Banshee screams for Antelope meat

Special Counsel Fitzgerald's investigation and ongoing legal
proceedings are serious, and now the proceedings -- the
process moves into a new phase. In our system, each
individual is presumed innocent and entitled to due process
and a fair trial . . .
-- George W. Bush


In our system of government an accused person is presumed
innocent until a contrary finding is made by a jury after an
opportunity to answer the charges and a full airing of the
facts. Mr. Libby is entitled to that opportunity . . .
-- Dick Cheney

*****

Newsday
Writers jailed in 2002 for political satire
After three years at Guantanamo, Afghan writers found to be
no threat to United States
BY JAMES RUPERT
STAFF CORRESPONDENT
October 31, 2005

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Badr Zaman Badr and his brother
Abdurrahim Muslim Dost relish writing a good joke that jabs
a corrupt politician or distills the sufferings of fellow
Afghans. Badr admires the political satires in "The
Canterbury Tales" and "Gulliver's Travels," and Dost wrote
some wicked lampoons in the 1990s, accusing Afghan mullahs
of growing rich while preaching and organizing jihad. So in
2002, when the U.S. military shackled the writers and flew
them to Guantanamo among prisoners whom Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld declared "the worst of the worst" violent
terrorists, the brothers found life imitating farce.

For months, grim interrogators grilled them over a satirical
article Dost had written in 1998, when the Clinton
administration offered a $5-million reward for Osama bin
Laden. Dost responded that Afghans put up 5 million Afghanis
-- equivalent to $113 -- for the arrest of President Bill
Clinton.

"It was a lampoon . . . of the poor Afghan economy" under
the Taliban, Badr recalled. The article carefully instructed
Afghans how to identify Clinton if they stumbled upon him.
"It said he was clean-shaven, had light-colored eyes and he
had been seen involved in a scandal with Monica Lewinsky,"
Badr said.

The interrogators, some flown down from Washington, didn't
get the joke, he said. "Again and again, they were asking
questions about this article. We had to explain that this
was a satire." He paused. "It was really pathetic."

It took the brothers three years to convince the Americans
that they posed no threat to Clinton or the United States,
and to get released -- a struggle that underscores the
enormous odds weighing against innocent foreign Muslims
caught in America's military prisons.

In recent months, scores of Afghans interviewed by Newsday
-- including a dozen former U.S. prisoners, plus human
rights officials and senior Afghan security officials --
said the United States is detaining enough innocent Afghans
in its war against the Taliban and al-Qaida that it is
seriously undermining popular support for its presence in
Afghanistan.

As Badr and Dost fought for their freedom, they had enormous
advantages over Guantanamo's 500-plus other captives.

The brothers are university-educated, and Badr, who holds a
master's degree in English literature, was one of few
prisoners able to speak fluently to the interrogators in
their own language. And since both men are writers, much of
their lives and political ideas are on public record here in
books and articles they have published.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico, declared this
summer that "there was no mistake" in the brothers'
detention because it "was directly related to their combat
activities [or support] as determined by an appropriate
Department of Defense official." U.S. officials declined to
discuss the case, so no full picture is available of why it
took so long for the pair to be cleared.

The Pentagon's prison network overseas is assigned to help
prevent attacks on the United States like those of Sept. 11,
2001, so "you cannot equate it to a justice system," said
Army Col. Samuel Rob, who was serving this summer as the
chief lawyer for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Still, he
added, innocent victims of the system are "a small
percentage, I'd say."

The military is slow to clear innocent prisoners, largely
because of its fear of letting even one real terrorist get
away, said Rob.

"What if this is a truly bad individual, the next World
Trade Center bomber, and you let him go? What do you say to
the families?" asked Rob.

Rob and the Defense Department say the prison system
performs satisfactorily in freeing innocents and letting
military investigators focus on prisoners who really are
part of terrorist networks. Badr and others -- including
some former military intelligence soldiers who served in
Guantanamo and Afghanistan -- emphatically disagree.

The United States for years called Badr and his brother
"enemy combatants," but the men say they never saw a
battlefield. And for an America that seeks a democratized
Afghanistan, they seem, potentially, allies. Americans "have
freedom to criticize your government, and this is very
good," said Badr. Also, "we know that America's laws say a
person is innocent until he is proven to be guilty,"
although "for us it is the reverse."

Badr and Dost are Pashtuns, members of the ethnic group that
spawned the Taliban. But the family library where they
receive their guests is crammed with poetry, histories and
religious treatises -- mind-broadening stuff that the
Taliban were more inclined to burn than read. For years, the
brothers' library has served as a salon for Pashtun
intellectuals and activists of many hues, including some who
also have been arrested in the U.S.-funded dragnet for
suspected Islamic militants.

Like millions of Afghans, they fled to Pakistan during the
Soviet occupation of their country in the 1980s and joined
one of the many anti-Soviet factions that got quiet support
from Pakistan's military intelligence service. Their small
group was called Jamiat-i-Dawatul Quran wa Sunna, and Dost
became editor of its magazine. Even then, "we were not
fighters," said Badr. "We took part in the war only as writers."

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the men split with
Jamiat, partly over its promotion of the extremist Wahhabi
sect of Islam. Dost wrote lampoons against the group's
leader, a cleric named Sami Ullah, portraying him as a
corrupt pawn of its sponsor, Pakistan, working against
Afghan interests.

In November 2001, as U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan, the
mullah's brother, Roh Ullah, "called us and said if we
didn't stop criticizing the party he would have us put in
jail," said Badr. Ten days later, men from Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate hauled the brothers
off to grimy cells.

Another Ullah brother, Hayat Ullah, insisted in an interview
that their family had not instigated the arrests. Dost is a
political rival, but "a very simple man," Hayat Ullah said.
"We have many powerful rivals. If I were going to get ISI to
pick up an enemy, why would I choose an ordinary person like
him?"

Pakistan-U.S. transfer

But two Pakistani analysts with sources in ISI said the
Ullah family has been accused in several cases of using its
links to the agency to have rivals arrested. And Roh Ullah
himself is now imprisoned at Guantanamo.

In the midnight chill of Feb. 9, 2002, ISI officers led Badr
and Dost, blindfolded and handcuffed, onto the tarmac of
Peshawar International Airport. When they heard airplanes,
"we knew they were handing us to the Americans," Badr said.

Beneath the blindfold, he stole glimpses of smiling
Pakistani officers, grim U.S. soldiers and a cargo plane.
"It was a big festival atmosphere, as though the Pakistanis
were handing over Osama bin Laden to the United States,"
Badr said.

Shouting and shoving, American troops forced the brothers to
the asphalt and bound their hands behind them with plastic
ties. "They chained our feet," Badr said. "Dogs were barking
at us. They pulled a sack down over my head. It was very
difficult to breathe . . . and I saw the flash of cameras.
They were taking pictures of us."

Flown to U.S. prisons at Bagram and Kandahar air bases in
Afghanistan, the brothers eventually learned from their
interrogators that the ISI had denounced them to the U.S. as
dangerous supporters of the Taliban and al-Qaida who had
threatened President Clinton.

In the three-plus years that the brothers spent in U.S.
prisons abroad, violent abuse and torture were widely reported.

Eight of 12 men interviewed after their release in recent
months from U.S. prisons in Afghanistan told Newsday they
had been beaten or had seen or heard other prisoners being
beaten.

The brothers escaped the worst abuse, partly because of
Badr's fluent English. At times, prisoners "who didn't speak
English got kicked by the MPs because they didn't understand
what the soldiers wanted," he said. And both men said that
while many prisoners clammed up under questioning, they were
talkative and able to demonstrate cooperation.

"Fortunately, we were not tortured," Badr said, "but we
heard torture." At Bagram, "We heard guards shouting at
people to make them stand up all night without sleeping." At
Kandahar, prisoners caught talking in their cells "were
punished by being forced to kneel on the ground with their
hands on their head and not moving for three or four hours
in hot weather.

Some became unconscious," he said. The U.S. military last
year investigated abuse at its prisons in Afghanistan but
the Pentagon ordered the report suppressed.

Routine interrogations

Badr and Dost were humiliated routinely. When being moved
between prisons or in groups, they often were thrown to the
ground, like that night at Peshawar airport. "They put our
faces in the dust," Badr said.

Like virtually all ex-prisoners interviewed, he said he felt
deliberately shamed by soldiers when they photographed him
naked or gave him regular rectal exams.

The brothers were flown to Guantanamo in May 2002 as soon as
Camp Delta, the permanent prison there, was opened. For more
than two years, they sat in separate cells, waiting days
between interrogation sessions to explain and re-explain
their lives and writings.

In his 35 months in U.S. captivity, Badr said, he had about
150 interrogation sessions with 25 different lead
interrogators from several U.S. agencies. "And that satire
was the biggest cause of their suspicion," he said.

When one team of interrogators "began to accept that this
was satire," the whole process would begin anew with
interrogators from another agency. In all, Badr said he was
told that four U.S. agencies -- including the CIA, FBI and
Defense Department -- would have to give their assent before
the men could be released. And their names would be
circulated to 40 other countries to ensure they were not
wanted anywhere else.

The Americans' investigations seemed to take forever to
confirm even where they had lived and studied. "I would tell
him [the interrogator] something simple and ... two or
two-and-a-half months later, he would come back and say, 'We
checked, and you were right about that,'" Badr said.

Another problem was that "Many of the interpreters were not
good," said Badr. He recalled an elderly man, arrested by
U.S. forces for shooting his rifle at a helicopter, who
explained that he had been trapping hawks and fired in anger
at one that flew away. But the interpreter mistook the
Persian word "booz" (hawk) for "baz" (goat). "The
interrogator became very angry," Badr said. "He thought the
old man was making a fool of him by claiming to be shooting
at goats flying in the air."

Angered by ordeal

Rob conceded that "obviously, we could use more
translators," but said the pace at which prisoners are
processed -- and innocents released -- is adequate.

That idea angers Badr. "They detained us for three and a
half years," he said. "Then they said to us, 'all right,
you're innocent, so go away.'"

Of that anger, Rob said, "that's understandable. Especially
if he's the breadwinner for his family and there's no one .
. ." The sentence hung uncompleted.

The brothers' anger is deepened by the abusiveness of many
U.S. soldiers, whom Badr compared to "Yahoos," the thuggish
characters of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels." And
they are upset that U.S. officials confiscated all of their
prison writings.

Still, Badr sounds neither bitter nor an enemy of America.
"I am curious to meet ordinary Americans," he said. "I
appreciated my interrogators in Guantanamo. . . . Many of
them were misguided, for example about my religion. . . .
But I can say that they were civilized people."

*****

Newsday
Books back former prisoners' claims
BY JAMES RUPERT
STAFF CORRESPONDENT
October 31, 2005

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Former U.S. soldiers at the Pentagon's
military prisons overseas have given evidence that a great
many of the captives in "the global war on terror" are innocent.

In the past year, a former Army interpreter at Guantanamo
and an interrogator at U.S. prisons in Afghanistan have
published books on their experiences that in many ways
buttress the accounts of ex-prisoners such as Afghan writers
Badr Zaman Badr and Abdurrahim Muslim Dost.

In 2002, America's prisons in Afghanistan were crammed with
ordinary people like Badr and Dost who were sometimes
literally sold to U.S. forces for the bounties that
Washington was offering, according to Chris Mackey, the
former interrogator. In his book, "The Interrogators,"
Mackey (a pseudonym) said his Army intelligence unit
struggled to evaluate "a steady stream of detainees from
Pakistan and other governments or Afghan warlords pocketing
a nice wad of cash for every prisoner they turned over."

Even when U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan made the
arrests, they "couldn't distinguish the good [people] from
the bad . . . so they dropped them all on our doorstep to
let us sort them out," he said. "They were bringing back a
lot of fighters, but they also were bringing back a lot of
farmers."

At Guantanamo in 2003, the bulk of prisoners were either
innocent or irrelevant to the U.S. investigation into
terrorist activities, according to Sgt. Erik Saar, who
supervised interpreters in interrogations there. "We did
have some bad guys, and some talkers" who were giving useful
intelligence information, Saar wrote in his book, "Inside
the Wire." "But from what I saw, there weren't many more
than a few dozen such characters at Guantanamo."

Even a prisoner who has convinced his interrogators that he
is no threat to the United States may not be freed. That
decision is made at the Pentagon. But "once the file's in
Washington, the decisions are all political," Saar quoted a
military interrogator as saying. Bureaucrats ask, "Would
releasing too many [prisoners] make the Gitmo operation look
bad?" Saar wrote.