Two 50-Year Olds Released from Guantanamo
By ANDY WORTHINGTON | Counterpunch, Oct 8, 2008
As the US courts put pressure on the government to justify the long detention of prisoners at Guantánamo without charge or trial (following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June, that they have constitutional habeas corpus rights, and that the government must justify their imprisonment), two of Guantánamo’s oldest prisoners have been quietly repatriated: 51-year old Sudanese prisoner Mustafa Ibrahim al-Hassan, and Mammar Ameur, a 50-year old refugee from Algeria.
Al-Hassan, a 51-year old father of four — two boys and two girls — was immediately reunited with his family after he arrived home. He was held at Guantánamo for six years and two months, even though there was no basis whatsoever for his imprisonment. Like others at Guantánamo, he had traveled to Pakistan in 2002, to study his religion and to seek out business opportunities, but was seized at a checkpoint by opportunistic Pakistani soldiers who were aware that the US authorities were offering bounty rewards for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” and that foreign visitors were easy prey.
Despite the fact that he had nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and was one of many innocent men seized in Pakistan without ever having set foot in Afghanistan, he reported that he was treated brutally in Pakistan custody. “When the investigators were interrogating me”, he said, “when I told them I went there to trade and I went there to study, they hit me, they tortured me. They were torturing us with electricity and they made us walk on sharp objects. They hit us a lot, and because of the pain we just said anything.”
Al-Hassan also suffered horribly in Guantánamo, and was beset by medical problems. For years he complained about stomach pains, but received no treatment. Then, in 2007, medical tests revealed the cause of the pain — a stomach ulcer that required immediate surgery. This was a source of great concern for Mustafa, as he had already had his spleen removed while he was a free man. Mustafa also suffered from liver pain in Guantánamo, and although his stomach surgery was successful, a blood test showed that he was also suffering from liver disease. In spite of this disturbing discovery, the authorities would not tell him how advanced his illness was.
Although al-Hassan’s health continued to deteriorate, he remained in Guantánamo, cruelly overlooked, even as his compatriots were freed. Last December, he was left behind after Adel Hamad and Salim Adem, two other innocent Sudanese prisoners seized in Pakistan, were released. Earlier this year, he was told that he would soon be released, but in May, when al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj and two other men — Amir Yacoub al-Amir and Walid Ali — were also released, he was, inexplicably, left behind yet again.
These disappointments, added to his grave illness and the pain of separation from his family, brought Mustafa al-Hassan to the point of despair. Zachary Katznelson, one of his lawyers at the legal action charity Reprieve, recently explained, “Mustafa is a family man, but it is almost impossible to be a father from Guantánamo Bay. Mustafa is not allowed any phone calls. Mail takes months and months to arrive. When it does arrive, it is usually heavily censored, even if it contains only family news. Still, he thinks about his children all the time. He wants to protect his children as much as possible from the reality of having their father locked up so far away.”
“My children should not have to bear these troubles,” he told Katznelson during a visit at Guantánamo. “They should not feel sadness or depression, but should be allowed to be children. But their father has been taken away.”
As Katznelson left, he said, “I am innocent. I didn’t do a thing to hurt anyone. All I want is to be home with my children.”
The other released prisoner, Mammar Ameur, had been living in Pakistan since 1990, and had been a registered UN refugee since 1996. Ameur was captured at the same time and in the same building as Adel Hamad, the Sudanese hospital administrator released last December. He and his wife and their four children lived in an apartment downstairs, and Hamad and his family lived upstairs.
In his tribunal at Guantánamo, Ameur specifically refuted an allegation that his house was “a suspected al-Qaeda house.” He pointed out that it was a small, two-roomed apartment near an airport used by the military, in an area that was “full of police stations,” and indicated, with some justification, that this was not an ideal location for al-Qaeda to operate in with any degree of safety.
The allegations against Ameur were as weak as those against Hamad, who was forced to refute groundless allegations that the Saudi charity who owned the hospital he worked for, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), was a front for terrorism. Ameur was accused of being a member of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), but he pointed out that he left Algeria before it was founded, serving as a mujahideen fighter against the Communist regime in Afghanistan from 1990-92, and stressed, “I don’t believe in this ideology because it’s against my religion. These people are criminals, like criminals everywhere.”
Unable to come up with any other allegations, the US authorities attempted to implicate him in the purported terrorist activities of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), another huge Saudi charity that mounts enormous humanitarian aid efforts, on the spurious basis that he knew someone who worked for the organization, and with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, because of his neighbor. Cutting to the heart of this entire folly, Ameur described what he was told by one of the Pakistanis who arrested him: “I was told by Pakistan intelligence when they captured us that we were innocent … but we have to do something for the Americans. We will have to give you as a gift to protect Pakistan.” He added, however, “Americans themselves have detained me here for nothing; I thought it was a Pakistani mistake, but it was the Americans. They have fabricated allegations as reasons to keep me here.”
It is to be hoped that the Algerian authorities pay attention to Ameur’s story, and do not subject him to a show trial on his return. The pity, of course, is that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees failed to help him, and that he must now endure the dangerous vagaries of the Algerian courts, who may decide to make some kind of pointless example of him.
An even greater pity, of course, is that both he and Mustafa Ibrahim al-Hassan were ever sent to Guantánamo in the first place. Like at least 120 other prisoners seized in Pakistan, their long imprisonment never had anything to do with al-Qaeda or the war in Afghanistan, and was, instead, the direct result of opportunism on the part of the Pakistani authorities and gullibility on the part of the US military and intelligence agencies, who somehow failed to understand that, if you offer substantial bounty payments for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects,” you end up with nothing more than innocent men — in this case a UN refugee and an economic migrant — packaged up as Osama bin Laden’s henchmen.
Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of ‘The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison’ (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk
He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk
Peace and Justice Post 
Holding Bush Accountable
January 17, 2009by Elizabeth Holtzman | The Nation, January 15, 2009
President Obama, on his first day in office, can make a number of changes that will mark a clean break with the Bush presidency. He can, and should, issue an executive order revoking any prior order that permits detainee mistreatment by any government agency. He should begin the process of closing Guantánamo, and he should submit to Congress a bill to end the use of military commissions, at least as presently constituted. Over the coming months he can pursue other reforms to restore respect for the Constitution, such as revising the Patriot Act, abolishing secret prisons and “extraordinary rendition,” and ending practices, like signing statements, that seek to undo laws.
While these steps are all crucial, however, it is not enough merely to cease the abuses of power and apparent criminality that marked the highest levels of George W. Bush’s administration. We cannot simply shrug off the constitutional and criminal misbehavior of the administration, treat it as an aberration and hope it won’t happen again. The misbehavior was not an aberration–aspects of it, particularly the idea that the president is above the law, were present in Watergate and in the Iran/Contra scandal. To fully restore the rule of law and prevent any repetition of Bush’s misconduct, the abuses of his administration must be directly confronted. As Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen–recently tapped by Obama to head his Office of Legal Counsel–wrote in Slate last March, “We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation’s past transgressions and reject Bush’s corruption of our American ideals.”
What we need to do is conceptually simple. We need to launch investigations to get at the central unanswered questions of Bush’s abuse of power, commence criminal proceedings and undertake institutional, statutory and constitutional reforms. Perhaps all these things don’t need to be done at once, but over time–not too much time–they must take place. Otherwise, we establish a doctrine of presidential impunity, which has no place in a country that cherishes the rule of law or considers itself a democracy. Bush’s claim that the president enjoys virtually unlimited power as commander in chief at a time of war–which Vice President Dick Cheney defiantly reasserted just last month–brought us perilously close to military dictatorship.
As the former district attorney in Brooklyn, New York, I know the price society pays for a doctrine of impunity. Failure to prosecute trivializes and encourages the crimes. The same holds true of political abuses–failure to hold violators accountable condones the abuse and entrenches its acceptability, creating a climate in which it is likely to be repeated. The doctrine of impunity suggests, too, that there is a dual system of justice–one for the powerful and one for ordinary Americans. Because the concept of equal justice under the law is the foundation of democracy, impunity for high-level officials who abuse power and commit crimes erodes our democracy.
An impeachment proceeding against President Bush would have been the proper forum to expose the full scope of his abuses and to impose punishment. That obviously didn’t happen, but investigations and prosecutions can still provide the vast civics lesson that an impeachment process would have given our nation.
There is another important reason for not “moving on.” On January 20, Barack Obama will take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution, which requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Much as President Obama might like to avoid controversy arising from investigations and prosecutions of high-level Bush administration officials, he cannot let them get away with breaking the law without violating his oath. His obligation to pursue justice in these cases is all the more serious given his acknowledgment that waterboarding is torture–which is a federal crime–and the vice president’s recent admission of his involvement in and approval of “enhanced” interrogation techniques.
Moreover, under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, our government is obliged to bring to justice those who have violated the conventions. Although Bush smugly ignored his constitutional duty to enforce treaty obligations and laws that punish detainee mistreatment, Obama cannot follow the same lawless path.
Continued >>
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Tags:Bush administration, Convention Against Tortur, criminal misbehavior, criminal proceedings, Guantanamo, President George W. Bush, President Obama, secret prisons, torture, waterboarding
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