Veterans for Common Sense

February 15, 2009, San Juan, Puerto Rico – Army Pvt. Brandon Neely was scared when he took Guantanamo’s first shackled detainees off a bus. Told to expect vicious terrorists, he grabbed a trembling, elderly detainee and ground his face into the cement — the first of a range of humiliations he says he participated in and witnessed as the prison was opening for business.

Watch MSNBC News Interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrdQ6s5zKl4&eurl

Neely has now come forward in this final year of the detention center’s existence, saying he wants to publicly air his feelings of guilt and shame about how some soldiers behaved as the military scrambled to handle the first alleged al-Qaida and Taliban members arriving at the isolated U.S. Navy base.

His account, one of the first by a former guard describing abuses at Guantanamo, describes a chaotic time when soldiers lacked clear rules for dealing with detainees who were denied many basic comforts. He says the circumstances changed quickly once monitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross arrived.

The military says it has gone to great lengths in the seven years since then to ensure the prisoners’ safe treatment. “Our policy is to treat detainees humanely,” said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.

After the Sept. 11 attacks and the swift U.S. military response in Afghanistan, the Bush administration had little time to prepare for the hundreds of prisoners being swept up on the battlefield. The U.S. Southern Command was given only a few weeks notice before they began arriving at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba — a locale thought to be beyond the reach of U.S. and Cuban law. The first arrivals were housed in cages that had been used for Haitian migrants almost a decade earlier.

Now President Barack Obama is committed to closing the prison and finding new ways of handling the remaining 245 detainees as well as any future terror suspects. Human rights groups say his pledge to adhere to long established laws and treaties governing prisoner treatment is essential if the United States hopes to prevent abuses in the future.

“If Guantanamo has taught us anything, it’s the importance of abiding by the rule of law,” said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch.

Or as Neely put it in an interview with The Associated Press this week, “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong.”

Neely, a burly Texan who served for a year in Iraq after his six months at Guantanamo, received an honorable discharge last year, with the rank of specialist, and now works as a law enforcement officer in the Houston area. He is also president of the local chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

An urge to tell his story led him to the University of California at Davis’ Guantanamo Testimonials Project, an effort to document accounts of prisoner abuse. It includes public statements from three other former guards, but Neely was the first to grant researchers an interview. He also spoke extensively with the AP.

Testimony from the other guards echoes some of Neely’s concerns. One of the other guards, Sean Baker, described in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” how he was beaten and hospitalized by fellow soldiers in a January 2003 training drill in which he wore an orange jumpsuit to play the role of a detainee.

Terry C. Holdbrooks Jr. told the Web site cageprisoners.com in an interview this month that he saw several abuses during his service at Guantanamo in 2003, including detainees subjected to cold temperatures and loud music, and he later converted to Islam.

Neely, 28, describes a litany of cruel treatment by his fellow soldiers, including beatings and humiliations he said were intended only to deliver physical or psychological pain.

A spokeswoman for the detention center, Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, said she could not comment on “what one individual may recall” from seven years ago. “Thousands of service members have honorably carried out their duties here in what is an arduous and scrutinized environment,” she said.

Neely’s account sheds new light on the early days of Guantanamo, where guards were hastily deployed in January 2002 and were soon confronted by men stumbling out of planes, shackled and wearing blackout goggles. They were held in chain-link cages and moved to more permanent structures three months later.

The soldiers, many of them still in their teens, had no detailed standard operating procedures and were taught hardly anything about the Geneva Conventions, which provide guidelines for humane treatment of prisoners of war, Neely said, though some learned about them on their own initiative.

“Most of us who had everyday contact with the detainees were really young,” he said in the AP telephone interview.

Army Col. Bill Costello acknowledged that Guantanamo-specific procedures developed over time, but insisted that the guards had strict direction from the start. “This was a professional guard force,” said Costello, who served as a Guantanamo spokesman during its first months and now speaks for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which oversees the base.

Only months had passed since the Sept. 11 attacks, and Neely said many of the guards wanted revenge. Especially before the first Red Cross visit, he said guards were seizing on any apparent infractions to “get some” by hurting the detainees. The soldiers’ behavior seemed justified at the time, he said, because they were told “these are the worst terrorists in the world.”

He said one medic punched a handcuffed prisoner in the face for refusing to swallow a liquid nutritional supplement, and another bragged about cruelly stretching a prisoner’s torn muscles during what was supposed to be physical therapy treatments.

He said detainees were forced to submit to take showers and defecate into buckets in full view of female soldiers, against Islamic customs. When a detainee yelled an expletive at a female guard, he said a crew of soldiers beat the man up and held him down so that the woman could repeatedly strike him in the face.

Neely says he feels personally ashamed for how he treated that elderly detainee the first day. As he recalls it, the man made a movement to resist on his way to his cage, and he responded by shoving the shackled man headfirst to the ground, bruising and scraping his face. Other soldiers hog-tied him and left him in the sun for hours.

Only later did Neely learn — from another detainee — that the man had jerked away thinking he was about to be executed.

“I just felt horrible,” Neely recalled.

Neely grew up in a military family in Huntsville, Texas, and said he initially saw the Army as a career. He says his experiences led him to see the treatment of detainees and the Iraq invasion as “morally wrong.” He refused to return to active duty when called up from the Inactive Ready Reserves in 2007 and ignored repeated letters threatening penalties.

Neely acknowledged that by talking about his experiences, he also has broken the nondisclosure pledge he signed before leaving Guantanamo. He also says a lawyer told him the document he signed could not be enforced.

Storum said guards receive “operational security debriefings” on their way out of Guantanamo “so that personnel are mindful of their responsibilities and are made aware of what can be openly discussed in a public forum.”

Interviews with former guards are rare. The military allows journalists visiting Guantanamo to interview active-duty guards at the base, but they are hand-picked by the military and speak in the presence of public affairs officers.

Neely said discussing his experience now has helped put it behind him. “Speaking out is a good way to deal with this,” he said.
On the Net:

    * The Guantanamo Testimonials Project: http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu

February 3, 2009 – A prominent law professor is charging that the Defense Department is issuing questionable data on the number of Guantanamo detainees who have been released “and then returned to the battlefield” because the government “is now in a position where they have to find some bad guys — even if they have to invent them by naming people who were never there.”
 
Their ultimate aim, Professor Mark Denbeaux of the Seton Hall University law school told us, “is to foment fear among American voters and limit the freedom of the Obama Administration to release any of the detainees still imprisoned.”
 
Denbeaux heads the law school’s Center for Policy and Research. The Center has issued a report which it says “rebuts and debunks” the most recent claim by the Department of Defense (DOD) that 61 “former Guantánamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight.”

The report is one of a series produced by the Center’s faculty and law students. Professor Denbeaux says the Center has determined that “DOD has issued ‘recidivism’ numbers 43 times, and each time they have been wrong –this last time the most egregiously so.”

He told us, “Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo – much less were they released from there.”
 
He added, “They have counted people as ‘returning to the fight’ for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning — except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men.”

Denbeaux charged that the Defense Department has issued numbers 43 times, and said these numbers conflict with each other. He noted that the government’s numbers are “seriously undercut by the DOD statement that ‘they do not track’ former detainees.”
 
“Time and time again, the Department of Defense, the Executive Branch, and other government officials have claimed publicly that Guantánamo Bay detainees who have been released have “returned to the battlefield” where they have then been re-captured or killed,” Denbeaux declared.
 
The Seton Hall report attempts to correct what it characterizes as errors in the latest DOD report, which was issued in mid-January. That report alleged that 61 detainees have returned to the battlefield. 
       
The Seton Hall report notes that in each of its 43 attempts to provide the numbers of the recidivist detainees, the Department of Defense has given different sets of numbers that are contradictory and internally inconsistent with the Department’s own data.
 
It says that DOD’s most recent press statement identifies no names, dates, places nor any conduct by released detainees.  “The raw numbers that are cited are unsupported, inconsistent with all other statements and appear to be presented to support the internal Department of Defense purposes,” the report says.
                                 
Previous DOD reports have said the numbers of recidivist detainees have been “one, several, some, a couple, a few, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 12-24, 25, 29, and 30,” the Seton Hall group contends.
 
But it adds that 82{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of DOD’s publicly made claims “contain qualifying language,” including terms such as: “at least”; “somewhere on the order of”; “approximately”; “around”; “just short of”; “we believe”; “estimated”; “roughly”; “more than”; “a couple”; “a few”; “some”; “several”; and “about.”
 
Department of Defense statements about the number of recidivist detainees which do not identify the detainee, the act of recidivism, the place, or the time, are especially unreliable, Seton Hall’s report declares. It claims that in the two instances in which DOD provided written support -July 12 2007 and May 20 2008, their previous oral assertions were repudiated. For instance, the report says, in DOD’s July 12, 2007 press release, “the 30 recidivists reported by DOD in April 2007 is reduced to five.”
 
DOD’s report of July 2007 identified seven prisoners by name, but the Seton Hall group says that “as many as two of those seven named were never in Guantanamo, and two of the remaining five were never killed or captured anywhere. Of the three remaining, one was killed in his apartment in Russia by Russian authorities. None of them is alleged to have left their homeland or attacked Americans on a battlefield or otherwise.”
 
Meanwhile, Newsweek magazine is reporting that The Pentagon “is preparing to declassify portions of a secret report on Guantanamo detainees that could further complicate President Obama’s plans to shut down the detention facility.”
 
The publication says that the report “will provide fresh details about 62 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo and are believed by U.S. intelligence officials to have returned to terrorist activities.”
 
One such example, involving a Saudi detainee named Said Ali Al-Shihri, who was released in 2007, has already received widespread media attention when Pentagon officials publicly asserted that he has recently reemerged as a deputy commander of Al Qaeda in Yemen, Newsweek reports..
 
Previously known publicly as Guantanamo detainee No. 372, Al-Shihri is alleged to have been involved in an unsuccessful attack on the U.S. embassy in Yemen last September.
 
Newsweek says, “The decision to release additional case studies from the report is in effect a warning shot to the new president from officials at the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies who are skeptical about some of his plans. Some Pentagon officials, including ones sympathetic to Obama’s goals, note the political outcry would be deafening should another example like Al-Shihri become public six months from now – and it turns out to be a Guantanamo detainee released under Obama’s watch rather than by the Bush administration.”
 
It adds, “The last thing Obama wants is for one of these guys [at Guantanamo] to get released and return to killing Americans.”
 
According to Newsweek, some counter-terrorism experts have raised questions about the significance of the Pentagon’s figures, noting that the number of so-called “recidivist” detainees represents only a small portion, about 12 per cent, of the approximately 520 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo since the detention facility was opened in January 2002. This compares with recidivism rates of as high as 67 percent in state prisons in the United States, according to Justice Department figures.
 
“There have also been concerns that Bush administration holdovers were deliberately playing up the cases in recent weeks in an effort to undercut Obama. One former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official noted to Newsweek that the Pentagon waited until the day after Obama
signed his executive order mandating the closure of Guantanamo to confirm
Al-Shihri’s renewed Al Qaeda ties,” Newsweek reports.
 
Approximately 240 detainees remain at Guantanamo. Human rights groups and defense lawyers contend there is little or no evidence of terrorist involvement against scores of them. This is also the opinion of some federal judges who in recent weeks have ordered the Pentagon to release some of them.
 
The Obama administration has given itself a year to shut down the facility, and is hoping that European countries including Portugal, Spain and Germany, will agree to take some of these detainees. The Bush Administration was able to  identify only two countries willing to take released detainees – Albania and Sweden.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and elsewhere for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration and now writes on a wide-range of issues, from human rights to foreign affairs, for numerous newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher and can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .