|
The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
|
October 15th, 2006 - Expecting
U.S. Help, Sent to Guantánamo |
|
Expecting U.S. Help, Sent to
Guantánamo By Tim Golden New York Times October 15, 2006 Abdul Rahim Al Ginco thought
he was saved when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrew
the Taliban regime. Mr. Ginco, a college student
living in the United Arab Emirates, had gone to Afghanistan in 2000 after
running away from his strict Muslim father. He was soon imprisoned by the
Taliban, and tortured by operatives of Al Qaeda until, he said, he falsely
confessed to being a spy for Israel and the United States. But rather than help Mr.
Ginco return home, American soldiers detained him again. Nearly five years
later, he remains in the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba - in part, it appears, on the strength of a propaganda videotape made by
his torturers. “This was a 22-year-old kid
who was brutally tortured,” one of Mr. Ginco’s American lawyers, Stephen R.
Sady, said. “And instead of being liberated, he has endured four and a half
years of additional confinement.” A bill signed into law by
President Bush last December requires the Pentagon to determine if
information being used to hold a detainee has been obtained by coercion and
“the probative value (if any)” of such information. Another law passed by
Congress last month would ban the use of statements made under torture from
the military tribunals that are to be used to prosecute some Guantánamo
detainees. But that second law, which
awaits the president’s signature, would also sweep away most federal court
challenges to the detention of Guantánamo prisoners, including perhaps the
one filed by American lawyers for Mr. Ginco, who is now 28. A spokesman for the
Department of Defense, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon of the Navy, said he could not
discuss the specifics of the evidence against any particular detainee. And
because part of the military’s case against Mr. Ginco remains classified, it
is not possible to evaluate fully the grounds for his detention. But partial transcripts from
two review hearings for Mr. Ginco at Guantánamo and information filed by his
lawyers last week in district court in Washington show that the military has
repeatedly accused him of having volunteered his life as a Qaeda martyr - a
claim that appears to be based on a videotape found in Afghanistan. That tape was pulled from
the rubble of a home used by Muhammad Atef, the reputed military chief of Al
Qaeda, who was killed by an American air strike on his home near Kabul on
Nov. 16, 2001. Mr. Ginco named Mr. Atef as one of the Qaeda and Taliban
operatives who tortured him in early 2000, applying electric shocks to his
ears and toes, nearly drowning him in a filthy water tank, depriving him of
sleep and beating him on the soles of his feet. In December 2001 and January
2002, several Western news reporters, including one for The New York Times,
interviewed Mr. Ginco and four other foreign prisoners as the Northern
Alliance took over the prison where they had been held in Kandahar. A
reporter for The Times of London described Mr. Ginco and some of the others
as “desperate to be interviewed by the F.B.I.” On Jan. 17, however, John
Ashcroft, then the attorney general, held a news conference to announce that
five videotapes had been recovered from the ruins of Mr. Atef’s home showing
several men who “may be trained and prepared to commit future suicide
terrorist acts.” The first man shown in an excerpt from one of those tapes was
Mr. Ginco, whom Mr. Ashcroft identified as Abd Al-Rahim. Lawyers for Mr. Ginco, who
was born to a Kurdish family in Syria, still have not viewed the complete
tape from which Mr. Ashcroft showed a brief excerpt or heard its audio. But
they said they believed it showed part of one of the propaganda videos made
by the torturers who extracted Mr. Ginco’s confession. In a hearing at
Guantánamo in November 2005, Mr. Ginco admitted to a military review panel
that he appeared in the video but said, “It wasn’t my choice.” The Taliban announced in May
2000 that Mr. Ginco had been arrested as a spy. Another videotape was then
broadcast on an Arab television network, in which he looks pale, uneasy and
underweight and confesses at length to having been a spy for the United
States and Israel. This interview with Mr.
Ginco about his purported espionage was also published in a Taliban
government magazine in July 2000. It quotes him as saying he was corrupted at
college by an “evil acquaintance” who introduced him to a “computer game
called PlayStation.” Later, he added, he was shown a pornographic computer
disc and introduced to an American embassy official, whom he identified as
“Shamoyel Anty,” an agent of “the Israeli intelligence agency.” After the collapse of the
Taliban, Mr. Ginco and the four other foreigners were taken for questioning
to the makeshift American detention center in Kandahar. Initially, one of the
men said, they were treated more as guests than as prisoners, and were given
chocolates and extra blankets by the American soldiers. His treatment suddenly
became much harsher, his lawyers said, after he was recognized as one of the
men depicted in a brief Time magazine article based on Mr. Ashcroft’s
announcement about the videotapes. Mr. Ginco and the four
others were transferred to Guantánamo in May 2002. Two of the five, a Briton
and a Russian, were released in 2004, and both have made sworn statements on
Mr. Ginco’s behalf, his lawyer, Mr. Sady, said. In other statements filed in
federal court, members of Mr. Ginco’s family said he had run away from home
after borrowing money for a camping trip from some of his college classmates.
Mr. Ginco’s elder brother, with whom he was living, said the family
considered such borrowing shameful, and that he threatened to tell their
strict father about the episode. Mr. Ginco said he had tried
to arrange to travel to Europe or Canada but could not because his father had
kept his passport. He said a former friend from college who worked at the
Afghan Embassy in Dubai told him that he could be deported to Afghanistan if
he went to the police and told them he was an undocumented Afghan, which he
then did. In Afghanistan, he quickly
drew the suspicion of the Taliban. He was told to go fight against Northern
Alliance forces, he said, and sent briefly to a Qaeda training camp. When he
tried to leave, he said, he was imprisoned and tortured. At Guantánamo, he
has told military officials that the mistreatment badly damaged his right arm
and that he had spent much of his time there in a psychiatric ward. Mr. Ginco’s lawyers, who are
federal public defenders in Oregon, are contesting his detention on the
grounds that he could not have fought against the United States after it
declared a war on terrorism because he was being held by the Taliban as an
American spy. Copyright 2006 The New York
Times Company External link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/us/15gitmo.html |