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Today's Stories December 22 / 23, 2007 Ralph Nader Politics and Profits: How the Oil Cartel Gets Its Way December 21, 2007 John Ross New Massacres Loom in Mexico Jacob Hornberger Nothing Can Morally Justify the Invasion of Iraq Dick J. Reavis A Way Out of the Newspaper Abyss Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon The 2007 P.U.-litzer Prizes Peter Morici Business as Usual as Recession Looms Jack McCarthy Let Us Now Praise Judith Regan (Even If She Did Sleep with Bernie Kerik) Raúl Zibechi Sex and Revolution Steve Early How the Presidential Candidates Made Me an Atheist David Macaray Union Aftermath Patrick Bond Zuma, the Center-Left and the Left-Left in S. Africa Lakota Freedom Delegation A Declaration of Independence from the USA Website of the Day Solomon v. Beck: Tale of the Tape   December 20, 2007 David Rosen Mitt Romney's Secret Life as a Pornographer Alan Farago The Huckster and the Wreckage: Jeb Bush and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis Laura Carlsen Standing Up to NAFTA Ashley Dawson The Return of the Bread Riot Wayne Smith and Jennifer Schuett Cuba Changes, US Policy Stagnates Website of the Day How to Talk to a FoxNews Reporter   December 19, 2007 Saul Landau Is the NIE Bush's Watergate? Paul W. Lovinger Hillary the Hawk Norman Solomon The Mad Corporate World of Glenn Beck Dave Zirin George Mitchell's Drugs of Choice Marjorie Cohn Bush Still Spinning Iranian Nukes Sen. Russell Feingold The Iraq War is Exhausting Our Nation Sonja Karkar A Christmas Reflection on Palestine Anthony Papa Open the Drug Gulags Christopher Ketcham Pave the Holy Lands with Good Intentions Davey D Britney's Little Sister is Pregnant: Should We Blame Hip Hop? Website of the Day When Republicans Use the F-Word on TV   December 18, 2007 R. F. Blader The Politics of Teen Pregnancy George Wuerthner Gunning for Wolves in Idaho Steven Higgs Can the NAFTA Superhighway be Stopped? Vijay Prashad Encounters with Ghadar David Macaray The Free Rider Problem Ralph Nader Nine Books That Make a Difference: a Reading List for the Holidays Eva Liddell Privatizing War Abroad, Invading Privacy at Home Martha Rosenberg While the Bodies are Still Warm: Drugs, Shrinks and Shooters Dave Lindorff When Impeachment is Out of Print Peter Morici The Consequences the Trade Deficit Website of the Day Ron Paul: How Fascism Will Come to America   December 17, 2007 Mike Whitney Staring Into the Abyss Tom Barry Planning the War on Immigrants Uri Avnery A Gaza Masada? Greg Moses Crossing the Line in Texas Allan Nairn Terrorism; Counter- Terrorism: Excuses for Murder Patrick Bond South Africa's Fight Between Hostile Brothers Stephen Lendman Police State America Charles Jonkel Grizzly Right of Way Laray Polk An Inside-Out Crisis in Gaza Stephen Fleischman Pawns in Their Game December 15 / 16, 2007 Peter Linebaugh A People's Penny for the Magna Carta Howard Zinn Bomb After Bomb Standard Schaefer The Greening of Big Tobacco Raymond J. Lawrence Let's Take Christ Out of Christmas Alan Farago Down on Desolation Row: the Vultures and the Growth Machine Saul Landau Lord Byron and the Bad Tourists Jenna Orkin Lying to "Reassure" the Public: Bush's EPA and the Post-9/11 Toxic Air Cover-Up Ahmad Samih Khalidi Why a Palestinian "State" is a Punitive Construct Robert Fantina Politics By Photo-Op Missy Comley Beattie Resistance Amid the Ruins Ramzy Baroud Of Mormons and Muslims James L. Secor A Vision for China's Future Elijah Wald Ike Turner's Music Won't be Forgotten Website of the Weekend The Alliance for the Wild Rockies Needs (and Deserves) Your Support   December 14, 2007 JoAnn Wypijewski The Dirty Cad: What Giuliani's Sex Life Tells Us About Him John Ross Iraqi Refugees Return: One Cruel Hoax Jacob Hornberger Terror Suspects Belong in Federal Court Andy Worthington Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? Allan Nairn "Shoot Them on the Spot": Rewarding War Crimes Dave Zirin The Mitchell Report: Absolving the Owners Dave Lindorff The First Cut is the Deepest Misty MacDuffee Toxic Grizzlies Ben Terrall What Happened to Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine? Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi Prerequisites for Peace Website of the Day Sen. Kit Bond: "Waterboarding is Like Swimming"   December 13, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Shrinking the Dollar from the Inside-Out Mike Whitney Dershowitz for the Defense--of Waterboarding Ron Jacobs Blank Check DemocratsL the Great War Funding Conspiracy Norman Solomon The USA's Human Rights Daze Peter Morici The Dragon and the Toothless Dog: China Doesn't Flinch Sandy Mayes Blocking the Strykers: 13 Days of War Resistance at Port Olympia Franklin Lamb The UN in Lebanon: Whose Mission Is It Fulfilling? Jacob Hornberger Don't Reform the CIA, Abolish It Nadim Rouhana An Interloper in My Own Land Dave Zirin On Pigskin and Petrol Website of the Day Rachel's Needs (and Deserves) Your Support! December 12, 2007 Allan Nairn US Intelligence is Tapping Indonesian Phones Alan Farago How Sprawl Eats Its Young Ray McGovern Torture, Lies and Videotape Winslow T. Wheeler The Phony Pentagon Budget Cuts Evan Jones The Raid on Great Western: Why an Australian Bank Might Spell Doom for the US Farm Belt James Petras An Open Letter to Sarkozy on the Exchange of Political Prisonsers Joel Hirschorn The Horserace Fiction: Clinton, Obama and the Democratic Machine Joshua Frank Why Ron Paul Deserves Our Attention Sherry Wolf Why the Left Should Reject Ron Paul Dan Bacher Survey of a Fish Graveyard Website of the Day Men Eating Bugs   December 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn What's Really Happened During the Surge? Diana Johnstone The Next Kosovo War Paul Craig Roberts It's Waco All Over Again: Preventive Detention and the Constitution David Macaray Impasse in Hollywood Ralph Nader Gail Collins Versus the Underdogs Andy Worthington Guantánamo Britons to be Released: a Mixed Result Martha Rosenberg No Holiday for High Risk Sex Workers Steve Champion / Anthony Ross Words for Our Brother, Tookie Williams Kim Nicolini Tangled Up in Dylan Michael Dickinson Say Goodbye to Purgatory: Pope Rat Gets Indulgent Website of the Day A Charming (and Worthy) Pitch December 10, 2007 Uri Avnery How They Stole the Bomb From Us Debbie Nathan The Perils of Journalism and Child Porn JoAnn Wypijewski Is There a Left Here Left? If So, What Can It Do? Steve Kelly Cheap Chips, Counterfeit Wilderness Donna J. Volatile Welcome to the Revolution   December 8 / 9, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Coup Against Bush and Cheney Brenda Norrell Seize the Land, Chain the Peace Activists Saul Landau The Ruins of Empire R. F. Blader A Rape in Every Drink? Ray McGovern Spinning Iran's Centrifuges Allan Nairn Imposed Hunger in Gaza, the Army in Indonesia Linn Washington, Jr Spotlight on Death Row Paul Craig Roberts When Will Bush Come Clean?   December 7, 2007 Sean Penn Piano Wire Puppeteers Arthur Versluis Mining Water in the Desert M. G. Piety Racism and the American Psyche: Some Thoughts on Race and Intelligence Pam Martens Banksters Gone Wild Alan Farago Will the Free Market Kill Suburbia? Sprawl and the Credit Crisis Allan Nairn It Takes (Out) a Village Col. Dan Smith Bush, Iran and the Politics of Doomsday Alice Slater The Iran Opening Robert Weissman The Story of Stuff Website of the Day Something About Mitt   December 5, 2007 Mike Whitney Why the CFR Hates Putin Sharon Smith The Anti-War Enablers: Tom Hayden and the Dead End Democrats James Petras Venezuela in the Aftermath Ron Jacobs The Iran Charade Dave Zirin Kicking a Dead Man: the Sliming of Sean Taylor John V. Whitbeck Two States or One? Time to Choose Peter Zinn Covered in New Orleans Niranjan Ramakrishnan Impeach Pelosi Instead Alan Farago The Credit Bomb Detonates in Florida Heather Gray US Meddling in Australian Politics Website of the Day A Donner Summit Night Before Xmas   December 4, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Jackboot State Stubs Its Toe in Ann Arbor Andy Worthington Guantánamo and the Supreme Court Paul Craig Roberts The Lies at the End of the American Dream Ray McGovern No-Nuke Iran Winslow T. Wheeler Admiral Mullen and the Defense Budget: When White Elephants are Too Small Allan Nairn The Regime Still Stands in Burma, Where "the People Just Want Food" Russell Mokhiber The USA v. Al Arian Nikolas Kozloff As Chávez Falters: Raising the Stakes for the South American Left John V. Walsh Peace Movement Paralyzed Ghada Ageel Will Peace Cost Me My Home? Stephen Soldz The Facts be Damned!: Psychologists' President Defends Psychologist Involvement in Interrogations Website of the Day Hands Off the People of Iran     December 3, 2007 Tariq Ali Venezuela After the Referendum Bill Quigley New Orleans: Bulldozers for the Poor, Tax Credits for Developers Eric Walberg The Bible and Middle East History Uri Avnery After Annapolis Marjorie Cohn Operation Iraqi Freedom Exposed Dave Lindorff Vengeance Isn't Sweet Stephen Fleischman Homeless in Paradise Martha Rosenberg Perp Walks for the Mink Clad on Chicago's Mag Mile Website of the Day So Just Lead!   December 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Emblems of the Bush Age: Adrift in a Sea of Booze Jeffrey St. Clair The Bear Minimum: the Grizzly and the Future of the Rocky Mountain West Mike Whitney "Iraq Doesn't Exist Anymore": an Interview with Nir Rosen Shemon Salam A Visit From the FBI Roger Burbach The Battle in Bolivia Benjamin Dangl New Politics in Old Bolivia Brian M. Downing The Quiet on the Middle Eastern Front: How Much Credit Goes to the Surge? Greg Moses Night of the Living Redneck: a Texas Horror Story Sonja Karkar The "Never-Never" Peace Conference Saul Landau Ethics and Evil in South Boston Margaret Kimberley Black America Left Behind John Ross What are the Prospects for a New Mexican Revolution? Reza Fiyouzat Exit on the Left: When Che's Children Visited Iran Judith Scherr Berkeley Turns Right for the Holidays Lance Olsen Of Forests and Finance: Logging for the Wealthy Christopher Brauchli Mr. Bush and the Despots Robert Fantina Iraq as U.S. Colony Dan Bacher Fish Triage on Prospect Island Michael Donnelly Remembering How to be Human: John Trudell and the Music of Urgency Website of the Weekend Appalachian Voices   November 30, 2007 Peter Stone Brown The Re-Packaging of Bob Dylan Wajahat Ali The Volatile Mistress: an Interview with Javed Jabbar, Pakistan's Former Minister of Information Allan Nairn Cold-Blooded Celebrity: Thomas L. Friedman and the Bali Bombers Alan Farago The Sorrows of Suburbia: Politics, Sprawl and the Housing Crash John Ross The Death of Latin America's First Revolution Corporate Crime Reporter America's Corporate Crime Capitals Lucia Alvarez Diego Gonzalez Argentina's Political Future James Rothenberg The Iraqi Miracle Website of the Day Bio-Bling?   November 29, 2007 R. F. Blader The Most Dangerous Kind of Bribe Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Distorting Fascism to Demonize Iran Stephen Soldz War on the Couch: Fear, Aggression and Empire Sheldon Richman Iraq 3.0 George Wuerthner Forest Fires, Lies and Chainsaws Felice Pace Did All Things Considered Self-Censor on Annapolis? Col. Dan Smith The Meaning of Annapolis Harvey Wasserman Terror Target Nukes Nikolas Kozloff Primetime Hate Debate: Lou Dobbs, Immigration and Campaign '08 Paul Krassner Huffington Post Bloggers Go On Strike! Dave Lindorff News Not Fit to Print: US Coup Planned for Venezuela? CP News Service The One State Declaration Website of the Day A Native View of Yellowstone Bison Slaughter November 28, 2007 James Petras CIA Destabilization Memo Surfaces on Venezuela Jeff Halper Annapolis: When the Roadmap is a One Way Street Pam Martens Crashing Citigroup Peter Morici Economy in Crisis: Avoiding a Recession Mohammed Khatib Separate and Unequal in Palestine Helen Redmond The Horror and the Hope: Health Care in America William S. Lind In the Fox's Lair: Quiet Before a New Iraq Storm? Ben Tripp We, the People: a Trope for All Seasons Liaquat Ali Khan Pakistan: First, Restore the Constitution and Reinstate the Judges Jeff Berg Holbrooke Says Bush Won't Attack Iran Website of the Day The Lies of Joe Klein   November 27, 2007 Joe DeRaymond On the Road to the Torture School Paul Craig Roberts Meet the Only Two Candidates Worse Than Bush and Cheney: Hillary and Rudy Marjorie Cohn Remembering Victor Rabinowitz Mike Whitney A Dollar the Size of a Postage Stamp Ron Jacobs The Myths of Military Progress Col. Dan Smith The Pentagon's "People System" Still Doesn't Work Ralph Nader Family Learning Karim Makdisi Annapolis and the Unholy Alliance: the View from Beirut Christopher Ketcham Memo to Hollywood Writers: Strike Until You Drop Ronan Bennett Martin Amis Does a Coulter Website of the Day Celebrating the Uncensored Media   November 26, 2007 Kathleen and Bill Christison Heading for Annapolis Paul Craig Roberts The End of All That David Macaray Enter Mediator Sameer Dossani Pakistan's Wounded Dictator Roger Burbach The Final Battle in Bolivia Mark Scaramella Guns and Greed in the Emerald Empire Brian McKinlay Howard's End Rick Kuhn The Fall of a Racist Union Buster Binoy Kampmark Ruddslide and Dull Alec Monica Benderman What Do You Know of War? Brenda Norrell Return to Alcatraz Website of the Day Ghostworld by DJ Spooky   November 24 / 25, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Ordeal of Catherine Wilkerson, MD Robert Fisk Darkness Falls on the Middle East Saul Landau Norman Mailer will Not R.I.P. Jeffrey St. Clair Justice Stephen Breyer, Cancer Bonds and the Origins of Neoliberal Environmentalism Rannie Amiri Beirut's Black Friday Christopher Brauchli Iraq Embassy as Gilded Palace Daniel Gross The Gap and Black Friday Mike Whitney "A Generalized Meltdown of Financial Institutions" Marjorie Cohn Iran and the 2008 Elections David Rosen Senior Sex: the Real Sexual Life of Aging Americans David Michael Green If Conservatism is the Ideology of Freedom .... Kenneth Rexroth When Euripides Played the Hindu Kush: Greeks and Buddhists in Afghanistan Muhammad Iqbal Trans. Shahid Alam Ghazal Website of the Day Aerial Footage of Delta Fish Kill November 23, 2007 Gary Leupp Killing the Buddha in Pakistan's Swat Valley Laura Carlsen Coming to Terms with Diversity in Bolivia: an Interview with Alvaro Garcia, Bolivia's VP David Macaray Keeping Labor Unions Out Andy Worthington Former Guantánamo Detainee Seeks Asylum in Sweden Clifton Ross Trashing Chavez: Keith Olberman's Toxic Rant Seth Sandronsky Battling Sodexho Dan Bacher Death in the Delta: Thousands of Fish Stranded by Bureau of Reclamation William A. Cook The Myth of Middle East Peace Website of the Day Waiting for the Guards: Stress Techniques as Torture, a Short Film   November 22, 2007 Alan Farago Who Lost America's Everglades? Greg Moses A Thanksgiving Basting Dave Lindorff Impeachment is Back on the Table Mike Ely Native Blood: the Myth pf Thanksgiving Omar Azfar Gore for President of Pakistan?   November 21, 2007 Vijay Prashad Our Dictator, Their Democracy Martha Rosenberg Undercover at a Turkey Slaughtering Plant Manuel Garcia, Jr. Epiphany on the Glacier John Ross The Last Days of Mexican Corn Brian McKenna Cancer Terrorists Unmasked Stephen Soldz Isolation Torture Routine at Guatánamo Monica Benderman Needing Peace Ben Terrall Slavery in the Fields: The Real Price of Sugar Website of the Day Mercy for Animals               Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition December 22 / 23, 2007 Tales of the Afghan Prisoners Intelligence Failures, Battlefield Myths and Unaccountable Prisons in Afghanistan By ANDY WORTHINGTON In the last week, while the media's attention has focused on the release of two Sudanese humanitarian aid workers from Guantánamo, the 13 Afghans who were flown to Kabul at the same time have barely been mentioned. The reasons for this oversight are clear: firstly, because one of the Sudanese ex-detainees, Adel Hamad, a hospital administrator, had become something of a celebrity after his enterprising lawyers posted a video about his case on YouTube, which prompted a group of campaigners to establish a website devoted to his plight; and secondly, because Hamad and his compatriot, Salim Adem, were released on their return, and various reporters were able to meet them. No such luxuries were reserved for the Afghans. Few of their stories are known at all, and on their return to Afghanistan they were promptly imprisoned in a wing of Pol-i-Charki, Kabul's main prison, which was recently refurbished by the US authorities. The oversight is disturbing because, for the most part, the stories of the Afghans demonstrate colossal ineptitude on the part of the US military and Special Forces in Afghanistan, at least equivalent to the failures of intelligence that led to the capture of Adel Hamad and Salim Adem. In addition, the imprisonment of these men in a prison wing refurbished by the US authorities raises uncomfortable questions about the role of the US military in Afghanistan, over six years after the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. Unaccountable US prisons in Afghanistan Despite the official inauguration of Hamid Karzai as the President of post-Taliban Afghanistan (and the country's first democratically elected leader) on December 7, 2004, the US military has continued to behave like an occupying power, holding hundreds of prisoners at Bagram airbase (formerly used to process detainees for Guantánamo), including foreigners as well as Afghans, and an unknown number of other prisoners in a variety of secret prisons and forward operating bases. Cut off from all outside scrutiny (except for representatives of the International Red Cross), these prisoners do not even have the limited legal representation available to the detainees in Guantánamo. In March 2005, when journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark visited Afghanistan, they met Dr. Rafiullah Bidar, a regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which had recently been established, with funding from the US Congress, "to investigate abuses committed by local warlords and to ensure that women's and children's rights were protected." Ironically, Bidar told the reporters that what his job actually entailed was registering complaints against the US military. "Many thousands of people have been rounded up and detained by them," he said. "Those who have been freed say that they were held alongside foreign detainees who've been brought to this country to be processed. No one is charged. No one is identified. No international monitors are allowed into the US jails. People who have been arrested say they've been brutalized ­ the tactics used are beyond belief." Speaking anonymously, a government minister also complained, "Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability." Nearly three years later, this situation has not changed. Lawyers at the US-based International Justice Network have filed a potentially ground-breaking habeas corpus claim on behalf of a detainee at Bagram, but the system as a whole -- like that in Iraq, where at least 15,000 detainees are held without charge or trial -- remains impervious to outside scrutiny. Until April 2007, however, the detainees released from Guantánamo -- 152 of the 220 held since the prison opened in January 2002 -- sidestepped this unaccountable prison system and were released on their return to Afghanistan, but this has changed with the US-financed refurbishment of Pol-i-Charki, and it is not yet clear whether the 32 detainees returned since April 2007 have simply exchanged Guantánamo for an even less accountable form of indefinite detention without charge or trial. Myths and lies: detainees who returned to the battlefield It's probable that the excuse for imprisoning the Afghans returned in the last eight months is the US military's oft-repeated claim that dozens of released detainees have returned to the battlefield. If so, this would be grossly disingenuous. Not only are the figures disputed, with only six recognized by those who have studied the stories in any detail, but the US administration has also refused to acknowledge the shocking truth about its own responsibility for releasing these men. The Taliban freed from Guantánamo include Abdullah Mehsud, a Pakistani Taliban commander, released in March 2004, who killed himself with a hand grenade after being cornered by security forces in Pakistan in July 2007. Mehsud came to prominence in October 2004, after his men kidnapped two Chinese engineers working on a dam project in Waziristan, when he explained that, at the time of his capture in November 2001, he was carrying a false Afghan ID card, and that he had successfully maintained throughout his detention that he was an innocent Afghan tribesman. Another was Mullah Shahzada, released in May 2003, who gave the Americans a false name and claimed that he was an innocent rug merchant. "He stuck to his story and was fairly calm about the whole thing," a military intelligence official told the New York Times. "He maintained over a period of time that he was nothing but an innocent rug merchant who just got snatched up." After his release, Shahzada seized control of Taliban operations in southern Afghanistan, recruiting fighters by "telling harrowing tales of his supposed ill-treatment in the cages of Guantánamo," and masterminded a jailbreak in Kandahar in October 2003, in which he bribed the guards to allow 41 Taliban fighters to escape through a tunnel. His post-Guantánamo notoriety came to an end in May 2004, when he was killed in an ambush by US Special Forces. While right-wing commentators seized on the release of Mehsud and Shahzada as evidence that no one should ever be released from Guantánamo, a rather different interpretation was offered by Gul Agha Sherzai, the post-Taliban governor of Kandahar, who pointed out that they would never have been freed if Afghan officials had been allowed to vet the Afghans in Guantánamo. "We know all these Taliban faces," he said, adding that repeated requests for access to the Afghan prisoners had been turned down. Sherzai's opinion was reinforced by security officials in Karzai's government, who, off the record, blamed the US for the return of Taliban commanders to the battlefield, explaining that "neither the American military officials, nor the Kabul police, who briefly process the detainees when they are sent home, consult them about the detainees they free." Of the 13 Afghans released from Guantánamo last week, nine have been identified. The rest, like dozens of those released in the last 18 months, did not have lawyers (who are told when their clients have been released), and as a result even their identities are unknown. The Pentagon never reveals the names of the detainees it frees, and without representatives of the world's media on the ground in Kabul, as they were for the first batches of released detainees in 2002 and 2003, these men remain as lost to the world as they were in Guantánamo. Taliban conscript or Taliban commander? The first of the nine to be captured, Abdul Rauf Aliza, remains something of an enigma to this day. Seized in November 2001 during the fall of Kunduz, the last Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan, he was held, with thousands of other men, in a filthy, overcrowded prison in Sheberghan run by General Rashid Dostum, one of the leaders of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, and was then transferred to the US prison at Kandahar airbase with nine other Afghan prisoners. One of the nine, Jan Mohammed, a baker from Helmand province who had been forcibly conscripted by the Taliban, was one of the first detainees to be released from Guantánamo in October 2002. After his release, he explained that the decision to transfer him to Kandahar came about because some of Dostum's men "told US soldiers that he and nine others were senior Taliban officials." "They came and took ten strong-looking people," he told the journalist David Rohde. "Only one of those ten was a Talib." It's probable that the solitary Taliban member transferred to Kandahar with Jan Mohammed was Abdul Rauf Aliza, who was identified by the US authorities as Mullah Abdul Rauf, a Taliban troop commander. Although Aliza claimed that he was conscripted by the Taliban, who said they would take his land if he refused, and insisted that he only worked for them as a cook, several released Afghans explained to the journalist Ashwin Raman that Mullah Abdul Rauf was one of three Taliban commanders in northern Afghanistan held in Guantánamo. They told Raman that he had not been so cautious with his identity while detained in Camp X-Ray, when he "repeatedly pleaded with the Americans to let many of the detainees free," saying, "These are no Talibs, I am the real Talib." While this suggests that Abdul Rauf Aliza and Mullah Abdul Rauf are one and the same, it's possible that the Taliban commander was hiding his true identity behind a false name, as was the case with Abdullah Mehsud and Mullah Shahzada. According to the Pentagon's records. Aliza was only 20 years old when he was captured, which would have made him an extremely youthful troop commander, but the truth, as with so much of Guantánamo's story, may never be uncovered. "Number three in Taliban intel" Two of the other released detainees were captured in December 2001. 26-year old Gholam Ruhani was seized with Abdul-Haq Wasiq, the Taliban's deputy minister of intelligence, and one of the few senior Taliban figures captured by the Americans, in a potentially perilous Special Forces operation in Ghazni, south of Kabul. At the time, Ghazni was a Taliban stronghold, but when the Special Forces received a tip-off that a local warlord had arranged a meeting with Qari Amadullah, the Taliban's minister of intelligence, in which, it was suggested, Amadullah might provide information that would lead to the capture of Osama bin Laden, their commander, Gary Berntsen approved the mission. In the end, Amadullah did not turn up, and clearly had no intention of doing so. Safely ensconced in Pakistan, after escaping from Afghanistan, he spoke to a journalist in late December, interrupting the interview to take a phone call, and then declaring, "I am personally requested by Mullah Omar and Sheikh Osama to go to Uruzgan and take the command of new guerrilla war preparations, which will start as soon as possible, and you will hear the news in papers and on BBC." Unsurprisingly, having effectively given US forces his itinerary as a result of this loose talk, he was killed in a US air strike a few days later. In the same interview, however, he also spoke about Abdul-Haq Wasiq. He said that Mullah Omar, who, he claimed, was living in a safe place in the mountains north of Kandahar, had asked him to visit, but he had been unable to do so, "because a lot of people know me, and I am frightened they will capture me somewhere on the road. So I sent my assistant Mullah Abdul-Haq Wasiq to Kandahar. Unfortunately he was captured by American agents in Ghazni." This suggests that Wasiq either made his own negotiations with the Americans in Ghazni, or was invited and then betrayed by the local warlord, because after the meeting he was duly arrested, along with Gholam Ruhani, by the Special Forces operatives, who duly declared that they were "the number two and three in Taliban intel." In Guantánamo, Wasiq, who is still imprisoned, has been coy about his role, claiming that he was forced to join the Taliban, and that he sometimes acted as the deputy minister of intelligence, but only to combat "thieves and bribes." This did not convince his tribunal, who greeted him with the words, "Good afternoon, Mr. Minister. Seldom before have we had someone of such prestige and responsibility." Ruhani, however, was adamant that he was not the "number three in Taliban intel." He said that he was a Taliban conscript, who fulfilled his duties in a clerical capacity to avoid being sent to the front lines, and explained that he was asked to attend the meeting between the Taliban and the Americans because he had learned a little English while studying electronics manuals in a store run by his elderly father. "I turned over my pistol and ammunition to the American, as an act of faith, because it was a friendly meeting," he said. "I expected to leave the meeting and return to my life, my shop and my family. Instead, I was arrested." The foot soldier The second man, 22-year old Omar al-Kunduzi, was one of around 250 detainees captured by Pakistani forces after crossing the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. Born in Afghanistan, he had been living in Saudi Arabia since the Soviet invasion, when he was just one year old, but returned to Afghanistan in September 2001. He told his lawyer that he wanted to fight in Chechnya (as did several other detainees from the Gulf countries), and added that Chechen representatives had told him to undertake military training in Afghanistan. He explained that he had trained at the al-Farouq camp (a camp for Arabs, established by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, but associated with al-Qaeda in the years before 9/11), but had a distaste for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda on religious grounds, insisting that both groups were responsible for killing Muslims, which he thought was wrong. This, too, was an explanation proferred by numerous detainees. In his tribunal at Guantánamo, he said that he was staying at a house in the eastern city of Jalalabad when the city fell in November 2001, and he explained that everyone in the house got into a pick-up truck and drove to the Tora Bora mountains, where they stayed in a cave for a month. No mention was made of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri or any other senior figures in al-Qaeda or the Taliban, who were also in Tora Bora at this time, and who all escaped safely to Pakistan. Instead, al-Kunduzi explained that he left for Pakistan with a group of Arabs, Pakistanis and other Afghans, and was arrested on the border, which surprised him. "I did not expect them to hand me over to the Americans," he said, "I thought they would treat me like an Afghani." The other six men released from Guantánamo last week and sent to Pol-i-Charki prison in Kabul were among the 100 or so detainees -- almost all Afghans -- who were captured between December 2002 and August 2003, when, with the exception of 29 mostly "high-value" detainees, transferred to Guantánamo in September 2004, September 2006, and throughout 2007, the last of the Guantánamo prisoners were processed. Although many more Afghans captured during this period were released without being sent to Guantánamo, and others continued to be held in Afghanistan, those who were sent to Cuba were mostly innocent men. Around 60 percent -- including at least 17 men who were working for the Karzai government -- were betrayed by opportunistic rivals, who were all too aware that the Americans were both gullible and lazy, and would not make any attempt to investigate the men's histories, and another 30 percent were bystanders rounded up arbitrarily after attacks on US forces. The teachers Two of these men were teachers. 40-year old Abdul Ghafour ran a small school in his village in Paktia province, and rarely left the area because his mother was ill. When US and Afghan forces came knocking on his door in the middle of the night on February 7, 2003, he thought that they were robbers, and went to the roof and fired a few warning shots. When the Americans opened fire in response and summoned fighter jets, he realized he had made a mistake, and he then let them in and was arrested, but at no point did anyone explain to him why they wanted to search his house in the first place. 37-year old Abdul Matin, a science teacher, had been living in Pakistan during the Taliban years, but returned to Afghanistan in February 2002 when the Karzai government called for people to help rebuild the country. He said that he was betrayed by local enemies, who knew that his father was wealthy, when he refused to pay a $30,000 bribe. The shopkeeper The story of Abdullah Wazir, who was 24 years old when he was captured, appears to be a case of opportunism on the part of the Pakistani police. A shopkeeper in a village near Khost, he said that he was on a bus, making one of his regular visits across the border to Pakistan to buy batteries and tires for his shop, and to mend the broken glass on his satellite phone, when the bus was stopped and searched by Pakistani police. Fearing that, if the police saw his phone, they might try to take his money because they were "corrupt," he explained that he gave his phone to Bostan Karim, an acquaintance from his village, with whom he had spent three days preaching five years before, and asked him "to hold it for two minutes." Unfortunately, he added, "a soldier on top of the bus saw me give the phone to Karim." He then "told another soldier that I had passed something to another person," and both men were then arrested, taken to a jail and interrogated. Although Wazir reported that "the boss of the jail told me that I will released tomorrow, in the afternoon they handcuffed our hands and took us somewhere else [Bagram, presumably]. We spent six to seven months at the place they took us. From there, they brought me here." Although Wazir was accused of being a member of the Taliban (an allegation that he denied), what particularly counted against him was his alleged association with Karim, who is still in Guantánamo. A preacher and also a shopkeeper, Karim, who was 33 years old when he was captured, was reportedly "apprehended because he matched the description of an al-Qaeda bomb cell leader and had a [satellite] phone." In a demonstration of the thinness of so many of the allegations that make up the "evidence" in Guantánamo, it was also alleged that he was "possibly identified as an al-Qaeda associate, planning landmine attacks in Khost," and was "possibly identified as a person likely to have communicated with Arab al-Qaeda members operating in Peshawar, Afghanistan [sic], and working directly for Arab al-Qaeda in the Khost province." Karim maintained that the allegations had been made by another detainee, Obaidullah (who is also still in Guantánamo), who had been a partner in his shop, but had fallen out with him in a dispute over money. From Obaidullah's statements in his own hearings, it's clear that, while being interrogated by US forces in Bagram, he admitted making up allegations against Karim. In his military review in 2005, he responded to an allegation that Karim "is thought to be a Taliban commander who is getting funding from the Taliban or the Arabs" by saying, "I accepted this by force in Bagram. They told me in Bagram that Karim is one of the Taliban commanders and they forced me to say yes. I am not aware if he is a Taliban commander." When asked who forced him to "say things," Obaidullah said, "The first time when they [US forces] captured me and brought me to Khost they put a knife to my throat and said if you don't tell us the truth and you lie to us we are going to slaughter you They tied my hands and put a heavy bag of sand on my hands and made me walk all night in the Khost airport In Bagram they gave me more trouble and would not let me sleep. They were standing me on the wall and my hands were hanging above my head. There were a lot of things they made me say." The "Commander" Also transferred was Gul Chaman (also known as Commander Chaman), who was 40 years old at the time of his capture. A former mujahideen fighter against the Soviet Union, Chaman had a colorful history. In the turmoil of the brutal civil war that followed the collapse of the Soviet government in the early 1990s, he fought for six months against the forces of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic Tajik who led the Northern Alliance (and who was assassinated by al-Qaeda operatives two days before 9/11), as a member of Hezb-e-Islami Gulduddin (HIG), a military faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. A virulently anti-American warlord, Hekmatyar had, nevertheless, been the main recipient of billions of dollars of US aid in the 1980s, because he was the favored warlord of the ISI (the Pakistani intelligence services), who were responsible for funneling US aid to the mujahideen. Chaman explained to his tribunal that he then switched sides, joining Massoud, and insisted that he did not join the Taliban after their rise to power in 1994. "When the Taliban movement started," he said, "[they] captured Logar and then they started coming to Azrah, which is my district. The Taliban collected ten guys by the name of Chaman's people and killed and executed them right on the spot. I was there and they did not capture me." He explained that they were "my cousins and my day laborers," and that the Taliban would not let him give them a proper burial. "After that," he continued, "I was against the Taliban. I did not fight but I tried my best to fight them through propaganda." Accused of being "heavily involved in the drug trade and other illegal activities in Kabul," Chaman denied the allegations, claiming that, after Hamid Karzai came to power, he made a few visits to Pakistan with a delegation connected with the chief of intelligence, and provided some information on HIG. He added, "I was doing work against the Taliban." The circumstances of his capture apparently had nothing whatsoever to do with this back story. Instead, it seems that he was seized and sent to Guantánamo because a young man called Mohammed Mustafa Sohail, who was working for an American contractor and who is still held in Guantánamo, accused him of stealing a computer from the Americans that he had actually stolen himself. Sohail explained that he accused Chaman after being interrogated for 68 hours in Kabul, when an interrogator "tortured and threatened me with a gun to my mouth, to try to make me say something," but whether or not there was any truth in this story it came too late for Chaman, who had already been handed over to the Americans at Bagram by the local intelligence chief. The pro-American rivals Two others, whose stories are in some ways the most shocking of the nine, were among six men captured in Gardez in July 2003, who were resolutely opposed to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. 32-year old Abdullah Mujahid was the police chief in Gardez and the security chief for Paktia province after the fall of the Taliban, and had just been promoted to a job protecting the highways of Kabul at the Interior Ministry. At the start of the US-led invasion, he met US Special Forces in Logar and invited them to Gardez, where he negotiated the rent of the camp that they used as their base, and he also fought alongside them during Operation Anaconda, a mission to oust al-Qaeda remnants from the Shah-i-Kot valley in Paktia province in March 2002. According to Mujahid's lawyers, he was so well respected that residents of Gardez and Paktia sent several petitions to the US administration, pointing out that he was "instrumental in helping establish schools, including schools for girls" in the region. Explaining the circumstances of his arrest, he said that two Americans detained him and asked him about two military commanders that he knew, who were accused of stealing. When he denied the story, he said that one of the men told me that I wasn't telling the truth about these people, so you belong in Cuba," and added, "It appears that the decision was made to send me to Cuba already." In Guantánamo, it was also alleged that Mujahid was "fired from his appointed position due to suspicions of collusion with anti-government forces," and that he later attacked US troops in retaliation, but Farah Stockman of the Boston Globe, who visited Gardez to find out more about his story, noted that he fell out of favor with the American forces operating in the area, who wanted to replace him with a professionally trained police chief, and that after his new job in Kabul was arranged, the Special Forces commander actually advised him to leave Gardez, warning him that he was at risk of being sent to Guantánamo if he remained. The US forces seem to have been particularly upset by Mujahid's response to the murder of Jamil Nasser, an Afghan prisoner (and a member of the new Afghan army) who was killed by Special Forces soldiers while in custody at a US base near Gardez in March 2003. After Nasser's death, the US military insisted on transferring his seven surviving colleagues, who had all been tortured and beaten horrendously, to Mujahid's custody. According to the Crimes of War Project, a Washington human rights group that investigated the abuse, the Special Forces commander "threatened to kill Mujahid if he released the prisoners," and it may have been his subsequent actions that convinced the Americans not only to remove him from office, but also to do it by sending him to Guantánamo. Farah Stockman reported that Mujahid "ordered that they [the injured men] be given medical treatment and mattresses," and then "described the prisoners' injuries to Afghan military prosecutors, who later wrote a report recommending that the American soldiers be punished." In addition, the theft that was allegedly responsible for getting Abdullah Mujahid sent to Guantánamo seems to have been reported by another of the detainees released last week, Dr. Hafizullah Shabaz Khail, a 56-year old pharmacist from Zormat, south of Gardez, who in turn blamed Mujahid for his imprisonment. Approached by the town elders after Hamid Karzai first came to power as the head of the interim post-Taliban government, Khail served as the mayor for six months until an official appointment was made, and then continued to help out with security. "While I was mayor in Zormat," he said, "there were no problems with the Americans. I met with American commanders several times ... We even took pictures together." Arrested after capturing some thieves who were working for Taj Mohammed, the head of security in Zormat, he suggested that Mujahid, who was Mohammed's boss, then arranged for the Americans to arrest him. If this is the case -- and lawyers for the two men suggested that they were bitter enemies -- then at least part of the reason that both men were in Guantánamo was because of allegations they had made against each other. The fact that the US authorities failed to notice this indicates that they had no interest in cross-referencing cases or investigating the truth of assertions made against those in their custody. Unlike Mujahid, who was cleared for release two years ago, Khail was not cleared for release until the last few months, even though, as with his rival, several local tribes sent a petition to the US authorities confirming his many contributions to their community. Suppression of witnesses at Guantánamo Mujahid's story was also notable because it was used by the journalist Declan Walsh to demonstrate one of the many failures of the tribunal process at Guantánamo. These tribunals -- the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) -- were dreamt up as a deliberately inadequate response to a decisive Supreme Court ruling, in June 2004, that the Guantánamo detainees had habeas corpus rights; in other words, that they had the right to challenge the basis of their detention. Initially criticized by lawyers and human rights activists because the detainees were denied legal representation, and were prevented from either seeing or hearing secret evidence against them, which could therefore have been obtained through torture, coercion or bribery, the tribunals were recently savaged by military officers who had taken part in them, who condemned them for relying on generalized and often generic evidence that had nothing to do with the detainees in question, and who indicated, moreover, that they were merely designed to rubber-stamp their prior designation as "enemy combatants" without rights, so that they could be held indefinitely without charge or trial. Declan Walsh's contribution was to demolish the US military's assertion that the detainees would be allowed to call witnesses, if they were "reasonably available." "No-Hearing Hearings," a report by researchers at the Seton Hall Law School, who analyzed documents released by the Pentagon in 2006, established that, although the CSRT process "provided that detainees could call witnesses no witness from outside Guantánamo ever appeared," often because the tribunal claimed that the request had been forwarded to the State Department, but that no reply had been received. In June 2006, after deciding to test how difficult it was to track down witnesses, Walsh focused on the case of Abdullah Mujahid, just one of many Afghans who asked his tribunal to make a few phone calls to verify his story. Walsh did just that, and within three days found three witnesses that the Pentagon had apparently been unable to contact. One was working in Washington DC, teaching at the National Defense University, and the other two were in Afghanistan. A call to President Karzai's office located Shahzada Masoud, an adviser on tribal affairs, who confirmed that Mujahid had accepted a job protecting the highways in Kabul and "was given a lavish transfer-of-power ceremony attended by government dignitaries," and Walsh obtained the phone number of Gul Haider, a defense ministry representative and former Northern Alliance commander, from a government official in Gardez. Haider confirmed that Mujahid sent 30 of his men to assist the Americans during Operation Anaconda, and said he had not heard anything to support the Americans' claims that he had turned against them. Pointing out that political rivalries were to blame for his arrest, and that someone had made false allegations, Haider said, "Afghanistan has many problems -- between tribes, Communists, the Taliban. That's why people like Abdullah, who are completely innocent, end up in jail." While I wait to find out if any of these men will be released from Pol-i-Charki -- and if others like Bostan Karim, Obaidullah and Mohammed Sohail will be released from Guantánamo -- I have to conclude that Gul Haider's comment could serve as an epitaph for most of the Afghans in Guantánamo. Andy Worthington (www.andyworthington.co.uk) is a British historian, and the author of 'The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007). He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk   Your Ad Here

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