The Guardian article "Al-Qaida assassin 'worked for MI6'" – which also ran on the front page of the print edition, reflects a very credulous approach to the WikiLeaks exposé. As the headline loudly suggests, some US military functionary thought that one of the prisoners from Guantánamo Bay – Adel Hamlily, misnamed by the US military as Adil Hadi al Jazairi Bin Hamlili – might have been working for the British security services at the same time as bombing two Christian churches, killing a number of people including an American diplomat and his daughter. Hamlily, my client, is also supposed to have bombed Karachi's Sheraton Hotel, killing 11 French submariners and two Pakistanis. The article is based entirely on a Guantánamo assessment dated 8 July, 2008.
If there were the slightest truth to this, there would have been two inexorable consequences: Hamlily would be held in Guantánamo Bay forever, and put on trial for horrific offences far more serious than any that have gone to a military tribunal so far; and if for some bizarre reason he were ever sent back to his home in Algeria, he could expect to be incarcerated or executed by the authorities both for murder and for treason. And if the authoritarian Algerian regime did not get him, surely some Islamic extremist would take him out for conniving with British intelligence.
It is important to understand that each of the 759 WikiLeaks Guantánamo "assessments" are comprised of the worst gossip that a military officer can come up with when trawling through several thousand documents that inferentially relate to each prisoner. When we are eventually allowed to hold hearings in Washington DC, we methodically disabuse the courts of endless mud that has been thrown at our clients. Hence we have proved 64% of the habeas petitioners innocent – and that comes after more than 500 prisoners were released by the military before the courts intervened. In other words, the error rate is astonishing.
Certainly the Guardian did not run this particular story in an attempt to expose an MI6 agent. Indeed, in August 2010, in the face of criticism, the Guardian's readers' editor explained how the paper's partner in this project, the New York Times, "took great care to mitigate any threat to US service members, Afghan security forces and informants working with the US in Afghanistan."
The purpose of the Guardian's story was to suggest that MI6 was being duped by an al-Qaida killer: Hamlily wrought mayhem while MI6 sat gullibly by.
Let us set aside the questionable notion that Hamlily ever genuinely helped MI6; if he had, then the British should surely have helped him get out of Guantánamo Bay long ago. But while I have rarely defended British security services in recent years, the underlying premise of the story is false, and demonstrably so.
Consider Hamlily's combatant status review tribunal in 2004, and the annual review boards in 2005 and 2006, all of which are public and full of outlandish accusations (most later withdrawn or disproved). Nowhere is there any mention of this slaughter on the streets of Pakistan. This means that the allegation came after 2006. Indeed, the suggestion that Hamlily was an "assassin" comes, we are told, from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who emerged from his torture cell in September 2006, his appearance in Guantánamo much heralded by then-President Bush. But Mohammed never actually mentioned Hamlily at all: he is quoted as describing how someone called Abu Adil committed these atrocities.
One might doubt the entire story merely from the fact that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and abused in many other ways over several years. But the name Abu Adil means not that your name is Adil, but that you are "Father of Adil". Due to a cultural misunderstanding, some officer trawled through the list of 779 prisoners and found seven in Guantánamo listed with the name Adil. Unfortunately, the military had also misspelled Hamlily's first name. So someone in US military intelligence (that famous oxymoron) leapt to the conclusion that Mohammed might be referring to Hamlily.
This was rapidly cleared up. In 2007, once again, there was no accusation against Hamlily concerning the bombings. Indeed, the US military reported as a "primary factor favor[ing] release or transfer" the fact that he "denied destroying churches" – indicating that they did not believe that Mohammed's doubtless sub-aquatic statement had anything to do with Hamlily.
And yet the Guardian published a headline based on the fact that some fool of a military officer threw the kitchen sink into the 2008 assessment of Hamlily, in an effort to prove to his superiors that this was a dangerous terrorist.
Surely the paper would have done well to consider how, in 2009, Hamlily was cleared by the Obama administration's review procedure, reflecting a finding that he was "no threat to the US or its coalition partners" – the solitary 2008 Bush-era memo was rejected as unreliable. Hamlily was returned to Algeria on January 20, 2010, a free man. Since then, he has suffered profoundly from a psychotic disorder, and other mental disabilities provoked by his abuse in US custody.
To suggest that MI6 was somehow duped by an "al-Qaida assassin" based on the drivel in this document is surely unsupportable. The prisoners in Guantánamo Bay have suffered unjustly and enough.
