Archive for July, 2007

In the New Statesman, Clive Stafford Smith updates the story of Abdullah bin Omar, previously reported here and here, confirming that, as suspected, the Tunisian refugee has been imprisoned and tortured on his return to the country of his birth.

For those who missed the story the first time round, bin Omar had been living in Pakistan for 13 years until he was captured by opportunist soldiers in 2002 and sold to the Americans, who took five years to realize that he was innocent of any crime. His forced return to his home country, where, as Stafford Smith states, he “has already been tortured, and he has been told that if he does not confess falsely to crimes, his wife and daughters will be raped,” is a moral outrage, and should provoke all decent people to stand up and demand that the US government no longer tries to worm its way out of a humanitarian disaster of its own making by sending innocent men to imprisonment, torture or even death.

Shockingly, bin Omar’s repatriation to torture is just the start of what may be a disturbing trend. As Stafford Smith notes, “There is doubtless worse to come. There are many other Guantánamo prisoners facing bin Omar’s fate –- from Tunisia and from Algeria, China, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Syria and Uzbekistan. Like him, many have been cleared for release. Much as they want to get out of Guantánamo –- a purgatory of imprisonment without charge or trial –- repatriation may take these men to hell itself.”

For more on the Tunisian detainees in Guantánamo, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

In an excellent new report from the human rights group Cageprisoners, Citizens No More: ‘War on Terror’ Abuses in Bosnia and Herzegovina, researcher Asim Qureshi travelled to the Balkans to investigate three strands of the “Global War on Terror” that have impacted on the area: the abduction, brutal imprisonment (and, in one case, “extraordinary rendition”) of two charity workers and a publisher in September 2001, just two weeks after 9/11; the plight of the six Algerian-born Bosnian citizens in Guantánamo (Qureshi conducted interviews with four of the men’s wives); and the recent pressure exerted on the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina –- by the United States –- to revoke the citizenship of hundreds of naturalized Bosnians from countries throughout North Africa and the Gulf, to tear them from their families, and to return them to the countries of their birth, where, unsurprisingly, many of them will face hardship and persecution.

While the story of the Guantánamo prisoners is an ongoing disgrace, and the currently unfolding deportation story is also extremely important –- as Fadhil al-Hammadani, an Iraqi facing deportation, explained, “When they extradite me to Iraq, they will do so as a terrorist, not like a man without papers” –- I’m going to focus in this article on the first of these stories, which has received little attention to date, concerning Nihad Karsic and Almin Hardaus, two charity workers for the Saudi High Commission for Relief (a charity that provides humanitarian aid to war orphans).

Abducted from their workplaces on 25 September 2001 by Italian carabinieri (part of the Italian peace-keeping force), Karsic and Hardaus were taken to an army base at Butmir, where they were hooded, held in cages and interrogated (and, in Hardaus’ case, interrogated by an American soldier), and then transported to a US army base in Tuzla, in a manner that would later become standard operating procedure for “terror suspects.”

“They handcuffed me, hooded me and placed earphones over my ears,” Karsic said. “I had these ski glasses, but blacked out.” In Tuzla, the men were then subjected to a pattern of abuse that was also to become depressingly familiar: “held in solitary confinement, forcibly stripped naked, forcibly kept awake, repeatedly beaten, verbally harassed, deprived of food and photographed.” When they were released after a week, Karsic said that the Americans told him “they had made a mistake,” gave him 500 dollars and made him sign a document where he promised not to say a word about what had happened.

A corollary to the case of Karsic and Hardaus concerns the Egyptian-born Munich-based publisher Abdel Halim Khafagy, who travelled to Bosnia in September 2001 in order to distribute copies of the Koran. Although he was 69 years old at the time, Khafargy –- and a Jordanian companion, of whom, shockingly, nothing further has been heard –- was abducted by masked men from a hotel room in Sarajevo the night before Karsic and Hardaus were seized, beaten severely in the head, and also taken to Tuzla, where he was held for several weeks, before being “rendered” to Egypt and its notorious torture prisons.

When he was finally returned to Germany, two months after his initial abduction –- and largely, it seems, through pressure exerted on the German government by Walter Lechner, a lawyer hired by his family –- Lechner described meeting a “severely haggard elderly gentleman, who was under heavy shock. His nerves had been shattered and he was not fully aware of what had happened to him.” Khafagy has since left Germany, and, according to classified documents released to the press and described in a WSWS article in December 2006, was abducted because he had been “confused with another person,” rather like Khalid El-Masri, another German who was abducted because the US and German authorities had mistaken him for someone else, who was seized in Macedonia and transferred to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan for five months.

As WSWS noted, the abduction of Khafagy, just two weeks after 9/11, undermined the German government’s ludicrous claim that it “only became aware of US secret prisons in Europe through media reports.” As the article also made clear, German agents were summoned by the Americans to read documents and to help with the interrogation of Khafargy in early October 2001, and one German agent later told a German TV programme, “I can still remember that the majority of [the] seized documents were heavily covered in blood … The Americans were obviously proud of the fact that the head wound incurred during the arrest had needed 20 stitches.” In addition, as Cageprisoners noted, bringing the story of Nihad Karsic and Almin Hardaus back into the spotlight also focuses attention on the Italian government –- led at the time by Silvio Berlusconi –- which is already under scrutiny for its part in the abduction of the cleric Abu Omar from a street in Milan in February 2003, and his subsequent rendition to Egypt.

The struggle to dismantle the unprincipled post-9/11 world of vengeance, torture and criminally poor “intelligence” has, in many ways, only just begun, and will take years to unravel, but Cageprisoners are to be commended for resuscitating this early story of the murky involvement of European countries in the abduction, illegal imprisonment and “extraordinary rendition” of its citizens and residents.

For more on US torture policies, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

Never ones to willingly admit defeat, officials at the Pentagon have responded to the recent collapse of the Military Commissions for Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan by alleging that Khadr, who was just 15 years old at the time of his capture, after a gun battle in Afghanistan in July 2002, “related,” just a few weeks after, “that he had been told about a $1,500 reward being placed on the head of each American killed.” Although it was not made clear who had offered the bounty, Khadr allegedly replied to questions about how he felt about the reward by saying, “I wanted to kill a lot of American[s] to get lots of money.”

Astutely recognizing desperation when they see it, his lawyers have pointed out that this supposedly significant information has not been mentioned at all during the last five years, and have suggested, as Canada’s Globe and Mail reports, that it is “suspect, ‘superfluous’ to the appeal motion and designed to undermine public sympathy” for Khadr. His military lawyer, Lieutenant-Commander William Kuebler, told the Globe and Mail, “We’re not inclined to believe reports about what Omar said to interrogators,” adding that “the government seeks to vilify Omar based on information it coerced out of him as a 15-year-old boy recovering from critical wounds inflicted by US forces. It shows how desperate they are.”

Nathan Whitling, one of Khadr’s Canadian lawyers, has also spoken out, explaining to the Globe and Mail that his client’s companions had already been killed by US air strikes when a grenade –- allegedly thrown by Khadr –- killed a US soldier, Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer. He continued: “It is hardly convincing for the US to suggest that in the midst of this battle, and after the entire site had been flattened by 500-pound bombs and everyone else in the compound [had been] killed, Omar was lying under the rubble thinking about how to earn himself $1,500.”

As one respondent to the Globe and Mail’s article noted, “The case against Mr. Khadr, what there was of it, is descending into farce. He was a 15 year-old child soldier. He’s been incarcerated in solitary confinement for years, under heavy mental, emotional and physical strain. By now he’s probably confessed to assassinating JFK for the Cuban mob. If and when Mr. Khadr’s case gets into the civil courts, even the US civil courts, they will throw it so hard it will bounce.”

Omar Khadr (left) during his aborted Military Commission hearing on 4 June 2007. The judge who threw out his case and has refused to reinstate it, Army Colonel Peter Brownback, sits on the far right (©AFP/Getty Images).

For more on Omar Khadr, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

On Saturday 30 June 2007, to mark 2,000 days since the establishment of the illegal prison in Guantánamo Bay, the British human rights group Cageprisoners held a conference in Balham, specifically to discuss the case of Shaker Aamer, but also to press for the release of other British residents in Guantánamo, and to call for the closure of the illegal prison.

Born in Saudi Arabia, Shaker is a British resident, and is married with four children. He was captured in Afghanistan, where he had been involved in a project to build a school with the released British prisoner Moazzam Begg, after the US-led invasion in October 2001, and was sold to the Americans, who subjected him to torture in a secret CIA prison and in a prison at Bagram airbase, and then flew him to Guantánamo. An enormously charismatic man, Shaker has persistently campaigned for the rights of the prisoners in Guantánamo, and as a result is regarded, erroneously, as a senior figure in al-Qaeda by the American authorities.

Since August 2005, when he led a short-lived Prisoners’ Council, which negotiated with the authorities to provide better treatment, he has been held in solitary confinement, and in January 2007 he embarked on a hunger strike as the only method left to him to highlight his predicament and that of his fellow prisoners. For their pains, the hunger strikers –- and Shaker is one of dozens –- are restrained, using 16 separate straps, twice a day for an hour and a half in a special chair, and force-fed through a thick tube which is forced up their noses and into their stomachs. The procedure is extremely painful, but anaesthetics are rarely used, the military staff responsible for the force-feeding are untrained –- and sometimes force the tube into prisoners’ lungs instead of their stomachs –- and the tubes are removed after each feeding. Designed to “break” the prisoners, and to force them to abandon their campaign, the force-feeding effectively tortures prisoners who –- seeing no way out of their illegal imprisonment –- wish to die to end their suffering.

As long ago as November 2005, when he was taking part in a huge hunger strike, which, at its height, involved at least 200 prisoners, Shaker wrote, “I am dying here every day, mentally and physically. This is happening to all of us. We have been ignored, locked up in the middle of the ocean for years. Rather than humiliate myself, having to beg for water, I would rather hurry up the process that is going to happen anyway … I want to make it easy on everyone. I want no feeding, no forced tubes, no ‘help,’ no ‘intensive assisted feeding,’ This is my legal right.”

Speakers at the conference –- which was extremely well-attended –- included Zachary Katznelson, one of Shaker’s lawyers at Reprieve, human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, activist Bianca Jagger and former prisoner Moazzam Begg. The most poignant moments of the event, however, were when one of Shaker’s daughters, and one of Moazzam Begg’s daughters, addressed the audience. Their words are reproduced below.

My Life Without My Dad

Lines written by Johaina Aamer, the 9-year old daughter of Shaker Aamer, 29 June 2007.

After school, when I have reached home,
“I have a surprise for you,” says my mum.
I get excited. What if my dad has returned?
It would be the best thing that ever happened.
“A chocolate cake and some games for fun.”
How can I say, “Thanks mum, but I want none.”
I run to my room with my heart broken.
My dad in a cage, locked up in a prison.
He was sold to the people with no hearts or emotions.
Where is the justice, for my dad is innocent?
A long, long waiting but no sign of return.
Each day is same for my brothers, me and mum.
I miss you everyday, you are never forgotten.
I wish to say goodbye to the world of corruption
So we can be together and rejoice in heaven.
I hide my tears and smile for this reason.

Imprisoned Fathers

Written and spoken by Marium Begg, daughter of released Guantanamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, at the Shaker Aamer conference, “A South London Man in Guantánamo,” 30 June 2007.

Bismillah al Rahman al Raheem. As salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. I greet you all with the Muslim greeting of peace.

Before I start I would like to say I am not used to talking in public, like my father, so if I make any mistakes then you can blame him! I would like to begin by giving you a taste of how I felt during the three years whilst my father was not with me. Imagine one night you are playing with your father who is very close to you. The next morning you find he has disappeared. “Where to?” you ask your self. Why would your beloved father leave you without telling anyone? You ask your mum and she says your father’s in a bad situation and he had to go. But you don’t know what that means. And because you are the eldest daughter at the age of six you have to help your mother with her difficulties and you have to help your brothers’ and sisters’ progress. How hard would life be for you all the time your mother calls you to do this and do that and when you walk into your father’s office to play with him his not there? How would you feel?

My family and I were put in this situation for three years and Johaina and her family are still in this situation. When my father was taken away, once I had understood what had happened, I used to cry every night. When I thought about him whilst at school I burst out crying, and when I saw his picture I would imagine him reading me a bedtime story, or giving me a kiss good night or picking me up and throwing me in the air. When he finally came back, after many years, I was too old to be picked up or thrown in the air.

When your friend asks you why your father never picks you up from school and you tell your friend he is in jail, they automatically assume he is a bad person. But how do you explain to that friend that there is such a place as Guantánamo? How do you tell that friend there is such a place, where the rule is “guilty until proven innocent”? How does a mother explain to her daughter that she has no idea when her father is coming back or that he might never even come back? I know that it was very difficult for my mother to explain to us children what had happened. And it was even harder for us to understand. Before this we never thought Americans were bad –- we even liked watching American cartoons. But that notion began to change as we grew up without our father.

Both Johaina’s father and mine were kidnapped almost six years ago, but I am very fortunate because mine came back. He saw my youngest brother for the first time in 2005. Uncle Shaker is still in Guantánamo, who’s been there all this time. He has never seen Johaina’s youngest brother Farris. It’s about time he did. I ask you all to join the campaign by my dad, Cageprisoners and others to call for the return of Johaina’s dad to his family and for the closure of Guantánamo Bay, so that all the other children can be reunited with their missing fathers. Thank you.

To demand the return of Shaker Aamer and the other British residents in Guantánamo, write a letter to Jacqui Smith, the new Home Secretary. The full address is: Rt Hon Jacqui Smith MP, Secretary of State for the Home Office, Home Office, 50 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AT.

For more on Shaker Aamer, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

As published on Indymedia.

To date, I have not written about the recent –- and recently foiled –- terrorist attacks in the UK, largely because I was struggling to comprehend how it was possible that doctors and medical students –- people dedicated to saving lives –- could embark upon plans to slaughter civilians in the mistaken belief that it would please their God. When doctors and medical staff in Guantánamo were revealed as complicit in torture and abuse, they faced the undiluted condemnation of their peers, and of all right-minded people, and this, surely, is how it should be.

Like many Britons who opposed the Iraq war –- and who are opposed to the lingering, and very real colonialism at the heart of British foreign policy –- I find it hard to stand in solidarity with those who led this country into the Iraq war (or who were complicit in it), as I don’t believe that it’s possible to take the high moral ground without first changing our policies –- with all the economic disadvantage and geopolitical “weakness” that this would entail. To be fair, Gordon Brown has at least begun to distance himself from his predecessor’s rhetoric, instructing his officials no longer to refer to the “War on Terror,” and refusing specifically to mention Muslims when referring to terrorists. In a BBC interview, he described al-Qaeda as “a terrorist cause that is totally unacceptable to mainstream people in every faith in every part of the world,” and wisely presented the challenge facing Britain as a police action against criminals, rather than a clash of civilizations. As Seamus Milne pointed out in the Guardian, however, the government’s continued denial that Britain’s foreign policy has anything to do with the UK’s status as a prominent terrorist target is both “delusional and dangerous.” Milne explained that, like Tony Blair before him, Gordon Brown had called the terror plot an attack on “our British way of life” and the “values that we represent,” which was “unrelated” to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or any other conflict.

Nevertheless, there is a profound difference between expressing anger about British foreign policy and attempting to kill British citizens as a result, and I am reminded, as are many British people who lived through this period, of the conflict between the British government and the IRA from the 1970s to the 1990s. Whilst it’s perfectly comprehensible to me that Guantánamo, and the secret prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are the modern-day equivalent of the Maze, and that these prisons, and the control orders imposed by the British government on “terror suspects” in the UK, are the modern-day equivalent of internment, the corollary –- that these policies are a breeding ground for the massively increased recruitment of “soldiers” dedicated to the overthrow of the hateful enemy –- should also not blind us to the fact that, as in the 1970s and 1980s, many of these recruits, while legitimately angry, demonstrate through their actions neither a brave piety nor the noble cause of the “freedom fighter,” but rather a callous disregard for human life and a fanaticism that actually marks them out as psychopaths and criminals. There is no God in a car bomb, just as there is no God in carpet-bombing or caging men for five and a half years in Guantánamo.

If there is to be an effective response in the UK to the growth of homicidal criminals masquerading as religious martyrs, then it must come through dialogue rather than confrontation; through sincere attempts by decent people within all the UK’s communities to overcome Manichean suspicions of the “other,” and to confront individuals who represent their countries or their religions as weapons of vengeance or “justice” rather than as advocates of peace, whether these are false politicians defending mass murder in the name of freedom and democracy, or false imams defending mass murder in the name of Allah. As noted above, Gordon Brown has at least begun to make moves towards breaking with the style of his predecessor –- although much more remains to be done –- and representatives of Britain’s many and varied Muslim communities have also spoken out loudly against the latest plots, taking out full-page newspaper advertisements –- as they did after the 7/7 bombings –- condemning the perpetrators, rejecting any attempts to link criminal activities to the teachings of Islam, and calling for society to remain united. Speaking to al-Jazeera, Ihtisham Hibatullah, a spokesman for the British Muslim Initiative, one of the organizers of the campaign, said, “The overwhelming response has come from the medical profession. People in the profession want to be heard saying, ‘not in their name.’”

The need to react to the recent terror plots with a measured response has been highlighted over the last week in the reports of racist attacks on Muslim-owned properties in Scotland –- in particular an attack on an Asian-owned newsagent in Riddrie, in Glasgow’s East End, which was destroyed by what press reports described as a “massive fire and explosion” after being rammed by a car, an attack on an estate agent next to a mosque in Bathgate, in West Lothian, and damage inflicted on a shop in Alva, near Stirling, that is owned by the family of Mohammed Atif Siddique, a student facing trial for alleged terrorist offences, whose arrest in April 2006 has been criticized by the campaigning group Scotland Against Criminalising Communities and other organizations.

Another unfortunate side-effect of the fear and paranoia that follows terrorist attacks is a tendency to blur the distinctions between, on the one hand, the legitimate criminal investigation of suspects, and, on the other, excessive responses that make a mockery of the law, curtail civil liberties and lead to shocking miscarriages of justice. While Gordon Brown avoided a knee-jerk reaction to the recent plots, refusing to call immediately for an increase in the time that suspects can be held without charge from 28 to 90 days, he has already signalled his willingness to campaign for just such a move, pressing for an extension of the 28-day limit on detention without charge just a month ago, a move which, as the Observer described it, sent “a powerful signal that he will take a harder line on terrorism than Tony Blair.”

With this in mind, it remains to be seen whether the heightened tension caused by this summer’s terror plots will, eventually, see Brown push for three months’ imprisonment without charge, and whether it will also prevent him from addressing three other issues related to counter-terror operations in the wake of 9/11, which he has inherited from Tony Blair, and which urgently need addressing: the plight of the wrongly imprisoned British residents in Guantánamo Bay, the continuing, and illegal campaign by the Home Office to hold terror suspects without charge or trial, under the widely-reviled control orders that keep them under virtual house arrest, and the attempt to circumvent international safeguards preventing the return of non-citizens to countries where they face the risk of torture, imprisonment and even death.

All three of these issues –- which in many crucial ways are related to each other –- question the state’s ability to respond appropriately –- and with justice –- to the threats posed to the UK by terrorists, and Gordon Brown’s response to them will be as much an indicator of his desire to distance himself from his predecessor as his calm response to the recent terror plots. In an article to follow shortly, I will look in depth at these issues, examining the government’s motivations for its actions, highlighting the egregious human rights abuses for which it is responsible, and explaining why it is imperative that Gordon Brown returns to the rule of law.