Report from Guantanano #1

by Rhona Mahony. Anant Raut came to Stanford University last week, on May 29, to describe the men locked up in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo, Cuba. He is a lawyer, now working for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, who has represented five of the prisoners. He has been to Guantanamo and met his clients in person.

That night, Raut spoke in a History Department auditorium. He looked like an expensive, East Coast attorney : dark suit, tasteful tie, erect posture. He spoke politely. So moderate, so controlled, so reasonable. His presentation was almost dull. Note that this fellow went to Harvard Law School, worked for the Federal Trade Commission, and then worked at Weil, Gotshal, an expensive New York law firm. Now he works for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. He is so square! Fire flickers somewhere underneath the conservative suit, though; he was one of the first corporate lawyers to volunteer to represent the Guantanamo prisoners in 2004.

He said, in his reasonable lecture-hall voice, that his top priority was to dispel three myths. Many Americans think that the Guantanamo prisoners are “the worst of the worst.” That is, the toughest, most murderous terrorists that the U.S. has been able to vacuum out of Al Qaeda hidey-holes around the world. As it turns out, no. They’re not. The Defense Department itself has figured out that over half of the men and boys locked up at Guantanamo never engaged in any “hostile act” whatsoever against the U.S.

Okay, so why are they there? Myth number two, Raut said, was that the Guantanamo prisoners had been captured on the battlefield, shooting or launching missiles at Americans and their allies. As it turns out, no. They weren’t. Only 5 percent of them were captured on a battlefield. Many of the others were seized by Afghan tribesmen who handed them in to Afghan or U.S. officials in return for a bounty. The bounties ranged up to $4000, many times the annual income of an entire Afghan extended family. How did the Afghans choose whom to seize? That’s hard to say. Many of their prisoners were non-Afghans–people who found themselves in Afghanistan with no relatives to vouch for them or protect them.

Surely the Guantanamo prisoners didn’t make it all the way to Cuba without having plotted, collaborated, stolen, spied, or acted reprehensibly in some way? Myth number three, Raut said, was that the Guantanamo prisoners must have been guilty of something. As it turns out, no. Many weren’t. One of Raut’s clients had been found locked in a cell of a Taliban jail. U.S. soldiers interpreted imprisonment by the Taliban as association with the Taliban. Raut described this miserable fellow as “demonstrably innocent.” Once Raut was able to make the Army connect Dot A to Dot B, the Army released him. Raut described several other prisoners, some of whom the New York Times and other major papers had written about. One Pakistani man, a chicken farmer named Abdur Sayed Rahman, was arrested because his name sounded like “Abdur Zahid Rahman,” the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister. An Afghan man was arrested because his name sounded like the name of a former Taliban provincial governor. The American hearing officer at Guantanamo told this man that he needed to contact the former governor himself to unravel the mix-up; the Army wouldn’t do it. When the man pointed out that he was being held incommunicado in Cuba, thousands of miles from Afganistan, the officer told him that he would be allowed to write a letter. He could show his results to the officer at his next hearing, which would take place one year from then.

Why are millions of dollars being spent to truck, fly, and lock up so many men with little or no evidence against them? Raut said that the Army has a procedure, codified in field manuals, for deciding whether someone it has captured should be held or released. It developed this procedure in Vietnam, when officers recognized the importance of devoting scarce vehicles, cells, and interrogators only to likely Viet Cong guerrillas, not harmless villagers. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, however, soon after the attacks on September 11, 2001, explicitly ordered the U.S. Army to set aside that procedure. All suspects, he ordered, however and by whomever captured, should be held, transported, and interrogated. That order, Raut said, resulted in poor “quality control” of incarcerated suspects.

Yes, the U.S. been pestered by many quality-control defects during George W. Bush’s Presidency. Raut is an interesting fellow: legalistic and personally conservative, but determined to challenge the national disgrace of his time. He describes his motives in this essay for Salon that was published in January of 2007. More power to him.