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| More on the Iraqi Gitmo detainee |
| 2005-03-31 |
| U.S. officials say one terror suspect imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay is a former Iraqi soldier and al-Qaida member who plotted with an Iraqi intelligence agent in August 1998 to attack the U.S. and other foreign embassies in Pakistan with chemical weapons. There is no public record of such an attempt being made, although the Islamabad embassy staff was reduced that month amid heightened security concerns after the Aug. 7 truck bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. On Aug. 20 the United States responded with cruise missile attacks on al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan and a target in Sudan. The Iraqi, whose identity is being concealed by the Pentagon on privacy grounds, is further described as a "trusted agent" of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and a member of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. He was arrested in Pakistan in July 2002. These accusations are contained in a two-page "summary of evidence" presented to the Iraqi for his appearance before a Combatant Status Review Board at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba late last year. The evidence was meant to convince the three-member review board - which has heard all 558 detainee cases at Guantanamo Bay - that the government properly classified him as an "enemy combatant." The summary was released to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. As a matter of policy, the government will not disclose which of the 558 detainees were among the 38 the review boards determined were not enemy combatants. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Daryl Borgquist, a spokesman for the Combatant Status Review Board, said yesterday he could not elaborate on the document pertaining to the Iraqi's case nor the source of the information in it because the summary of evidence was derived from classified information. In a July 29 memo spelling out procedures for conducting review board hearings, the Navy wrote that the government's evidence against detainees should be presumed to be "genuine and accurate." Navy Secretary Gordon England, who is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's designated overseer of the review process, was asked at a Pentagon news conference yesterday about the reliability of the government's evidence against detainees generally but not specifically about the Iraqi's case. "They're the facts as certainly as we know them," he said. "They're fact." Among the few details made public about the Iraqi is that he is 39 and has been held at Guantanamo Bay since October 2002, three months after he was reported captured in Pakistan. The assertion that the Iraqi was involved in a plot against embassies in Pakistan is not further substantiated in the document. It states only that he traveled to Pakistan in August 1998 with a member of Iraqi intelligence "for the purpose of" striking at embassies with chemical mortars. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |