Holland: OK, let me go back briefly to an earlier point. Supporters of Bush's global network of "black" prisons say that those who ended up in them were "unlawful combatants." And you said that a lot of people from around the Muslim world were drawn to serve as foot soldiers in Afghanistan's civil war, but in the book, you also make it clear that many were not even foot soldiers -- not combatants at all -- but religious students, aid workers and other adventurous young people, and many of them would later get caught up in the chaos that followed the invasion and ended up at Gitmo.
Worthington: Yes, that's right. I'd say that between 70 and 100 of the foreign -- non-Afghan -- detainees had traveled to Afghanistan to provide humanitarian aid to the Afghan people, to teach or study the Koran, as economic migrants, or even because they were curious about the "pure Islamic state" that, in some quarters, the Taliban was alleged to have established. A similar number were captured in Pakistan. Charity workers were captured near the border, where they had traveled to provide assistance at refugee camps, and others -- including missionaries, entrepreneurs, economic migrants, refugees and students -- were actually captured elsewhere in Pakistan, in towns and cities far from the "battlefields" of Afghanistan.
And then, of course, there are the Afghan detainees, who made up over a quarter of Guantánamo's total population. Many of these were unwilling conscripts, who were forced to serve the Taliban, and most of the rest were picked up either on the basis of false intelligence -- because the U.S. forces did not know who to trust -- or were handed over by their rivals, in business or in politics, who told false stories to the Americans.
Holland: And what was the process by which the U.S. military sorted out one from the other -- how did they distinguish between "enemy combatants" and the poor suckers that were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Worthington: There was no process. In all previous wars, the U.S. military has followed the Geneva Conventions, and, in accordance with Article 5 of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, has held battlefield tribunals to separate the wheat from the chaff -- or the fighters from the farmers. In the first Gulf War, for example, the military held 1,196 battlefield tribunals, and nearly three-quarters of the prisoners were subsequently released.
In Afghanistan, however, not only were there no battlefield tribunals, but Chris Mackey, who worked as a senior interrogator in the prisons at the airbases in Kandahar and Bagram, where the Guantánamo prisoners were processed, noted in his book
The Interrogators that every single Arab who ended up in U.S. custody was sent to Guantánamo on the orders of senior figures in the military and the intelligence services, who received the lists of prisoners at their base in Kuwait.
