The Guantánamo Whistleblowers

By ANDY WORTHINGTON
from Counterpunch

Jostling for media space in the last week--and largely losing out to spurious claims that Guantánamo is about to close--is the story of Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, an army intelligence officer with 26 years' experience, who has bravely spoken out against the Guantánamo regime. In an affidavit filed with an Appeal Court petition on behalf of Kuwaiti detainee Fawzi al-Odah, Abraham delivered a damning verdict on the legitimacy of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which ran from July 2004 to March 2005, and were set up to determine whether the Guantánamo detainees had been correctly designated as "enemy combatants."

Currently an army reservist and an attorney in California, Abraham worked at Guantánamo, from 11 September 2004 to 9 March 2005, in the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants (OARDEC) as "an agency liaison, responsible for coordinating with government agencies, including certain Department of Defense (DoD) and non-DoD organizations, to gather or validate information relating to detainees for use in CSRTs." He also served as a member of a CSRT, and, as he described it, "had the opportunity to observe and participate in the operation of the CSRT process," and he concluded from his experience that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, and that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees' prior designation as "enemy combatants."

Specifically, Abraham complained that the OARDEC personnel--mostly from the military reserves--who were responsible for compiling the information used in the "Unclassified Summary of Evidence" against each detainee were woefully inexperienced, and that few of whom "had any experience or training in the legal or intelligence fields." He also complained that the tribunals' Recorders were similarly inexperienced, and were "typically relatively junior officers with little training or experience in matters relating to the collection, processing, analyzing, and/or dissemination of intelligence material," and that those who actually aggregated the information--the case writers--"in most instances" had "the same limited degree of knowledge and experience relating to the intelligence community and intelligence products." Given the shortcomings of the majority of the personnel involved, Abraham also noted that, although "large amounts of information" were received, the workers "often had no context for determining whether the information was relevant," and frequently discarded information because it was "considered to be ambiguous, confusing or poorly written," as well as "reject[ing] some information arbitrarily while accepting other information without any articulable rationale."

(Continued here.)