three years in prison..because of a joke

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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 " s, " 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.

 

 

 

External control are you gonna let them get you?

Do you wanna be a prisoner in the boundaries they set you?