| WASHINGTON, Apr 28, 2011 (IPS) - Was Adel Hamlily an agent for MI6, the British secret services, and simultaneously a "facilitator, courier, kidnapper, and assassin for al-Qaida"? Was there a secret al Qaeda cell in Bremen that even the German government knew nothing about? And could it be possible that an 11-year-old Saudi villager was leading a terrorist cell in London? Earlier this week, Wikileaks released memos from the U.S. military officials in charge of the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on 759 out of the 779 alleged "terrorists" that have been held at the maximum security facility since the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. At the time that they were captured, General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters, "These are people who would gnaw through hydraulic lines at the back of a C-17 (aircraft) to bring it down." But experts who have trawled through the new files say that the documents show that the U.S. military jumped to some very dubious conclusions. The Wikileaks documents also show that the U.S. military were duped by some of the prisoners. Worst of all the Wikileaks files prove that hundreds of innocent men were imprisoned. "Some fool of a military officer threw the kitchen sink into the 2008 assessment of Hamlily, in an effort to prove to his superiors that this was a dangerous terrorist," writes Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of Reprieve, a British charity, who has represented 128 of the 779 men who were held in Guantanamo Bay. "It is important to understand that each of the 759 WikiLeaks Guantánamo 'assessments' are comprised of the worst gossip that a military officer can come up with," added Smith in a commentary written for the Guardian newspaper in Britain. "(W)e have proved 64 percent of the habeas petitioners innocent - and that comes after more than 500 prisoners were released by the military before the courts intervened. In other words, the error rate is astonishing." Andrew Worthington, author of "The Guantanamo Files" who has compiled the most definitive annotated list of all Guantanamo detainees, says that the files "reveal accounts of incompetence familiar to those who have studied Guantanamo closely, with innocent men detained by mistake - or because the U.S. was offering substantial bounties to its allies for al Qaeda or Taliban suspects." The files show that military interrogators themselves concluded that an estimated 150 men, almost one in five, had no connection to any terrorist activity whatsoever. Another 380, roughly half of those held in Guantanamo, were believed to be low-level militants. Take the case of Mukhibullo Abdukarimovich Umarov, born in Alisurkhan, Tajikistan, and Mazharudin, a Tajik who was born in Pajpai, Pakistan. Both men were arrested while studying at a small library in Karachi, Pakistan on May 19, 2002. Both Umarov and Mazharudin have one-page files; the two files are almost identical. They state: "It was undetermined as to why the detainee was transferred to GTMO (Guantanamo). Since his arrival at GTMO it has been determined that this detainee is not an al-Qaida or Taliban member. There, after reviewing all relevant and reasonably available information, it is GTMO's assessment that this detainee is not an enemy combatant." The Wikileaks documents also show that U.S. military officials believed that Murat Kurnaz, a Turk who was born in Germany, was a member of "Bremen Group, the Bremen Cell, the Bremen Terrorist Recruitment Cell and the Bremen Jihadist Network." But Der Spiegel, a respected German weekly, notes that, "Germany's domestic intelligence agency, which monitors Islamist radicals, nor any other German investigative authorities have ever heard of a Bremen al-Qaida cell." "The documents verify ignorance, incompetence and wanton behavior," Bernhard Docke, a German lawyer who represented Kurnaz, told Der Spiegel. "Guantanamo appears to be an autistic and Kafka-esque machine of suspicion in which vague conjecture, simply through the passage of time and constant repetition, becomes supposedly solid fact." Indeed Joyce Hens Green, a U.S. judge who reviewed Kurnaz's case, later concluded that the military had "no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with al-Qaida or making any specific threat against the U.S." or "any evidence that Kurnaz harbored any individual who has in engaged in, aided, abetted or conspired to commit acts of terrorism against the United States." The Wikileaks files also reveal that the military interrogators were willing to believe almost anything. Yasim Basardah of Shabwah, Yemen - a former thief, drug addict and an acknowledged member of Al Qaeda who fought against the U.S. in the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in late 2001 - provided testimony against 123 of his fellow prisoners. "The current U.S. government knowledge base of the personnel and activities within Tora Bora would not have been possible without the co-operation and truthfulness of this detainee (Basardah) whose reporting has directly supported US tactical operations in Afghanistan," wrote one military analyst. "It seems many JTF-GTMO detainees are willing to reveal self-incriminating information to him." For example, Basardah told his interrogators that fellow inmate Yousef Abkir Salih al-Qarani was a leader of a "London, United Kingdom-based al-Qaida cell" in 1998. Yet a more detailed investigation by lawyers showed that al-Qarani was born in 1987 and had not left his family village in Saudi Arabia, making it unlikely that he was leading a terrorist group in the UK at the age of 11. But Basardah was rewarded well for this information at the time, according to an investigation by the Washington Post, which revealed that he "received a CD player, chewing tobacco, coffee, library books" as well as McDonald's apple pies and a video game console. Every single one of these detainees has since been released. Umarov and Mazharudin were held for two years before being released by the George W. Bush administration in 2004 while Kurnaz was let go in 2006. Basardah and Hamlily spent eight years each at Guantanamo and were released by the Barack Obama administration in 2010. However, 171 of the original 779 prisoners remain in Guantanamo today. Of this number 89 have been cleared for release but are being held for security reasons - either because they are from Yemen, which is still considered to be a major Al Qaeda base, or because the detainees face imprisonment in their countries of origin if they return. Other Guantanamo prisoners are stuck in a judicial limbo. In March, President Barack Obama signed an executive order extending their imprisonment indefinitely without any charges - even though the government remains unsure of who some of the men are, let alone what, if anything, they did. One affected individual is Omar Hamzayavich Abdulayev. His file, released by WikiLeaks, merely notes: "Detainee's identity remains uncertain." Glenn Greenwald, a U.S. constitutional lawyer and blogger, says that these new Wikileaks documents "conclusively underscore the evils" of the Obama executive order: "The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically." *Pratap Chatterjee is a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC specialising in fraud, waste and abuse in government procurement. The Guantanamo FilesWikileaks Documents Reveal Hazards Of Blindly Relying On Secret EvidenceThe flood of news stories in the wake of the latest Wikileaks document dump reveal how one Guantanamo detainee after another was imprisoned at Gitmo for years based on tips from informants that turned out to be false. As James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation said in today’s New York Times, that’s not a big surprise. Law enforcement relies on such dubious tips in building criminal cases all the time. “The nature of intelligence is that it is ambiguous sometimes. It is sometimes based on sources you wouldn’t take to Sunday school.” In criminal cases, that’s not necessarily a problem, because criminal defendants ultimately get a chance to test the evidence in court. But that’s not the case for military detainees. Until the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that Guantanamo prisoners had a right to challenge their detention in federal court, they were stuck in the prison with no independent assessment of their guilt or innocence. In fact, that’s still the case for detainees imprisoned by the United States in Afghanistan today. The U.S. military holds some 1700 detainees at a prison on the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan – nearly ten times as many as remain at Guantanamo. But unlike at Guantanamo, prisoners in Afghanistan don’t have the right to legal representation or to challenge or even to see the secret evidence being used against them. In some cases, these Afghan detainees may be truly dangerous Taliban operatives that the government is legitimately keeping off the battlefield. But in other cases, the prisoners may be completely innocent. It’s impossible to know. The New York Times today describes the case of Guantanamo detainee Mohammed el-Gharani, deemed “an al Qaeda suicide operative” on the basis of statements from two informants – one who turned out to be a serial informant with major psychiatric problems, and another who admitted he had a bad memory and had deliberately tried to mislead investigators. The background and integrity of an informant is all the kind of information that ordinarily comes out in a trial, where evidence is presented publicly and then challenged by both sides. In Gharani’s case, the dubious value of these “tips” was only revealed once he was able to challenge his detention in court, via a lawyer who brought a habeas corpus petition. The federal judge eventually decided the “intelligence” was far too dubious to justify Gharani’s continued imprisonment. But none of this happens in Afghanistan. Detainees held by U.S. forces there are not allowed to have lawyers. And although they’re allowed to attend a hearing every six months to make a statement to a Detainee Review Board, which consists of three U.S. military officers, they’re not allowed to see the evidence provided to the military by informants, because it’s classified. In most cases, that means they’re not allowed to see a critical piece of the evidence being used against them. I went to observe these hearings in Afghanistan in February (I’ll be producing a report on this soon), and was shocked by how little evidence was actually presented during the unclassified portion of the hearing. Mostly, it consisted of a U.S. military officer reading the charges and reciting any incriminating items found near where the detainee was arrested. Sometimes those items, such as weapons or explosive devices, were found in a neighbor’s house, and had no evidence connection to the detainee himself. The government didn’t produce a single witness in any case I observed to explain how or where the items were found or why the government believed they were connected to the detainee. After about a half-hour open hearing, each session was closed so that classified informant evidence could be presented. I wasn’t allowed to see it, and neither was the detainee. Was it damning, and reliable? Maybe. But so long as prisoners in Afghanistan don’t get to make their case to an independent judicial body or be represented by lawyers trained to challenge the evidence, no one outside the U.S. military will ever know. Unfortunately, as the latest set of documents revealed by Wikileaks demonstrates, the military’s ability or willingness to truly vet its secret informant evidence does not inspire confidence. The result is that we may well be imprisoning the wrong people. Gitmo, Wikileaks And A Window On TyrannyThe Wikileaks-released Guantanamo Bay files provide an invaluable insight into the mindset of the US and its allies since September 11. An infrastructure of torture was implemented, a practice still defended by the US government today, to allegedly protect the homeland from future attack. The result was hundreds of innocent men kidnapped and incarcerated without trial – a “legal and moral disaster”, according to The New York Times - and President Obama continues shielding torturers in the previous and current administrations. He has pledged to Look Forward and Not Back. The current President has merely extended the Bush administration’s indefinite detention regime for so-called terror suspects. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald unleashed necessary fury about this reality: The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically. Yet this authoritarian impulse to believe untested claims by the US government is exactly what many in the media have been doing for years, repeating without question deliberately leaked intelligence files on the “worst of the worst” prisoners. One local example is The Australian columnist Chris Kenny, failed Liberal politician and former chief of staff to former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. During a Twitter conversation on Wednesday with Paul Barrett, a former Secretary of Australian Departments of Defence and Primary Industries & Energy, Kenny wrote, “You're arguing to set free people who have murdered thousands” when Barrett asked why the US refused to conduct fair and open trials for individuals who had never faced justice. In Kenny’s worldview, the American military has smeared hundreds of Muslims as terrorists and that’s good enough for him. The fact that the Wikileaks file shows the vast majority of Guantanamo Bay detainees had no connection to September 11 or terrorism can be ignored. This has been the default position of the vast bulk of the corporate press since 9/11. In Australia, especially the Murdoch press has smeared former Guantanamo Bay inmates David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib. This continued with Downer who called both men “terrible, terrible people”, perhaps because he fears what an independent investigation may find in regards to his own government’s alleged complicity in their long incarceration. Australian journalist Sally Neighbour published an analysis a few days ago that inadvertently undermined her own paper’s years of misleading reporting: The dossiers on Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks reveal the so-called evidence used to justify their incarceration to be a confused mishmash replete with glaring factual errors and inconsistencies, principally based on self-incrimination that would not be admitted in a proper court of law and tainted by the inclusion of information obtained under torture. What Neighbour conveniently omitted from her report were the journalists and editors who have dined for years on rehashing US government released propaganda against Hicks and Habib, including The Australian, and smearing them constantly. Clearly media accountability was not on the agenda for a decade of establishment stenography. Today’s Australiane ditorial begrudgingly acknowledges the torture suffered by Habib and Hicks but issues no apology for spending years accusing them both of terrorism. Thankfully this week’s Sydney Morning Herald editorially called the treatment of Hicks and Habib by its rightful name, torture. It took one of the world’s more diligent and un-embedded journalists on Guantanamo Bay inmates, Andy Worthington, to unpack the Wikileaks revelations and highlight the decade of ignoring legal precedent for the Cuban and American black hole down which countless men were tortured and housed. Reading Worthington’s copious work over the years makes a reader wonder why more mainstream reporters didn’t investigate the prison camp with a very critical eye. Is it because, as a former Bush official said, too many US journalists wanted to be seen as“patriotic” and protect America’s “interests”. Truth came a distant third. Guantanamo Bay was a place where psychological experiments and torture was common-place. But what of the latest Wikileaks revelations themselves which, for the record, should be seen as merely US official opinion rather than actual factual reporting? We learn that the USallowed a number of repressive country’s intelligence services access to Guantanamo Bay detainees, including officials from China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. This highly prejudicial process was also committed by Australia during the Howard government when it emerged in 2005 that Chinese officials were allowed to interrogate Chinese asylum seekers in Sydney’s Villawood detention centre. In the years after 9/11 (and also before), America was kidnapping terror suspects and sending them through extraordinary rendition to authoritarian states where these prisoners would be tortured for information. The latest Guantanamo Bay files confirm that Washington was also asking repressive regimes to assist them in identifying people as well as probably threatening their families back home. The Wikileaks files detail America’s treatment of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj who languished without charge for six years in Guantanamo Bay. It can now be confirmed that he was only held in the prison camp because the Bush administration hated the Qatar-based news network and wanted to gain more information about its alleged connection to terrorism. It is a chilling warning to media companies the world over. The response of the Obama administration to the latest document dump was typically Orwellian. The lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay were told, even after the mainstream press had widely disseminated the Wikileaks documents, that the files remained legally classified. The New York Times perfectly highlighted the issue: Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern law professor who represents Abu Zubaydah, the detainee accused of being a terrorist facilitator who was waterboarded by theCentral Intelligence Agency, said he could not comment on the newly disclosed assessment of his client, which is posted on The Times Web site.“Everyone else can talk about it,” Mr. Margulies said. “I can’t talk about it.” Although Wikileaks itself was not a major focus of this release (only briefly, anyway), it again proved the power of the whistle-blowing website. Western news organisations were forced to collaborate with an organisation with a relatively small staff and budget. The obvious question remains; why didn’t The New York Times, The Washington Post or TheGuardian receive the scoop with their own investigations? If former US army soldier Bradley Manning was the leaker of this information – President Obama has already said Manning is guilty, undoubtedly affecting any potential trial - he has given the world an invaluable insight into a superpower’s tyranny; he is a patriot in the truest sense of the word. Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution. All the WikiLeaks Fit to PrintThere is a craven disconnect between the eagerness of leading editors to exploit the important news revealed by WikiLeaks and their efforts to distance themselves from both the courageous website and Bradley Manning, the alleged source of documents posted there.Alleged is required when referring to the Army private so as not to repeat the egregious error of a constitutional-law-professor-turned-president who has already presumed Manning guilty of crimes for which he is not even formally charged. “He broke the law,” President Barack Obama said of Manning by way of countering his own supporters at a San Francisco fundraiser who dared question the conditions of Manning’s imprisonment. Conditions that Human Rights Watch challenged as “extremely restrictive and possibly punitive and degrading.” Manning was transferred last week to a Kansas prison from Quantico, Va., where for months he had been subjected to shackling, forced nudity, isolation and other harsh treatment—all of which was justified by the government as necessary to prevent him from committing suicide. Clearly the feds were trying to break the man. Why indeed is Manning the one behind bars and not the government officials who kept hidden unpleasant truths about this nation’s policies that the public has a right to know? And why do leaders of our constitutionally protected free press now seek to distance themselves from news sources that have performed a great public service? A service documented by the fact, as tallied by The Atlantic magazine, that more than half of the issues of The New York Times this year have carried stories that relied on WikiLeaks’ disclosures. That is the case with the latest batch of releases. A New York Times editorial on Tuesday titled “The Guantanamo Papers” states that the newly leaked documents are “a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created” at the U.S. prison in Cuba but does not credit Manning or WikiLeaks as the source. Instead the editorial refers to a Sunday New York Times front-page news story headed “Classified Files Offer New Insights Into Detainees.” While conceding that WikiLeaks originally obtained the documents, the paper insists they were “provided to The Times by another source.” But shouldn’t we then conclude that WikiLeaks and its alleged source deserve immense credit for revelations about the Guantanamo operation that, as the Times news story put it, resulted in “laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal”? To date there has been no evidence that the leaks seriously compromised U.S. national security, and the information involved was of the lowest level of classification. Here, too, Obama was wrong when he insisted that there is something indelibly clear and sacrosanct about the classification of government secrets, when in fact the rules are ill-defined and routinely violated by government officials interested in using secret data to buttress their policy arguments. It was nonsense for the president to state “I have to abide by certain rules of classified information” when he doesn’t. Rules of classification derive from presidential executive orders, and the president has the authority to declassify on the fly, as is convenient to his purpose. Obama misspoke when he said: “If I was to release stuff, information that I’m not authorized to release, I’m breaking the law. … We’re a nation of laws. We don’t individually make our own decisions about how the laws operate. … He [Manning] broke the law.” But that is often what whistle-blowers do in breaking the procedural rules of their organization, private or government-affiliated, to expose a more serious infraction on the part of the organization. That is what Daniel Ellsberg did in releasing the Pentagon Papers documents detailing an official but secret history exposing the justification of the Vietnam War as a blatant lie. The Pentagon Papers carried a far higher security classification than the material Manning allegedly released. The WikiLeaks material has been far more useful than even the Pentagon Papers in revealing government impropriety involving regimes throughout the world, and the result has been a more aroused public and greater accountability, be it from officials in Egypt or the United States. If this constitutes a crime, it has to date not been shown to be anything but a victimless one, and the net effect of the publication of this material has been to let the public in on information it has every right to know. It is obvious that Manning is being punished because government officials don’t like to be shown to be so deeply in the wrong. That was the view of former State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley, who resigned after daring to speak the truth about the mistreatment of Manning, labeling his detention “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” It is all that, and it is high time that the media that confirmed the value of the WikiLeaks information defended the rights of the whistle-blowers who by challenging the code of official secrecy let the public in on the real story. |
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That’s more than four times the annual dose permitted to nuclear workers at the stricken plant.
Radiation from the station, where four of six reactors have been damaged by explosions, has forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and contaminated farmland and drinking water. A plan to flood the containment vessel of reactor No. 1 with more water to speed up emergency cooling efforts announced yesterday by the utility known as Tepco may not be possible now.
“Tepco must figure out the source of high radiation,” said Hironobu Unesaki, a nuclear engineering professor at Kyoto University. “If it’s from contaminated water leaking from inside the reactor, Tepco’s so-called water tomb may be jeopardized because flooding the containment vessel will result in more radiation in the building.”
Decontaminating Robots
Tepco plans to decontaminate the two iRobot Corp. Packbot robots before sending them into a building tomorrow or later to further investigate the damage, spokesman Takeo Iwamoto said. High radiation in the reactor buildings prevents engineers from working inside them, Iwamoto said.
The cores in reactors 1, 2 and 3 and the spent fuels rods in reactor 4 have been damaged. Tepco has been using fire trucks, concrete pumps and other emergency measures for nearly seven weeks to pour millions of liters of water to cool the units after the accident.
Tepco started moving the radioactive water, which leaked to the basements and trenches, to a waste storage facility on April 19. Tepco transferred 1.89 million liters of the water from the trenches near reactor No. 2 as of 7 a.m. today, Iwamoto said. The utility plans to install a second pump after transferring 2.5 million liters.
Less Damage
Tepco shares fell 3.3 percent to 412 yen today in Tokyo. The shares are down about 80 percent since the quake and tsunami struck on March 11, leaving almost 26,000 people dead or missing.
Reactors 1 and 2 are less damaged than estimated, Tepco said in a statement today.
As much as 55 percent of the No. 1 reactor core at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi station was damaged, compared with its earlier estimate of 70 percent.
“We revised the core damage data because some readings on the containment vessel monitors were wrong,” Matsumoto said. “There was also a recording mistake. We are investigating why this happened.”
The assessment for the No. 2 reactor was cut to 25 percent from 35 percent, while that for the No. 3 unit was raised to 30 percent from 25 percent.
“It seems a reasonable estimate that three reactor cores may be damaged to a similar extent,” said Unesaki. The new estimate “doesn’t indicate lower or higher risks at the plant.”
Radiation in Tokyo’s water supply fell to undetectable levels for the first time since March 18, the capital’s public health institute said today.
The level of iodine-131 in tap water fell to zero yesterday, and cesium-134 and cesium-137 also weren’t detected, the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Public Health said today.
Tokyo residents were told on March 23 that the city’s water was unsafe for infants after iodine and cesium levels exceeded guidelines.
To contact the reporters on this story: Tsuyoshi Inajima in Tokyo at tinajima@bloomberg.net; Michio Nakayama in Tokyo at mnakayama4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Amit Prakash at aprakash1@bloomberg.net
Fukushima city removing radioactive topsoil in schools 27 Apr 2011 A city in Fukushima Prefecture started Wednesday to remove topsoil from playgrounds in its elementary and nursery schools, following radiation leaks from a crisis-hit nuclear power plant nearby. Heavy machinery began scooping off surface soil at Kaoru Elementary School and Tsurumidan Nursery School in Koriyama, city officials said, adding that the removed soil will be 'discarded' in landfills in the inland city.