He was then imprisoned by the Taliban for 18 months, in what Tim Reid described as a “squalid, vermin infested” prison in Kandahar, which held around 2,000 prisoners of the Taliban, but was left behind — with four other foreign prisoners — when the Taliban abandoned the prison following the US-led invasion. It was then that the story became truly surreal. Tim Reid and several other journalists arrived in Kandahar in January 2002 to find “a bizarre scene playing out in the jail.” As Reid explained, “The entire prison had been emptied except for five men who had chosen to stay there because they had nowhere else to go. There was a man from Manchester called Jamal Udeen [aka al-Harith], two Saudis, a student from Tatarstan — and Mr. al-Ginco. They became known as the ‘Kandahar Five.’”
Reid recalled that all five men asked the Americans to help them, and that “A French colleague, on a visit to the US base at Kandahar airport the next day, told an American officer about the men,” but a few days later, after two Americans — “one in uniform and a civilian” — had turned up at the jail to take photographs of the five, “they returned with armed soldiers and took the men to the US jail in Kandahar airport.”
The logic behind this was always non-existent, but whereas the other four men were eventually released from Guantánamo — the Tatar (Airat Vakhitov) in February 2004, Jamal Udeen in March 2004, and the Saudis (Saddiq Turkistani and Abdul Hakim Bukhari) in 2006 and 2007 — al-Ginco’s story was transformed into the darkest of nightmares, when, during an investigation of Mohammed Atef’s house, US soldiers found a videotape that included footage of him.
Abdul Rahim al-Ginco’s US nightmare
As al-Ginco explained in Guantánamo, the tape contained the “confession” he had made, as the result of his torture by al-Qaeda, which had led to a sentence of 25 years in prison for spying. He added, “When the Americans came I told them about the videotape the Taliban made of me. By me telling them about the video it created confusion to the point where the Americans believed I was working with al-Qaeda.” This was putting it mildly. Although the tape did indeed contain al-Ginco’s confession, and, apparently, footage of his torture, Attorney General John Ashcroft “believed otherwise,” as Tim Reid put it, adding, “On January 17, 2002, Mr. Ashcroft held a press conference naming and showing pictures of five men sought as potential terrorists. One he called ‘Abd al-Rahim’ — Mr. al-Ginco.”
Eleven days later, Time magazine “published an article containing Mr. al-Ginco’s picture and the allegation that he was a terror suspect,” which “found its way to the US jail in Kandahar airport,” and suddenly, al-Ginco said, “the Americans’ attitude towards him changed. He was accused of being a terrorist. He was subjected to long periods of stress positions, sleep deprivation and snarling dogs. In May 2002, after two years of being called an Israeli spy by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Mr. al-Ginco was sent to Guantánamo Bay, now accused of being al-Qaeda and a US enemy.”
Back in January, following discussions with al-Ginco’s lawyers, Tim Reid wrote, “When I met Mr. al-Ginco in January 2002, he was a quiet character but lucid and hopeful that things would get better. Today he is being treated inside Guantánamo for post-traumatic stress disorder.” This was not the only way in which he has suffered in Guantánamo. In his administrative review board in 2005, he explained that other prisoners were also convinced that he was a spy, and had threatened him, with the result that he had tried to harm himself in Guantánamo, “because of my emotional issues” — being picked on by the other prisoners — and had spent three years in the psychiatric ward, and added that he was receiving medication for epilepsy.
By the time Barack Obama took office, al-Ginco had been moved to Camp 4, where compliant prisoners — and those who are not regarded as a threat — are allowed to live communally, and to have ”access to books, magazines and a chance to exercise.” This was certainly an improvement, but it remains inexplicable that the Obama administration considered his case worth pursuing, and on Monday Judge Leon made this clear in the strongest terms possible (PDF).
The government’s position “defies common sense”
After explaining that he was required to rule on “whether the Government has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that [al-Ginco] is being lawfully detained … because he was ‘part of’ the Taliban or al-Qaeda at the time he was taken into custody by US forces,” Judge Leon noted that, although the government “effectively concedes [that al-Ginco] was not only imprisoned, but tortured by al-Qaeda into making a false ‘confession’ that he was a US spy, and imprisoned thereafter by the Taliban for over eighteen months at the infamous Sarousa [Sarposa] prison in Kandahar,” officials still contend, “[n]otwithstanding these extraordinary intervening events,” that he was “still ‘part of’ the Taliban and/or al-Qaeda when he was taken into US custody.”
Judge Leon then ran though al-Ginco’s claims — of his short and unwilling attendance at the training camp, and his subsequent torture (which he described as arguably “barbaric”) and imprisonment at the hands of al-Qaeda and the Taliban — and noted that he “contends, in essence, that even if he had a prior arrangement with al-Qaeda or the Taliban in 2000, his subsequent torture and imprisonment for eighteen months vitiates that relationship to such a degree that he no longer was ‘part of’ al-Qaeda or the Taliban when he was taken in custody in 2002.”
Ruling for al-Ginco, Judge Leon then mocked the government for “taking a position that defies common sense,” by asking the court to address whether a relationship with al-Qaeda or the Taliban “can be sufficiently vitiated by the passage of time, intervening events, or both.” Concluding that “The answer, of course, is yes,” he then dismantled the government’s case point by point, stating, “To say the least, five days at a guest house in Kabul combined with eighteen days at a training camp does not add up to a longstanding bond of brotherhood,” adding that al-Ginco’s torture “evinces a total evisceration of whatever relationship might have existed!” and that his abandonment in the Taliban prison “is even more definitive proof that any preexisting relationship had been utterly destroyed,” and concluding that an analysis of all these factors “overwhelmingly leads this Court to conclude that the relationship that existed in 2000 — such as it was — no longer existed whatsoever in 2002 when Janko was taken into custody.”
The ruling could not have been harsher, but while Lyle Denniston on SCOTUSblog noted that it may have an impact on other cases, explaining that “Colleagues on the District Court pay attention to each other’s rulings, and Leon’s interpretation of the effects of torture during captivity, other forms of mistreatment, and lengthy confinement in harsh conditions could be read more broadly to establish breaks with past terrorism,” I have to say that, from my point of view, I hope that what it demonstrates to the Obama administration — and specifically, to Eric Holder’s Justice Department — is that, with more habeas cases forthcoming, more time and effort would be better spent on working out which cases to drop, and on doing further damage to Dick Cheney’s credibility, than on pressing ahead with cases that, when viewed objectively, are also bound to fail.
There may be no more cases that are quite as bleakly ridiculous as that of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, but there are many, many others in which the Justice Department’s long efforts to construct a viable case have come to nothing, because there was never any evidence in the first place, and it would be better for all involved if the administration worked this out now, rather than face further humiliation as it presses ahead with what, in most cases, is nothing more than a doomed and pointless attempt to defend the bitter fruits of the Bush administration’s colossally incompetent “War on Terror” detention policy.
