[wvns] Lt. Col. Abraham's Damning Verdict
Guantánamo Whistleblower Launches a New Attack on Rigged Tribunals
Lt. Col. Abraham's Damning Verdict
By ANDY WORTHINGTON
http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington11202007.html
The media -- both mainstream outlets and the blogosphere -- have spent
the last week consumed by the story of a leaked operating manual from
Guantánamo. This is understandable in some ways. The prison's Standard
Operating Procedures have never been revealed to the public before,
and, while it takes some dedication to stay awake through the numbing
and pedantic attention to detail that drags on through 238 pages,
there is something genuinely shocking about the stark admission that
all incoming detainees are to be held in isolation for the first 30
days "to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization
felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process," which
"concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of
the detainee on the interrogator." At least as worrying is the
additional directive that, during this period, the detainees are to be
prevented from having contact with representatives of the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). What makes these
admissions particularly disturbing, of course, is that they were
brazenly committed to paper in an official document, even though the
conduct that they endorse -- the establishment of an offshore
interrogation camp, and denying access to ICRC representatives -- is
illegal.
These are not, however, facts that were previously unknown. A copious
amount of evidence (discussed in the majority of the books published
about Guantánamo, including my own, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories
of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison) attests to the fact
that the prison's major focus was the illegal interrogation of
detainees, and the denial of access to ICRC representatives has also
been reported in detail, particularly in the cases of Abdallah
Tabarak, a supposed bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, who was
mysteriously released in 2004, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian
accused of aiding the 9/11 hijackers in Germany, who is still held in
Guantánamo.
More noticeably, the manual, published in March 2003, is nearly five
years old, and, although there are good reasons to be wary of the
administration's claims that it is completely out of date, it is, to a
large degree, ancient news, whose domination of the media has
overshadowed other, more contemporary issues of considerable importance.
A case in point is a new statement by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, an
Army reservist who worked at Guantánamo in 2004-05, which was
submitted to the Washington DC Circuit Court as part of a brief in the
continuing, and long-running struggle to secure justice for Sudanese
detainee Adel Hamad. A hospital administrator for a large Saudi
charity, Hamad had lived in Pakistan for 17 years, working on various
humanitarian aid projects, when he was captured by Pakistani and
American intelligence operatives in July 2002, based on spurious or
non-existent "intelligence," and sent to Guantánamo.
Lt. Col. Abraham, an Army reservist with 20 years experience in
military intelligence, first came to prominence in June this year,
when his criticisms of the tribunal process at Guantánamo -- the
Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs), convened to assess whether,
on capture, the detainees had been correctly designated as "enemy
combatants" -- were widely credited with persuading the justices of
the Supreme Court to reverse themselves for the first time in 60
years, agreeing to review the detainees' right to challenge the basis
of their detention in a case that is scheduled to start on December 5.
In an affidavit filed in the case of Fawzi al-Odah, a Kuwaiti
detainee, Lt. Col. Abraham delivered a damning verdict on the tribunal
process, which he described as severely flawed, relying on
intelligence "of a generalized nature -- often outdated, often
'generic,' rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of
the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals'
status." In addition, he insisted that the process was designed to
rubber-stamp the detainees' prior designation as "enemy combatants."
His latest statement is no less explosive. After giving a little more
of his background, pointing out that his last assignment before
Guantánamo, from November 2001 to November 2002, was as "the Lead
Counterterrorism Analyst for the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific
Command," for which he received the Defense Meritorious Service Medal,
Abraham explains that he has been asked by Adel Hamad's lawyer, the
Federal Public Defender for the District of Oregon, to provide
"additional information about the manner in which OARDEC [the Office
for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants]
operated during my assignment there, from September 11, 2004 until
March 9, 2005," and also "to comment upon certain declarations
provided by the directors of the national intelligence organizations,"
which were filed in an attempt to prevent the courts, and, in some
cases, the detainees' lawyers, from having access to supposedly
sensitive government information about the detainees.
After revisiting previously aired complaints about OARDEC --
specifically that most of the staff "were volunteer reserves forces
with little or no experience with intelligence or legal matters," who
were ill-equipped to deal with OARDEC's "extraordinary and historic
mission" -- Lt. Col. Abraham launches a blistering attack on the
woeful, and deliberately narrow parameters of OARDEC's capabilities,
which, by extension, refutes the national intelligence directors'
claims that there was any information worth concealing.
Noting that the mission, as established in the Combatant Status Review
Tribunal Procedures, in July 2004, mandated OARDEC to request
"reasonably available information in the possession of the US
government bearing on the issue of whether the detainee meets the
criteria to be designated as an enemy combatant," he points out that,
in reality, "the facilities and systems utilized by OARDEC precluded
access to or use of information that OARDEC needed in order to perform
its primary mission effectively," and that the mission was
additionally hampered because there was "no systematic method for
requesting the government information relating to specific detainees,"
and because the largely unskilled staff "rarely selected the most
promising sources of information and failed effectively to identify
and pursue leads if any developed."
The specific problems relating to the collection of evidence centered
on the fact that OARDEC was only permitted access to material that was
"classified SECRET and below"; in other words, that access to "TOP
SECRET information," which might have been particularly useful, was
denied across the board. This lack of access was compounded by the
administration's insistence that all 558 CSRTs were completed within
120 days, and, even more critically, by the fact that OARDEC was
"entirely dependent on indulgences from external organizations,"
having "no organic intelligence assets, no collection capabilities, no
dissemination authority, and no direct tasking authority" of its own.
"As a result," he adds, requests for information were "very rarely"
sent to the CIA, were never sent to the NSA (National Security Agency)
or the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and were only sent to the US
Army Intelligence and Security Command when Abraham himself "mentioned
this fairly obvious and fertile source of information." Compounding
these failures, OARDEC's lack of any "tasking authority" meant that
any responses to the limited number of requests that were actually
made were "largely dependant on whether anyone at the agency was
inclined to do so." In most instances, he concludes, "OARDEC received
either a negative response (no information available) or no response
at all."
Abraham also notes that, even on the databases available to OARDEC,
"access to much information was confined to particular individuals or
groups, called communities of interest (COIs)," and adds that, "In
order to access COI-restricted information, individuals either had to
be members of the COI or obtain special access." However, "Even if an
OARDEC member had the appropriate clearance and access to the overall
system, without a password and authorization, he or she would be
denied access to COI information." As a result, he explains that most
of the OARDEC staff lacked access to COI-restricted information to
such an extent that, "If there were information about a detainee in
those other systems, the OARDEC researchers could not find it." His
conclusion is bleak. Given these obstacles, and the fact that most of
the staff "had little if any understanding of the nature of, or even
the existence of the myriad of intelligence components They literally
did not know what they were missing."
Shorn of almost all genuine sources of intelligence, Abraham writes
that OARDEC "relied primarily upon information provided by Joint Task
Force Guantánamo" -- the organization running the prison itself --
"which consisted primarily of post-detention custodial and
interrogation reports"; or, in rather clearer language, "Most of the
information OARDEC collected consisted of information obtained during
interrogations of other detainees."
Describing a typical scenario, he notes that the compilation of
material for the tribunals effectively began and ended with the file
received from Guantánamo, which contained little more than
post-detention summaries of interrogations, and incident reports
relating to the detainee's behavior. On some occasions, documentation
relating to the detainee's initial detention, "including notes on the
contents of items in the detainee's possession" might also be in the
file, "but this was not so in every case." He then explains that, even
with this evidence, the researchers failed to investigate it
rigorously, preferring, instead, to search their "limited databases"
and "cast broad nets for any information, no matter how marginal, no
matter how tenuous, no matter how dated, no matter how generic, no
matter how dubious the source, so long as it could be connected to the
detainee."
The result of this slap-dash approach was obvious, and, looked at in
conjunction with the lack of access to genuine classified information
(if, indeed, any existed) explains some of the more egregious and
well-documented failures of the tribunal process. "Where no
information was obtained about an individual," Abraham explains --
adding, crucially, that this "was the case for nearly all detainees
except individuals of prominence" -- the search "would shift to more
broadly based themes, such as the region from where the individual
came, his ethnic group or nation of origin, or any organization
denominated as being associated with terrorist activities, with which
the individual was alleged to have been associated." For the last of
these allegations, Abraham notes, pointedly, that OARDEC personnel
"presumed that having an alleged association with an organization was
a sufficient basis for attributing all research relating to that
organization to the individual. As Mark and Josh Denbeaux of Seton
Hall Law School realized through their analysis of the CSRT documents,
and as I write about in depth in The Guantánamo Files, what this meant
in practice was not only that a significant number of detainees were
tarred as terrorists through the most tangential associations with
organizations proscribed by the US government, but also that
organizations that were not included on the government's blacklists --
like the World Association of Muslim Youth, for which Adel Hamad
worked as a hospital administrator -- were labeled as entities
associated with terrorism.
Furthermore, Abraham notes that "information relating to the
credibility of a source was omitted, making sources appear
authoritative even when they were suspect," and he uses, as an
example, an allegation against a particular group that "would be
repeated without disclosing that it originated with one of the groups'
political opponents or some government overtly hostile to it" (as
happened, in particular, with detainees from China, Libya and
Tunisia). He also points out that, using the time restraints as a
deliberate cover, "independent evidence from the detainee's life
before his arrest" was never investigated, even though the detainees'
"claims of innocence often could have been corroborated or disproved
by a few simple inquiries," and in this instance he uses, as an
example, that, "if a detainee told interrogators that he had worked at
a hospital in Afghanistan, OARDEC could have requested that an agency
with regional or functional purview locate and obtain records from the
hospital and interview personnel there." In addition, he notes that
"Beyond impractical discussions about bringing villagers to the
nearest video conference facility," he was "not aware of any realistic
attempts" to "identify or even attempt to bring before the Tribunal
[outside] witnesses [requested by the detainee] or their statements,"
and concludes that OARDEC "was designed to conduct Tribunals without
witnesses other than the accused detainee." This, too, is a topic that
I discuss at length in The Guantánamo Files, particular in relation to
many of the Afghan detainees, who begged their tribunals to make a few
phone calls to confirm their innocence, and in June 2006 the
journalist Declan Walsh proved how easy it was to contact witnesses
that the US government claimed to be unable to find, locating, in just
72 hours, three witnesses, in Washington, Kabul and Gardez, who were
able to verify the story told by a wrongly imprisoned pro-US Afghan
commander, Abdullah Mujahid (who is still in Guantánamo, even though
he has now been cleared for release).
After this comprehensive demolition of the tribunals' claims to
competency, Abraham turns his attention to the claims made by the
directors of the national intelligence organizations that granting the
courts access to government information about the detainees "might
risk disclosure of highly sensitive national intelligence information,
such as source or method information." He notes in the first instance
that OARDEC's systems were so primitive that the staff were unable to
communicate electronically with major organizations including the CIA
and the NSA, and also had no way of retaining or utilizing highly
classified information. "This limitation," he writes, "precluded any
possibly that such sensitive information could be incorporated into
materials presented to the Tribunals."
Moreover, Abraham points out that "the kinds of sensitive national
intelligence information discussed by the intelligence directors is
not normally shared between intelligence agencies except in the rarest
of circumstances," and specifically rebuts a statement made by General
Michael Hayden, the current director of the CIA, and the director of
the NSA from 1999 to 2005 -- that disclosure of government information
would reveal details of "clandestine intelligence operations,
including counterterrorism operations, foreign intelligence
information and assistance, information provided by sensitive sources,
and technical collection activities" -- by insisting that this kind of
information would not have been disclosed to OARDEC, or to the
tribunal members, "under any circumstances." He adds that, "in the few
cases where the concerns might apply, there are adequate mechanisms in
place to provide for in camera review of any critical information, the
nature of which precludes disclosure beyond the court."
In a damning aside (which he cannot prove, though I too infer that it
is correct, based on my extensive research into the detainees'
stories), Abraham explains that, even assuming OARDEC had been able to
conduct an exhaustive search for information, "what it would have
likely discerned from the exercise is that there is little information
to be obtained on people that have never before been considered let
alone determined to be persons of interest." As long ago as February
2002, this was effectively admitted by Brigadier General Mike Lehnert
of the Marines, who was in charge of Guantánamo in the early days,
when he stated, "A large number [of the detainees] claim to be
Taliban, a smaller number we have been able to confirm as al-Qaeda,
and a rather large number in the middle we have not been able to
determine their status. Many of the detainees are not forthcoming.
Many have been interviewed as many as four times, each time providing
a different name and different information."
The administration's response to this failure to extract information
from the detainees (who, in 95% percent of cases, were not actually
captured by the Americans themselves, but were handed over or sold by
their Afghan or Pakistani allies) was to instigate the grotesque
system of punishments and rewards, partly chronicled in the leaked
manual from March 2003, whereby, to put it bluntly, torture became a
substitute for the skilled gathering of intelligence. A later
component of the regime, as Lt. Col. Abraham has described in such
shocking detail, was to rig the tribunals to make it appear that the
"rather large number in the middle" -- many of whom were completely
innocent, or had nothing useful to offer -- were a grave and
continuing threat to US security. As many of the 310 detainees still
in Guantánamo were effectively condemned by this corrupt process, I
contend that Lt. Col. Abraham's latest statement (which was only
previously reported on the Supreme Court's SCOTUSblog) is actually far
more important than a leaked operating manual.
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