Government Dismisses Charges Against Five Guantanamo Detainees

After being held in captivity for several years in some cases, a number of suspects at Guantanamo Bay see charges dropped, at least for now.

(SALEM, Ore.) - The Defense Department announced today that charges against five detainees at Guantanamo Bay have been dismissed without prejudice.

Judge Susan Crawford with the Office of Military Commissions Convening Authority, dismissed the pending charges against Noor Uthman Mohammed, Binyam Mohammed, Sufyiam Barhoumi, Ghassan Abdullah al Shirbi, and Jabran Said Bin al Qahtani, the five detainees who had charges sworn by prosecutors.

Dismissed without prejudice means the government can raise the charges again at a later time; it does not mean these detainees are legally in the clear.

The Chief Prosecutor, Army Colonel Lawrence Morris, recently appointed new trial teams who will review all available material, coordinate with intelligence agencies and recommend appropriate courses of action in each case.

As you study the history of the cases, it at least partly clear why the government is now dismissing the charges. Soldiers and Marines in Iraq are frequently disturbed by how quickly prisoners that they risk their lives to capture are released from custody. It seems the dismissal of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay or "Gitmo" as it is known in the ranks of the military, is a larger dose of the same.

According to hrw.org, Noor Uthman Mohammed, a Sudanese national, is accused of murder, attacking civilians and civilian objects, destruction of property, terrorism and providing material support for terrorism. Specifically, the U.S. alleges that Mohamed trained at a the Khaldan terrorism training camp in Afghanistan and that between 1996-2000 he instructed terrorist recruits on how to use Kalashnikov assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, artillery as well as anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. Among other allegations, the United States claims he delivered a fax machine to Osama bin Laden at the al Qaeda training camp, Jihad Wal.

He was arrested in March 2002 when US and Pakistani forces raided an alleged al Qaeda safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was held at Guantanamo for more than five years before charges were sworn against him in May 2008.

IndyMedia has a scathing review of the case against 29-year old Binyam Mohammed al-Habashi. He is a refugee from Ethiopia who arrived in the UK with his father in 1995, and was a janitor at a mosque in west London. Captured in Pakistan in April 2002, he was then handed over to the US authorities, who, in what appears to be one of the most devastatingly inept failures of intelligence in the whole of the “War on Terror.” It was decided – apparently based on a “confession” extracted under torture – that he was a major al-Qaeda terrorist, who was planning to detonate a “dirty bomb” in a US city.

It is reported that in a successful attempt to force a confession out of him, al-Habashi was “rendered” to Morocco, whose notoriously brutal interrogators, working on behalf of the Americans, tortured him for 18 months, repeatedly cutting his penis with razor blades, and he was then transferred to the “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan.

According to Wikipedia, Ghassan Abdallah Ghazi Al Shirbi is a Saudi has allegedly been named the "electronic builder" and referred to as a right hand man of Abu Zubaydah by fellow Guantanamo inmates. The US Department of Defense reports that Al Shirbi was born on December 28th, 1974, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

He was captured by Pakistani forces during a raid at Faisalabad, Pakistan in March 2002. He wasn't brought to Bahrain Airbase, as prisoner #237, for interrogation until June when he was chiefly interrogated by two soldiers romantically linked to each other. Speaking fluent English, he appeared "dismissive and aloof", and said that he was glad to see the Taliban ruling Afghanistan, quoting statistics that showed a dramatic decrease in crime rates and new schools built under their government. He asked the interrogations chief whether he had read anything by T. E. Lawrence, or From Beirut to Jerusalem, and later dismissed the interrogator's statement that he was a graduate of Fordham University by retorting that it was a "third-tier school".

He offered the names, addresses and phone numbers of several American classmates, professors and landlords he said would vouch for him having done nothing wrong. When it was arranged to transfer al-Shirbi to Guantanamo, he calmly told his interrogators that "after a while, the truth would blur for him and that he would just say whatever we wanted to hear just to have the solitude that would come from the end of our questioning"

Wikipedia states that Jabran Said bin Al Qahtani is a Saudi who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internee Security Number is 696. Joint Task Force Guantanamo analysts estimate he was born in 1977, in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

Initially the Bush Presidency asserted that they could withhold all the protections of the Geneva Conventions to captives from the war on terror like Jabran Said bin Al Qahtan. This policy was challenged before the Judicial branch. Critics argued that the USA could not evade its obligation to conduct competent tribunals to determine whether captives are, or are not, entitled to the protections of prisoner of war status.

Subsequently the DOD instituted the Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The Tribunals, however, were not authorized to determine whether the captives were lawful combatants -- rather they were merely empowered to make a recommendation as to whether the captive had previously been correctly determined to match the Bush Presidency's definition of an enemy combatant.