The Second World War lasted for six years, and at the end of it
prisoners of war were released to resume their lives. At Guantanamo, on
the other hand, the prison has just marked the ninth anniversary of its opening,
and on Thursday the Pentagon announced that Awal Gul, a 48-year old
Afghan prisoner, who had been held for nine years without charge or
trial and was scheduled to be held forever, died in a shower after
suffering a heart attack. Gul had never been held as a prisoner of war,
and despite the US government's assertions that he could be held
forever, no one in a position of authority -- neither President Bush nor
President Obama -- had never adequately demonstrated that he constituted a
threat to the United States.
From what is known of Gul's story, he had run a weapons depot in his
home town in eastern Afghanistan, after the end of the Soviet
occupation, and had then run it on behalf of the Taliban after their
rise to power in 1996. However, in his tribunal at Guantanamo, as I
explained in a profile of him two years ago:
Gul said that he had resigned from the Taliban ... and, in a volte-face
that was typical of Afghan politics, had begun working with the pro-US
warlord Hazrat Ali, one of three Afghan commanders who had fought at
Tora Bora on the Americans' behalf [Tora Bora being the site of a
showdown, in December 2001, between al-Qaeda and senior Taliban
supporters on the one hand, and a proxy Afghan army directed by US
Special Forces on the other]. He explained that, on Ali's advice, he
handed himself in to Northern Alliance commanders in Kabul in February
2002, in an attempt to quell rumors about his involvement with the
Taliban, but was then handed over to the Americans.
Whether there was any truth to this story had still not been clearly
established after nine years, when, as Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese, a
Guantanamo spokesman, explained, Gul had been working out on Tuesday
night in Camp 6, and then "went to go take a shower and apparently
collapsed in the shower." Cmdr. Reese added, "Detainees on the cellblock
then assisted him in getting to the guard station," and from there he
was taken to a clinic, and then to the Navy base hospital, which is some
distance from the prison blocks, where he died despite "extensive life
saving measures."
Unlike the six other deaths at Guantanamo -- the three heavily disputed deaths
in June 2006, which appear to have involved a secret torture team
operating in a secret facility outside Guantanamo's main perimeter fence
rather than the authorities' claim that the men committed suicide
simultaneously, two other alleged suicides in May 2007 and June 2009, and the death by cancer of an unrecognized hero of the anti-Taliban resistance in December 2007 -- the death of Awal Gul at least appears straightforward.
Nevertheless, the US government should be ashamed that it has
presided over the death of a man whose claims that he was mistakely
detained had never been the subject of a judicial ruling, despite the
fact that he, along with all the Guantanamo prisoners, had been granted habeas corpus rights by the US Supreme Court two years and eight months ago.
In Gul's defense, his lawyer, Matthew Dodge, an Atlanta-based federal
public defender, said that documents in the possession of the US
government proved that Gul "had quit the Taliban a year before the Sept.
11 terror attacks," as the Miami Herald explained. Dodge and Gul's other lawyer, Brian Mendelsohn, also stated,
"Mr. Gul was kind, philosophical, devout, and hopeful to the end, in
spite of all that our government has put him through ... The government
charged that he was a prominent member of the Taliban and its military,
but we proved that this is false. Indeed, we have documents from
Afghanistan, even a letter from Mullah Omar himself on Taliban
letterhead, discussing Mr. Gul's efforts to resign from the Taliban a
year or more before 9/11/01. He resigned because he was disgusted by the
Taliban's growing penchant for corruption and abuse. Mr. Gul was never
an enemy of the United States in any way."
The lawyers added, "It is a shame that the government will finally
fly him home not in handcuffs and a hood, but in a casket." FBI reports,
included in his habeas petition, not only stated that Gul had 18
children (seven boys and eleven daughters), but also described him as "a
former Taliban commander," and noted that, in June 2008, he told a San
Diego-based FBI agent that he was "tired from war and thirsty for
peace."
In contrast, US Southern Command responded to news of Gul's death by
issuing a statement claiming that he was "an admitted Taliban recruiter
and commander of a military base in Jalalabad," who "at one point," as
the Miami Herald put it, "allegedly operated an al-Qaeda
guesthouse." The use of "allegedly" in the second part of that claim
rather undermines the credibility of that particular allegation, and as
for the first, Gul's time as a recruiter and commander clearly relates
to the period before the disillusionment that he expressed, and that was
confirmed by the FBI.
The Southcom statement also claimed that Gul "admitted to meeting
with Osama bin Laden and providing him with operational assistance on
several occasions," but Gul himself told his tribunal at Guantanamo in
2004 that, although he had seen bin Laden on three occasions, "the first
time in 1990 in a gathering for 'rich Saudis" who had come to build a
hospital and school," he was "unaware that the al-Qaeda founder was
anti-American," and had not been involved in providing any kind of
operational assistance.
Gul's lawyers called the Southcom statement "outrageous," and explained:
The government, through this post-death statement, makes
claims more outlandish even than the government lawyers in Mr. Gul's
habeas case. We now hear for the very first time in the nearly 10 years
since Mr. Gul's arrest, that (1) he operated a guesthouse for Al-Qaeda
members, and (2) that he admitted providing bin Laden operational
support on several occasions. Over the course of almost 3 years in
court, the government has never provided any evidence at all to support
this slander. Neither Mr. Gul not any credible witness has ever said
such things.
Other allegations are equally worthless. Responding to an allegation
that he had trained on Stinger missiles (portable surface-to-air
missiles used to bring down planes and helicopters), Gul stated that he
had indeed trained to use them, but had done so in the 1980s, when the
US supplied the missiles to Afghan mujahideen resisting the Soviet
occupation.
The Miami Herald also revealed that, last March, District
Court Judge Rosemary Collyer had heard oral arguments from both sides in
Gul's habeas corpus petition, but for some reason had failed to reach a
decision in his case.
The final blow, however, came from Matthew Dodge, who explained that
President Obama's Guantanamo Review Task Force, comprising over 60
career officials and lawyers from government departments and the
intelligence services, who reviewed all the Guantanamo cases in 2009,
had designated Gul as one of 48 prisoners
who should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial,
meaning that, even if his habeas petiton had been granted by Judge
Collyer, the decision taken by an unaccountable executive Task Force
would have led to an appeal, almost certainly consigning him to
continued indefinite detention, possibly for the rest of his life.
How this is supposed to constitute anything resembling justice or
fairness is beyond me, and I can only conclude that, not only was Awal
Gul betrayed by the US authorities, but also that any of the other 47
men designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial (whose
identities have not been publicly disclosed, although they are known to
their lawyers) must be reflecting today that, a year from now, or five
years from now, or ten, 15 or 20 years from now, they too might die of a
heart attack in the living grave of Guantanamo, only to have the US
government respond by wheeling out whatever untested allegations it has
on file that can be brandished to create the illusion that they were
beneath contempt.
I never met Awal Gul, of course, and, as I have stated, I have no
idea whether or not his story was true, but even the US government never
attempted to claim that he was actually involved in any terrorist
activities, and I can only state, in closing, that his sad and lonely
death, in a place increasingly shorn of all hope, is a depressing
indictment of the US government's ongoing and apparently permanent
inability to treat the men at Guantanamo with anything other than
heartless disdain.