Top terror suspect learns American culture in confinement at Guantanamo
In this photo taken by the International Red Cross and provided by the family of Mohammed Rahim al-Afghani, Rahim poses for a photo at Guantanamo Bay prison at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba. / AP/Red Cross via Rahim family
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico An Afghan man who is being held with the most significant terrorism suspects in U.S. custody has apparently gained extensive knowledge of western pop culture in an unlikely place: the top secret prison-within-a-prison in Guantanamo Bay.
Nearly five years ago, Mohammed Rahim al-Afghani became the last prisoner sent to Guantanamo. He was accused of helping Osama bin Laden elude capture, and the CIA had interrogated him for months at an undisclosed location before he was locked away in Guantanamo's Camp 7, a prison unit shrouded in secrecy that holds about 15 men who have been designated "high value" detainees by the U.S. government.
With no court appearances, or even charges filed, nothing was heard from Rahim and he has remained largely a mystery. So, it was a surprise when his lawyer, Carlos Warner, released letters from the detainee described by the head of the CIA as a "tough, seasoned jihadist." More surprising still was the content: quirky notes peppered with references to Howard Stern, Fox News and the global video hit of South Korean singer PSY.
"Dear Mr. Warner," he wrote. "I like this new song Gangnam Style. I want to do the dance for you but cannot because of my shackles."
In another letter, the multilingual Rahim shows some familiarity with American slang. He tells his lawyer, most likely in jest, that he has adopted a banana rat, a rodent commonly spotted around the U.S. base in Cuba. "Tell the guards to leave my friend alone. They need to chillax."
It's hardly what one would expect from a middle-age Afghan who has never been to the U.S. While there is still little public information about Rahim, the letters provide some insight into the man — and suggest that the prisoners in Camp 7, a group that includes five charged with aiding and orchestrating the Sept. 11 terror attack, are not completely isolated from the outside world.
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To Warner, a federal public defender for the Northern District of Ohio, the letters humanize a man who he contends has been demonized by U.S. authorities, who allege he worked as a translator and assistant to bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders. The lawyer says the letters demonstrate a surprising amount of resilience.
"It shows he's different and he's intelligent," Warner said. "Just think that he's doing this under all the restrictions that's he's under down there. He has an incredibly good sense of humor."
There have been letters released to the media in the past from other detainees at Guantanamo, often providing valuable information about a prison that will have been open for 11 years on Jan. 11. Sami al-Haj, an Al-Jazeera journalist when he was captured and sent to Guantanamo, provided detailed accounts of a hunger strike before he was eventually released. Shaker Aamer, the last resident of Britain still held at the prison, has given an insider's view on confinement conditions.
Rahim's are different because he is in Camp 7, and the content departs so sharply from what one might expect from a jihadist. "I want you to contact Amanda Palmer," he wrote Nov. 6, referring to the American singer. "... Ask her to write a song about me and my family."
Warner and U.S. officials are prohibited from publicly discussing Rahim's life and the allegations against him, but the broad outlines are in a public document filed in federal court by the government in response to Warner's filing of a civil writ of habeas corpus seeking the prisoner's release.
The document says Rahim is about 47 and was born in eastern Afghanistan. He fled with his family over the border to Pakistan when the Soviet Union invaded in 1979. Rahim has told authorities that he returned temporarily to fight the invaders, a war that killed two of his brothers, and moved back permanently once they retreated from the country.
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As for the Geneva Convention, when have any 'insurgents', terrorists or any other words used for these people used the Geneva Convention rules of war.
Most of these comments refer to the rights of these prisoners. Victims have the right to live.
The US needs to leave these people alone, if they want to kill each other, let them. America has no business in the mid-east in the first place.
Oh well, I'm sure if I were as educated as those who write arm long comments defending these people, I could make a rebutle (spelled wrong?) also an arm long just to be scanned over.
How many of the Guantanamo captives complied with the Geneva Conventions? Having read the transcript from their annual status reviews I am afraid I have to tell you that almost all of the captives complied with the Geneva Conventions.
You may not know this, but the USA blanketed Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal regions with notices of the generous rewards open to those who turned in someone they said was a member of the Taliban, or who was a foreigner. US intelligence officials arbitrarily decided that every foreigner in Afghanistan was a terrorist, and that they simply would not believe foreigners who claimed they were (1) aid workers; (2) koran teachers; (3) antiquities seekers; (4) drug traffickers.
Were foreigners who weren't combatants compliant with the Geneva Conventions? Hell yes.
What arguments did the DoD advance to claim they were combatants? There was a huge discrepancy between who the Geneva Convention considers a combatant and who the Bush administration classified as a combatant.
According to the Geneva Convention once a soldier's hitch is over, they turn in their uniform and their gun, and go home to their civilian job, they become a civilian. According to the Geneva Conventions, even if that demobilized soldier had been a hero, in an earlier conflict, if they stayed home, and didn't re-enlist, they remained a civilian.
But, in Guantanamo, any individual who had once carried a gun was classed as an enemy combatant. One old grandfather, who had a stroke in the early 1990s, and had to use a walker, was classed as an enemy combatant because he had fought against Afghanistan's Soviet invaders in the 1980s. Another grandfather had served in the motor pool of the King of Afghanistan's peace-time Army in the early 1960s. He too had that past military service used to classify him as an enemy combatant. Some Arab countries have universal conscription, so all 18 year olds have to go through basic training, and spend some time in uniform. Lots of the foreigners had the fact that they had once been drafted, years ago, and thousands of miles away, used to justify calling them enemy combatants. Some of the captives had seen military service during the 1991 Gulf War. They too had that military service used to classify them as enemy combatants -- even though they served with our allies, and had been on our side.
None of these men would have been considered combatants, under the Geneva Conventions. All of them were in perfect compliance with the Third Geneva Convention, which lays out how an individual should behave in order to be considered a "lawful combatant", entitled to POW status when captured. They weren't combatants, so they were in compliance.
"Justifying" the events at Abu Ghraib, which JUDYMAR14 seems as illiterately incapable of spelling correctly as so many other words or terms of more than two syllables, by saying those involved there didn't kill thousands of innocent people. Carefully accepting the NWO lie that "terrorists" did cause the events of September 11, that the crashes claimed to have occurred did cause the Twin Towers to collapse, that there were people in the towers when they fell and that the people who caried out everything from stock fraud to denying legitimate insurance claims to selling petrochemical poisons labeled as medicine were "innocent"! But notice the additional malignant sentiment JUDYMAR14 promotes, that, because something is not killing thousands of people, then it is right!
Endorsing the idea of apprehension and punishment before someone commits a crime.
Defining those who condemn the actions of the government, even if they are craven and malignant, is guilty of "treason".
And, of course, trundling the New World Order lie that "terrorists" are necessarily bereft of all human qualities, that they just woke up one day with an unquenchable thirst to see Americans dead. Of course, the ilk of JUDYMAR14 would not consider that the West had committed innumerable atrocities against the Muslim world and were engaging in entirely new levels of clandestine abominations, carefully unreported by the crooks in the "news", and that "terrorists" were simply retaliating, or were acting to thwart the West's own Special Forces and CIA/MI-5/Mossad criminalities.
If the ilk of JUDYMAR14 saw a Muslim saying that anyone who criticizes the government's violations of human rights was a traitor, or saw a Muslim endoring the idea of sentencing someone without their even having committed a crime, or saw a Muslim saying every one of an innumerable list of violations of human rights was okay because it wasn't killing thousands of people, would they endorse it, or describe it as foul?
To leave somebody in limbo without law-enforcement-gathered proof that he is really a bad guy (and in the case of this Rahim there is no proof of any wrongdoing on his own), is completely unworthy of a democratic state.
What is more, the CIA is not a law-enforcement agency, it does information gathering. In cases like this Rahim, the CIA is prosecutor, judge, and enforcer in one role. This is illegal by the standards of any civilized society.
I can't say it enough "OUT OF TOUCH WITH RETALITY!
If any of these terriorists are released invite one/two into your home to share your sense of humors. It should be a BLAST.
It is a huge mistake to believe all the men were terrorists. The prosecution surely doesn't believe that, so why do you?
I don't live in a trailer, thank you very much!
I don't seem to remember the girl at Abu Gharib killing thousands of innocent people. For that matter, she didn't kill any in uniform either. And it was one girl, not girls.
Please remember that the principles of respecting the rule of law, and presumption of innocence are not frills. Making sure suspects are ACTUALLY guilty protects the entire public.
Making sure we don't rely on false confessions, derived from torture, protects the entire public.
People who protest the treatment of these barbarians are treasonists. All the murders these terriorists have committed - to Westerners and their own people - should be lucky to be alive. Why should our laws pertain to them?
"Sense of humor"? His tongue should be cut out!
Do terriorists adhere to the Geneva Convention?
You must not live in a Western country.
Big oversight -- it didn't explicitly protect civilians from torture. But the 4th Geneva Convention, which the USA signed in 1949, defines the term "protected person" -- everyone found in a war zone is a "protected person". The convention protects innocent civilian bystanders from being recklessly killed by bombardment aimed at nearby combatants. And it
protects civilians from being tortured. It doesn't only protect innocent civilians. It protects individuals suspected of committing war crimes. It protects individuals who have been convicted of terrorism.
With regard to Rahim, while allegations have been leveled against him, absolutely zero actual evidence has been made public. He may be a peripheral individual, with only a tenuous tie to al Qaeda. Given the shocking incompetence shown by the US intelligence establishment he may be completely innocent.
Sorry to have to say, but you are out of touch with reality.
Does the fact he was suspected, interrogated, tortured, prove his guilt? Absolutely not. The CIA tortured German citizen Khalid el-Masri, on the extremely flimsy justification that his name resembled that of a individual who was on a suspect list.
He had what looked like a legitimate German passport, with details that, if they were true, would have ruled him out as a suspect. So, while one team was interrogating him another team examined the passport for signs it was a forgery.
When document team reported that their examination of the passport confirmed it was a legitimate German passport that showed no sign of alteration, their superior told LOOK HARDER.
Eventually the tests ended up destroying the passport. It is this "he still seems innocent, LOOK HARDER, mentality that leads to torture.
If you look at the documents the DoD was forced to publish from the annual reviews you will find dozens of references to the Taliban's "forty man unit". Some elements of the US intelligence establishment believed that al Qaeda had trained 40 members of the Taliban to serve as an elite 007 assassination team.
But it all seemed like a sick fever dream to me. The most unlikely captives were named as being elite assassins, cripples, the feeble-minded, frail elderly men. It shows the dangers of using torture, and other coercive interrogation techniques, and then taking the confessions they produce at face value.
One of the elderly men the shockingly incompetent intelligence analysts at Guantanamo named was an elderly man known at Guantanamo as Abdul Razzaq. He was named in large part because someone, during their interrogation, said Abdul Razzaq was the 2nd in command of the assassination squad.
Guantanamo held six captives named Abdul Razzaq. It is an extremely common name.
He died of cancer just over four years ago. Shortly after his death two journalist were able to establish, with relatively little effort, that the US intelligence analysts got everything wrong about this man.
They established his real name -- Abdul Razzaq Hekmati. They established that he was telling the truth when he claimed he was an anti-Taliban hero, and the Taliban had placed a $1,000,000 bounty on his head.
He stood accused of plotting to help Taliban leaders escape from a Northern Alliance prison. This was the only allegation with a grain of truth, and the incompetent analysts at Guantanamo got the one true thing completely backward.
Abdul Razzaq Hekmati and his son had heroically helped three very senior Northern Alliance leaders excape from a Taliban prison in 1999 -- hence the $1,000,000 bounty.
Torture failed here. It failed catastrophically.
The worst part of this story is that, as with so many other captives if instead of using torture US intelligence analysts had employed regular gumshoe detective work, his story would have been confirmed in 2002.
When you read the transcripts for yourself you will find what I found -- that captive after captive offered accounts of themselves that could have been refuted or confirmed with trivial effort. But US intelligence officials never bothered to take the obvious step of employing regular gumshoe detective work to refute or confirm their accounts.
Unlike most captives Abdul Razzaq attended all his official status hearings. At each one the officers belittled his claim that he rescued senior Northern Alliance leaders, saying those leaders would have come forward to speak in his defense. They claimed they asked the State Department to try and contact the men he rescued, and they reported back they couldn't be found.
But the journalists found these men, one of whom was a general, one of whom was a provincial Governor. The Governor, Ismail Khan, told them he had personally buttonholed the US ambassador and told him that he was a hero, had rescued him, and should be released. So all that mockery that the State Department couldn't find his character witnesses was all B.S., as the Ambassador would have been the most senior State Department official in the country.
The allegations against Hekmati had said that, in the period prior to the US invasion and shortly after, he had been a senior Taliban leader. Well, another failure to do even the minimum gumshoe detective work is that Hekmati said he had to go into exile, in Iran, after the Taliban put a $1,000,000 bounty on his head. The Northern Alliance issued this elderly hero a regular stipend. OK, wouldn't the obvious step have been the routine gumshoe detective work of auditing the Northern Alliance financial records. If the financial records showed he was signing for his regular stipend in Iran, he obviously couldn't have been serving as a Taliban leader in Afghanistan.
Second, President Obama tried very hard to close that base. Without getting into party politics, you can find out why he did not succeed if you wish.
Third... I doubt he is happy, just resilient. Being housed and fed is not all a human requires ("Man does not live by bread alone..."
How many are out there? One is too many! So far I see two right off the bat.
This is incorrect. First, Chuck766, we put CONVICTED murderers in prison, sometimes for life. When have democracies that honor the rule of law ever held individuals for life before, without charging them with a crime?
Second, on the relatively rare instances when there seems to have been a serious malfunction in the justice system, as with Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, we do object to the life sentence.
Third, you can't fairly determine whether he is common criminal, or war criminal, or "lawful combatant" who can't be prosecuted for acts of war, or even an innocent civilian bystander, who was apprehended in error without a truly fair trial.
If you read the transcripts of the captives annual status reviews -- as I have, you will see that, when read in detail, the US intelligence analysts recognized that the Taliban did wear a uniform. All these claims that the captives are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions are nonsense. Most of the captives are entitled to the protections of the 3rd Geneva Convention, because they were innocent civilian bystanders, or they were lawful combatants, after all. The handful of captives who don't qualify for protection under the 3rd Geneva Convention are protected from torture by the 4th Geneva Convention.