For years, the British government and a network of anti-Guantanamo activists have agitated for the release of Shaker Aamer. Now their wish was finally granted. Aamer has been released from Guantanamo. He is receiving a hero’s welcome in the UK, where much of the media has treated him as an innocent who was wrongly detained.
The press’s coverage has been greatly influenced by the prolific public relations campaign waged on Aamer’s behalf. Numerous articles, blog posts, press releases, and the like have been issued to further Aamer’s cause. A common theme is that Aamer has been mercilessly tortured while detained at Guantanamo. Aamer’s advocates have repeatedly made this claim.
According to a former U.S. official who oversaw interrogations at Guantanamo, however, Aamer was hardly tortured.
“Any assertion that he was tortured is patently false,” Paul Rester, the former Director of the Joint Intelligence Group, JTF-GTMO told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “He can claim that until hell freezes over and it still won’t be true.”
A leaked JTF-GTMO threat assessment, which was authored as an internal U.S. government document and not meant for public consumption, is entirely consistent with Rester’s testimony.
“Detainee is uncooperative and continues to withhold information of intelligence value about his extremist activities and associations,” the threat assessment, which was written in November 2007, reads. Aamer “has failed to fully account for his travels and high level associates which have been reported by other JTF-GTMO detainees…is extremely egotistical, has manipulated debriefers and guard staff, and will continue to attempt to do so to support his political agenda.”
Aamer, the JTF-GTMO assessment continues, “refuses to participate in direct questioning, often citing imaginary, or assumed mistreatment of himself, or others, as justifications [for his] refusal in a classic example of al Qaeda counter interrogation techniques. “
JTF-GTMO’s summary is entirely inconsistent with the story told by Aamer and his advocates.
Aamer says that he was tortured in Bagram, Afghanistan before being transferred to Guantanamo. In Aamer’s telling, which has been dutifully repeated in the press, the torture was so exquisite that he was willing to tell the interrogator “whatever he wants to hear” and would have even “told them he was bin Laden” to end the torture.
Aamer reportedly uses this story to claim that a confession he signed while detained in Afghanistan in 2001 was extracted under duress. But Aamer’s advocates argue that the torture didn’t stop once he was moved to Cuba. Of course, it is in Aamer’s interest to make these claims. But the press rarely, if ever, scrutinizes his allegations.
A large part of the problem is that the U.S. government does not even attempt to publicly rebut the allegations, even when U.S. officials know they are definitively untrue. Indeed, the U.S. government’s response to the intense anti-Guantanamo media campaign has been lame. The Bush administration did little to fight the many erroneous claims made about the facility. And the Obama administration, which is devoted to shuttering Guantanamo, has no interest in correcting the record.
Another problem is that few people, other than the detainees and the interrogators themselves, have direct knowledge of what took place. The press and the public are necessarily working off of secondhand information.
Still, as is typical, the torture claims in Aamer’s case come from Aamer himself and his advocates in groups such as Reprieve, a radical leftwing outfit that is hardly interested in providing a clear-eyed assessment of America’s detention policies. In other words, the allegations should be taken with a large grain of salt.
Moreover, the leaked JTF-GTMO threat assessment undercuts Aamer’s torture story in significant ways. There is no evidence of Aamer’s forced confessions, either at Bagram or Guantanamo.
The reporting on Aamer suffers from many additional problems as well.
For instance, Aamer was not “cleared for release” by President Obama’s Guantanamo Review Task Force, as some British politicians and many others claim. Instead, President Obama’s task force recommended that Aamer be transferred “subject to appropriate security measures.” The phrase “cleared for release,” which implies that Aamer is either innocent or now a non-threat, was not even used by Obama’s task force.
“It is important to emphasize that a decision to approve a detainee for transfer does not reflect a decision that the detainee poses no threat or no risk of recidivism,” Obama’s task force explained in its January 2010 report. “Rather, the decision reflects the best predictive judgment of senior government officials, based on the available information, that any threat posed by the detainee can be sufficiently mitigated through feasible and appropriate security measures in the receiving country.” The task force emphasized: “Indeed, all transfer decisions were made subject to the implementation of appropriate security measures in the receiving country, and extensive discussions are conducted with the receiving country about such security measures before any transfer is implemented.”
Therefore, Aamer’s transfer to the UK does not mean that the U.S. was wrong to detain him in the first place, or that he can be freed without security concerns. This won’t stop the press from erroneously reporting that Aamer was “cleared for release” and yet mysteriously held in Cuba for years without explanation.
In reality, Aamer’s transfer to the UK was delayed by diplomatic wrangling and the concerns some U.S. officials have about the security risk he poses.
As the Washington Post reported last month, U.S. “military officials have expressed concern about the possibility that Aamer, who has been an influential figure among other prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, could return to militant activity once released.” An anonymous “senior U.S. defense official” elaborated that Aamer’s transfer finally became possible “following a thorough review of his case and taking into consideration the robust security assurances that will be provided by the British government.”
This raises an obvious question: If Aamer is as innocent as his advocates claim, then why do U.S. officials find it necessary to declare that “robust security assurances” have been made?
Which brings us to the evidence amassed against Aamer.
It is impossible to fully assess the intelligence collected on Aamer, given that not all of it has been made public. But U.S. officials clearly think Aamer was an al Qaeda agent at the time of his capture. U.S. officials have also expressed concern over Aamer’s brief ties to al Qaeda operatives who have plotted attacks against the West, such as the would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was likely slated to take part in follow-on attacks after 9/11. (Aamer’s ties to Reid and Moussaoui do not seem to be deep based on the available reporting.)
The leaked JTF-GTMO threat assessment provides a guide to some of the intelligence amassed against Aamer. Even though, in JTF-GTMO’s eyes, he never fully revealed the extent of his jihadist connections, Aamer allegedly admitted knowing at least several al Qaeda actors. These include Reid and Moussaoui, as well as Abu Hafs al Mauritani, one al Qaeda’s main theologians in pre-9/11 Afghanistan. Aamer also allegedly told U.S. authorities that he lived next to Abu Musab al Suri, an al Qaeda-affiliated ideologue who worked directly with bin Laden at times.
Aamer’s suspected cover story, even if accepted at face value, didn’t prove his innocence. He said that he worked for the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), a “charity” that is in reality a known al Qaeda front. The RIHS, which is based in Kuwait, has been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government because of its well-established role funding al Qaeda.
A number of Aamer’s fellow detainees told authorities that he was, in fact, a member of al Qaeda. One of them is Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. At some point during his detention, Zubaydah “identified individuals who could be suited for attacks against Western targets.” Zubaydah’s list included Aamer, who “was in the U.S. before the jihad in Bosnia,” meaning sometime before the mid-1990s.
According to the JTF-GTMO file, Zubaydah elaborated: “With his strong English and American dialect, and his general appearance, [Aamer] could easily enter the U.S. as an Arab merchant. If he were known [to authorities], he could enter through the land from the North (Canada) or South (Mexico). I know he is al Qaeda and loves to work inside the U.S.”
Because of the harsh treatment Zubaydah was subjected to while in U.S. custody, many will undoubtedly exclude his testimony out of hand. But there are other witnesses cited in the JTF-GTMO file who were certainly not tortured and yet also identified Aamer as an al Qaeda operative.
One of them is Moazzam Begg, who was once held at Guantanamo. Begg has asserted that he, too, was tortured while in U.S. custody. But the overwhelming weight of the evidence shows this is not true. In fact, the “Feinstein Report” authored by Democrats on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Intelligence who investigated the CIA’s detention and interrogation practices, cited Begg’s testimony while in U.S. custody as an example of the valuable intelligence that was learned without using coercive interrogation measures.
With that in mind, consider what Begg had to say about Aamer.
Begg told U.S. officials that Aamer “served as a recruiter for al Qaeda,” according to the JTF-GTMO file. Begg also described a trip he and Aamer made to Ireland in late 2000. The pair met with “an Ireland-based terrorist facilitator who holds a leadership position in [an] al Qaeda European cell.” Begg also allegedly described Aamer’s time waging jihad and training in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. (Begg was transferred to the UK in 2005 and has been a prolific anti-American propagandist since then.)
Another detainee who cooperated with U.S. authorities, and fingered Aamer as an al Qaeda operative, is an Egyptian named Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed al Sawah.
As late as September 2008, years after he was first detained, JTF-GTMO found that Sawah “continue[d] to be a highly prolific source,” who “has provided invaluable intelligence regarding explosives, al Qaeda, affiliated entities and their activities.”
Even though Sawah is believed to have designed the prototype of the shoe bomb used by Richard Reid, conceived of a mine that could be used to sink US naval vessels, and built a variety of other sophisticated explosives for al Qaeda, JTF-GTMO recommended that he be transferred to another country. “If released,” JTF-GTMO’s analysts wrote, Sawah “will possibly reestablish extremist associations, but is unlikely to do so as his cooperation with the U.S. government may serve to identify detainee as a target for revenge by those associates.”
It is a testament to how cooperative Sawah was that U.S. military officials recommended he be transferred, despite being an expert bomb maker, because they believed al Qaeda could seek retribution against him. (Sawah is still at Guantanamo, but is slated for transfer.)
Not only did Sawah identify Aamer as an al Qaeda operative, he also stated that Aamer “delivered (couriered) money from the UK to Bosnia in 1996” and “belonged to the group associated [with] Abu Hamza al Masri in the UK.” Al Masri is a notorious jihadist. Sawah explained that Aamer was “in Tora Bora and operated a radio that [he] used to communicate with other fighting positions.”
That is, Sawah identified Aamer as a key participant in the Battle of Tora Bora in late 2001. During that battle, al Qaeda made what could have been its last stand. Instead, bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders escaped, living to fight another day. JTF-GTMO concluded that Aamer served as a “sub-commander” for al Qaeda forces fighting under Ibn Sheikh al Libi, Osama bin Laden’s handpicked commander for the crucial battle.
JTF-GTMO analysts used what these detainees and others said about Aamer to build a composite profile. They also weighed information from the Saudis, finding that Aamer may have had “knowledge of the Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia” in 1996. (One theory of the bombings, as discussed in the 9/11 Commission report, is that al Qaeda assisted the Iranian-backed Hezbollah operatives who were principally responsible. That has not been proven, however.)
In the end, JTF-GTMO found that Aamer was a “close associate” of Osama bin Laden, who posed a “high risk” to “the U.S., its interests and allies.”
Now Aamer is being treated as hero in Britain.
Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
