Joshua R. Claus is a former member of the United States Army, whose unit was present at both Iraq's Abu Ghraib and at the Bagram Theater Detention Facility in Afghanistan, and was the first interrogator of Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr. In 2005, he was found guilty of maltreatment and assault against an Afghanistan detainee who later died. [1] [2]
Claus pleaded guilty to playing a role in the routine abuse of captives held in extrajudicial detention in the Bagram Theatre Detention Facility in 2002, [3] [4] at a time when Claus's unit, the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, was assigned to Bagram. Detainees Habibullah and Dilawar (surnames were not provided) were killed in custody during that time. Military pathologists classified the killings as homicides. Claus and 27 other members of the United States Armed Forces were named for the role they played in the abuse. However, military prosecutors decided that responsibility for the men's deaths was spread too broadly for any one soldier to face murder or manslaughter charges.
Claus was charged with assault, prisoner maltreatment, and lying to investigators. He pleaded guilty, and received a five-month prison sentence in 2005. [5]
On March 14, 2008, it became known that Claus was one of Omar Khadr's first interrogators. [2] The U.S. government has attempted to keep this information suppressed, asking reporters to identify Claus as "Interrogator One." [6] [7] [8] When Carol Rosenberg, of the Miami Herald , and Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star , two reporters who had been following the Guantanamo commissions closely, and two other Canadian reporters published Claus's name, following a pre-trial hearing in May 2010, they were banned from traveling to Guantanamo. Shephard had already published an interview with Claus, where he openly acknowledged being Khadr's interrogator. The Guantanamo prosecution were widely criticized for treating Claus's name as a secret when it had already been widely publicized. [9] [10] The ban was quietly rescinded in July 2010. [11]
Claus was given immunity from prosecution for any possible abuse of Khadr during the interrogation, in return for his testimony at Khadr's murder trial before a military tribunal at Guantanamo. [12] The trial began on August 10, 2010. [13]
Mullah Habibullah was an Afghan who died on December 4, 2002 while in US custody at the Bagram Collection Point, a US military detention center in Afghanistan. His death was one of those classed as a homicide, though the initial military statement described his death as due to natural causes.
Omar Ahmed Said Khadr is a Canadian who, at the age of 15, was detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay for ten years, during which he pleaded guilty to the murder of U.S. Army Sergeant 1st Class Christopher Speer and other charges. He later appealed his conviction, claiming that he falsely pleaded guilty so that he could return to Canada where he remained in custody for three additional years. Khadr sued the Canadian government for infringing his rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; this lawsuit was settled in 2017 with a CA$10.5 million payment and an apology by the federal government.
In 2005, The New York Times obtained a 2,000-page United States Army investigatory report concerning the homicides of two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners by U.S. military personnel in December 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility in Bagram, Afghanistan and general treatment of prisoners. The two prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were repeatedly chained to the ceiling and beaten, resulting in their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners' deaths were homicides. Autopsies revealed severe trauma to both prisoners' legs, describing the trauma as comparable to being run over by a bus. Seven soldiers were charged in 2005.
Dilawar, also known as Dilawar of Yakubi, was an Afghan farmer and taxi driver who was tortured to death by US Army soldiers at the Bagram Collection Point, a US military detention center in Afghanistan.
Ghassan Abdallah Ghazi al-Sharbi is a Saudi citizen who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 682.
Saad Madi Saad al Azmi is a Kuwaiti citizen. He was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantánamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba, and later repatriated on November 4, 2005. Joint Task Force Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts report that al-Azmi was born on May 29, 1979, in Doha, Kuwait.
Damien M. Corsetti was a soldier in the United States Army. As part of the Army's investigation into prisoner abuse at Bagram, Corsetti was charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, assault and performing an indecent act with another person. PFC Corsetti was later found not guilty of all charges. At the time Corsetti was a specialist in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, serving under Lieutenant Carolyn Wood.
Adel al Zamel is a citizen of Kuwait who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba.
Khalid Mahomoud Abdul Wahab Al Asmr is a citizen of Jordan who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.
Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan refugee born in 1985 in Miranshah, Pakistan, was accused of attempted murder before a Guantanamo military commission on charges that he threw a grenade at a passing American convoy on December 17, 2002. Jawad's family says that he was 12 years old at the time of his detention in 2002. The United States Department of Defense maintains that a bone scan showed he was about 17 when taken into custody.
Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Haza al-Darbi is a citizen of Saudi Arabia who was held in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba from August 2002 to May 2018; in May 2018, he was transferred to Saudi Arabia's custody. He was the only detainee held at Guantanamo released during President Donald Trump's administration.
The United States Department of Defense (DOD) had stopped reporting Guantanamo suicide attempts in 2002. In mid-2002 the DoD changed the way they classified suicide attempts, and enumerated them under other acts of "self-injurious behavior".
Taxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 American documentary film directed by Alex Gibney, and produced by Gibney, Eva Orner, and Susannah Shipman. It won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It focuses on the December 2002 killing of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention and interrogated at a black site at Bagram air base.
Michelle Shephard is an independent investigative reporter, author and filmmaker. She has been awarded the Michener Award for public service journalism and won Canada's top newspaper prize, the National Newspaper Award, three times. In 2011, she was an associate producer on a documentary called Under Fire: Journalists in Combat. She produced the National Film Board documentary, Prisoners of the Absurd, which premiered at Amsterdam's film festival in 2014. Shephard also co-directed a film based on her book about Omar Khadr, Guantanamo's Child, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015.
Mahmud Sadik is a citizen of Afghanistan who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 512.
Noor Habib Ullah is a citizen of Afghanistan who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. Habibullah was one of three former captives who McClatchy Newspapers profiled; he also appeared in a BBC interview which claimed he was abused while interned at Bagram. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 626.
Munir Naseer is a citizen of Pakistan who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States's Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 85.
Carol Rosenberg is a senior journalist at The New York Times. Long a military-affairs reporter at the Miami Herald, from January 2002 into 2019 she reported on the operation of the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camps, at its naval base in Cuba. Her coverage of detention of captives at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp has been praised by her colleagues and legal scholars, and in 2010 she spoke about it by invitation at the National Press Club. Rosenberg had previously covered events in the Middle East. In 2011, she received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for her nearly decade of work on the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
On January 16, 2010, the United States Department of Defense complied with a court order and made public a heavily redacted list of the detainees held in the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. Detainees were initially held in primitive, temporary quarters, in what was originally called the Bagram Collection Point, from late 2001. Detainees were later moved to an indoor detention center until late 2009, when newly constructed facilities were opened.
Brahim Yadel is a citizen of France who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 371. Born in Aubervilliers, France, the Department of Defense has reported his date of birth.
Legal arguments before the U.S. war crimes commission in Guantanamo Bay indicated Sgt. Joshua Claus of military intelligence participated in many, maybe all, of the interrogations of the Canadian terror suspect after U.S. forces delivered him to the Bagram detention centre in Afghanistan in July 2002.[ permanent dead link ]
charged with assault, prisoner maltreatment, and lying to investigators
The next morning, December 9, 2002, Dilawar was subjected to his final interrogation at which he was unable to kneel when ordered or physically comply with anything. This caused the interrogation session to erode to more physical abuse. An interrogator identified as Spc. Joshua Claus took over from Walls, who remained present. Dilawar's last interrogation eroded into more abuse and assault and he was returned to his cell and re-shackled. Dilawar was found dead the next morning.
During the trial, the defence will call testimony of former army sergeant Joshua Claus, who interrogated Mr. Khadr shortly after the then-15-year-old's capture in Afghanistan. In May pre-trial hearings, a man identified as Interrogator 1 said in testimony that he threatened Mr. Khadr with being gang-raped to death if he did not co-operate. That interrogator was later identified as former sergeant Claus. He has also been convicted of abusing a different detainee and has left the military.
That reporters are being punished for disclosing information that has been publicly available for years is nothing short of absurd — any gag order that covers this kind of information is not just overbroad but nonsensical," Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. "Plainly, no legitimate government interest is served by suppressing information that is already well known.
While covering a hearing last week to determine the admissibility of confessions made by Canadian detainee Omar Khadr, four journalists from The Herald, which is owned by McClatchy, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and Can-West Newspapers of Canada printed the name of a witness who had been identified at the hearing as "Interrogator No. 1." The witness, Joshua Claus, had been convicted by a U.S. military jury of detainee abuse in 2005 and sentenced to five months in prison. His role as Khadr's interrogator had been known since 2008, when it was first revealed by a judge at Guantanamo. He later gave an on-the-record interview to the Toronto Star.
Faced with protests from a number of news organizations, the Pentagon is considering revising the rules it invoked in May to ban four reporters from covering the trials of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Pentagon on Thursday reversed its ban on a Miami Herald reporter from covering military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said the reporter can return to the naval base there to cover a hearing next week.
A U.S. Army officer was going to have Canadian Omar Khadr executed after a July 2002 firefight in Afghanistan but was stopped at the last moment by Special Forces troops, according to a diary account.