From Andy Worthington Author and Journalist
By Andy Worthington

The saga of the Guantánamo whistleblowers, which sprang to life in June, but then, like so many news stories, was considered done and dusted by a media hungry for fresh meat, resurfaced unexpectedly last week when an Army Major filed an affidavit in the case of Adel Hamad, a Sudanese detainee who was kidnapped in July 2002 from his home in Pakistan, where he was working as a hospital administrator. The Major, who does not wish to be identified, stated that, between October 2004 and February 2005, he served on 49 of the 558 Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo, which were convened to assess whether or not the detainees had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants.”

In his affidavit, the Major, a Judge Advocate’s General (JAG) officer who served as a Second Lieutenant in the Army Reserves, and has worked as a Deputy District Attorney, explained that the training he received, both in Washington and Guantánamo, was “minimal,” that the CSRT process was “not well defined,” and that, “although the CSRT rules required having a JAG on each CSRT panel,” they were “silent as to the role.” He and other JAG lawyers concluded that they were there as “informal legal advisors to the other board members,” whose legal knowledge was often poor. He described, for example, “a sentiment among the JAG officers that many of the CSRT officers did not understand the distinction between conclusory statements and evidence,” and noted that some tribunal members “did not understand that the presumption was to be given to the evidence.” In part, however, this was by design on the government’s part, as he also noted, “The CSRT rules afforded the government evidence a presumption of correctness. For me as a tribunal member this meant that when I had a piece of evidence with some small corroboration, then I had to view that with great significance and it would also have made it difficult for any detainee to rebut.”

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