Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi.
He became known as Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi. But his real name is Nashwan al-Tamir. Al-Hadi was born to a Sunni Arab family in Mosul, Iraq in 1961. He fought in the bloody Iran/Iraq war, then left Iraq, and the horrors of life in Saddam’s army, to join the Mujahideen’s campaign to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan, where he met Osama Bin Laden and later helped form al-Qaeda. Al-Hadi was a leader of the guerilla campaign against the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. In 2003 and 2004, fighters under Al-Hadi’s command made several lethal attacks against US and coalition forces.
In 2006, Al-Hadi was captured in Turkey and turned over to the CIA, where he was held as a “high-value” detainee for the next six months at a black site in Afghanistan. Al-Hadi was repeatedly interrogated, tortured and confined in a cramped, soundproofed cell no larger than a closet.
For the past 17 years, he has been living in a cell at Guantanamo prison, nearly paralyzed by a degenerative spine condition that has been exacerbated by years of medical neglect and mistreatment. Al-Hadi was one of the last “enemy combatants” sent to Gitmo.
In 2014, after more than seven years in custody, Al-Hadi was arraigned on war crimes charges before a military commission. Four of the principal charges filed against Al-Hadi–that his troops killed humanitarian workers, fired on medical vehicles, killed civilians and used perfidy (civilian disguises) to attack US troops–are precisely the kinds of atrocities that Israeli troops have committed in Gaza with US weapons. His trial was delayed in 2017, after Al-Hadi was found lying on the floor of his cell in a pool of his own waste, paralyzed and incontinent.
Al-Hadi was diagnosed with a degenerative spinal disc disease, which had worsened drastically during his time in US custody. Six spinal operations followed in less than a year, all conducted in the primitive operating room at Gitmo, at least two of them to correct mistakes made in the previous surgeries. Under the strictures of US law, Al-Hadi couldn’t be treated at a hospital in the states. At the time of his surgeries, Gitmo didn’t even have an MRI machine. When Al-Hadi returned to court a couple of years later, he was paralyzed, confined to a padded wheelchair and sometimes rolled in on a hospital bed.
In June 2022, Hadi pleaded guilty to war crimes charges in a secret deal with the Biden administration to expedite the long-stalled tribunals. “He pleaded guilty for his role as a frontline commander in Afghanistan,” said his lawyer, Susan Hensler. “He has been in custody for 16 years, including the six months he spent in a C.I.A. black site. We hope the United States makes good on its promise to transfer him as soon as possible for the medical care he desperately needs.”
Al-Hadi’s sentencing was postponed until 2024, in part to give the Pentagon time to find a nation that will accept him after his release and be able to provide him with appropriate medical care for the remainder of his life.
The charges Hadi ultimately pleaded guilty to were far less serious than those the Bush and Obama administrations originally accused him of, which included a role in the 9/11 attacks, a conspiracy to drive non-Muslims out of the Arabian peninsula, assassinating a French UN worker and blowing up the large carvings of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan. Ultimately, Hadi confessed to supervising fighters who fired on a medevac helicopter and dressed as civilians to plant IEDs that killed three allied soldiers–alleged crimes that the Bush administration wanted to punish with his execution, despite having denied of him of a lawyer for more than five years.
On June 17, Al-Hadi finally had the chance to tell the story of his capture, rendition to Afghanistan, interrogation and torture, and incarceration in Gitmo (at a cost of $13 million a year) where his health deteriorated sharply. Sitting in his padded wheelchair, Hadi described being snatched in Turkey, bound, hooded, shackled and gagged, then flown to another site where he was held in a cell without windows.
That site was one of the last of the CIA’s secret prisons in Afghanistan. The cell had a toilet and a stainless steel shower. Each day men dressed in black with masked faces came to interrogate him. Again and again, they probed him about the location of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders. Each day, Al-Hadi gave them the same answer: I don’t know.
After three months, Al-Hadi was moved to a different room, a cell called Quiet Room 4. As Al-Hadi spoke, his defense team introduced a virtual representation of the cell. It was smaller, more confining. There was no toilet or shower, just a bucket and a mat on the floor. There were three shackles on the wall and a bloodstain.
Hadi described being blindfolded, stripped naked and his beard roughly shaved. Then photographed. This happened twice at the black site. Gratuitous acts of humiliation meant to shame him.
Pork was routinely mixed in his meals. So Al-Hadi went on a hunger strike and eventually became too weak to walk. The black-masked guards force-fed him with bottles of Ensure, until he regained some of his strength so that he could once again endure the same kind of ritualized torture, day after day, month after month.
The entire time Al-Hadi was held in Afghanistan he never saw the sun, never knew what time it was, when to say his prayers or in which direction to say them. Unlike many other CIA prisoners, who were blasted with loud music, Al-Hadi was condemned to six months of silence. From his Quiet Cell, he couldn’t hear street noises, bird songs or human voices. He was living in a void.
Unlike many US war criminals, such as Eddie “the Blade” Gallager, who unapologetically stabbed to death a wounded young Iraqi and posed for a photo with his corpse, Al-Hadi seems genuinely remorseful about the carnage his fighters inflicted during the cruel war in Afghanistan. During his testimony, he told the father of one of the US soldiers killed in an IED attack, “I know what it is to watch another soldier die or get wounded, I know this feeling and I am sorry. I know you suffered too much. I know what it is to be a father of a son. To lose your son — your sadness must be overwhelming. I am sorry. As the commander, I take responsibility for what my men did. I want you to know I do not have any hate in my heart for anyone. I thought I was doing right. I wasn’t. I am sorry.”
Ultimately, Al-Hadi’s contrition, remorse and failing body, crippled by years of torture and confinement, did little to sway an 11-member, anonymous U.S. military jury, which on Thursday handed down the maximum sentence of 30 years in prison for committing the same kind of war crimes the US and its allies have committed with impunity for decades, including crimes against Al-Hadi himself.