I would say that up to half of those captured
were innocent men – Afghans betrayed by other Afghans; missionaries,
humanitarian aid workers and economic migrants from a range
of other countries, many seized and sold by the Americans’
Afghan and Pakistani allies, taking advantage of the bounty
payments, averaging $5,000 a head, that were paid for “al-Qaeda
and Taliban suspects.” The rest, for the most part, were Taliban
foot soldiers, mostly recruited to fight in an inter-Muslim
civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance that
began long before 9/11. In addition, as comments made anonymously
by senior officials over the last four years have made clear,
no more than 40 to 50 of those held in Guantánamo’s
six-year history had any meaningful connection whatsoever
with al-Qaeda, a figure that is even less than the Seton Hall
Law School’s estimate.
Al-istiqamah: You
make the valid point that the US failed to understand the
Islamic ‘culture’ – e.g. why idealistic foreigners would come
to Afghanistan to live and work under what they considered
to be an Islamic State without a sinister motive. Is this
the underlying reason for the US military’s failure to win
hearts and minds?
Andy Worthington: Well,
this cultural ignorance doesn’t help, but in Afghanistan I
think the US lost the battle for “hearts and minds” through
its chronic failures of intelligence (trusting extremely untrustworthy
lawlords and other dubious characters), through the scale
of its imprisonment of Afghans as “enemy combatants,” not
just in Guantánamo, but also in Bagram airbase and
in various other forward operating bases, and through its
refusal to adequately investigate murders in US custody. What
also happened was that the administration lost interest in
Afghanistan sometime in 2002, when it began gunning for Iraq,
and so failed to stay the course
to provide the reconstruction that might have made a genuine
difference. And all these failures were, of course, repeated
and magnified in Iraq itself.
Al-istiqamah: You
mention the case of US citizen Daniel Joseph Maldonado in
the final chapter ’Endgame.’ What did you make of his account
of rendition to Kenya, which appeared
in our September 2007 issue?
Andy Worthington: I thought
it was excellent. As you know, it was how I first discovered
your website, and I think that this sort of detailed reporting
– on issues that are not covered in the mainstream media at
all – is absolutely invaluable.
Al-istiqamah: Had
Daniel not been a US citizen, would he have been rendered
to Guantánamo instead of being flown home to the States?
Andy Worthington: Not necessarily. What’s
bizarre, as I mentioned in the final chapter, and as I have
reported
since, is that six prisoners have arrived in Guantánamo
in the last year, even while every other indication from the
government is that it is genuinely attempting to scale down
the operation. There seems to be little logic to this process
(although there’s little logic to much of what the administration
does), as only two of the six are regarded as “high-value
detainees.” Had Daniel not been an American, it seems more
likely that he would have continued to be held in one of the
Americans’ proxy prisons in the Horn of Africa, which, of
course, are reported on far less than Guantánamo.
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