Gul was too polite to put it this way, but he was effectively saying that it was all, all of it, bullshit. His affiliation with HIG was the same as that of millions of other Afghans: The group ran the refugee camps he needed to survive. He said he supported his family by selling small goods, like used books and jars of honey. He said the reason he was in that guesthouse that night was because he was on the road, selling, trying to scrape together some money. He said the Afghans had grabbed the wrong person.

The government’s allegations were built on secret interrogations and unidentified sources named things like IZ-10026. Sullivan-Bennis came to believe that Gul was innocent. It had happened before: An alleged al Qaeda agent named Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri was detained for 13 years before his release; during his PRB hearing, the government admitted it may have had the wrong man.

The PRB process, though, is not about guilt or innocence. It’s akin to a parole hearing: Are you ready to repent? One of Sullivan-Bennis’s supervising attorneys had called it “having to roll over and show them your tummy.” Gul believed he had committed no crimes for which to repent. But he wouldn’t be the first to be granted freedom through the review board by expressing remorse for things he’d never done.

Thomas Wilner is one of the lawyers who won the two landmark Supreme Court cases that established habeas corpus rights for Guantánamo detainees. The PRB process “is not based on evidence,” he told me. “You have to be contrite. What do you tell a client who wants to go, ‘Fuck you! I’m innocent!’”

That first meeting between Gul and Sullivan-Bennis would come just four days before the PRB convened. Then came the hearing.

“So he sits in this white room with oddly comfortable chairs that the detainees have never been allowed to sit in before,” Sullivan-Bennis recalled. “They prop him up at the head of the table, and he sinks into this enormous beige puffy chair and he faces this enormous screen.” On the giant screen were the floating heads of a six-member board representing the Department of Justice and the other federal agencies that weigh in on the clearance process for Guantánamo. “And then, essentially, it’s an interrogation.”

Later, Sullivan-Bennis would identify all manner of reasons why the hearing didn’t break their way. But in her view it all came down to prep—they just didn’t have enough time.

“In making this determination,” the official ruling read, “the Board considered the detainee’s … failure to acknowledge or accept responsibility for past activities. The Board welcomes seeing the detainee’s file in six months with greater candor.”

So Gul was not recommended for transfer. But it was OK. Much higher profile Guantánamo detainees had been released through the PRB. That included Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who’d been implicated both in recruiting three of the 9/11 hijackers and in planning the foiled “Millennium Plot” to detonate explosives at LAX. In all, 36 detainees have been cleared and released through the review board. At least seven of those had not been granted a transfer after their first hearing before eventually winning their freedom.

Toward the end of President Obama’s second term, he had greatly accelerated the process of clearing out Guantánamo. By the end of the Bush administration the detainee population was 245; by the end of the Obama administration, it was 41. As president, Hillary Clinton would likely have been as eager to cut these last men loose: Before leaving her post as secretary of state, in January 2013, Clinton had sent Obama a forceful and detailed memo urging him to shutter the prison for good.

A decision by a trial judge in Chicago to grant lawyers for a terrorism suspect unprecedented access to secret intelligence-court records would be a €œsea change in how such sensitive documents are handled and could end up jeopardizing national security, U.S. government attorneys argue in a hard-hitting appeal filed on Monday.

Big Real Estate Claims Credit for Terror Trial Move

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By Laura Kusisto

April 6, 2011 | 1:37 p.m

And now you know why this man is smiling.

+Enlarge

Amidst the celebratory backslapping at the Real Estate Board of New York's Ingenies on Monday evening, REBNY president Steven Spinola quietly savored an even bigger victory.

In a January 2010 Observer article, he had sounded one of the earliest calls for not holding the 9/11 terror trials in the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Monday afternoon that the trials will, indeed, be held at the Guantanamo Bay prison (to the dismay of many among President Obama's lefty base). 

The Observer nabbed Big Real Estate's super at the 101 Club on Park Avenue and queried: Was REBNY the first to sound the call? "I do believe we were," said Mr. Spinola with a wide grin.

As early as December 2009, Mr. Spinola (pictured) met with Bill Rudin, the landlord and Association for a Better New York chair, in his office. Initially, Mr. Spinola spoke with then-White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and presidential adviser and policy wonk David Axelrod. The board at first kept a low public profile on the issue to resist offending the administration.

But Mr. Spinola was getting an earful from REBNY members, as The Observer noted a month after the meeting with Mr. Rudin, more than he had gotten on any single issue since he took over the board in the mid-1980s: "They're saying to me, 'You've got to stop this, you can't let it happen.'" To hold the trial downtown, they said, would disrupt traffic and create security concerns that could drive out tourists and office tenants, plummeting the downtown economy to post-9/11 lows.

The real estate board, one of the most powerful lobby groups in the state, has had an impact on other issues like property taxes, but none with quite such national resonance. In other words, the board took on the president of the United States and won. 

via observer.com