The Seattle Times
Nation & World: Monday, December 23, 2002
No tie to al-Qaida for 10 percent held at Guantánamo
By Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — The United States is holding dozens of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay who have no meaningful connection to al-Qaida or the Taliban and were sent to the maximum-security facility over the objections of intelligence officers in Afghanistan who had recommended them for release, according to military sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
At least 59 detainees — nearly 10 percent of the prison population at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — were deemed to be of no intelligence value after interrogations in Afghanistan.
All were placed on "recommended for repatriation" lists well before they were transferred to Guantánamo, a facility intended to hold the most hardened terrorists and Taliban suspects.
Dozens of the detainees are Afghan and Pakistani nationals described in classified intelligence reports as farmers, taxi drivers, cobblers and laborers. Some were low-level fighters conscripted by the Taliban in the weeks before the collapse of the ruling Afghan regime.
None of the 59 met U.S. screening criteria for determining which prisoners should be sent to Guantánamo Bay, military sources said. But all were transferred anyway, sources said, for reasons that continue to baffle and frustrate intelligence officers nearly a year after the first group of detainees arrived at the facility.
"There are a lot of guilty (people) in there," said one officer, "but there's a lot of farmers in there too."
The sources' accounts point to a previously undisclosed struggle within the military over the handling of the detainees. Even senior commanders were said to be troubled by the problems.
Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the operational commander at Guantánamo Bay until October, traveled to Afghanistan in the spring to complain that too many "Mickey Mouse" detainees were being sent to the already crowded facility, sources said.
The sources blamed a host of problems, including flawed screening guidelines, policies that made it almost impossible to take prisoners off Guantánamo flight manifests and a pervasive fear of letting a valuable prisoner go free by mistake.
"No one wanted to be the guy who released the 21st hijacker," one officer said.
While that concern remains a legitimate one, the fact that dozens of the detainees are still in custody a year or more after their capture has become a source of deep concern to military officers engaged in the war on terrorism around the globe.
Many fear that detaining innocents, and providing no legal mechanism for appeal, can only breed distrust and animosity toward the United States — not only in the home countries and governments of the prisoners but also among the inmates.
"We're basically condemning these guys to long-term imprisonment," said a military official who was a senior interrogator at Guantánamo Bay. Even amid the tight security, he said, there is significant indoctrination of prisoners by radical Islamists among them.
The Afghan and Pakistani governments have raised the issue with Washington. A Pakistani embassy official, who declined to be identified, said his government is convinced that many of the 58 Pakistanis known to be in custody "probably joined the Taliban but didn't know how to spell al-Qaida."
One prisoner was transferred because he was Arab by birth and had once fought for the Taliban, thereby meeting two key screening criteria.
But before the war he had sustained such a massive head injury that he could utter little more than his name and was known by interrogators at Guantánamo Bay as "half-head Bob."
"He had basically had a combat lobotomy," the interrogator said. "Every (intelligence report) on him from Afghanistan said, 'No value, no value, don't send him.' "
According to classified Pentagon guidelines, Guantánamo Bay was meant to be a long-term detention facility for al-Qaida operatives, Taliban leaders, "foreign" fighters and "any others who may pose a threat to U.S. interests, may have intelligence value, or may be of interest for U.S. prosecution."
Pentagon officials declined to discuss individual cases but insist that the United States has reasonable grounds for holding all the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
"All are considered enemy combatants lawfully detained in accordance with the law of armed conflict," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Burfeind, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees operations at Guantánamo Bay.
"Everybody that was sent met the conditions that were sent down from our higher headquarters," said Army Col. Michael Flynn, the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan when many of the detainees were transferred. Through much of the war, the decisions were made far from the battlefield, by commanders in Kuwait or back in the United States. Intelligence officers in Afghanistan became increasingly dismayed at the number of low-level detainees on the manifests.
"We saw it as having huge potential for eroding public trust," one officer said. In a conflict dependent on the cooperation of local Afghans, he said, "winning the hearts and minds was our greater concern."
To call attention to the problem, some began circulating lists of prisoners they believed were being improperly placed on Guantanamo Bay flight manifests. The lists were seen by senior intelligence officers in Afghanistan, Kuwait and the United States.
One of the lists covers 49 Afghans and 10 Pakistanis who were being held at Kandahar Air Base until the Afghan facility was shut down in June, prompting their transfer to Guantánamo Bay, sources said.
The list describes detainees' occupations, the circumstances of their captures, summaries of interrogations and alibis they provided. The prisoners range in age from 16 to 50, most with little or no education.
A typical entry describes a 30-year-old Afghan farmer captured by Afghan forces who "seemed most interested in stealing his car and money."
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