins Coie. "It was something special."

Hamdan's name might be well-known in the country where he was born, but his face is not. As he walks along the market's narrow cobblestone pathways packed with vendors, their cheeks bulging with khat, what draws attention is the presence of foreigners, not Hamdan. He says that's why he invited the Star to take pictures of his daughters on the condition that he not be photographed himself.

Many prisoners who return from Guantanamo, or any jail for that matter, come back to a place they no longer know. But not when home is Yemen, the poor southern neighbour of Saudi Arabia, with a history that reaches into antiquity and where large swaths of the countryside abide by tribal laws of justice and retribution. Local magazine Yemen Today recently published a photo retrospective comparing historic pictures from decades ago to the same shot today. The only difference in most of the photos was that the modern images were in colour.

Hamdan agrees that it's not the daily routine here that is hard. It's getting over the memories of Guantanamo. "Everyone needs time to adjust" is all he will say, preferring not to talk in detail about those years spent in the U.S. prison.

As U.S. President Barack Obama focuses on closing Gitmo, he will have to consider where to send the nearly 100 remaining Yemeni detainees, some of whom are considered dangerous but cannot be prosecuted due to insufficient or tainted evidence.

There is a fear that after seven years in custody, even the innocent may harbour a deadly grudge.

WASHINGTON UNDERSTANDABLY views Yemen as a problem country, doubting the government's ability to control a burgeoning Al Qaeda movement, which claimed responsibility for last fall's deadly attack on the American embassy.

It's not unusual for Yemenis to say they support Al Qaeda's ideology, and discussions over the daily afternoon khat-chewing sessions often turn to the oppression of Muslims and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or, increasingly, Somalia. And the ungoverned, autonomous tribal regions in the north have long made the country an attractive sanctuary for extremists.

Negotiations are reportedly ongoing with Saudi Arabia to send the Yemenis who will not be prosecuted to the neighbouring kingdom's rehabilitation program. But cultural, political and religious differences may make the program's effectiveness doubtful.

"Sending them to Saudi Arabia is illogical and probably counterproductive," argues Barbara Bodine, the U.S. ambassador in Yemen from 1997 to 2001. "Saudis and Yemenis are no more interchangeable than French and the Swiss, possibly less. Common language and common border do not equate to common culture."

The past success of the Saudi program, says Bodine, was mainly due to lavish incentives – houses, cars, arranged marriages – and threats to comply or risk consequences to their family. "It is doubtful the Saudis would want to provide that level of incentive to Yemenis, and how useful are they if the Yemenis are to return home?"

There is no doubt Obama's effort to mend relations between the U.S. and the greater Muslim community have had an impact. But there is a time limit to that goodwill, and in Yemen the fate of the Guantanamo prisoners is critical.

Hamdan is not among the optimists who believe Obama is dramatically different from his predecessor. "Every day, every day, they say he can't do something," he says sipping coffee on the rooftop terrace of the Burj Al Salam hotel, as the muezzins' cries from the city's dozens of mosques reverberate in a cacophony below.

When asked if he believes Guantanamo will close its doors by the deadline of Jan. 22, 2010, and if dozens of his former cellmates will be repatriated, Hamdan pauses before answering.

"Inshallah."

Toronto Star

The Go-Between: Interpreting Life in Bermuda for Freed Gitmo Prisoners

By PAULO PRADA

HAMILTON, Bermuda -- Rushan Abbas climbed the stone steps of Camden, the official residence of Bermuda's premier, earlier this summer and led three island newcomers into a stately receiving room where the Rev. Al Sharpton was waiting.

"Thank you for your valuable time," said Ms. Abbas, after interpreting Rev. Sharpton's greeting to the three men into Uighur, an obscure language of central Asia.

Being Uighur Muslims from western China -- and having spent the past seven years as prisoners at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- the men really had no idea who the American civil-rights activist is.

Rushan Abbas

The task of explaining many such mysteries to the freed Uighurs has fallen to Ms. Abbas, a 42-year-old former office worker and mother of three in Fresno, Calif. Since 2002, her rare combination of language skills, passports and Uighur activism has made Ms. Abbas the primary link between Guantanamo's Uighur detainees and a world far removed from the Afghan hamlets where they were living just before the U.S. military captured them early in its hunt for al Qaeda.

The men say they were passing through the region at the time after fleeing China, where Uighurs, a people of Turkic descent, have long been an oppressed minority. In early July, clashes between Uighurs and residents from China's Han majority led to 197 deaths in Xinjiang province, which is home to most Chinese Uighurs.

Ms. Abbas had never worked as an interpreter before Sept. 11, 2001. She has since gone from a sales job in California, through the barbed wire of Guantanamo, to the private jet that Bermuda chartered to retrieve the Uighurs after the U.S. government freed them June 11. In the process, Ms. Abbas, a native Uighur and a naturalized U.S. citizen, went from helping the Defense Department interrogate prisoners to working for their release.

"She got into this expecting vicious, throat-slitting terrorists," says Sabin Willett, a Boston lawyer who helped free the Uighurs. "Now she's helping to demythologize those men."

After the Uighurs were released, Ms. Abbas spent two weeks easing their transition. Now, after a recent move from Fresno to Washington, D.C., she is on standby to fly to Palau, in case a deal is finalized with the Pacific island nation to accept 13 remaining Guantanamo Uighurs.

"I have to explain almost everything," says Ms. Abbas. The visit from Rev. Sharpton, she explained to the men and to a fourth colleague who didn't make the meeting, was a show of support for Bermuda's government, which had caught political flak for accepting them.

In addition to interpreting, Ms. Abbas coordinated everything from meals to visits from Bermudan lawyers and government employees who are helping them find homes, English classes and work. On Monday, the Uighurs began jobs as landscapers at the state-owned Port Royal Golf Course.

As they settled in at the oceanside guesthouse where they first arrived, Ms. Abbas baked bread, fried flounder, and made halwa, a sweet confection. "She's our translator, our assistant, and our chef," says Abdullah Abdulqadir, 30, the most jovial of the four men.

Ms. Abbas was born in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province and the city where the recent violence erupted. Her father, a scientist, befriended an American researcher who invited Ms. Abbas to study in the U.S. once she had finished a biology degree at Xinjiang University. In 1989, she moved to Prosser, Wash., studied plant pathology at Washington State University, fell in love with a professor and married. Over the next seven years, Ms. Abbas had three children, became a U.S. citizen and grew active in Uighur-American circles.

In 1998, when U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia launched a Uighur language service, Ms. Abbas became the sole female voice on the channel, communicating world news to western China and other Uighur areas. In 2000, she quit radio to work in sales for an exporter of animal feed.

Then, as she recalls it, one Saturday morning a few months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the phone rang. "I've been looking for you for weeks," the voice on the line said.

It was an executive at Titan Corp., now owned by L-3 Communications Corp., which was providing interpreters for the U.S. military. The company needed her in Guantanamo, where a small group of captured Uighurs had recently been shipped.

Three weeks later, she was in Cuba, in fatigues, interpreting the interrogation of a Uighur detainee. After the interview, the detainee told interrogators he would like to speak with Ms. Abbas. "You are Rushan Abbas," the prisoner said. He and others recognized her voice from Radio Free Asia.

A U.S. government official said that some of the Uighurs before their capture lived at times in suspected terrorist training camps. Investigators, though, never had enough evidence to prove they were indeed "enemy combatants," the official said.

Frustrated with what she describes as fruitless and repetitive interviews, Ms. Abbas resigned from her Guantanamo post in 2002, and returned to another sales job in California.

In early 2003, the military transferred the Uighurs to a medium-security portion of Guantanamo. Since then, the U.S. has been unable to free most of them. They can't return to China, where the government considers them separatists. China has warned other countries not to accept them.

In 2005, a group of U.S. law firms launched a pro bono effort to free the Uighurs, but had trouble communicating with the detainees. "Get Rushan," one of the detainees told the lawyers.

Over the past three years, Ms. Abbas made more than 20 trips to Guantanamo. She left her job and $65,000 salary and now free-lances for the law firms.

Last October, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. must release the 17 Uighurs who remained at Guantanamo. The four in Bermuda were going to be sent in May to live in Virginia, but local and state officials protested.

Once Bermuda accepted them, Ms. Abbas helped the men understand that they would no longer be treated as prisoners. "I thought we would still be wearing shackles," says Salahidin Abdulahat, 32, recalling their surprise when they stepped into the chartered jet and saw couches, a phone and a microwave.

Before leaving Bermuda for home, Ms. Abbas made sure the Uighurs had some things they needed to adjust to a free life in the West. "I really liked the Wii," said Mr. Abdulahat, boasting how well he played a virtual bowling game the men had in their final week at Guantanamo. Ms. Abbas interpreted. Within seconds, a Bermuda government worker across the table was on the phone pricing gadgets.

Write to Paulo Prada at paulo.prada@wsj.com

Residents of Michigan Town Want Prison to Stay Open, Even If That Means Housing Guantanamo Bay Detainees

By Kari Lydersen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 5, 2009

STANDISH, Mich., Aug. 4 -- From the road, the Standish Maximum Correctional Facility looks like it could be a country resort, lush wooded grounds surrounded by corn fields and flower beds.

Prison employees and residents of this northern Michigan town are proud of the facility and want to keep it open at all costs, even if that means becoming the new home of Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The news that the Obama administration is considering moving some detainees at the military prison in Cuba to facilities within U.S. borders, including Standish and Fort Leavenworth, Kan., prompted Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm (D) and several state legislators Tuesday to voice their opposition. But residents here are most concerned about keeping some of the 340 jobs and other economic sustenance the prison provides, in a county where unemployment tops 17 percent.

A hand-painted sign outside the lockup begs "Save Our Town, Save Standish Max," referring to the collection of buildings behind razor-topped fencing that contains 604 beds, usually reserved for maximum-security inmates. Throughout the quaint, somewhat ramshackle borough of 1,500 people, marquees and handmade posters outside churches, bars and Denise's Beauty Barn carry the same message.

The facility is one of three prisons and five correctional camps slated to close because of the state budget crisis and a declining prison population. The Michigan Corrections Department needs to cut $120 million from its $2 billion budget for the fiscal year that will start in October, and 500 to 1,000 jobs will be lost with the closings.

State officials are making a last-ditch effort to turn Standish into a medium-security facility for about 1,100 California prisoners. They also proposed housing inmates from Alaska.

And then there is the Guantanamo Bay option.

Some residents loathe the idea of terrorism suspects locked up in their town, but relish the chance to keep people employed. Others scoff at the notion that current guards would keep their jobs in a federal facility housing such detainees. State and federal spokesmen said they had no information on likely hiring practices.

"The state officers are more than capable of doing anything the federal government would have us do," said Bob Davis, president of the local corrections officers union. "But if they bring them here, I think we'll be cut out of jobs. They'll want their own personnel, there will be CIA all over the place."

Standish warden Thomas Birkett first heard about the proposal on television over the weekend. "There had been rumors, but no one in our department knows what it means, no one can tell you anything," he said.

Over the past few months, former governor John Engler (R) and Michigan legislators and business leaders brought up the idea of housing Guantanamo Bay detainees in the state. Engler proposed putting them in the sparsely populated and remote Upper Peninsula, which has two maximum-security facilities.

Standish City Manager Michael Moran III supports bringing the detainees to town. Even if locals do not keep their jobs, he said, the economic stimulus would be crucial. The prison pays the town $36,000 per month in water and sewer fees, and new employees would help keep businesses afloat. If the prison closes, teachers probably will lose jobs as school enrollment drops, post office revenue will plummet, and family-owned restaurants and bars will suffer. The town is home to small factories making fire sprinklers, pet food and plastic parts, but the prison is by far the biggest employer.

Elementary school teacher Kitty Campau wants to keep the prison open, but she considers Guantanamo Bay detainees a last resort.

"That scares me," she said after choir practice at a Catholic church whose parishioners have been protesting the closure plan. "We have high-risk prisoners there now, but not terrorists."

Michigan Sen. Carl M. Levin (D) and Reps. Dale E. Kildee (D) and Bart Stupak (D), who represents Standish, have supported the idea of bringing Guantanamo Bay detainees to the state. On the question of whether Standish should be the site, Stupak said he will reserve his opinion until federal and state officials have further studied economic and security issues.

Officials from the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security will visit potential sites for Guantanamo Bay detainees in the next few weeks, Stupak's office said. Michigan corrections spokesman John Cordell said the California deal may be finalized soon, which could mean no inmates from the prison in Cuba.

"It's hard to believe the feds and lawmakers could get their act together overnight, and California could make a decision any minute now," said Mel Grieshaber, executive director of the Michigan Corrections Organization, the union representing prison guards.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.) said he opposes bringing Guantanamo Bay detainees to Michigan, based on information he sees as the ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He thinks locals would be endangered by affiliates of the detainees coming to the area.

"If President Obama wants to move Gitmo jihadists to Standish, I would hope he would brief the local officials and guards," he said. "I want to make sure everyone has a much more comprehensive view of who these people are and the threat they pose to those in the facility and the community. I think if they knew what I know, they would make the same decision as me. Michigan can do a lot better than becoming the federal government's penal colony."

During a media call for the Republican National Committee on Tuesday, Rep. Mike Rogers (Mich.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) echoed this sentiment, saying Guantanamo Bay inmates should not be anywhere in the continental United States. Roberts threatened to shut down the Senate before allowing the detainees in Kansas, and Rogers suggested that Guantanamo Bay's name be changed rather than closing the facility.

But auto mechanic Gary Church, 50, laughed at the idea that locals would be in danger.

"If they do get out, they're not going to rob the general store," he said. "They are thinkers and planners, not street criminals. They do big stuff."

New Detainee Facility in U.S. Being Considered for Guantanamo Prisoners

By Peter Finn and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 3, 2009

The administration is considering whether to transfer some detainees at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a facility in the United States that would contain courtrooms to hold federal criminal trials and military commissions to prosecute terrorism suspects, administration officials said Sunday.

The maximum-security facility would be jointly run by the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, with each assuming responsibility for different sets of inmates. Officials said such a facility could also house prisoners held in indefinite detention and those cleared for release but who have no country willing to accept them. Those convicted in federal court or military commissions could serve their terms there.

Officials said administration planners looking for one site for the facility have focused on the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a state maximum-security prison in Standish, Mich., that is scheduled to be closed.

An administration official confirmed that the ideas, which were first reported by the Associated Press on Sunday, have been debated by an interagency task force examining detention policy, but stressed that they have not moved beyond that stage.

"This is one of the ideas that's been floated and come under discussion," the official said, adding that the task force has not decided whether to recommend such a proposal to department heads or, eventually, to President Obama. The official and others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to speak publicly about the issue.

In one of his first acts in the White House, Obama signed an executive order that committed his administration to closing Guantanamo Bay within one year. But those plans have run into fierce political opposition, including from some Democrats, and have prolonged internal debates about how to formulate detention policy.

Administration officials said the transfer plan would mitigate the challenge of scattering detainees across numerous jurisdictions, a move that would require a detailed security plan for each and upgrades for many facilities. A single prison would also localize political opposition and, in the case of Michigan, might draw political backing.

"If state and local officials are supportive, the senator believes the idea should be considered," said Tara Andringa, a spokeswoman for Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.).

Some members of the Michigan congressional delegation initially suggested renovating the prison for Guantanamo Bay detainees as a way to help stimulate the economy through public-works jobs in the state's Upper Peninsula, according to administration and congressional sources. But there has also been bipartisan opposition in the state to closing the prison in Cuba.

The U.S. senators from Kansas, Republicans Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts, have been vocal in their opposition to using Fort Leavenworth to house Guantanamo Bay detainees, arguing that the facility in Cuba should be kept open. They also said that any transfer of detainees to Kansas would undermine the ability of the base's Command and General Staff College to attract foreign military personnel who would be reluctant to attend programs at Fort Leavenworth if former Guantanamo Bay detainees were held there.

"It makes no sense to spend millions and millions of dollars to build what we already have at Guantanamo," Brownback said in a statement Sunday. "Fort Leavenworth is a medium security facility with one maximum security wing that can house only 30 prisoners. That wing could not handle all that is required for detainees, support staff, and court facilities. . . . This is a bad idea chasing after another bad idea on a hurry up timeline."

Congress has blocked the administration from using money to transfer to the United States any of the 229 detainees remaining at Guantanamo Bay. And politicians in both parties have said they want to see a detailed plan from the administration before they would support the arrival of prisoners such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The administration has transferred one Guantanamo Bay detainee to the United States for trial in federal court. Ahmed Ghailani, a Tanzanian, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in June to multiple charges in connection with the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. The attacks killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

An administration official said the creation of a prison-detention-courthouse facility would not preclude the possibility that a select group of detainees might be tried in New York or Virginia, where the Sept. 11 attacks occurred. Mohammed and four other detainees were facing a capital trial before a military commission until the Obama administration suspended proceedings at Guantanamo Bay.

Administration officials insist they are determined to work with Congress, and any new detention policy, as well as a hybrid facility, would almost certainly need legislative backing. Issues such as how jury pools would be formed for federal trials at such a prison have not been resolved.

The administration has said it has cleared more than 50 Guantanamo Bay prisoners for release, and the State Department is negotiating with governments in Europe and elsewhere to find homes for them. If the administration does not transfer some detainees by January, a new stateside facility could include a lower-security unit like the one at the Cuban facility for detainees who have been cleared for release.

The administration has signaled that some Guantanamo Bay detainees will be tried in federal court and some in military commissions. It also said that there may be a third category of prisoners who are deemed too dangerous to release but who cannot be tried because of a lack of evidence or the need to protect intelligence material.

Administration officials said any system of indefinite detention will include legal safeguards such as periodic reviews by judges and congressional oversight. But human rights and civil liberties groups such as Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union oppose detention without trial.

Legal, Diplomatic Issues Stall Guantanamo Detainees' Confinement Challenges

By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 31, 2009

In the 13 months since the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision granting detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their confinements before federal judges, most prisoners still have not had their day in court.

In addition, prisoners who have successfully contested their detentions are having difficulty getting released. Nineteen of 28 detainees ordered freed remain at Guantanamo Bay, ensnared in a diplomatic and legal limbo that has frustrated federal judges, the government and attorneys for detainees.

In the days after the Supreme Court's June 12, 2008, decision, federal judges said they would push the government to swiftly resolve civil lawsuits brought in the District's federal court by about 200 detainees under habeas corpus, a centuries-old legal doctrine that allows prisoners to challenge their confinements before independent arbiters.

But the cases quickly bogged down in appeals court rulings and lengthy fights over legal theories and evidence. In some cases, after years of court battles, the government abandoned allegations on the eve of hearings. That was the case involving a young Afghan detainee who was ordered released Thursday.

In many respects, judges and attorneys for the government and detainees have spent much of their time in the past year tussling over some of the same vexing issues that have stymied two presidents and Congress and recently forced a Justice Department task force to announce that it needed six more months to complete its work.

"These cases are difficult," U.S. District Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth said in an interview about the issue last week. "We are having to develop answers to complicated legal questions. These are novel cases in our country's history."

Judges, lawyers, government officials and outside experts said there are myriad reasons for the sluggish progress, despite the declaration in Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion that "the costs of delay can no longer be borne by those who are held in custody."

Although the opinion was sweeping, the high court gave little guidance in how to handle the lawsuits, forcing judges to create rules and procedures on the fly.

The government's evidence is heavily classified, resulting in cumbersome handling procedures. Judges, for example, cannot take most government documents home to review at night. Instead, most of the judges visit the courthouse on weekends to review Guantanamo Bay files. The work is so time-consuming that the judiciary has assigned federal judges from outside the District to help handle routine civil matters.

Battles over legal issues and evidence have also gobbled up time. Attorneys for detainees have aggressively sought access to medical records and documents that might undermine government allegations. Meanwhile, the government has fought the detainees' requests and has continued to defend cases that judges say are surprisingly weak.

David J. Cynamon, a lawyer representing four detainees, accused the Justice Department of enacting a "scorched-earth defense policy in fighting every issue, big and little, that comes up in the cases."

Justice Department officials counter that they are trying to protect national security and classified information. They also rejected criticism from judges and detainee attorneys about the strength of their cases, saying most of their evidence was collected on chaotic battlefields for intelligence purposes, not for a courtroom.

Judges have generally given the Justice Department wide latitude in what information it can present to justify a detention. They set the bar of proof at "preponderance of the evidence," a standard in which the government wins if the evidence slightly tilts to its side. Since November, the government has won orders -- all by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon -- allowing it to detain five Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

Even so, records and judicial opinions have revealed that many cases are flimsy or even illogical.

Last month, after months of litigation, Leon eviscerated the government's case against a Syrian detainee, saying it was weak and defied "common sense."

Leon even used exclamation points in his opinion to highlight the case's absurdity. Another federal judge, Gladys Kessler, wrote that the government "produced virtually no credible evidence" to justify a Yemeni's confinement.

A third judge has criticized government attorneys for bringing a case against an Afghan because it is "riddled with holes."

"This case is an outrage to me," U.S. District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle said two weeks ago during a hearing on the detention of Mohammed Jawad, who might have been as young as 12 when captured. The Afghan is accused of injuring two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan interpreter in a December 2002 grenade attack.

Under pressure from the judge, the government announced last week that it was no longer contesting Jawad's challenge but was mulling over potential criminal charges instead. Huvelle on Thursday ordered Jawad's release. The government has until at least until Aug. 21 to send him home or charge him.

At Thursday's hearing, the judge criticized the government for its repeated delays in the habeas case. She stopped short of telling the government how to transfer Jawad, saying she didn't have the authority to tread into such territory.

Even when ordered freed, many detainees have remained prisoners. Under a recent appeals court ruling, federal judges have been given little power to enforce the ultimate remedy in habeas challenges: release of prisoners. An appeals court ruled in February that judges cannot order the release of detainees into the United States, and federal judges do not have the power to order other countries to accept detainees.

In another ruling, an appeals court held that judges cannot even compel the government to provide 30 days' notice about an impending transfer.

The decisions have led some judges to delay habeas challenges because the effort seems futile, especially if the government has already designated a detainee for transfer. One judge griped to a colleague that they have the power only to issue "advisory opinions."

Last month, for example, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton delayed proceeding on a detainee's challenge because he did not "see any meaningful purpose in forging ahead."

The case involved Umar Abdulayev, 30, whom the government has approved for release, probably to his home country of Tajikistan. One of Abdulayev's attorneys, Matthew O'Hara, says the detainee does not want to be sent home because he is afraid he might be tortured. He asked Walton to block any such transfer and urged the judge to hold a habeas hearing on the government's evidence. O'Hara said he believes that a ruling in favor of his client might encourage another country to accept him.

Walton denied the request, saying in court that he did not have the power to block a transfer and that a habeas hearing would be pointless in light of the appellate decisions.

The complexities of cases were on display Thursday in a brief hearing before Leon, a judge who has methodically marched through most of his habeas challenges.

In November, Leon ordered the government to engage in diplomatic negotiations to release five Algerians who were picked up in Bosnia in 2001. Since the ruling, the government has transferred three men to Bosnia and one to France. The fifth, Saber Lahmar, 40, remains a prisoner because the government has been unable to find him a home.

Bosnia has apparently refused to accept him. Lahmar is in the same spot as more than a dozen Uighurs, Chinese Muslims who were ordered released but cannot go home because they fear they might be tortured. Four Uighurs were transferred recently to Bermuda, but 13 remain at Guantanamo Bay.

A Justice Department lawyer told Leon on Thursday that the State Department was working hard to find Lahmar a place to live.

The judge said he might eventually order a State Department official to testify to get another progress check. Otherwise there was little else for him to do.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073004116.html