Gitmo’s forever prisoners

Two Pakistani brothers, Abdul and Mohammad Ahmed Rabbani, held by the US at the Guantanamo Bay military prison for over two decades without charges have been released. This is the latest in a series of Gitmo releases by the Biden administration, bringing the tally of prisoners currently held to 32, down from a peak of 680 prisoners in 2003. The Rabbani brothers were arrested by Pakistani authorities in 2002 and handed over to the Americans. According to a US Senate Intelligence Committee report, Mohammed Ahmed Rabbani was one of 17 known detainees to have been tortured at the CIA’s notorious overseas black sites, prisons beyond the legal jurisdiction of the US and where the CIA had full authority to use illegal and inhuman tactics against prisoners. The brothers were suspected by the CIA to have provided some logistical assistance to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the masterminds of the 9/11 and USS Cole attacks, respectively. For 20 years, they were held without any formal charge brought against them though.

As the US continues to bring the ‘war on terror’ era to a close, the full scale of its violations of both international and American law and the damage this caused to people throughout the Muslim world are slowly becoming apparent. The world has known for years about US torture and detentions without charges, but as human faces are now matched to numbers and case files, the sense of injustice, lawlessness and cruelty are hitting home like never before. Ahmed Rabbani’s wife was four months pregnant with his son at the time he was arrested and the latter is now a 20-year-old man who has never met his father before. American authorities themselves admitted that the intelligence Ahmed and his brother offered was of little value and what little they did give they recanted on account of the physical abuse the information was given under. In 2013, Ahmed began a seven-year long series of hunger strikes to try and get the justice that he was being denied.

Several former detainees, including the Rabbani brothers, are now trying to get a different sort of day in court by suing the US government for their unlawful detentions and torture. According to the brothers’ lawyer, their chances of getting any compensation or even a simple apology are very low. However, by keeping the abuses against international and human rights law committed by the US in the media spotlight, the former detainees might succeed in giving future American presidents pause before giving carte blanche to their soldiers and intelligence operatives. And those in our parts of the world must also reflect on how their governments handed people over to a foreign power. Bagram and Guantanamo became symbols of how the ‘war on terror’ turned the US into an outlaw state, with the cry of terrorism enough for it to embrace police-state tactics and crimes against Muslims. That stain can only be cleansed with a reckoning of the magnitude of the crimes committed.