Guantanamo prisoner's freedom plea

An Afghan prisoner pleaded for his freedom before a military review tribunal at Guantanamo Bay that journalists were allowed to witness for the first time today.

The 31-year-old detainee in orange garb sat before the three-member panel, hands bound and feet chained to a metal ring in the floor, as he spoke quietly through an interpreter.

“I surrendered myself to Americans because I believed Americans are for human rights,” he said. “I had never heard Americans mistreated anybody in the past.”

The review hearing, the ninth since they began last Friday, was held in a windowless 10-foot-by-20-foot room in a trailer at the US prison camp in Cuba.

The detainee – a slight man with a long, dark beard – glanced at panel members and three journalists wearing yellow media badges. Other reporters watched through a two-way mirror.

“If you are arresting everybody with the name of Taliban it doesn’t mean they are all against Americans,” he said. ”I wasn’t going to fight anyone.”

“There should be a difference between someone who surrenders himself and someone who fights against Americans.

"I surrendered myself,” said the man, who claimed he had been in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz when he heard there would be a surrender arrangement and turned himself in to Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek strongman.

Asked by a tribunal recorder whether the prisoner had surrendered in a car with a Taliban leader, he said: ”Yes.” The prisoner had asked to call an unidentified witness, but the military ruled it would not be relevant to deciding whether he was properly held as an “enemy combatant”.

The detainee agreed that he had a Kalashnikov rifle issued to him by the Taliban, but said it was given to him ”forcefully”.

“They were giving (them) to everybody,” he said.

After an hour of the proceedings that were open to some members of the press, the hearings were closed to review classified information.