GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
They shouted “Allahu Akbar” — God is great — as one of them slammed a metal mop squeezer against Akhtiar’s head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as “the worst of the worst.”
But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces.
The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed “infidel” and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.
“He was not an enemy of the government; he was a friend of the government,” a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy Newspapers.
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the United States has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.
Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al-Qaeda’s leadership, and it isn’t clear that any of them knew terrorists of consequence.
In effect, many detainees posed no danger to the United States or allies.
Guantanamo houses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who, along with four other high-profile detainees, faces military commission charges. Cases also have been opened against 15 other detainees for assorted offenses, such as attending al-Qaeda training camps.
But because the Bush administration set up Guantanamo under special rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges or federal court challenge, it’s impossible to know how many of the 770 men who have been held there were terrorists.
Military commissions have publicly charged six detainees — less than 1 percent of more than 770 who have been at Guantanamo — with direct involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks; they dropped charges in one case.
Converting new terrorists
McClatchy reporting also found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam — thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them — and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.
The Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, Islamic holy war, against the West.
In a classified 2005 review of 35 detainees released from Guantanamo, Pakistani police intelligence concluded that the men — the majority of whom had been subjected to “severe mental and physical torture,” according to the report — had “extreme feelings of resentment and hatred against USA.”
“A lot of our friends are working against the Americans now because if you torture someone without any reason, what do you expect?” Issa Khan, a Pakistani former detainee, said in an interview in Islamabad. “Many people who were in Guantanamo are now working with the Taliban.”
With ruling, walls tumble
The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.
A series of White House directives placed “suspected enemy combatants” beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions’ protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.
However, the attempts to keep the detainees beyond the law came crashing down last week. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that detainees have the right to contest their cases in federal courts and that a 2006 act of Congress forbidding them from doing so was unconstitutional.
One former administration official said the White House’s initial policy and legal decisions “probably made instances of abuse more likely. . . . My sense is that decisions taken at the top probably sent a signal that the old rules don’t apply. . . . Certainly some people read what was coming out of Washington (as) ‘the gloves are off; this isn’t a Geneva world anymore.’ ”
Like many others who previously worked in the White House or Defense Department, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal and political sensitivities of the issue.
The Pentagon declined to discuss the findings. It issued a statement Friday saying that military policy always has been to treat detainees humanely, to investigate credible complaints of abuse and to hold people accountable. The statement says that an al-Qaeda manual urges detainees to lie about prison conditions once they’re released.
“We typically do not respond to each and every allegation of abuse made by past and present detainees,” the statement said.
Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said McClatchy’s conclusions squared with their observations.
“As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless,” a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail.
During a military review board hearing at Guantanamo, Mohammed Akhtiar had some advice.
“I wish,” he said, “that the United States would realize who the bad guys are and who the good guys are.”
