Apr 25, 2011

Libyan, Once a Detainee, Is Now a U.S. Ally of Sorts


By ROD NORDLAND and SCOTT SHANE

Published: April 24, 2011

DARNAH, Libya — For more than five years, Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu was a prisoner at the Guantánamo Bay prison, judged “a probable member of Al Qaeda” by the analysts there. They concluded in a newly disclosed 2005 assessment that his release would represent a “medium to high risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.”
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Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi is a rebel fighter in Libya.

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Today, Mr. Qumu, 51, is a notable figure in the Libyan rebels’ fight to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, reportedly a leader of a ragtag band of fighters known as the Darnah Brigade for his birthplace, this shabby port town of 100,000 people in northeast Libya. The former enemy and prisoner of the United States is now an ally of sorts, a remarkable turnabout resulting from shifting American policies rather than any obvious change in Mr. Qumu.
He was a tank driver in the Libyan Army in the 1980s, when the Central Intelligence Agency was spending billions to support religious militants trying to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. Mr. Qumu moved to Afghanistan in the early 1990s, just as Osama bin Laden and other former mujahedeen were violently turning against their former benefactor, the United States.
He was captured in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, accused of being a member of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and sent to Guantánamo — in part because of information provided by Colonel Qaddafi’s government.
“The Libyan Government considers detainee a ‘dangerous man with no qualms about committing terrorist acts,’ ” says the classified 2005 assessment, evidently quoting Libyan intelligence findings, which was obtained by The New York Times. “ ‘He was known as one of the extremist commanders of the Afghan Arabs,’ ” the Libyan information continues, referring to Arab fighters who remained in Afghanistan after the anti-Soviet jihad.
When that Guantánamo assessment was written, the United States was working closely with Colonel Qaddafi’s intelligence service against terrorism. Now, the United States is a leader of the international coalition trying to oust Colonel Qaddafi — and is backing with air power the rebels, including Mr. Qumu.
The classified Guantánamo assessment of Mr. Qumu claims that he suffered from “a non-specific personality disorder” and recounted — again citing the Libyan government as its source — a history of drug addiction and drug dealing and accusations of murder and armed assault.
In 1993, the document asserts, Mr. Qumu escaped from a Libyan prison, fled to Egypt and went on to Afghanistan, training at a camp run by Mr. bin Laden. At Guantánamo, Mr. Qumu denied knowledge of terrorist activities. He said he feared being returned to Libya, where he faced criminal charges, and asked to go to some other country where “You (the United States) can watch me,” according to a hearing summary.
Nonetheless, in 2007, he was sent from Guantánamo to Libya and released the next year in an amnesty for militants.
Colonel Qaddafi has cited claims about Mr. Qumu’s past in statements blaming Al Qaeda for the entire Libyan uprising. American officials have nervously noted the presence of at least a few former militants in the rebels’ ranks.
The walls of buildings along the road into Darnah are decorated with the usual anti-Qaddafi and pro-Western slogans, in English and Arabic, found all over eastern Libya. But there are notable additions: “No Qaeda” and “No to Extremism.”
Darnah has reason to be touchy. The town has a long history of Islamic militancy, including a revolt against Colonel Qaddafi’s rule led by Islamists in the mid-1990s that resulted in a vicious crackdown. Activists from here are credited with starting the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which later announced that it was affiliating with Al Qaeda, and which sent militants like Mr. Qumu to fight in Afghanistan.
Most famously, though, Darnah has a claim to being the world’s most productive recruiting ground for suicide bombers. An analysis of 600 suicide bombers in Iraq by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point found that of 440 who listed their hometowns in a recruiting roster, 52 were from Darnah, the most of any city, with Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 40 times as populous, as the next biggest source, sending 51.
In addition to Mr. Qumu, local residents say the Darnah Brigade is led by Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi, another Libyan thought to be a militant who was in Afghanistan during theTaliban’s rule, when Al Qaeda had training camps there.
Mr. Qumu did not turn up for a promised interview last week, but Mr. Hasadi did, in crumpled fatigues with a light beard and a lazy left eye, perpetually half-closed. He denied that Mr. Qumu was in his group, recently renamed the Martyrs of Abu Salim Brigade, after a prison in Tripoli where 1,200 inmates were slaughtered in 1996. Two of Mr. Qumu’s sons are in his brigade, he said.
“I don’t know how to convince everyone that we are not Al Qaeda here,” Mr. Hasadi said. “Our aim is to topple Qaddafi,” he added. “I know that you will never believe me, but it is true.”
For now, Western observers in Benghazi, the temporary rebel capital 180 miles from here, seem content to accept those assurances. “We’re more worried about Al Qaeda infiltration from outside than the indigenous ones” one said. “Most of them have a local agenda so they don’t present as much as a threat to the West.”

Rod Nordland reported from Darnah, and Scott Shane from Washington. Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Benghazi, Libya.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 25, 2011
An earlier version of the picture caption with this article erroneously identified Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi as Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 25, 2011, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Libyan Makes Journey From Detainee to Rebel (and U.S. Ally of Sorts).
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Guantánamo Files: Answers to Readers’ Questions

Published: April 25, 2011
Reporters and editors of The New York Times are answering readers’ questions about “The Guantánamo Files,” The Times’s coverage of a trove of more than 700 classified files, obtained last year by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, about past and present detainees at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The documents were made available to The Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.
Questions may be submitted by e-mail to askthetimes@nytimes.com.

The Geneva Conventions
Q. Did any of the files show the military engaging in actions that violate the Geneva conventions? Was anyone harmed at the expense of the new information?
— John
A. The documents are assessments of each detainee, and they say almost nothing about the treatment of detainees, good or bad. They are totally focused on intelligence about what the detainees had allegedly done in the past and what danger they might pose if released. There is very little about the harsh treatment of some detainees early in the prison’s history, or the implications of that treatment for the veracity of what they told interrogators at the time.
— Scott Shane
Hardened Fighters
Q. How many of the detainees have histories going back to the Soviet-Afghan war?
— Barbara McKown
A. The majority of the detainees who were brought to Guantánamo are far too young to have fought the Soviets in the 1980s. Many of the non-Afghan Arabs who were swept up along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in late 2001 were in their 20s and had gone there from their home countries — most often Saudi Arabia or Yemen — within the past couple of years. However, there are also a handful of veteran jihadists with long and storied histories — not just the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s, but also war zones like Bosnia and Chechnya.
— Charlie Savage
Purpose of the Files
Q. What use did the United States put all this information to, or was it just archived somewhere?
— Malena Marchan
A.These detainee assessments were prepared between 2002 and 2009 to summarize what the government knew about each detainee. They were an important part of the decision-making concerning which detainees could be sent home or transferred to other countries — 600 of 779 to date — and which should be kept at Guantanamo — 172 are still there. The Obama administration has since performed new reviews of each of the remaining detainees, but those new documents remain secret.
— Scott Shane
Why Not Call It Torture?
Q. The article today says the documents "are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo." Why does The New York Times continue to refuse to call torture by its name?
— Aaron Dome, Chicago
A. Some of the interrogation methods may fit a legal or common-sense definition of torture. Others may not. To refer to the whole range of practices as "torture" would be simply polemical.
— Bill Keller
The Safety of Americans
Q. How do you justify releasing these leaked secret documents, despite our government warning you that doing so may jeopardize the safety of Americans?
— B. Turgidson
A. We redacted or withheld documents that we believed could put lives at risk — Americans or not. For example, we agreed to excise the names of guards or interrogators who could conceivably be targets of reprisals. But a claim of "jeopardizing the safey of Americans" is a slippery slope. Some people would argue that simply drawing attention to Guantánamo Bay arouses hostility toward Americans. (That argument was made about the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.) In weighing such concerns, we listen respectfully to the arguments of officials, but we do not surrender our own judgment.
— Bill Keller
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The internal documents from the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,published in The Times on Monday were a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created there. They describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration’s system for deciding detainees’ guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released.
Innocent men were picked up on the basis of scant or nonexistent evidence and subjected to lengthy detention and often to abuse and torture. Some people were released who later acted against the United States. Inmates who committed suicide were regarded only as a public relations problem. There are seriously dangerous prisoners at Guantánamo who cannot be released but may never get a real trial because the evidence is so tainted.
The torture has stopped. The inmates’ cases have been reviewed. But the detention camp in Cuba remains a festering sore on this country’s global reputation. Hampered by ideologues and cowards in Congress, President Obama has made scant progress in healing it.
Evidence obtained from torture and the uncorroborated whispers of fellow prisoners fill the more than 700 classified documents obtained by The Times and other news organizations. Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi believed to have been an intended participant in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself. Yet claims Mr. Qahtani is said to have made about at least 16 prisoners are cited in their files with no mention of the coercion.
Some assessments relied on innuendo, gossip or information supplied by individuals whose motives were untrustworthy and whose information later proved false. Haji Jalil was captured in 2003 after an Afghan intelligence official said he had taken an “active part” in an ambush that killed American soldiers. He was sent home two years later, an inexcusable delay, after American officials determined that Mr. Jalil had been used to provide cover for the involvement of the intelligence official and others in the attack.
The Obama administration objected to release of the classified documents. The administration notes that the assessments were written between 2002 and early 2009 and that the task force established by Mr. Obama in January 2009 came to different conclusions about some of the remaining 172 prisoners. We accept that caution. But the administration is wrong to insist on secrecy. Inordinate resort to secrecy and resistance to testing evidence in fair and credible legal proceedings put the nation in this fix.
The administration should make its assessments of the remaining Guantánamo detainees public to the extent possible and free lawyers for detainees to fully communicate their clients’ side of the story.
The military commission trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and five other alleged Sept. 11 plotters should be pursued by the Defense Department using only evidence that would pass muster in federal court, and with maximum transparency.
The disaster at Guantánamo Bay is now Mr. Obama’s problem. He should not compound Mr. Bush’s mistakes in his efforts to correct them.
A version of this editorial appeared in print on April 26, 2011, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: The Guantánamo Papers.
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Classified Files Offer New Insights Into Detainees

By CHARLIE SAVAGE, WILLIAM GLABERSON and ANDREW W. LEHREN
Published: April 24, 2011
WASHINGTON — A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.
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Brennan Linsley/Associated Press
The American prison at Guantánamo Bay still holds 172 detainees, most rated “high risk.”

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A detainee at the Guantánamo Bay prison prayed outside his cell in 2007, in an area for the most compliant detainees.

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Military intelligence officials, in assessments of detainees written between February 2002 and January 2009, evaluated their histories and provided glimpses of the tensions between captors and captives. What began as a jury-rigged experiment after the 2001 terrorist attacks now seems like an enduring American institution, and the leaked files show why, by laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.
The documents meticulously record the detainees’ “pocket litter” when they were captured: a bus ticket to Kabul, a fake passport and forged student ID, a restaurant receipt, even a poem. They list the prisoners’ illnesses — hepatitis, gout, tuberculosis, depression. They note their serialinterrogations, enumerating — even after six or more years of relentless questioning — remaining “areas of potential exploitation.” They describe inmates’ infractions — punching guards, tearing apart shower shoes, shouting across cellblocks. And, as analysts try to bolster the case for continued incarceration, they record years of detainees’ comments about one another.
The secret documents, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, reveal that most of the 172 remaining prisoners have been rated as a “high risk” of posing a threat to the United States and its allies if released without adequate rehabilitation and supervision. But they also show that an even larger number of the prisoners who have left Cuba — about a third of the 600 already transferred to other countries — were also designated “high risk” before they were freed or passed to the custody of other governments.
The documents are largely silent about the use of the harsh interrogation tactics at Guantánamo — including sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions and prolonged exposure to cold temperatures — that drew global condemnation. Several prisoners, though, are portrayed as making up false stories about being subjected to abuse.
The government’s basic allegations against many detainees have long been public, and have often been challenged by prisoners and their lawyers. But the dossiers, prepared under the Bush administration, provide a deeper look at the frightening, if flawed, intelligence that has persuaded the Obama administration, too, that the prison cannot readily be closed.
Prisoners who especially worried counterterrorism officials included some accused of being assassins for Al Qaeda, operatives for a canceled suicide mission and detainees who vowed to their interrogators that they would wreak revenge against America.
The military analysts’ files provide new details about the most infamous of their prisoners, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sometime around March 2002, he ordered a former Baltimore resident to don a suicide bomb vest and carry out a “martyrdom” attack against Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s president, according to the documents. But when the man, Majid Khan, got to the Pakistani mosque that he had been told Mr. Musharraf would visit, the assignment turned out to be just a test of his “willingness to die for the cause.”
The dossiers also show the seat-of-the-pants intelligence gathering in war zones that led to the incarcerations of innocent men for years in cases of mistaken identity or simple misfortune. In May 2003, for example, Afghan forces captured Prisoner 1051, an Afghan named Sharbat, near the scene of a roadside bomb explosion, the documents show. He denied any involvement, saying he was a shepherd. Guantánamo debriefers and analysts agreed, citing his consistent story, his knowledge of herding animals and his ignorance of “simple military and political concepts,” according to his assessment. Yet a military tribunal declared him an “enemy combatant” anyway, and he was not sent home until 2006.
Obama administration officials condemned the publication of the classified documents, which were obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks last year but provided to The Times by another source. The officials pointed out that an administration task force set up in January 2009 reviewed the information in the prisoner assessments, and in some cases came to different conclusions. Thus, they said, the documents published by The Times may not represent the government’s current view of detainees at Guantánamo.
Among the findings in the files:
¶The 20th hijacker: The best-documented case of an abusive interrogation at Guantánamo was the coercive questioning, in late 2002 and early 2003, of Mohammed Qahtani. A Saudi believed to have been an intended participant in the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Qahtani was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself. His file says, “Although publicly released records allege detainee was subject to harsh interrogation techniques in the early stages of detention,” his confessions “appear to be true and are corroborated in reporting from other sources.” But claims that he is said to have made about at least 16 other prisoners — mostly in April and May 2003 — are cited in their files without any caveat.
¶Threats against captors: While some detainees are described in the documents as “mostly compliant and rarely hostile to guard force and staff,” others spoke of violence. One detainee said “he would like to tell his friends in Iraq to find the interrogator, slice him up, and make a shwarma (a type of sandwich) out of him, with the interrogator’s head sticking out of the end of the shwarma.” Another “threatened to kill a U.S. service member by chopping off his head and hands when he gets out,” and informed a guard that “he will murder him and drink his blood for lunch. Detainee also stated he would fly planes into houses and prayed that President Bush would die.”

The Guantánamo Files

These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.

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¶The role of foreign officials: The leaked documents show how many foreign countries sent intelligence officers to question Guantánamo detainees — among them China, Russia, Tajikistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria and Tunisia. One such visit changed a detainee’s account: a Saudi prisoner initially told American interrogators he had traveled to Afghanistan to train at a Libyan-run terrorist training camp. But an analyst added: “Detainee changed his story to a less incriminating one after the Saudi Delegation came and spoke to the detainees.”
¶A Qaeda leader’s reputation: The file for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was charged before a military commission last week for plotting the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000, says he was “more senior” in Al Qaeda than Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and describes him as “so dedicated to jihad that he reportedly received injections to promote impotence and recommended the injections to others so more time could be spent on the jihad (rather than being distracted by women).”
¶The Yemenis’ hard luck: The files for dozens of the remaining prisoners portray them as low-level foot-soldiers who traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks to receive basic military training and fight in the civil war there, not as global terrorists. Otherwise identical detainees from other countries were sent home many years ago, the files show, but the Yemenis remain at Guantánamo because of concerns over the stability of their country and its ability to monitor them.
¶Dubious information: Some assessments revealed the risk of relying on information supplied by people whose motives were murky. Hajji Jalil, then a 33-year-old Afghan, was captured in July 2003, after the Afghan chief of intelligence in Helmand Province said Mr. Jalil had taken an “active part” in an ambush that killed two American soldiers. But American officials, citing “fraudulent circumstances,” said later that the intelligence chief and others had participated in the ambush, and they had “targeted” Mr. Jalil “to provide cover for their own involvement.” He was sent home in March 2005.
¶A British agent: One report reveals that American officials discovered a detainee had been recruited by British and Canadian intelligence to work as an agent because of his “connections to members of various Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups.” But the report suggests that he had never shifted his militant loyalties. It says that the Central Intelligence Agency, after repeated interrogations of the detainee, concluded that he had “withheld important information” from the British and Canadians, and assessed him “to be a threat” to American and allied personnel in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has since been sent back to his country.
¶A journalist’s interrogation: The documents show that a major reason a Sudanese cameraman for Al Jazeera, Sami al-Hajj, was held at Guantánamo for six years was for questioning about the television network’s “training program, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan,” including contacts with terrorist groups. While Mr. Hajj insisted he was just a journalist, his file says he helped Islamic extremist groups courier money and obtain Stinger missiles and cites the United Arab Emirates’ claim that he was a Qaeda member. He was released in 2008 and returned to work for Al Jazeera.
¶The first to leave: The documents offer the first public look at the military’s views of 158 detainees who did not receive a formal hearing under a system instituted in 2004. Many were assessed to be “of little intelligence value” with no ties to or significant knowledge about Al Qaeda or the Taliban, as was the case of a detainee who was an Afghan used car salesman. But also among those freed early was a Pakistani who would become a suicide attacker three years later.
Many of the dossiers include official close-up photographs of the detainees,  providing images of hundreds of the   prisoners, many of whom have not been seen publicly in years. 
The files — classified “secret” and marked “noforn,” meaning they should not be shared with foreign governments — represent the fourth major collection of secret American documents that have become public over the past year; earlier releases included military incident reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and portions of an archive of some 250,000 diplomatic cables. Military prosecutors have accused an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, of leaking the materials.
The Guantánamo assessments seem unlikely to end the long-running debate about America’s most controversial prison. The documents can be mined for evidence supporting beliefs across the political spectrum about the relative perils posed by the detainees and whether the government’s system of holding most without trials is justified.

The Guantánamo Files

These articles are based on a huge trove of secret documents leaked last year to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks and made available to The New York Times by another source on the condition of anonymity.

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Editors and reporters who worked on these articles will be answering select questions about the coverage of the material.
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Much of the information in the documents is impossible to verify. The documents were prepared by intelligence and military officials operating at first in the haze of war, then, as the years passed, in a prison under international criticism. In some cases, judges have rejected the government’s allegations, because confessions were made during coercive interrogation or other sources were not credible.
In 2009, a task force of officials from the government’s national security agencies re-evaluated all 240 detainees then remaining at the prison. They vetted the military’s assessments against information held by other agencies, and dropped the “high/medium/low” risk ratings in favor of a more nuanced look at how each detainee might fare if released, in light of his specific family and national environment. But those newer assessments are still secret and not available for comparison.
Moreover, the leaked archive is not complete; it contains no assessments for about 75 of the detainees.
Yet for all the limitations of the files, they still offer an extraordinary look inside a prison that has long been known for its secrecy and for a struggle between the military that runs it — using constant surveillance, forced removal from cells and other tools to exert control — and detainees who often fought back with the limited tools available to them: hunger strikes, threats of retribution and hoarded contraband ranging from a metal screw to leftover food.
 Scores of detainees were given disciplinary citations for “inappropriate use of bodily fluids,” as some files delicately say; other files make clear that detainees on a fairly regular basis were accused by guards of throwing urine and feces.
No new prisoners have been transferred to Guantánamo since 2007. Some Republicans are urging the Obama administration to send newly captured terrorism suspects to the prison, but so far officials have refused to increase the inmate population.
As a result, Guantánamo seems increasingly frozen in time, with detainees locked into their roles at the receding moment of their capture.
For example, an assessment of a former top Taliban official said he “appears to be resentful of being apprehended while he claimed he was working for the US and Coalition forces to find Mullah Omar,” a reference to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban chief who is in hiding.
But whatever the truth about the detainee’s role before his capture in 2002, it is receding into the past. So, presumably, is the value of whatever information he possesses. Still, his jailers have continued to press him for answers. His assessment of January 2008 — six years after he arrived in Cuba — contended that it was worthwhile to continue to interrogate him, in part because he might know about Mullah Omar’s “possible whereabouts.”
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