Abuses against Repatriated Detainees

To date, 18 Yemenis have been repatriated-14 from Guantanamo and four from CIA prisons. The difficulties that many of the men have faced upon their return bode poorly for future repatriations. They attest to the need for a genuine rehabilitation effort that facilitates rather than hinders former detainees' reintegration.

In interviews with Human Rights Watch, three repatriated detainees and lawyers for several more described extended, unlawful detention, psychological trauma, and difficulties finding work or reconnecting with families and communities. Their experiences fit into a broader pattern of emotional, physical, and social problems that researchers have documented among repatriated Guantanamo detainees in various countries.[116]

Yemen's Public Security Organization, which reports directly to President Saleh, detained all repatriated detainees upon their return, some in degrading, underground facilities, even though only two Guantanamo prisoners and three former prisoners held by the CIA were ever charged with crimes.[117] Yemeni authorities denied many detainees access to lawyers and, in some cases, arbitrarily restricted visits with relatives. One detainee was held for a week and most were held for two to three months.

One man, "Fahmi Muhammad" (a pseudonym), was held for two years without charge in Yemen and says he was tortured in an effort to make him confess he was a spy. "If our brothers at Guantanamo knew of these conditions," he told Human Rights Watch, "they would not want to return."[118]

Government officials denied any torture of detainees. Walid Alshahari, a political officer at the Yemeni Embassy to the United States, said that the returnees were held for varying periods of time because the authorities needed to investigate whether they were a security risk and had no files from the United States to guide them.[119]

In addition, three former CIA detainees were held for more than nine months without charge upon their return in 2005 to Yemen, reportedly at the behest of the United States, before being convicted of falsifying identification documents.[120] The Yemeni human rights group HOOD, which monitored the trials, said the evidence against them was tainted and in some cases nonexistent. The conviction of Muhammad al-Asad, for example, was based on accusations that he altered his Tanzanian passport two decades earlier, but prosecutors never produced the passport.[121]

The Yemeni government did not free repatriated Guantanamo detainees until they had secured a guarantor: a relative, tribesman, or prominent businessman who promises to pay a fine or in some cases go to jail if the released prisoner disappears. This practice is widely accepted in Yemen and is part of tribal tradition, but is not codified in law.

After serving the final month of his US-imposed sentence in Yemen, former bin Laden driver Salim Hamdan was detained for an additional two weeks, until January 10, 2009, while relatives found a guarantor who satisfied the Yemeni authorities.[122]

Yemeni security agents routinely take hostage male relatives of fugitive suspects even if they aren't guarantors. In January 2009, authorities allegedly held the brother of Ali Mohsen Salih, one of the Guantanamo returnees who disappeared that month, for 10 days.[123]

Hostage taking amounts to an arbitrary deprivation of liberty that is prohibited under all circumstances by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.[124]

Released detainees claim that they have received no medical care, job training, psychological counseling, or financial assistance such as micro-loans from the government. The only help the detainees said they received came from non-governmental organizations such as the International Committee for the Red Cross, primarily for medicaltreatment. Many said they suffered flashbacks of abuse. Branded as criminals even if they were never even charged with a crime, many said they cannot find jobs.

"Guantanamo destroyed a big part of my life," said former detainee "Omar Fawza" (a pseudonym). "People treat me differently. I used to be close with friends and relatives but now they keep their distance. They say, 'You were in a suspicious place.' They don't trust me. . . . But I did nothing wrong."[125]

Individual Cases

"Fahmi Muhammad"

I was tortured for five days from nine in the morning until dawn. The cell was dark. They beat me with shoes and there were insults, bad words, and threats to do bad things to my female relatives and to imprison my father. I told them, "If you're going to torture me, it won't be anything new. The Americans already put me through torture." [126]

During more than a year in US-run prisons in Afghanistan, Fahmi Muhammad said, he was chained naked to a ceiling swing, crammed into a 2-by-2 meter cell with nine other men, and taunted with barking dogs while he was shackled and blindfolded. Moved to Guantanamo, he was detained for another year without charge-a month of it in solitary confinement-along with hundreds of others the Bush administration branded "the worst of the worst."

Even his trip home from Guantanamo in 2004 was brutal, Muhammad told Human Rights Watch. He said his captors drugged him, causing him to slip in and out of consciousness on the flight to Sanaa. When he came to, he said, he was behind bars in Yemen, wearing civilian clothes instead of his prison jumpsuit, and hallucinating, with no idea where he was. His hallucinations were terrifying and lasted four days, he said.

None of that, he said, was as bad as what happened to him after his return. He was imprisoned for two more years without access to a lawyer, nearly half the time in an underground cell. He said authorities barred his relatives' visits for the first six months.

"It's even worse here," said Muhammad, who was arrested in Iran in late 2001 and turned over to US authorities three months later. At least in US custody, he said, his abusers weren't fellow Yemenis. "If our brothers at Guantanamo knew of these conditions," he added, "they would not want to return."

According to Muhammad, Yemeni authorities suspected he was a spy for the United States because he was the first detainee to be released.

For ten months it was the same question: "Why are you the only Yemeni to come back?"

 I grew tired of the pressure. I said, "If you think I'm a spy, okay, I'm a spy."

. . . . They said, "They brought you here to work against us."

I said, "Okay." They started to be afraid of me. Then I told them the truth: "I'm not a spy." They started to get angry with this.

At one point, he recalled, he admonished his interrogator, saying:

"I came to my own country expecting sympathy but you received me with insults and torture. Shame on you." The interrogator didn't care. He treated me worse.

Since his release, Muhammad's situation has remained difficult. Penniless and depressed, he is branded as a suspect and cannot find work, even though he was never charged with a crime. "I can't get a job, not when people know I've been in Guantanamo and Political Security," he said. "People are afraid."

Muhammad had hoped to become a driver upon his release, but said no one will hire him or give him a loan to buy a car because they fear the attention of the Yemeni security services. Authorities have taken his passport and require him to sign in with them once a month.

He lives at home but said his father has kicked him out twice, calling him a burden. He is married with one son and a second child on the way, but his wife and child are forced to live separately from him, since he cannot afford his own home. "I wouldn't have gotten married if I had known how things would turn out," he told Human Rights Watch. "I thought I would have a new life. I told my wife we should get divorced but she loves me."

"Malek al-Dhabi"

Malek al-Dhabi says that he set out for Pakistan in September 2001 to seek heart surgery.[127] En route, he says, he was sold for bounty as a terrorist suspect, tortured in three US-run prisons in Afghanistan and dumped in Guantanamo, where he was detained for nearly four years without being charged with a crime. He describes himself as "a very simple person" who had no involvement in al Qaeda. 

When he met with Human Rights Watch, al-Dhabi sported a hennaed beard and a curved, Yemeni dagger in his belt that is a traditional symbol of male prowess. But he sounded defeated as he spoke of his difficulties adjusting to Yemeni society after years in US custody. Arriving home in December 2006, he felt that the world that had passed him by.

When he arrived, his wife was on her deathbed. Two of his children were gravely ill and had no money for treatment. Two others had married, and the two youngest, who were children when he left, had grown so much he hardly recognized them.

For two months after his return, the Yemeni government kept him in detention. Al-Dhabi said the reason for his imprisonment was that he could not find a guarantor to take responsibility if he fled or misbehaved.Finally freed, he found his wife and 12 children living hand to mouth, supported only by the meager earnings of one son, who had left his studies to provide for the family. His neighbors welcomed him back, but he was not at ease. "I felt strange," he said. "I felt something had changed. I don't know what it is but the people there had changed and I had changed, too."

He had only a few months with his wife before she died. Feeling further alienated, he moved to a different town. He lives off the money his children send him but it is not always enough to pay his rent and medical bills. If he could regain his health and get a job, he told Human Rights Watch, "I wouldn't feel like such a burden on my children."

Traumatized by flashbacks and still suffering from the heart condition that prompted him to leave Yemen more than seven years ago, Al-Dhabi says he lacks the concentration to return to his old job as an electrician or to learn a new trade. But neither the United States nor Yemen has provided him with medical care, job training, or compensation. Summing it up, he said, "It's a catastrophe. I have lost a lot of things-my health, my kids' childhoods, my career, and many years of my life."

Al-Dhabi wants financial compensation and an apology for his time in US custody. As a young man working in Saudi Arabia as an electrician, he said he had formed a positive opinion of Americans:

I met a lot of Americans then and I knew them as good people and practical and hard working, and I truly liked them. But after my capture, my view of Americans completely changed. Americans sometimes say they believe in human rights. . . . But what I see is that this concept of human rights is not applied in reality.

"Omar Fawza"

Guantanamo destroyed a big part of my life. People treat me differently. I used to be close with friends and relatives but now they keep their distance. They say, "You were in a suspicious place." They don't trust me. . . . But I did nothing wrong. I don't want what happened to me to happen to the others when they come back from Guantanamo.[128]

After his capture in Pakistan in December 2001 and subsequent transfer to Guantanamo, Omar Fawza told a US military panel that he had traveled to Afghanistan the previous year to fight with the Taliban against the opposition Northern Alliance. He said he never saw combat and did not go to fight the United States.

The United States held Fawza for five years in Afghanistan and Guantanamo as an "enemy combatant." He was never charged with an offense. Under international humanitarian law, as a captured fighter, Fawza should have been repatriated to Yemen after US forces defeated the Taliban government and a new Afghan government under President Hamid Karzai took office in 2002. Instead, he was not released until the end of 2006.

The reasons for his release remain classified. But factors listed in his favor at his 2004  status review proceedings at Guantanamo included good behavior and his insistence that he considered his time in Afghanistan a mistake and Osama bin Laden a "criminal."

A round-faced man with a short beard, Fawza declined to discuss his time in Afghanistan.

During his military review at Guantanamo, he said that after fleeing to Pakistan, he gave up his assault rifle and asked police for help in contacting Yemeni authorities. Instead, the police turned him over to US officials. Taken to the US-run prison, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, he said he was held in bitter cold, awakened on the hour every night, and pushed "like I was a dog."

At Guantanamo, he said, US military personnel would punish him when he refused to answer questions he had already answered by turning the air conditioning to its coldest level and leaving him shivering alone in a room for seven to eight hours, chained to a chair in his lightweight jumpsuit and slippers. By the time he left, he said, "I had lost all feeling."

Upon learning he would go home, Fawza said, he was filled with relief. But since his return, he said, he has been treated as if he were a terrorist. Yemeni authorities detained him in an underground prison for six weeks. Since then, like other former Guantanamo detainees, he has had to report regularly to authorities and cannot leave the country or travel inside Yemen without advance permission. 

The hardships extend beyond the official sanctions. He says that because of his incarceration at Guantanamo, he has been unable to make friends, get a job, or arrange a marriage, a costly but critical milestone in a man's life in Yemen. Fawza said:

There is a girl I am interested in, but I can't ask her father for her hand because I don't have bride money or a way to support her. Her father wouldn't dismiss me if I had a job. I just want to be self-sufficient.

 

Should their allegations of mistreatment by US forces be true, the Yemenis are entitled to a remedy.But unlike some Yemenis, Fawza has no interest in a US apology; he just wants compensation. "An official apology is not important," he told Human Rights Watch. "I can't support myself on an apology."

International Legal Standards

The treatment of Yemeni detainees at Bagram, at Guantanamo, and upon their return to Yemen has violated fundamental human rights guarantees.

The United States and Yemen are party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (Convention against Torture).[129] These treaties prohibit arbitrary detention, torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and unfair trials. They also require that victims of government abuse shall be entitled to an effective remedy, including compensation.[130]

Various treaty bodies of the United Nations have addressed the failure of the United States to provide redress and adequate compensation to individuals who were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in detention facilities in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq and other overseas locations. In its Concluding Observations to the submission of the United States in 2006, the Human Rights Committee, the international body of experts that monitors compliance with the ICCPR, stated that the US government "should ensure that the right to reparation of the victims" of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and other mistreatment be respected.[131] Likewise, in 2006 the Committee against Torture, which addresses state compliance with the Convention against Torture, concluded that the United States "should ensure, in accordance with the Convention, that mechanisms to obtain full redress, compensation and rehabilitation are accessible to all victims of acts of torture or abuse. . . perpetrated by its officials."[132]

The United States subjected the Yemenis detained at Guantanamo and Bagram to long-term arbitrary detention without charge, torture, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and unfair trials. The Yemeni government is responsible for similar violations against some of the returnees.

It remains unclear how the Yemeni government will treat future returnees from Guantanamo and Bagram. Human Rights Watch is concerned that they, too, will be subjected to detention without charge in abusive conditions. We are also concerned that they may be tried before Yemen's Specialized Criminal Court, which fails to guarantee defendants' basic rights to due process[133]

Finally, former detainees who have sent back to Yemen are entitled under international law to a remedy for the violations of human rights they endured while in US custody. Such a remedy could take the form of compensation or reintegration. President Obama should ensure that both future and past returnees are provided fair redress.