[leaflet slide]

What is the smiling fellow saying?

Get wealth and power beyond your dreams …
You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is what we distributed to induce people to turn in prisoners. All over Northeastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, in late 2001. How many did we distribute?

[slide]
Leaflets are “dropping like snowflakes in December in Chicago”
Donald Rumsfeld (December, 2001)

There’s one other way to find out Who’s at Guantanamo -- go there.


When I did that, for the first time in 2005, it led to the most surprising things of all


I met Adel

[slide]

and Abu Bakker

[slide]


What we discovered on July 14, 2005, was that even the Military admitted their innocence. And kept them lock up, secretly, anyway.


Adel and Abu Bakker are Uighurs, a Muslim minority group from central Asia. Their republic was overrun by Mao Tse Tung in 1949. Ever since, Uighur poets have sung of, and Uighur patriots have argued for independence. In Communist China, this is known as “terrorism.”

Many Uighurs have been imprisoned. Many have fled the country. Among them were Adel and Abu Bakker. In 2001, they were in Afghanistan. When the US bombed his village, he and the other Uighurs fled to the mountains, and then crossed back into Pakistan.

Now, at the time, the US was dropping those leaflets we saw. And so the grateful Pakistani villagers cashed the leaflets in for bounties. The going rate was $5000 per head.

Adel, Abu Bakker, and sixteen other Uighurs were shipped to Kandahar in January, 2002. For a moment, let’s leave them in the U.S. Airbase at Kandahar, a dreadful place that MPs referred to as the “Abbatoir,” and focus on China. Ever since 9/11, China had been exploiting the so-called “war on terror,” by urging the US that its political dissidents were terrorists -- particularly the Uighurs. We knew this was bogus. For years, in its annual China report, the State Department had noted the communist oppression of the Uighurs. In December, a spokesman said, “We don’t regard the Uighur groups as terrorists.”....

Seventy-five of the 132 men, or more than half the group, are -- like Farouq Ali Ahmed, the subject of National Journal's accompanying story -- not accused of taking part in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. (The 75 include 10 detainees whom the U.S. government "no longer" considers enemy combatants, although at least eight of the 10 are still being held at Guantanamo.) Typically, documents describe these men as "associated" with the Taliban or with Al Qaeda -- sometimes directly so, and sometimes through only weak or distant connections. Several men worked for charities that had some ties to Al Qaeda; Farouq lived in a house associated with the Taliban.

Some of the "associated" men are said to have attended jihadist training camps before September 11, an accusation admitted by some and denied by others. The U.S. government says that some of the suspected jihadists trained in Afghanistan, even though other records show that they had not yet entered the country at the time of the training camps. Just 57 of the 132 men, or 43 percent, are accused of being on a battlefield in post-9/11 Afghanistan.

The government's documents tie only eight of the 132 men directly to plans for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan.

One of the eight, an Australian fundamentalist Muslim, admitted that he trained several of the 9/11 hijackers and intended to hijack a plane himself; another of the eight, a Briton, is said to have targeted 33 Jewish organizations in New York City. Both men were released to their home governments in January 2005. Neither one is facing charges at home.

The Australian says he falsely confessed while undergoing torture in Egypt; the Australian government, which was watching him well before 9/11, has revoked his passport but has said it lacks sufficient information to press terrorism charges against him. The British man was cleared after a few hours of questioning in London.

The remaining six of the eight were arrested in Sarajevo, Bosnia, after being accused of planning to attack the American Embassy there; the charge was investigated and dismissed by a judge. The country's human-rights chamber issued an order prohibiting the men from being taken out of the country. The Americans seized them anyway.

The Defense Department accusations fall into only two categories -- those who participated in hostilities and those who did not. But the boundaries between the two categories can be fuzzy. In the nonhostile category, for example, is a suspected Qaeda financier picked up in Pakistan. In the hostile group, on the other hand, are a few men whose most direct link to hostilities appears to be getting wounded by one of the thousands of American bombs dropped on Afghanistan.

One hundred and fifteen of the files also note where the detainees were captured. Only 35 percent of the 115 were arrested in Afghanistan; 55 percent were captured by Pakistani forces in Pakistan.

At least 39 of the arrests made in Pakistan came in the border region, where Qaeda fighters, along with civilian Afghan refugees and nonfighting Arabs, were stampeding out of the country in the fall of 2001, desperate to escape the war. Many of the enemy combatants arrested in that region say they fled the sudden chaos of Afghanistan without retrieving their passports and identification papers and that when they asked to be taken to their embassies, they were taken to prison instead. Many of the men who detailed their capture described being taken through one, two, or three Pakistani prisons before they were delivered to the Americans.

Many, though not all, of the remaining 24 arrests made in Pakistan came in targeted raids on senior Qaeda leaders between January and September 2002. The senior suspects captured in these raids immediately disappeared into CIA custody -- they are not at Guantanamo. But their lesser companions, or others arrested in the same town on the same night, were delivered to Cuba.

Also in this group are at least three men who were picked off Pakistani buses in apparently random sweeps for foreigners, and one man who says he answered a knock on the door of the apartment next to his.

* The authors are counsel for two detainees in Guantanamo.
1 See, Combatant Status Review Board Letters, Release date January 2005, February 2005, March 2005,
April 2005 and the Final Release available at the Seton Hall Law School library, Newark,

Page 3.

This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the
United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected
enemies.
5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants – mostly
Uighers – are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to
be enemy combatants.

Page 4.

INTRODUCTION
The United States Government detains over 500 individuals at Guantanamo Bay as so-called
“enemy combatants.” In attempting to defend the necessity of the Guantanamo detention camp, the
Government has routinely referred this group as “the worst of the worst” of the Government’s
enemies.2 The Government has detained most these individuals for more than four years; only
approximately 10 have been charged with any crime related to violations of the laws of war. The
rest remain detained based on the Government’s own conclusions, without prospect of a trial or
judicial hearing. During these lengthy detentions, the Government has had sufficient time for the
Government to conclude whether, in fact, these men were enemy combatants and to document its
rationale.
On March 28, 2002, in a Department of Defense briefing, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld said:
As has been the case in previous wars, the country that takes prisoners
generally decides that they would prefer them not to go back to the
battlefield. They detain those enemy combatants for the duration of the
conflict. They do so for the very simple reason, which I would have thought
is obvious, namely to keep them from going right back and, in this case,
killing more Americans and conducting more terrorist acts.3
The Report concludes, however, that the large majority of detainees never participated in any
combat against the United States on a battlefield. Therefore, while setting aside the significant legal
and constitutional issues at stake in the Guantanamo litigation presently being considered in the
federal courts, this Report merely addresses the factual basis underlying the public representations
regarding the status of the Guantanamo detainees.
Part I of this Report describes the sources and limitations of the data analyzed here. Part II
describes the “findings” the Government has made. The “findings” in this sense, constitutes the
Government’s determination that the individual in question is an enemy combatant, which is in turn
based on the Government’s classifications of terrorist groups, the asserted connection of the
individual with the purported terrorist groups, as well as the commission of “hostile acts,” if any,
that the Government has determined an individual has committed. Part III then examines the
evidence, including sources for such evidence, upon which the Government has relied in making
these findings. Part IV addresses the continued detention of individuals deemed not to be enemy
2 The Washington Post, in an article dated October 23, 2002 quoted Secretary Rumsfeld as terming the
detainees Athe worst of the worst.@ In an article dated December 22, 2002, the Post quoted Rear Adm. John D.
Stufflebeem, Deputy Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, AThey are bad guys. They are the worst of
the worst, and if let out on the street, they will go back to the proclivity of trying to kill Americans and others.@
Donald Rumsfeld Holds Defense Department Briefing. (2002, March 28). FDCH Political Transcripts. Retrieved
January 10, 2006 from Lexis-Nexis database.
3 Threats and Responses: The Detainees; Some Guantanamo Prisoners Will Be Freed, Rumsfeld Says,
(2002, October 23). The New York Times, p 14. Retrieved February 7, 2006 from Lexis-Nexis database.

Page 5.

combatants, comparing the Government’s allegations against such persons to similar or more serious
allegations against persons still deemed to be “enemy combatants.”
I. THE DATA
The data in this Report are based on written determinations the Government has produced for
detainees it has designated as enemy combatants.4 These written determinations were prepared
following military hearings commenced in 2004, called Combatant Status Review Tribunals,
designed to ascertain whether a detainee should continue to be classified as an “enemy combatant.”
The data are obviously limited.5 The data are framed in the Government’s terms and therefore are
no more precise than the Government’s categories permit. Finally, the charges are anonymous in the
sense that the summaries upon which this interim report relies are not identified by name or ISN for
any of the prisoners. It is therefore not possible at this time to determine which summary applies to
which prisoner.
Within these limitations, however, the data are very powerful because they set forth the best
case for the status of the individuals the Government has processed. The data reviewed are the
documents prepared by the Government containing the evidence upon which the Government relied
in making its decision that these detainees were enemy combatants. The Report assumes that the
information contained in the CSRT Summaries of Evidence is an accurate description of the
evidence relied upon by the Government to conclude that each prisoner is an enemy combatant.
Such summaries were filed by the Government against each individual detainee’s in advance
of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CRST) hearing.
4 The files reviewed are available at the Seton Hall Law School library, Newark, NJ.
5 There is other data currently being compiled based on different information. Each prisoner at
Guantanamo who has had summaries of evidence filed against them has had an internal administrative evaluation of
the charges. The process is that a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, or CSRT, has received the charges and
considered them. Some of those enemy detainees who are represented by counsel in pending habeas corpus Federal
District Courts have received (when so ordered by the Federal District Court Judge) the classified and declassified
portion of the CSRT proceedings. The CSRT proceedings are described as CSRT returns. The declassified portion
of those CSRT returns are being reviewed and placed into a companion data base.