Topic: Time Runs Out For An Afghan Held By The U.S.

The second was Mohammed Jan, a distant cousin who had falsely denounced him as part of a long-running family feud. “It was one person who gave them wrong information and just because of this wrong person, I am here,” Mr. Hekmati pleaded at his October 2004 review hearing.
“They can’t prove anything against me because I never did anything wrong,” he went on. “The person that was giving you all that wrong information, this is the person that killed my two brothers, my sister, my father and two of my sons.”
Mr. Akhundzada denied any part in Mr. Hekmati’s arrest, attributing it to a mistake by American Special Forces. He said they were often fed false information.
But friends of Mr. Hekmati said he was arrested in 2003 by Afghan forces in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, during Mr. Akhundzada’s tenure and later turned over to American forces.
Mr. Hekmati maintained that he was opposed to the Taliban, whom he described as “dangerous and dirty people” who had deviated from Islam.
“Taliban and Al Qaeda are the same,” he said at his review board hearing in September 2005. “When I’m against Taliban I’m going against Al Qaeda. There’s an expression in Pashto that you cannot hold two watermelons in one hand at the same time.”
The only allegation that he accepted was that he had worked as a truck driver for the Taliban, but he said he had been forced to work for them three months a year, as every able-bodied man was during the Taliban’s rule.
Several people in Afghanistan, including Hajji Mir Wali, a member of Parliament, and Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, who was held in a cell next to Mr. Hekmati in Guantánamo for three months in 2003, confirmed that he was a truck driver for the Taliban government in the 1990s.
But Mullah Zaeef said Mr. Hekmati could never have worked for the Taliban again after 1999, such was their fury over the prison break he organized.
Hajji Wali, who knew Mr. Hekmati well, said: “It was the Americans’ mistake. I know he had no relations with the Taliban.”
Yet the Americans on his tribunal and review boards seemed unaware of how significant the prison break was, or how important were the men he had helped escape and whom he had asked to be called as witnesses.
The Prison Break
The 1999 escape was a deep humiliation for the Taliban government, which blocked roads and searched houses across the country for days afterward and offered $1 million for the capture of the escapees. Two of Mr. Hekmati’s relatives were badly tortured by the Taliban after the prison break as the Taliban looked for information.
Two of the men Mr. Hekmati freed, Mr. Khan and Hajji Zaher, returned to the battlefield to lead forces against the Taliban. They both received significant American support in 2001 and worked with Special Forces units.
A third man who escaped with them was another commander of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Gen. Mohammed Qasim.
According to Mr. Hekmati’s account in his hearing in September 2005, he organized the escape because he opposed the Taliban’s “ruthlessness and injustice.”
Mr. Hekmati said he had written a letter outlining his escape plan, which his son, Hekmatullah, who worked as an intelligence officer at the Taliban’s high security prison, smuggled in to Mr. Khan. Mr. Khan then put Mr. Hekmati in touch with his own son, who gave him $20,000 to buy a Toyota Land Cruiser for a getaway vehicle.
Mr. Hekmati said that because his son was trusted by the Taliban, he was able to walk the three prisoners out one night to where he was waiting in the dark with the vehicle. Hekmatullah collaborated much of his father’s account in an interview in 2002.
The men escaped to Iran, where Mr. Khan provided Mr. Hekmati and his family with a house and financial support in return for his daring. Mr. Hekmati said he returned to Afghanistan only in 2002, after the Taliban were toppled and Mr. Karzai’s interim government was installed. Within a year, he was arrested.
The Military Tribunals
In a report in February 2006 based on an analysis of documents released by the Pentagon, researchers at Seton Hall University School of Law, in Newark, concluded that no outside witnesses had ever been called to appear at Guantánamo. Lt. Col. Stephen E. Abraham, a former United States intelligence officer who had worked on the tribunals, stepped forward last June to criticize the tribunals.
In a submission to the Supreme Court, he condemned them for relying on generalized evidence that would have been dismissed by any competent court, and as being devised to rubber-stamp the administration’s assertion that the detainees had been correctly designated “enemy combatants” when they were captured and that they could be held indefinitely.
In a second submission, to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in November, Colonel Abraham explained that he was “not aware of any realistic attempts” to “identify or even attempt to bring before the tribunal witnesses or their statements,” and concluded that the whole process “was designed to conduct tribunals without witnesses other than the accused detainee.”
That is one of the reasons Afghan officials have asked that Afghan detainees be transferred from Guantánamo to Afghanistan. “Of course a judicial process needs witnesses and documents and evidence,” Minister of Justice Mohammad Sarwar Danish said. “Most of these cases have not come to trial, and are not proceeding, and that is why we asked them to be moved here.”
After Mr. Hekmati was arrested, two of the men he broke out of prison, Mr. Khan and Hajji Zaher, said they appealed to American and Afghan officials for his release. “I asked President Karzai to help, but unfortunately it did not help,” Mr. Khan said. He said he also asked the American ambassador to Afghanistan at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, with no result.
“We did try but it was not working,” Hajji Zaher said in a phone interview. “When they are sending someone to Guantánamo, they have their own rules.”
After Mr. Hekmati’s death at Guantánamo, his body was returned to Afghanistan and quietly buried in an unmarked grave in Kandahar on Jan. 8. His family did not dare attend the funeral, fearful of both the Taliban and the Americans, friends said.
As the Taliban has reasserted itself in much of southern Afghanistan, Mr. Hekmati’s son remains in hiding. Neither he nor any relative or elder of their tribe collected his father’s body.
“He is caught in the middle,” said Hajji Wali, a family friend. “He is scared of the Taliban and scared of the government and the Americans, because the Americans took his innocent father and they could take him, too.”