Doug Bandow

Grabbing the Wrong People for Guantanamo

U.S. incarceration and torture of alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay has turned into an international PR disaster.  One of the biggest problems is that so many of the alleged terrorists were essentially kidnap victims, turned over to U.S. officials for bounties.  With no effective way of telling who was who, American officials locked up a lot of people who appear to have had nothing to do with terrorism.

Reports Andy Worthington:

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

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

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

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

The U.S. is entitled to defend itself from attack, but that does not mean willy-nilly grabbing people off the street and holding them for years for no effect.  No wonder America’s reputation suffered so with the Bush administration’s needless abuses of Constitution and liberty.