The Bush administration has been frustrated in its policies of detaining prisoners in the “war on terrorism” by a number of court decisions recently.
On June 12, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees at Guantanamo Bay detention facility had a right to challenge their incarceration with writs of habeas corpus, the fundamental legal principle that allows prisoners to challenge their detention. The government, in other words, must either file charges or set them free.
On June 23, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered that a Chinese detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, an ethnic Uighur, must either be given a new military hearing or be released.
The court had decided three days earlier to reject the Pentagon’s argument that Parhat was an “enemy combatant” because the government’s classified evidence did not support the charge.
The government had charged that Parhat was “affiliated” with a Uighur independence group, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, which was in turn “associated” with al Qaida and the Taliban. The court decided that the evidence presented against Parhat “was insufficient to sustain [the Tribunal’s] determination that Parhat is an enemy combatant”.
The court rejected the argument that “several of the assertions in the intelligence documents” upon which the charge that Parhat is an “enemy combatant” is based “are made in at least three different documents.” In it’s decision, the court stated, “We are not persuaded. Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has ‘said it thrice’ does not make an allegation true.” The literary reference was to Carroll’s poem, The Hunting of the Snark, in which the Bellman says, “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
The court also rejected the government’s argument that “the statements made in the documents are reliable because the State and Defense Departments would not have put them in intelligence documents were that not the case.” In explanation, the court stated, “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true”
As the Washington Post noted in a June 29 article, the Bush administration may just decide to send detainees to its Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan instead of to Guantanamo Bay, which has increasingly come under scrutiny, including massive pressure to close to down the base altogether.
Charges Filed Against Cole Bombing Suspect
On June 30, amid increasing scrutiny of the government’s detainee policies, military prosecutors announced charges against Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent, for his alleged participation in the bombing of the USS Cole warship in Yemen in October 2000.
As the Washington Post reported, “Nashiri contended at a military hearing last year that he confessed to masterminding the Cole attack only because he had been tortured, according to a transcript of that hearing.”
Nashiri was submitted to “waterboarding” by CIA interrogators, a torture technique which simulates the sensation of drowning for the victim.
As the Post also noted, “Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, also was waterboarded and faces trial before a military commission. The CIA also waterboarded Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein, also known as Abu Zubaida, a top operational facilitator for al-Qaeda”.
Interrogations Designed to Elicit False Confessions
On July 2, the New York Times reported that military training of interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay were taught that included the use of a chart that “had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The document from which the techniques included in the chart were taken was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War”.
Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said, “What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions. People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”
Other interrogation techniques were derived from the military’s “Survivial, Evasion, Resistance, Escape” program (SERE), which is designed to give military personnel training in how to resist such techniques used by the enemies of the United States of America. Instead, the techniques, regarded as torture by the US, became officially sanctioned by the Bush administration for use against detainees in its “war on terrorism”.
The Times added that “The harshest known interrogation at Guantanamo was that of Moahmmed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qahtani’s interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese.”
