Gitmo panels struggle to assess facts
Updated: 2007-09-10 11:25
The transcripts provide a rare opportunity to hear from the detainees themselves, and show increasing despair and frustration.
"It appears that our lives don't mean anything to the Americans ... I have a feeling that I might be here until my death," Mohammed Nasir Khusruf, a 60-year-old detainee from Yemen, told the ARB - the second to hear his case.
At the ARBs, conducted in a trailer inside the Guantanamo detention center, detainees are unable to confront those who have made statements against them. They are not provided with attorneys. The Bush administration has denied the Guantanamo detainees access to civilian courts and only three are charged with war crimes under a new military commissions system that has already run into a legal snarl.
"I am entering the fifth year," Afghan detainee Hamoud Abdullah Hamoud Hassan al-Wady told his panel. "I want to see American justice. Where is it?"
The unidentified military officer heading the panel told al-Wady that this was his opportunity to "clear up some of the allegations that have been presented to us."
Yet in case after case, the source of often very serious accusations against the men is unclear, hamstringing detainees' efforts to contest the allegations.
In a case that illustrates the frustration, a military panelist told Mohammed Ali Salem al-Zarnuki that "a senior al-Qaida operative" had claimed he was seen in Kabul "at the front lines." Al-Zarnuki, a Yemeni who was arrested in Pakistan, had repeatedly denied ever being in Afghanistan.
"As I had said before, I don't know Afghanistan," al-Zarnuki insisted to his military panel. "I wish you would bring that guy so I can talk to him. Maybe I look like someone he knows."
Sometimes the frustration seemed to come from the other direction, as in the case of an Afghan detainee who insisted he was a simple merchant.
"I am very curious as to why a shopkeeper would be here. I find it very puzzling," a panel member said. It was impossible to gauge from the transcript whether the officer was salting his remarks with irony.
Only about 18 percent of detainees showed up for the ARBs out of the 330 cases considered last year, the military said. It was the second round of panels which determine whether a prisoner should continue to be held or be transferred from the base in southeast Cuba. Most of the first round of ARBs was held in 2005.
The detainees who chose to participate, for the most part, were cooperative and polite, at times admitting they attended combat training camps in Afghanistan or fighting for the Taliban against the rival Afghan Northern Alliance.
Some said they were simply farmers or shopkeepers swept up by US or allied forces in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. None acknowledged any major role in international terrorism.
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