Antony Loewenstein

The recently released Wikileaks files on Guantanamo Bay showed a US empire arrogant on fear and power.

But here’s an insight from Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Army colonel who served as Colin Powell’s right-hand at the State Department, that explains a lot. From a speech in 2009 on the “mosaic philosophy”:

This philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals–in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees’ innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.

My following article appears in today’s ABC The Drum:

The Wikileaks-released Guantanamo Bay files provide an invaluable insight into the mindset of the US and its allies since September 11.

An infrastructure of torture was implemented, a practice still defended by the US government today, to allegedly protect the homeland from future attack.

The result was hundreds of innocent men kidnapped and incarcerated without trial – a “legal and moral disaster”, according to The New York Times – and President Obama continues shielding torturers in the previous and current administrations. He has pledged to Look Forward and Not Back. The current President has merely extended the Bush administration’s indefinite detention regime for so-called terror suspects.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald unleashed necessary fury about this reality:

The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically.

Yet this authoritarian impulse to believe untested claims by the US government is exactly what many in the media have been doing for years, repeating without question deliberately leaked intelligence files on the “worst of the worst” prisoners.

One local example is The Australian columnist Chris Kenny, failed Liberal politician and former chief of staff to former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. During a Twitter conversation on Wednesday with Paul Barrett, a former Secretary of Australian Departments of Defence and Primary Industries & Energy, Kenny wrote, “You’re arguing to set free people who have murdered thousands” when Barrett asked why the US refused to conduct fair and open trials for individuals who had never faced justice.

In Kenny’s worldview, the American military has smeared hundreds of Muslims as terrorists and that’s good enough for him. The fact that the Wikileaks file shows the vast majority of Guantanamo Bay detainees had no connection to September 11 or terrorism can be ignored.

This has been the default position of the vast bulk of the corporate press since 9/11. In Australia, especially the Murdoch press has smeared former Guantanamo Bay inmates David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib. This continued with Downer who called both men “terrible, terrible people”, perhaps because he fears what an independent investigation may find in regards to his own government’s alleged complicity in their long incarceration.

Australian journalist Sally Neighbour published an analysis a few days ago that inadvertently undermined her own paper’s years of misleading reporting:

The dossiers on Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks reveal the so-called evidence used to justify their incarceration to be a confused mishmash replete with glaring factual errors and inconsistencies, principally based on self-incrimination that would not be admitted in a proper court of law and tainted by the inclusion of information obtained under torture.

What Neighbour conveniently omitted from her report were the journalists and editors who have dined for years on rehashing US government released propaganda against Hicks and Habib, including The Australian, and smearing them constantly. Clearly media accountability was not on the agenda for a decade of establishment stenography. Today’s Australian editorial begrudgingly acknowledges the torture suffered by Habib and Hicks but issues no apology for spending years accusing them both of terrorism.

Thankfully this week’s Sydney Morning Herald editorially called the treatment of Hicks and Habib by its rightful name, torture.

It took one of the world’s more diligent and un-embedded journalists on Guantanamo Bay inmates, Andy Worthington, to unpack the Wikileaks revelations and highlight the decade of ignoring legal precedent for the Cuban and American black hole down which countless men were tortured and housed.

Reading Worthington’s copious work over the years makes a reader wonder why more mainstream reporters didn’t investigate the prison camp with a very critical eye. Is it because, as a former Bush official said, too many US journalists wanted to be seen as “patriotic” and protect America’s “interests”. Truth came a distant third. Guantanamo Bay was a place where psychological experiments and torture was common-place.

But what of the latest Wikileaks revelations themselves which, for the record, should be seen as merely US official opinion rather than actual factual reporting? We learn that the US allowed a number of repressive country’s intelligence services access to Guantanamo Bay detainees, including officials from China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

This highly prejudicial process was also committed by Australia during the Howard government when it emerged in 2005 that Chinese officials were allowed to interrogate Chinese asylum seekers in Sydney’s Villawood detention centre.

In the years after 9/11 (and also before), America was kidnapping terror suspects and sending them through extraordinary rendition to authoritarian states where these prisoners would be tortured for information. The latest Guantanamo Bay files confirm that Washington was also asking repressive regimes to assist them in identifying people as well as probably threatening their families back home.

The Wikileaks files detail America’s treatment of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj who languished without charge for six years in Guantanamo Bay. It can now be confirmed that he was only held in the prison camp because the Bush administration hated the Qatar-based news network and wanted to gain more information about its alleged connection to terrorism. It is a chilling warning to media companies the world over.

The response of the Obama administration to the latest document dump was typically Orwellian. The lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay were told, even after the mainstream press had widely disseminated the Wikileaks documents, that the files remained legally classified. The New York Times perfectly highlighted the issue:

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern law professor who represents Abu Zubaydah, the detainee accused of being a terrorist facilitator who was waterboarded by the Central Intelligence Agency, said he could not comment on the newly disclosed assessment of his client, which is posted on The Times Web site.“Everyone else can talk about it,” Mr. Margulies said. “I can’t talk about it.”

Although Wikileaks itself was not a major focus of this release (only briefly, anyway), it again proved the power of the whistle-blowing website. Western news organisations were forced to collaborate with an organisation with a relatively small staff and budget. The obvious question remains; why didn’t The New York Times, The Washington Post or The Guardian receive the scoop with their own investigations?

If former US army soldier Bradley Manning was the leaker of this information – President Obama has already said Manning is guilty, undoubtedly affecting any potential trial – he has given the world an invaluable insight into a superpower’s tyranny; he is a patriot in the truest sense of the word.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.

I appeared last night on ABCTV News 24′s The Drum alongside ABC journalist Marius Benson and lobbyist Sue Cato (video here).

While China, we learn via Wikileaks, ignores Australia’s supposed concerns for human rights, I asked if Prime Minister Julia Gillard actually cared about human rights as there had been no public comments from her after this week’s Guantanamo Bay files on countless innocent prisoners tortured by the world’s super-power. US crimes are not abuses in the eyes of our political and media elites. The words “human rights” are used as a political weapon as opposed to being something to cherish. Gillard’s current trip to China is solely about trade and military ties. Can the media and politicians be honest about this, please?

We discussed the alleged medical experimentation in Guantanamo Bay and the doctors complicit in the process. Both David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib have accused the US of doing this to them and yet we still don’t take their allegations seriously; how much did the Australian government know?

Finally, the UN report on war crimes in Sri Lanka during the country’s civil war (the massive allegations have unsurprisingly been denied by Colombo). The fact that up to 40,000 innocents may have been murdered by Sri Lanka (and far less by the Tamil Tigers) requires a robust and international trial. I called on Australia and the global community to back a transparent inquiry (a position supported by a Guardian editorial). Like the Goldstone report into Israeli and Hamas crimes, this latest UN investigation warrants the most serious response, despite China, the US, the West and Australia all likely to not show much enthusiasm.

Sadly, Canberra is more concerned about working with Colombo to stop poor Tamils getting onto boats and coming to Australia. So much for our priority ever being human rights accountability.

Really:

Anyone surfing the Internet this week is free to read leaked documents about the prisoners held by the American military at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to print them out or e-mail them to friends.

Except, that is, for the lawyers who represent the prisoners.

On Monday, hours after WikiLeaks, The New York Times and other news organizations began publishing the documents online, the Justice Department informed Guantánamo defense lawyers that the documents remained legally classified even after they were made public.

Because the lawyers have security clearances, they are obligated to treat the readily available files “in accordance with all relevant security precautions and safeguards” — handling them, for example, only in secure government facilities, said the notice from the department’s Court Security Office.

God bless the US:

Many in the Western media and political elites have spent years since 9/11 smearing a litany of Muslim “terrorists” because the US leaked selective information to friendly journalists and leaders. Serious questions were dismissed. The Murdoch press globally loved to hype bogus US claims about the “worst of the worst” at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. So to read today this, in Murdoch’s Australian by Sally Neighbour, is welcome but when will the self-analysis come, if ever? What of the countless articles sourced solely from US intelligence in the pages of the Murdoch media? Media needs to grow a memory, or the general public will treat you with appropriate contempt:

The secret files released by WikiLeaks on the two Australians formerly consigned to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp provide a unique and disturbing window into the quality of the intelligence relied on by the US to confine terror suspects in the prison camp supposedly reserved for “the worst of the worst”.

The dossiers on Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks reveal the so-called evidence used to justify their incarceration to be a confused mishmash replete with glaring factual errors and inconsistencies, principally based on self-incrimination that would not be admitted in a proper court of law and tainted by the inclusion of information obtained under torture.

The case against Habib is summarised in a memorandum marked “secret” on the letterhead of the Department of Defence Joint Task Force, Guantanamo Bay, dated August 6, 2004, and addressed to the commander of the United States Southern Command in Miami.

The document begins with a “detainee summary”, which is said to be based on Habib’s own statements but is full of factual mistakes. For example, it says Habib lived in “Meadowbark” (a misspelling of Meadowbank) in Sydney in 1980, when he didn’t arrive in Australia until 1982; that he later moved to “Greenwika”, apparently a reference to Sydney’s Greenacre; that he visited Egypt with his wife and children in 1986 when in fact they went in 1988; that he travelled to the US in 1992, which he did not; and so on. These could be dismissed as trivial slips except that this is a quasi-legal document that was used to justify Habib’s detention in Guantanamo for more than three years.

Oops:

An al-Qaida operative accused of bombing two Christian churches and a luxury hotel in Pakistan in 2002 was at the same time working for British intelligence, according to secret files on detainees who were shipped to the US military’s Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili, an Algerian citizen described as a “facilitator, courier, kidnapper, and assassin for al-Qaida”, was detained in Pakistan in 2003 and later sent to Guantánamo Bay.

But according to Hamlili’s Guantánamo “assessment” file, one of 759 individual dossiers obtained by the Guardian, US interrogators were convinced that he was simultaneously acting as an informer for British and Canadian intelligence.

After his capture in June 2003 Hamlili was transferred to Bagram detention centre, north of Kabul, where he underwent numerous “custodial interviews” with CIA personnel.

They found him “to have withheld important information from the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service and British Secret Intelligence Service … and to be a threat to US and allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

The Guardian and the New York Times published a series of reports based on the leaked cache of documents which exposed the flimsy grounds on which many detainees were transferred to the camp and portrayed a system focused overwhelmingly on extracting intelligence from prisoners.

Leading dissident British historian Mark Curtis writes in his last book, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, that London has routinely helped Islamists in the name of allegedly protecting the homeland.

The evidence, via Wikileaks, just keeps on coming:

The documents also show that in the earliest years of the prison camps operation, the Pentagon permitted Chinese and Russian interrogators into the camps — information from those sessions are included in some captives’ assessments — something American defense lawyers working free-of-charge for the foreign prisoners have alleged and protested for years.

There’s not a whiff in the documents that any of the work is leading the U.S. closer to capturing Bin Laden. In fact, the documents suggest a sort of mission creep beyond the post-9/11 goal of hunting down the al Qaida inner circle and sleeper cells.

The file of one captive, now living in Ireland, shows he was sent to Guantanamo so that U.S. military intelligence could gather information on the secret service of Uzbekistan. A man from Bahrain is shipped to Guantanamo in June 2002, in part, for interrogation on “personalities in the Bahraini court.”

…

The cases of two former Australian Guantanamo Bay prisoners, Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks, have received fresh oxygen after the release of their files by Wikileaks today. I’ve extensively covered them both over the years (Habib and Hicks) and one thing stands out; the sheer dishonesty of Western defenders of the policy and the callous brutality of American interrogators (physical or mental). Some details:

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib told Egyptian interrogators under “extreme duress” he planned to hijack a Qantas plane and had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks on the United States, according to newly-released WikiLeaks files.

The documents also allege fellow Australian Guantanamo detainee David Hicks was approached to become a martyr by al-Qa’ida’s number three in charge of military operations, but refused the invitation.

Mr Habib’s Guantanamo prisoner file appears to confirm he was tortured by Egyptian authorities in 2001, making a raft of “admissions” which he later recanted.

In its latest high-profile information release, WikiLeaks has begun releasing 779 secret files from the United States’ notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

The 2004 files classified both Mr Habib and Mr Hicks as “high risk” detainees, with Mr Habib’s file alleging “violent behaviour” by him towards US guards.

Mr Hicks’ file describes him as a “compliant” but “deceptive”. He was held in “high regard” by other detainees, including senior al-Qa’ida operatives.

“The detainee is highly-trained, experienced and combat-hardened, which makes him a valued member and possible leader for any extremist organisation,” it says of Mr Hicks, who was returned to Australia in 2007 after being convicted by a US military commission of providing material support for terrorism.

In an analysts’ note on Mr Hicks’ file, it says: “Mohammed Atef, al-Qa’ida’s No. 3 in charge of military operations, approached detainee regarding his willingness to be a martyr, which the detainee declined.”

In his book, Guantanamo: My Journey, Mr Hicks tells how he left Australia in November 1999 and signed up with the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, to join “the freedom struggle in Kashmir”.

After he had completed a beginner’s training course, LET sent him to Afghanistan for further training.

He said he reluctantly did a beginners’ course and denied doing any terrorism-related training.

The September 11 attacks occurred a month after Hicks’s final course, when he was in Pakistan.

He went back to Afghanistan after leaving his passport behind, he said, and joined up to fight with the Taliban to defend himself as the US attacked the country.

Mr Habib, who plans to sue the Egyptian government over his detention and alleged torture, told interrogators in Cairo he was en route to hijack a Qantas plane when he was detained, and had information on his home computer on poisoning US rivers.

He also claimed to have trained six of the 9/11 hijackers in martial arts and how to use a knife disguised as a cigarette lighter.

Once at Guantanamo Bay, Mr Habib retracted the confessions, saying he lied to Egyptian interrogators.

Mr Habib was released without charge from Guantanamo Bay in 2005 and returned to Australia.

His file says he had “direct and personal access” to a senior al-Qa’ida official but his US interrogators said his real value to the hardline Islamist terror group was as an Australian organiser and operative.

It contains a note by the Joint Task Force Guantanamo that Mr Habib was regarded as a detainee of “high intelligence value”.

It says he refused to take a polygraph test.

US intelligence officials regarded Mr Habib as a high value asset for his knowledge of al-Qa’ida financing, safe houses, and its training and tactics.

They questioned whether he was a “money courier and terrorist operations facilitator”, given his extensive international travel.

“Among the questions that remain unanswered: how did he afford to travel as extensively as he did while being unemployed and having lost a great deal of money in the matter of his Australian government contract?

“What were the actual number of times he went to Afghanistan, Egypt and the US (records indicate that he entered the US prior to 1993).”

After being arrested in Pakistan, Mr Habib was “rendered” by the CIA to Egypt.

He has described being tortured there by beatings, cigarette burns, electrocution, fingernail removal and near-drowning.

Mr Habib has alleged that Australian officials were involved in his rendition and torture.

After being transferred from Egypt, Mr Habib spent four years in Guantanamo Bay before being released in January 2005.

Mr Habib was last year refused a new passport on the grounds that ASIO still considered him a threat.

His lawyers said the decision was ridiculous, and based on unproven claims.

Mr Habib’s case against Egypt’s new vice-president, Omar Sulaiman, is seen as a human rights test case of the post-Mubarak era in Egypt.

An Australian-led campaign to support David Hicks and clear his name today released the following statement in response to the Wikileaks revelations:

Media Release

Wikileaks file on David Hicks- The U.S.S. Pettiloo says it all.

The file released on the Wikileaks website only confirms the inaccuracy of information that has been released by the former U.S. administration to the public in relation to David Hicks. The incompetence of the interrogators to obtain reliable and factual information is clear- they failed get Mr Hicks’ name correct, where he was captured, or the name of their own Navy ship- even when utilising interrogation techniques tantamount to torture. Much of the inaccuracies in the file have been addressed in Mr Hicks’ book, however, following is a list for your convenience.

Ø  David Hicks’ middle name is Matthew, not Michael

Ø  Jama’at Al Tablighi is a peaceful Islamic organisation- this has long been confirmed

Ø  Mr Hicks has at no time flown to East Timor- to engage in hostilities, or otherwise

Ø  LeT was not listed as a terrorist organisation until 2002, long after Mr Hicks had been detained. The report confirms that no member of LeT had engaged in a terrorist act- they allege an intention, which there is no evidence of. As Mr Hicks explains in his book, LeT dissolved after 2001. The group that calls themselves LeT now is not the same group as it was over a decade ago as it is made up of different people.

Ø  Allegations of meeting senior al-Qaeda leadership- Mr Hicks explains in his book that did not hear the word al-Qaeda until he reached Guantanamo Bay- and this was from the mouth of an interrogator. Mr Hicks has not met any people by the names of Abu-Hufs or Mohammed Atef, and the U.S. has not provided any evidence of this.

Ø  Mr Hicks did not go to Bagram at all- Mr Hicks was captured by the Northern Alliance at a Taxi stand in Baglan on his way back to Australia. He was then sold to the U.S. for approximately US$5000.

Ø  There is no such ship as the Pettiloo- Mr Hicks was transferred to two U.S. Navy ships, the U.S.S. Bataan and the U.S.S Peleliu- what they failed to mention in this report was the 10 hour beatings inflicted on Mr Hicks and the other detainees, and the photos depicting Hicks naked with a bleeding wound on his head due to having his head rammed into the tarmac several times.

Ø  As for the report stating that Mr Hicks ‘admitted’ to being a member of al-Qaeda- Any and all statements were obtained under torture, this is why he was not taken through a regularly constituted court. In the final Military Commissions hearing, David’s legal team submitted what is called the Alford Plea. This is a US based plea in which an accused person can agree to plead guilty whilst maintaining innocence. David has always maintained his innocence and strongly denies that he was involved with any terrorist organisations- he did what he had to do to come home.

Ø  The report alleges that Mr Hicks led in prayer and was held in high regard by other Guantanamo detainees- Mr Hicks cannot speak Arabic, and his knowledge of the religion would not qualify him to lead prayer. Some detainees thought that Mr Hicks was a spy, so any allegation that he was a leader is simply outrageous.

Ø  Any allegation that Mr Hicks was unruly or created disturbances is simply untrue. Former Guantanamo bay guard, Brandon Neely who was on the ground with Mr Hicks has confirmed this recently (link below).

Ø  As documents have revealed, detainees were forced to take medication and David was injected in the spine (see link below)

Ø  All charges that they quote in the document and the Military Commissions process were ruled as unconstitutional and illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court. Even the final Military Commissions Act of 2006 has been replaced by President Obama due to the unfairness of the system, and the fact that it did not establish a legitimate legal framework.

Ø  The report alleges that if Mr Hicks is released, he would be a threat to the U.S. and its allies- Mr Hicks has been a free member of society for over three years, and has proven this to be completely false.

Mr Hicks has never been accused of hurting anyone, participating in, supporting, preparing for or knowing of a terrorist act. The final charge in the Military Commissions hearing was one count under the material support for terrorism charge- which was foreign to Australian and international law- that did not accuse him of personally supporting terrorism, rather, it was alleged that he supported an organisation that supported terrorism. Of note is the fact that it has never been proven that the camps he attended were in fact al-Qaeda. Mr Hicks has never gone through a fair trial process.

This document shows that even back in 2004, Mr Hicks was not suspected and/or accused of hurting any person, or involved in any terrorist acts. The Australian government has always maintained that Mr Hicks has not broken any Australian Law.

“…I objected strongly to the Military Commissions Act that was drafted by the Bush Administration and passed by Congress because it failed to establish a legitimate legal framework…”

President Obama comments on the 2006 Military Commissions Act

Further information:

Evidence of forced medication

For a copy of David’s interview about torture and interrogations

A place of torture, deprivation, lack of judicial oversight, a gulag and utterly deplorable. Welcome to the US empire:

However, the shocking human cost of obtaining this intelligence is also exposed with dozens of innocent people sent to Guantanamo – and hundreds of low-level foot-soldiers being held for years and probably tortured before being assessed as of little significance.

The Daily Telegraph, along with other newspapers including The Washington Post, today exposes America’s own analysis of almost ten years of controversial interrogations on the world’s most dangerous terrorists. This newspaper has been shown thousands of pages of top-secret files obtained by the WikiLeaks website.

The disclosures are set to spark intense debate around the world about the establishment of Guantanamo Bay in the months after 9/11 – which has enabled the US to collect vital intelligence from senior Al Qaeda commanders but sparked fury in the middle east and Europe over the treatment of detainees.

Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was tortured by American and Egyptian officials post 9/11 and was smeared and shunned by the corporate press for years. He demands justice and deserves it. He talked to me about these issues in February, including the involvement of Egypt’s new Vice-President, Omar Sulaiman.

A few days ago I was contacted by an Egyptian human rights worker and lawyer looking to contact Habib directly to being proceedings in the post-Mubarak country. Things are moving quickly (and of course, not a peep about prosecuting Sulaiman in the US or Australia, as he was their nice, torturing bitch):

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib is suing Egypt’s new Vice-President, Omar Sulaiman, over his incommunicado detention and torture in Cairo in 2001, in what is shaping as an important human rights test case in the post-Mubarak era in Egypt.

Cairo lawyers acting for Mr Habib have notified the Egyptian Attorney-General they are launching proceedings against General Sulaiman, who heads Egyptian intelligence, along with the country’s former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, and Jamal Mubarak, the son and lieutenant of former president Hosni Mubarak, who resigned amid anti-regime protests in February.

A summary filed by the Cairo lawyers says Mr Habib was detained without charge for six months and subjected to “the most horrible torture methods” including electric shock, cigarette burns, attack by dogs, sexual violation and water torture.

The documents allege some of Mr Habib’s interrogations were conducted personally by General Sulaiman, who has been Egypt’s intelligence chief since 1993, and that torture occurred in the presence of Jamal Mubarak, who was a senior official in the ousted regime.

The lawyers have petitioned the Egyptian Attorney-General to have the country’s embassy in Canberra arrange for Mr Habib to travel to Cairo to give evidence.

Mr Habib does not have a current Australian passport as he is still deemed by the security agency ASIO to be a security risk. He told The Australian he had asked the federal government to issue temporary travel documents to enable him to travel to Egypt to testify, but was awaiting an answer.