Eight Years of Guantánamo: What’s Changed?
by Frida Berrigan
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/11-0
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Eight Years in Guantanamo
By Douglas Farah
Posting by Margot Williams, Counterterrorism Blog newslinks editor and director of research at SNS Global LLC.
On January 11, 2002, the first prisoners from the war on terror in Afghanistan arrived at the United States Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay on an Air Force cargo plane, wearing orange jump suits, face masks, shackles and manacles. On that first day, about 23 suspected enemy combatants were locked into the wire cages of the now-abandoned “Camp X-Ray.”
According to public records available on the Pentagon web site, 23 men were processed into the detention camp on January 12, their weights and heights recorded. On January 12, the New York Times reported that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld implied that there was nothing special about these prisoners – “I don’t even know their names” – and suggested that they had been sent to Cuba simply to make way for more prisoners being captured in Kandahar. “We just have to keep the flow going, that that’s what taking place,” Rumsfeld said.
Eight years later, twelve of the first arrivals remain in detention in Guantanamo.* Their names and Internment Serial Numbers (ISNs) were compared with a Pentagon list of detainees who have been released, the measurements of heights and weights, court documents relating to military tribunal proceedings and cases in U.S. District Court. Among them is Ali Hamza Ahmad Sulman al Bahlul, from Yemen, a former Al Qaeda propaganda chief convicted of terrorism charges in November 2008 and sentenced to life in prison. Half of the 12 remaining from the original group are citizens of Yemen, the country currently in the spotlight for the threats and actions of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a terrorist organization led by former Guantanamo detainees and a fugitive from a 2006 jailbreak in Yemen. The others are from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Tunisia.
According to analysis of government documents, the 12 detainees* who arrived on the first flight are:
Abdul Haq Wasiq ISN #4, Afghanistan
Mullah Norullah Noori ISN #6, Afghanistan
Mullah Mohammad Fazl ISN #7, Afghanistan
Mahmoud Abd al Aziz Abd al Mujahid ISN #31, Yemen
Ibrahim Othman Ibrahim Idris ISN #36, Sudan
Abd al Malik Abd al Wahab ISN#37, Yemen
Ridah Bin Saleh al Yazidi ISN #38, Tunisia, approved for transfer
Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman al Bahlul ISN #39, Yemen, sentenced to life in prison
Abdul Rahman Shalabi ISN #42, Saudi Arabia
Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel ISN #43, Yemen
Mohammed Rajab Sadiq Abu Ghanim ISN #44, Yemen
Ali Ahmad Muhammad al Rahizi ISN#45, Yemen
*It is possible that this group may include either of two unidentified detainees who were recently transferred to Hungary and Belgium.
Links for information on the detainees point to the New York Times “Guantanamo Docket” database; the author of this posting was the administrator of the database during her employment at the Times as database research editor.
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2010/01/eight_years_in_guantanamo.php
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