I Was Tortured for Days at Guantanamo Bay
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
Meanwhile, he's still in Guantanamo some 17 years later.
So what happened to the real Hassan Ghul?
Ghul was "Captured by Kurdish Peshmarga forces in Iraqi Kurdistan and turned over to American intelligence in early 2004... In 2006, Ghul was transferred to the custody of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which released him in 2007."
Also there’s some chance these people may harbor a slight dislike towards the land of the free.
Edit: You would think that citizens of the United States would know better than most that oppression by distant governments causes revolts, not obedience.
I'm willing to bet that's the whole point. This way some countries can keep up the BS "war on terror". They create and maintain a certain status quo and then "fight" against it. This way trillions of dollars get siphoned (from their own citizens!) into certain people's pockets (some even enemies of their own citizens!), and they maintain influence over the Middle East.
> citizens of the United States would know better
The citizens of the US, like most of the world, has Facebook to keep them entertained, and student loans and more immediate problems to distract them from things that have no obvious direct impact on them. When they found out every aspect of their lives is being spied on and investigated even by their own was there a massive revolt? No, everyone everywhere took it sitting down in a sign that this can continue and even escalate. They'll even justify torture by saying "well they probably are terrorists otherwise they wouldn't get this treatment". Land of the free to do as you're told.
https://mamot.fr/system/media_attachments/files/001/582/923/...
Similar pressures apply to Pakistan and to other countries who might feel even less responsibility to free him.
In that part of the world, citizenship and identity can be a messy subject. None of those countries is ethnically or linguistically homogeneous, not all of them can reliably track all citizens if they lost their papers.
And I can imagine he wouldn't be a "gift" for the Pakistani government itself, considering political implications.
No, he doesn't.
So, for the sake of the national security of the committer of these crimes, we will keep them indefinitely, hoping the problem will one day go away or we get a President who will make it all legal.
Seriously.
This is the argument.
EDIT: downvote all you want, but America has a serious human rights issue here. It is detaining INNOCENT people with no due process, indefinitely - for DECADES now. It is time for the American people to demand the closure of Guantanamo, and for an investigation into the CIA's black torture sites, of which there are far, far too many around the world, secretly tucked out of the view of the American public. If you are okay with this, you're the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Ahmad_Ghulam_Rabbani
The defacto argument is "If he's in Guantanamo, he must be bad." But the courts don't use that argument for the determination of whether someone should be released or not.
I can see how they could get away with torturing suspected terrorists or whatever (although I don't agree with it) end even how they might keep holding someone who was wrongfully accused after more evidence surfaces (again, it would be deplorable, but not unlikely), but this is a completely third party that they imprisoned because they thought he was someone else! I don't see a single argument that could be made for not releasing him - not even a really bad one.
How is this not on the news every day? How is the UN and every single human rights org not all over this?? How does this not come up in every single US presidential debate?
To release him now would be an admission of comprehensive institutional failure at every level -- from his initial capture, through mis-identification, rendition, torture and ongoing imprisonment. The longer the error persists, the worse it gets, and the harder it becomes to admit it's all a horrible mistake. Nobody in the US government institutions that maintain his imprisonment will benefit from admitting it was all a mistake: to the military he's an embarrassment, and to the politicians, releasing him would be handing ammunition to their electoral rivals. (Democracy has failure modes: this is one of them.) So it'd be far better for everyone concerned if he'd quietly die of natural causes so they could bury him and the controversy at the same time.
(Finally, a really cynical part of me thinks that maybe keeping an innocent bloke in jail for 17 years is expedient to a certain part of the US foreign affairs establishment because it sends a message to everyone outside the USA, world-wide: "we can fsck you up on a whim and there is nothing anybody can do about it." In other words, it's dominance signaling. See also the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, imprisoned in Iran, for example.)
And I do understand why the government won't just release him, but if everyone in the world knew about this, releasing him wouldn't do that much harm (everyone would have already seen the failure) and would actually be brilliant PR for whoever does it. But then again, that would require people and especially media that actually care and have a longer attention span than 30 seconds, which seems rather far from achievable right now.
(This being HN, we see this sort of thing discussed wrt. failing startups or larger corporations, but seldom so brutally and clearly with governments -- although the moderators' policy on political discussions is necessary if only to prevent HN turning into a permanent floating firestorm of flame wars.)
Not only that, but as soon as you release somebody who was wrongfully imprisoned, they can sue in civil courts, and they often win.
There are 71 men in Guantanamo that are "too innocent to charge, too dangerous to release."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Ahmad_Ghulam_Rabbani
What's sad is that in 2008, the US supreme court issued it's ruling in Boumediene v. Bush:
"The Nation’s basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say 'what the law is'."
After 9/11 there was this perception (somewhat engineered by the neo-cons, but also organic in that Americans had never experienced anything like that and had a bit of an existential crisis) that American civil liberties and laws had actually made the country weak and had created a loophole that terrorists had been able to exploit. This led to the "new normal", where it was seen as necessary (even a matter of civic duty) to accept ceding our civil rights and liberties in order to allow the government to aggressively pursue the terrorist threat by any means necessary.
This lead to Guantanamo Bay and the normalization of indefinite detainment and torture in American culture, to the increased militarization of American police, to the modern global surveillance panopticon as revealed by Snowden, and the War on Terror.
It's not. Both Cuba and the United States recognize that Guantanamo Bay is part of Cuba. They disagree about whether a pre-Revolution lease agreement is still in place or not.
Damn, if there are people so dumb that they would buy "I'm not talking about the general case but just this one dude that we KNOW was sent there BY ACCIDENT - can't we just release the poor guy?" as being soft on terrorism then it's no surprise US politics are such a shitshow...
Obama's efforts to close it, which did come up in debates (and came back in 2016) were basically rebuffed by Congress. Not because they want to keep Gitmo open, but because nobody wants the prisoners moved into their constituency's backyard.
George W. Bush approved enhanced interrogation and rolled out black sites, Barack Obama closed those sites but failed to close Guantanamo, and Trump seems to be content to keep it open. Republican senators are ardently opposed to trials for detainees on US soil, and dont have a solution for the camp other than to keep it open until the population passes away peacefully or foreign nations start accepting them as immigrants.
https://www.defenseone.com/politics/2019/04/guantanamo-nursi...
The oldest man in GITMO currently is 71. Each of these detainees receives the same care as a US Soldier, but frankly doesnt contribute much. Our reasoning for keeping them there (often against overwhelming evidence of their innocence) has been contemptuous at some times, comical at others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Usage_in_terrorism
Id surmise 20 years after 9/11 that GITMO is a sore spot in US politics most bureaucrats are content to just pretend never existed. It hasnt produced the Jack Bauer results we'd all been promised. Its arguably not been much of a detention center at all in the past decade. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2157134/PlayStation...
The only concerning human rights fallout from this is that some countries are now more recalcitrant about handing over their citizens to US law enforcement, and many designated enemies are now more emboldened to use torture freely against US soldiers and citizens as we are now on the record as having employed torture ourselves.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/ISN_0146...
It certainly doesn't justify torture, but it also doesn't look like he's the completely innocent bystander he claims to be.
From my quick reading, looks like he admitted to operating an Al-qaeda safe house and being a high level trusted driver/messenger.
Also looks like majority of his life was spent in Saudi Arabia, but was expelled before going to Pakistan. Arrested multiple times trying to travel to join jihad training...
Maybe that's why no one wants to take him.
Maybe he's denied his guilt differently in the past, but the article's wording looks suspiciously to me like dancing around a lie.
I'm trying to remain objective, but I'm starting to get that bitterness felt once you realized you've been intentionally fooled.
Still, everyone deserves due process.
Maybe there's more to the story than what the detainee chooses to share in his letter to the editor.
Read the linked report, even if it's just for insight into how the system isn't working.
Edit: Also, fwiw, apparently he was a well known al Qaeda "facilitator" in Karachi, meaning he was implicated by others too. It's not solely his "admission". But also the report claims he's a well behaved, cooperative prisoner who voluntary shared a lot...
It's obviously still based on trusting the classified report, if you want to believe it.
The advice was to surrender to the first American he saw. The father had been taken prisoner by the US Army during the first world war, and his experience in captivity was such that he advised his own son to surrender to the Americans as quickly as possible, rather than fight.
How many lives, both American and others, were saved by this and others like him? We'll never know, but if your enemy believes that by surrendering to you he will be safe and well-treated, surely many.
So where are we now? Now the narrative is "If the Americans capture you, you will wish you were dead." Everyone who carries out these tortures is holding a gun to the head of every American soldier in the field. I'm surprised that torturers don't get fragged by their own side more often. Maybe they do.
I used to think that the concept of doublethink in 1984 was satire. It pains me to realize that it absolutely is not.
I have to admit, it's hard to believe we'd allow this sort of thing these days and yet there is also recent history supporting this as a pattern of behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
How can anyone watch this and realize that precisely nobody went to jail or suffered any kind of process of justice as a result and still think that the country has any respect whatsoever for its written policies or procedures?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/31/cia-admits-spy...
I, for one, am firmly convinced that there are two different sets of laws in this country. One for us, and one for them.
Playing the devil's advocate for a moment- suppose you had some information about 9/11 one week before, would you torture your informant to get the precise date and location ? one person's rights in exchange for thousands.
And still under the devil's advocate cover- why are tortures different than killing terrorist (or "terrorists") in remote countries without trial while many times causing suffering collateral damage ?
When I was in college Alan Dershowitz participated in a public debate about torture in front of students where (aside from a great deal of incoherent blather and blatant disrespect his opponent, a woman whose husband had been tortured and murdered) he pulled some example of torture stopping a terror plot in (I believe?) Southeast Asia.
But when I looked up the details after the debate, it turned out that in fact torture hadn’t accomplished anything and the plot was stopped through unrelated regular investigative police work.
The whole argument is disingenuous, and many of the torture apologists behind it are lazy and academically dishonest.
> why are tortures different than killing terrorist (or "terrorists") in remote countries without trial
Personally I would argue that assassination is an unjust, illegal, and ineffective tactic for fighting against criminals, even violent criminals.
But still, assassination and torture are pretty clearly different. One is killing someone who presumably cannot be easily captured by ordinary law enforcement action. The other is inflicting horrific pain and suffering on a defenseless person in custody out of spite, for no practical benefit.
This is a pretty classic example of a utility monster. It's part of the reason that many have issues with utilitarianism.
Regardless, we're talking about Abu Ghraib. This was a rape factory that pushed several thousand through it's doors, so it's important to keep that in view, rather than drifting off into fantastical hypotheticals that presupposes our defensive reaction instead of our continual aggression.
I'm not sure it's even utilitarianism. Otherwise he'd be admitting that "Well, torture doesn't give us any actionable intelligence, so we shouldn't be torturing anybody". Utilitarianism isn't about doing pointless actions in the remote hope of the victim giving up anything useful or true.
> Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines right from wrong by focusing on outcomes. It is a form of consequentialism.
Stated otherwise: Suppose you had some information about 9/11 one week before and you torture your informant to get the precise date and location. You don't get anything because torture doesn't work, and it draws resources away from more useful investigative efforts to track potential attackers, while undermining US strategic and diplomatic efforts overseas. Should you have tortured that person or not?
Utilitarianism is about the perception of value. If torturing someone makes a population feel better, then at scale it is a net positive.
It's consequentialist but the OP was pretty spot on. Utilitarianism is about maximizing utility.
> If your goal is to make people feel better, maybe, but even then I'd posit that you'd make them feel better by preventing 9/11.
Unless the terrorist attack provided greater utility than preventing it, then you wouldn't want to stop it. Utilitarianism is real worrying, isn't it?
Again, it depends on what your goal is. Utilitarianism is as worrying as moral relativism, and I don't see people worried about that either.
Well, as I've said multiple times, we're talking about Utilitarianism, so the goal is always utility maximization.
> Utilitarianism is as worrying as moral relativism, and I don't see people worried about that either.
Plenty of people are justifiably terrified about moral relativism.
1. The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.
2. The CIA's justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_interrogation_techniq...
Secondly, the argument is essentially utilitarian, "one person's rights in exchange for thousands"-- which you would argue was true in this one case. However, if your strategy was adopted as policy, how many torture cases would there be? Would it only be this one time? Or are we talking about thousands of people being tortured over the years in the hope that one time this save thousands of lives.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/nazi-interrogator-revealed-...
Discussions about the utility of torture always make me thing of what people are really after:
“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
Edit: Probably doesn't make good TV though....
Torture literally does not work and the scenarios where it could conceivably work never materialize.
Even at the most basic level; torture doesn't work to reveal the truth, so any "information" that you gained is worthless until confirmed by another reliable channel, and if you can do that - well you might as well could have just used that reliable channel in the first place. It's also worth pointing out that even if someone knows something, they are not going to tell you just because you torture them. Famously the US tortured an actual terrorist for months on end using these methods and the man told his torturers exactly only those things he knew they already knew.
It doesn't work.
This needs to go to the International Court Of Justice in Den Haag, regardless if the court is being recognized by the US.
So they will just lie, you will torture them some more until you persuade yourself they told you the truth, and the attack will happen somewhere else than where they told you anyway.
But hey - you get to torture them some more after the fact to feel better.
He doesn't need the help.
I would also, assuming its as bad as it sounds, at the very least, I'd go hard after those doctors and get their licenses, at least. I bet it would trigger already existing law if you could elminate this evil little maneuver.
Now, a motivated administration could still get someone to do it, I'm sure, unethical doctors at the end of their career, or doctors you pay off or threaten to do it. But that increases the difficulty considerably.
Oh, and I would also like to see an interview with W and Obama (and Trump!) about this.
And by that I mean that yes, there were individual incidents of torture, but they weren't sanctioned and often prosecuted. There might be as of yet unknown incidents or programs, but the space and scope for such would be rather limited, given all that happened since.
The willingness to torture prisoners arbitrarily, and the unwillingness to police or prosecute or punish the widespread application of torture in prisons is well-distributed and longstanding tradition within the United States.
Apparently, it's also fairly common to torture schoolchildren: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/11/20/illinois...
Additionally, it's sort of hard to say that the incidences in question by the military weren't sanctioned when the CIA actually hacked into Congress to further the coverup.
I haven't yet found any reporting on such operations in English-speaking or even onshore media being tied back to the CIA or NSA or even political campaigns. The latter may even be allowed to do it.
It's important to remember that US authorities never used torture in general, and probably not at all since this program was used. That doesn't make what happened any better, but it doesn't mean the US is worse in this regard than China, North Korea or Russia. We just don't know the extent of human rights violations there, and we sort of assume that's their normal behavior anyway.
Certainly not how I remember the Iraq War...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_priso...
We did?
Bush and Cheney are free men, as is the entire chain of those who advocated for torture (John Yoo still gets into the New York Times!), as are those who have carried out illegal orders to torture.
What did we do, exactly?
Good luck getting remotely as much from China or Russia...
... there are careers and money to be made.
Out of all the senators and representatives, there was just 1 that opposed giving the executive carte blanche authorization to do whatever it wants to whoever it wants after the Sep 11, 2001 attacks. She received tons and tons of hate mail and death threats.
How you assign blame internally is up to you.
On the other hand having an affair is a reason to remove a president from the office :) Unless of course you like his racism enough :)
The 2-party system is insane, it means no matter what you do you'll be the governing party in a decade or so anyway. So why not risk big? There's no consequences to fuckups.
If you have no democratic control over your intelligence agencies then you don't live in a democracy.
It seems to me, a layman, that the motive could be legal or political instead.
Currently they are treated (relatively) well and have access to lawyers. I think they could sue for damages, but they are probably focused on being released first.
https://www.newsweek.com/dear-president-trump-close-guantana...
Rabbani previously went on hunger strike in 2017, but Guantanamo's force-feeding prevented him from dying:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/guantanamo-detainee-c...
Further details on Rabbani:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rabbani-guantana...
While Guantanamo methods are supposedly shady (and illegal in light of basic human rights and conventions), there is a very non-zero chance that the article is a made up and/or incomplete story by this convict. I’m not going to claim anything, but let’s not jump to conclusions on who is real evil based only on what someone says on the internet out of a prison cell.
It may sound hard for this guy, but if he’s innocent, he is still outnumbered by cynical liars who claim the same everyday. They have time at their hands to figure out ways to make life easier and constant deception is one of the methods used.
Iow, one of the answers on why it’s not a daily headline is because UN, human rights and those who make headlines check a little deeper -or- put it under “opinion” tag (like in this article).
They might have mistaken him initially for someone else, but it doesn't seem like his real identity is really an innocent bystander.
So, let me try to follow your reasoning:
(1) he was arrested because of a case of mistaken identity
(2) the person he was mistaken for was arrested later and positively identified
(3) he must have been guilty of something because he was arrested
I'm really not following, care to explain?
He's not the bad guy they originally thought he was, but still a bad guy, or at least was working for the bad guy.
Not advocating for torture, and not necessarily saying it's true, just presenting the other side.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/ISN_0146...
So, either he was 'a bad guy', let's see the charges, or it was a case of mistaken identity. It does not look like there is much middle ground here.
2) This isn't about his character or being "good" vs "bad". This is about whether he knowingly provided material support to Al Qaeda or enemy combatants. The leaked report I linked to makes a compelling (to me) case that he repeatedly attempted to join and assist militant jihad groups, including after being jailed for it in Pakistan.
3) That said, none of it justifies torture, and none of it justifies denying him the right to a trial, be it military or civilian.
(1) the guy was not arrested in some house after a raid but sold by kidnappers to the Americans being told that he was someone else.
(2) he wasn't the 'driver/messenger/accomplice' of anybody interesting, he was a cab driver with a pregnant wife minding his own business
Note that because there is no trial that none of the above has ever been countered so that's the only evidence there is. If the other side has a story it wishes to tell it's had 17 years and counting to do so. The only apparent reason why he is still there is because the people in charge are scared that he will sue them (and rightly so).
It's a case of perverse incentives gone bad, not a case of catching 'Bonnie' when looking for 'Clyde'.
Really? C'mon man...
The "article" that's a letter written by the detainee?
I read it. In detail.
I'm saying consider a source other than the detainee.
I'm about as skeptical of perverse government incentives as one can get. But that doesn't mean I automatically take the word of the detainee, either... He has his own incentives at play.
He deserves a trial. He didn't deserve to be tortured and shouldn't have been. But his story doesn't add up to me.
>>1)sold by kidnappers
According to the detainee assessment I linked to above:
(Edit: Wikileaks classified Detainee Assessment link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/ISN_0146...)
(---Which again, l don't necessarily trust to be true or in good faith any more than the detainees letter, but it's 11 pages of pretty damning classified details, that paint a different picture than "innocent bystander".--- )
>The Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate (ISID) captured detainee along with his driver, Muhammad Madni, on 10 September 2002 at detainee’s safe house in Karachi. Detainee was held in Pakistani custody and was transferred to US custody at Bagram, AF in May 2004.
Maybe they thought he was someone different, but it looks like he was definitely involved, since:
>He [Madni] also provided information on other safe houses, which led on the following day to the arrest of 11 September 2001 terrorist attack planners Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Hassan Muhammad Ali Bin Attash, aka (Muhammed Tawfiq), and other al-Qaida members. During the second ISID raid, a group of eight suspected members of al-Qaida resisted arrest resulting in the deaths of two of the cell members. The remaining six were taken prisoner and weapons and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were confiscated.
>>2) he wasn't the 'driver/messenger/accomplice' of anybody interesting, he was a cab driver with a pregnant wife minding his own business
But we don't know that, other than taking him at his word. (Unless you've got something else you're going off of.) The report calls him a combat trained "facilitator" and says he was paid to do many different things, including driving for his superiors, housing militants and smuggling them over the border to Afghanistan:
>Detainee is an admitted al-Qaida facilitator, who had the full trust and confidence of al-Qaida leadership. Detainee admitted working directly for senior al-Qaida operational planner Khalid Shaykh Muhammad (KSM)...
>In 1994, detainee initially trained for seven months at a militant camp near Khowst, AF and then went to the Khaldan Training Camp for a two-month training session in tactics. Detainee then attempted to go to Kashmir, PK but was arrested at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, for which he spent 1995 and 1996 in prison.
>Detainee has been forthcoming in the past about his role as a facilitator and his associations among the highest levels of the al-Qaida organization, which has been corroborated by numerous JTF-GTMO detainees reporting. ... Detainee downplays the fact that he received advanced military training at terrorist training camps and he has become non-cooperative with interrogators since late 2004.
>...Detainee reported meeting with UBL on 6 to 12 occasions...
>In 1999, detainee began working directly for UBL’s chief of operations, Abu Hafs,aka (Muhammad Atif). Detainee would transport al-Qaida fighters for Abu Hafs from Karachi to Quetta, PK, where another driver would take them to Kandahar. Detainee next met senior al-Qaida operational planner KU-10024 who offered detainee a job driving him around in a taxi for 200 Pakistani rupees a day. Detainee stated he felt close to KU-10024, believing they fought for the same cause. In 2000, Abu Hafs ordered detainee to rent a house with two floors, one for detainee’s family and one for his guests, but he was frequently away per KU-10024’s instructions to be vigilant.
Seriously, there's 11 solid pages of this. Maybe it's lies and a cover-up or maybe not, but at least read and consider that there's more to the story than a prisoner's letter to a paper.
If nothing else, read it for insight into the "system" at play.
I think you did read my comment as a definitive statement, while it just describes an option that was not mentioned itt, but has some potential to be true.
Wow. I have seen this attitude deployed by law enforcement against certain demographics "Well, he might not have committed this crime, but he committed some other crime for sure. Pinning this on him is no biggie, he had it coming". This attitude makes a mockery of any nation that considers itself a nation ruled by law - that is not the way the law should work
That’s bad, but I can’t see this “attitude” in my comments. I thought I put enough “one of maybe possible, chances are, explanation”.
This is not what I meant. Speaking about versions and possibilities is not the same as acting solely out of these.
17 years without a trial is not acceptable by any western values.
You may not have noticed, but Western values have changed. Indefinite detainment without trial and torture are perfectly acceptable for Muslims and brown people.
If Guantanamo Bay ever harms one hair on a pretty Christian white girl's head, though, Americans will burn it to the ground.
Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani was one of the 71 individuals deemed too innocent to charge, but too dangerous to release.
Plus even news articles can be corrected in comments. I've read many misleading articles where the flaws/bias are pointed out in comments, so ling as the author isn't allowed to "curate" them freely.
Sure, if you really want to interpret me in the most uncharitable way possible.
>evidence that he _did_ anything
There wouldn't be. It's not an "article", it's a (very good) plea for public sympathy written by the detainee. Do you expect him to implicate himself?
I don't even question whether he was tortured. But I do seriously question whether he was an innocent bystander, given the classified WikiLeaks documents on him.