Also In This Issue Guantanamo's Grip · Empty Evidence [an error occurred while processing this directive]

By Corine Hegland, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Feb. 3, 2006

As a result of the habeas corpus petitions filed by attorneys representing Guantanamo detainees, the Defense Department has had to file court documents on 132 of the enemy combatants, or just under a quarter of the prison's population. National Journal undertook a detailed review of the unclassified files to develop profiles of the 132 men. NJ separately reviewed transcripts for 314 prisoners who pleaded their cases before Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo. Taken together, the information provides a picture of who, exactly, has been taken prisoner in the war on terror and is being held in an anomalous U.S. military prison on an island belonging to one of America's bitterest enemies.

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush issued a military order that authorized the Defense Department to detain noncitizens suspected of having ties with Al Qaeda or other terrorists. As a result, hundreds of so-called "enemy combatants" were rounded up and taken to prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since early 2002, lawyers working on a volunteer basis have filed papers with U.S. courts asking the government to explain why it is holding individual prisoners. These habeas corpus petitions have forced disclosures by the Defense Department that shed light on some of the details surrounding the estimated 500 prisoners currently in U.S. captivity.

The Defense Department declined a request to release comparable statistics for all of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

The first thing that jumps out of the statistics is that a majority of the detainees in both groups are not Afghans -- nor were they picked up in Afghanistan as U.S. troops fought the Taliban and Al Qaeda, nor were they picked up by American troops at all. Most are from Arab countries, and most were arrested in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities.

Seventy-five of the 132 men, or more than half the group, are -- like Farouq Ali Ahmed, the subject of National Journal's accompanying story -- not accused of taking part in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. (The 75 include 10 detainees whom the U.S. government "no longer" considers enemy combatants, although at least eight of the 10 are still being held at Guantanamo.) Typically, documents describe these men as "associated" with the Taliban or with Al Qaeda -- sometimes directly so, and sometimes through only weak or distant connections. Several men worked for charities that had some ties to Al Qaeda; Farouq lived in a house associated with the Taliban.

Some of the "associated" men are said to have attended jihadist training camps before September 11, an accusation admitted by some and denied by others. The U.S. government says that some of the suspected jihadists trained in Afghanistan, even though other records show that they had not yet entered the country at the time of the training camps. Just 57 of the 132 men, or 43 percent, are accused of being on a battlefield in post-9/11 Afghanistan.

The government's documents tie only eight of the 132 men directly to plans for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan.

One of the eight, an Australian fundamentalist Muslim, admitted that he trained several of the 9/11 hijackers and intended to hijack a plane himself; another of the eight, a Briton, is said to have targeted 33 Jewish organizations in New York City. Both men were released to their home governments in January 2005. Neither one is facing charges at home.

The Australian says he falsely confessed while undergoing torture in Egypt; the Australian government, which was watching him well before 9/11, has revoked his passport but has said it lacks sufficient information to press terrorism charges against him. The British man was cleared after a few hours of questioning in London.

The remaining six of the eight were arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia, after being accused of planning to attack the American Embassy there; the charge was investigated and dismissed by a judge. The country's human-rights chamber issued an order prohibiting the men from being taken out of the country. The Americans seized them anyway.

The Defense Department accusations fall into only two categories -- those who participated in hostilities and those who did not. But the boundaries between the two categories can be fuzzy. In the nonhostile category, for example, is a suspected Qaeda financier picked up in Pakistan. In the hostile group, on the other hand, are a few men whose most direct link to hostilities appears to be getting wounded by one of the thousands of American bombs dropped on Afghanistan.

One hundred and fifteen of the files also note where the detainees were captured. Only 35 percent of the 115 were arrested in Afghanistan; 55 percent were captured by Pakistani forces in Pakistan.

At least 39 of the arrests made in Pakistan came in the border region, where Qaeda fighters, along with civilian Afghan refugees and nonfighting Arabs, were stampeding out of the country in the fall of 2001, desperate to escape the war. Many of the enemy combatants arrested in that region say they fled the sudden chaos of Afghanistan without retrieving their passports and identification papers and that when they asked to be taken to their embassies, they were taken to prison instead. Many of the men who detailed their capture described being taken through one, two, or three Pakistani prisons before they were delivered to the Americans.

Many, though not all, of the remaining 24 arrests made in Pakistan came in targeted raids on senior Qaeda leaders between January and September 2002. The senior suspects captured in these raids immediately disappeared into CIA custody -- they are not at Guantanamo. But their lesser companions, or others arrested in the same town on the same night, were delivered to Cuba.

Also in this group are at least three men who were picked off Pakistani buses in apparently random sweeps for foreigners, and one man who says he answered a knock on the door of the apartment next to his.

The 314 transcripts released to the Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit give similar results. The 314 men described there included 97 Afghans who were arrested in Afghanistan. But they also included 211 foreigners, 152 of whom -- or more than 70 percent -- were arrested outside of Afghanistan. And 145 of those men were captured in Pakistan. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Need A Reprint Of This Article?
National Journal Group offers both print and electronic reprint services, as well as permissions for academic use, photocopying and republication. Click here to order, or call us at 877-394-7350.