Some detainees can't go home

Whatever orders civilian judges might issue under the latest U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the United States is struggling with how to send away some of the detainees at Guantánamo who the Defense Department has already decided to let go.

By some measures, Mammar Ameur seems an unlikely candidate to be among the 270 war-on-terror detainees held at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay..

He has a white beard and bad feet. He has a wife and four kids. And 2 ½ years ago, the Pentagon decided he could go home. Yet he passes his days in Camp 4, a communal Hogan's Heroes-style compound for the most cooperative of captives.

That's because Ameur has the misfortune of being Algerian.

Despite years of talks, the North African nation has so far refused to take home a single one of its citizens held in war-on-terror custody at the U.S. base in southeast Cuba.

Meantime, Ameur is an example of the men for whom Thursday's Supreme Court ruling -- that they can take their cases to U.S. courts -- is likely a hollow victory.

NOWHERE TO GO

Even if a civilian court were to order Ameur's release, he has no place to go. The Pentagon says there are about 70 detainees in a similar predicament.

''[The Algerians] simply decided that they do not want to accept back any of the detainees from the United States,'' said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the Defense Department deputy in charge of detainee affairs. She called it ``discouraging.''

Last summer, she said, Washington and Algiers agreed on repatriation of a number of Algerians she would not quantify. Then the North African nation reversed course. Its diplomats say that perhaps the men should go back to the countries where they were taken into custody -- locations from South Asia to Sarajevo, but none inside their home countries.

Ameur's may be a typical tale. He says he was a charity worker in Pakistan, a good Muslim who fled a bloody Islamic insurgency in Algeria in the 1990s and ultimately got U.N. refugee status in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, he said, U.S. intelligence officers mistook the home where he and his family lived for an al Qaeda safe house -- and labeled him a terrorist because he had once been trained by al Ittihad al Islami, a Kuwaiti aid group that President Bush listed as a terror organization after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

FATHERLESS FAMILY

After that, his wife and kids moved back to Algeria, and the children have grown up without him, says his attorney, Ramzi Kassem, a teaching fellow at the Yale Law School.

''He wants to be back home with his family. That's what he's always wanted. It's really not much more complicated than that,'' said Kassem.

But where to go? Back to Pakistan, whose security forces helped the United States round up the Guantánamo-bound suspects in the first place? To a third country?

The military has gradually thinned the ranks of prisoners at Guantánamo by getting their home governments to take them. Nearly 100 Saudi Arabians have been sent home to state-run rehabilitation programs designed to rid them of any vestiges of radical Islam.

The U.S. is likewise negotiating the return of many of the 100 or so detained Yemenis.

''I think the brutally frank answer is that we're stuck,'' Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate committee May 20, when asked how the various agencies of the Bush administration were handling the task of moving toward closure of the prison camps at Guantánamo Bay.

OPPOSITION

There are also 25 detainees whose opposition to their home governments makes them likely subjects of political retribution.

Chief among them are the 17 Uighurs -- Chinese citizens from an ethnic Islamic minority who fled their homeland for Afghanistan long before the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. government now agrees that they would suffer religious oppression as devout Muslims if returned to China, a communist country.

Supreme Court rules Gitmo detainees can challenge their detention.»

The Supreme Court ruled today that “foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.” The AP reports:

The justices, in a 5-4 ruling Thursday, handed the Bush administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

Families sue over Guantánamo Bay suicides

The US department of defence is being sued over the suicide deaths of two Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

The New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees, said it was seeking unspecified damages on behalf of the families of Salah al-Salami and Yasser al-Zahrani, both Saudis.

The claim was announced yesterday, on the second anniversary of their deaths with another detainee from Yemen. All three hanged themselves inside their cells with bed sheets.

"After two years, there has still been no public accounting for what happened to these men," Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer at the centre, said in a statement.

The centre said it could not find the family of the Yemeni man.

The US military said the suicides prompted a complete review of operations at the detention centre in Cuba.

"As we value life, the deaths two years ago were deeply saddening," Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman and navy commander, said yesterday.

The military would release the results of its investigation of the deaths when the findings were ready, he said.

Washington is forging ahead with the prosecution of about 80 of the roughly 270 men being held at Guantánamo on suspicion of terrorism or links to the Taliban or al-Qaida.

They include the UK resident Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, who is accused of an al-Qaida dirty bomb plot to attack apartment buildings in the US.

His lawyers have condemned the charges against him as part of a US "rush to charge as many people as possible at Guantánamo Bay prior to President Bush leaving office".

About this articleClose This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Wednesday June 11 2008. It was last updated at 12:03 on June 11 2008.

Ex-official Says DoD Nixed Iran Attack

WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials firmly opposed Vice President Dick Cheney's proposal to strike Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bases last summer by insisting that the administration make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former Bush administration official.

J. Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal.

McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposed several weeks earlier "launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran," citing two officials involved in Iran policy.

According to Carpenter, who is now at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, a strongly pro-Israel think tank, Pentagon officials argued that no decision should be made about the limited airstrike on Iran without a thorough discussion of the sequence of events that would follow an Iranian retaliation against such an attack. Carpenter said the Defense Department officials insisted that the Bush administration had to make "a policy decision about how far the administration would go -- what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks."

The question of escalation posed by Defense Department officials involved not only the potential of the Mahdi Army in Iraq to attack, Carpenter said, but also possible responses across the Middle East by Hezbollah and by Iran.

Carpenter suggested that Defense Department officials were shifting the debate on a limited strike from the Iraq-based rationale, which they were not contesting, to the much bigger issue of the threat of escalation to full-scale war with Iran, knowing that it would be politically easier to thwart the proposal on that basis.

The former State Department official said the Defense Department "knew that it would be difficult to get interagency consensus on that question."

The Joint Chiefs were fully supportive of the position taken by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the Cheney proposal, according to Carpenter. "It's clear that the military leadership was being very conservative on this issue," he said.

At least some Defense Department and military officials suggested that Iran had more and better options for hitting back at the United States than the United States had for hitting Iran, according to one former Bush administration insider.

Former Bush speechwriter and senior policy adviser Michael Gerson, who had left the administration in 2006, wrote a column in the Washington Post on July 20, 2007, in which he gave no hint of Cheney's proposal but referred to "options" for striking Iranian targets based on the Cheney line that Iran "smuggles in the advanced explosive devices that kill and maim American soldiers."

Gerson cited two possibilities: "Engaging in hot pursuit against weapon supply lines over the Iranian border or striking explosives factories and staging areas within Iran." But the Pentagon and the military leadership were opposing such options, he reported, because of the fear that Iran has "escalation dominance" in its conflict with the United States.

That meant, according to Gerson, that "in a broadened conflict, the Iranians could complicate our lives in Iraq and the region more than we complicate theirs."

Carpenter's account of the Pentagon's position on the Cheney proposal suggests, however, that civilian and military opponents were saying that Iran's ability to escalate posed the question of whether the United States was going to go to a full-scale air war against Iran.

Pentagon civilian and military opposition to such a strategic attack on Iran had become well-known during 2007. But this is the first evidence from an insider that Cheney's proposal was perceived as a ploy to provoke Iranian retaliation that could used to justify a strategic attack on Iran.

The option of attacking nuclear sites had been raised by President Bush with the Joint Chiefs at a meeting in "the tank" at the Pentagon on Dec. 13, 2006, and had been opposed by the Joint Chiefs, according a report by Time magazine's Joe Klein last June. After he become head of the Central Command in March 2007, Adm. William Fallon also made his opposition to such a massive attack on Iran known to the White House, according to Middle East specialist Hillary Mann, who had developed close working relationships with Pentagon officials when she worked on the National Security Council staff.

It appeared in early 2007, therefore, that a strike against Iran's nuclear program and military power had been blocked by opposition from the Pentagon. Cheney's proposal for an attack on Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bases in June 2007, tied to the alleged Iranian role in providing both weapons -- especially the highly lethal explosively formed projectiles -- and training to Shiite militias appears to have been a strategy for getting around the firm resistance of military leaders to such an unprovoked attack.

Although the Pentagon bottled up the Cheney proposal in inter-agency discussions, Cheney had a strategic asset that he could use to try to overcome that obstacle: his alliance with Gen. David Petraeus.

And Cheney had already used Gen. David Petraeus' takeover as the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq in early February 2007 to do an end run about the Washington national security bureaucracy to establish the propaganda line that Iran was manufacturing explosively formed projectiles and shipping them to the Mahdi Army militiamen.

Petraeus was also a supporter of Cheney's proposal for striking Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps targets in Iran, going so far as to hint in an interview with Fox News last September that he had passed on to the White House his desire to do something about alleged Iranian assistance to Shiites that would require U.S. forces beyond his control.

At that point, Adm. Fallon was in a position to deter any effort to go around Defense Department and military opposition to such a strike because he controlled all military access to the region as a whole. But Fallon's forced resignation in March and the subsequent promotion of Petraeus to become CENTCOM chief later this year gives Cheney a possible option to ignore the position of his opponents in Washington once more in the final months of the administration.