In 2000, Abdul Rahim al Janko fled the United Arab Emirates for Afghanistan. He was in a family scrape involving borrowed money and fear of a strict father. His plan was to make it from Afghanistan to Europe.
In Afghanistan, al Janko was conscripted by the Taliban, and sent to a training camp. After 18 days of training, not much wanting to go off to fight the Northern Alliance, he asked to be allowed to leave. The Taliban accused al Janko of being an American and Israeli spy.
Al Janko was tortured, including electric shocks, being hung from the ceiling, water torture, and beatings to the soles of his feet. Under torture, al Janko falsely confessed to being an American and Israeli spy.
A videotape of his dazed and stilted confessions was widely shown on U.A.E. television. His family and friends saw it.
Al Janko was dumped in the Sarposa prison in Kandahar, on a sentence of 25 years.
Sarposa prison in about 2008. Graham Thomson/Canwest News Service.
Plaintiff is the victim of a decade-long Kafkaesque nightmare from which he is just awakening.
Al Janko v. Gates, Complaint
A year and a half later, after the Taliban fled Kandahar in December 2001, Western journalists found al Janko and four others staying on at the prison:
In January 2002, shortly after the Taleban had fled Kandahar after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, I arrived in the city. Amid the chaos and confusion there was a bizarre scene playing out in the jail. The entire prison had been emptied except for five men who had chosen to stay there because they had nowhere else to go.
Guantánamo inmate tortured by al-Qaeda and entombed by the US, London Times
The journalists helped the five get in touch with the Americans. After a few days, soldiers arrived and took the five to a prison at the Kandahar airport. They were treated fairly well.
On January 17, now four months after 9/11, John Ashcroft held a press conference. He played what he said were martyrdom videotapes found in the rubble of Mohammed Atef's house near Kabul. One of the martyrdom tapes was actually of Abdul Rahim al Janko confessing to being an American and Israeli spy. The tapes were played with the sound off:
I wouldn't indicate to you that we will release the sound on it. It may be that we will, and it may be we won't.
Attorney General John Ashcroft
In Kandahar, military intelligence learned about the tape from reading "The Martyrs' Home Movies" in Time. The relatively good treatment stopped, the harsh interrogation of Abdul Rahim al Janko started:
Immediately after the press conference and Time Magazine story Plaintiff was detained by U.S. forces in a humiliating and degrading fashion. He was detained at KAB and subjected to harsh interrogation methods. Plaintiff was interrogated by U.S. officials on at least fourteen different occasions for approximately the next one hundred days. His treatment at KAB included a combination of abusive techniques such as striking his forehead, threatening to remove his fingernails, sleep deprivation, exposure to very cold temperatures, exercise to exhaustion through sit-ups, push-ups, and running in chains, stress positions for hours at a time, use of police dogs, and rough treatment prior to interrogation sessions.
Al Janko v. Gates, Complaint
Ayrat Vakhitov, al Janko's fellow prisoner at Sarposa and fellow prisoner at Kandahar detention facility, describes it:
The first day we spent together in the same area, and I saw Abdul Rahim brought back from interrogation with red patches on his face and with his clothing ripped. Abdul Rahim was very intim[id]ated and told me that he had been shown an article in a magazine and that statements he made on Abu Dhabi television were being twisted into meaning he was a terrorist.
From that time, Abdul Rahim received very bad treatment. From my area, I saw and heard interrogations of Abdul Rahim using sleep deprivation, exercise like push-ups and sit-ups to the point of exhaustion, police dogs set on Abdul Rahim, and forcing him to stay in uncomfortable positions for long times, such as kneeling on gravel with his hands on his head for hours at a time. I suffered the same treatment.
Al-Ginco v. Obama, Traverse
At this precise time, a military intelligence soldier at Kandahar reported beatings of a prisoner:
I noticed several cuts and bruises on MP number 's face. He also complained of pain and soreness to his ribs. MP number stated that approximately four days ago he was beaten by three to four guards. MP number stated that everyone in the pen was instructed to get up but he was unable to because of numbness in the leg. That is when the guards approached him and began to beat him. The following two nights MP number stated that three to four guards entered the pen and kicked him repeatedly and left.
[snip]
It is quite apparent that between my initial meet and 01 feb 02 meet that something had happened to MP number 's face.
Sworn statement
Under torture, al Janko confessed to being a member of al Qaida. He told interrogators whatever they wanted to hear:
[T]hey told me to say I'm Al Qaida, so, I told them, okay, I'm Al Qaida. How I told Taliban I'm a spy, now I tell you guys I'm Qaida.
Al-Ginco v. Obama, Traverse
Interrogators wanted to hear of links between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein. So al Janko told them that:
Under stress of this harsh treatment at KAB, Plaintiff falsely confessed that he was a member of al-Qaeda and had knowledge of al-Qaeda plans and personnel. He fabricated information such as the connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Al Janko v. Gates, Complaint
Ibn Sheikh al-Libi's claims that Iraq assisted in al-Qaida's weapons of mass destruction efforts, central to justifications for the war, and also telling interrogators whatever they wanted to hear, were made at very nearly this time.
Al Janko was transported from Kandahar to Guantanamo in May 2002.
His Combat Status Review Tribunal in 2004, his first annual Administrative Review Board in 2005, and his second annual Administrative Review Board in 2006, all used al Janko's tortured confessions to the Taliban, to justify his imprisonment at Guantanamo:
The detainee volunteered to be a suicide martyr.
Combat Status Review Tribunal
In a video that was obtained from a senior member of al Qaida’s residence, the detainee claims that he was recruited to join the Jihad in Chechnya.
First annual Administrative Review Board
In a video that was obtained from a senior member of al Qaida's residence, the detainee claims that he was recruited to join the jihad in Chechnya.
Second annual Administrative Review Board
Al Janko's habeas petition was filed in 2005. Four years after that, following Boumediene v. Bush in 2008, his petition began to be heard.
Judge Richard J. Leon's order of June 2009 eventually freed al Janko. Judge Leon's opinion on the government claims in the case contains more exclamations than usual in legal filings:
By taking a position that defies common sense, the Government forces this Court to address an issue novel to these habeas proceedings: whether a prior relationship between a detainee and al Qaeda (or the Taliban) can be sufficiently vitiated by the passage oftime, intervening events, or both, such that the detainee could no longer be considered to be "part of" either organization at the time he was taken into custody.6 The answer, of course, is yes.
[snip]
The Government also contends, in essence, that the extreme treatment Janko was subjected to over a substantial period of time thereafter was not sufficient to vitiate that relationship. As such, the Government contends he was still "part of' those organizations when he was ultimately taken into custody by the U.s. forces some two years later. I disagree!
[snip]
Surely extreme treatment of that nature evinces a total evisceration of whatever relationship might have existed!
Al Ginco v. Obama, Unclassified Habeas Opinion
Abdul Rahim al Janko had spent 18 months imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban, a month housed at Sarposa prison, and seven and a half years imprisoned and tortured by Americans at Kandahar and Guantanamo. His tortured confessions to the Taliban, about being an American spy, had been used by Americans to imprison him for being al Qaida.
He now lives in Antwerp.
Plaintiff is the victim of a decade-long Kafkaesque nightmare from which he is just awakening.
Al Janko v. Gates, Complaint
Al Janko has recently filed a lawsuit for his absurd false imprisonment and torture. That being locked up and tortured, by Taliban and al Qaeda, for being an American spy, somehow makes someone an enemy combatant against America, for being Taliban and al Qaeda, who had locked him up.
According to Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan in the 9th Circuit, and according to strongly repeated government arguments, the government can simply squash the suit by invocation of State Secrets. The fact that the secrets are not really secrets, and the fact that this overrules the most basic issues of justice, don't even matter.
Our decade-long Kafkaesque national nightmare, legal standards in the war on terror, still continues. We have not yet awakened from it.
They will be ready to show the world that we are not a country that ships prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far off countries. That we are not a country that runs prisons which lock people away without ever telling them why they are there or what they are charged with.
Senator Barack Obama, April 3, 2007
We are not ready to show the world that we are not a country that runs prisons without ever telling people what they are charged with. The fact that we are a nation that does and has done so, is absurdly held to be some sort of secret.