Archive for January, 2008

From Sudan, Reuters reports on a conference held in the capital, Khartoum, to demand the release of seven Sudanese detainees still held in Guantánamo. Organized by local human rights groups, the conference’s speakers included the wife of Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj, who is still held in the much-criticized prison, and several released Sudanese detainees, who also “demanded cash payouts and an apology from the United States” for the “mental and physical torture” they suffered during their imprisonment.

Adel Hassan Hamad and Salim Muhood Adem, after their release. They are standing in front of posters showing some of the other Sudanese detainees still held in Guantánamo. Photo © Mohamed Nureldin Abdalla, Reuters.

“We have asked for compensation and an apology,” aid worker Adel Hassan Hamad told the conference, adding that his American lawyers would seek compensation in the US courts, and that two other former detainees were also seeking compensation. Released in December, Mr. Hamad, whose story was explained at length here, wore orange overalls to identify his sympathy with those still held in Guantánamo. Unknown to me, until this article was published, was the distressing news that one of his daughters had died during his imprisonment because his wife could not afford medical treatment.

As reported by Reuters, many of those attending the conference “broke down in tears” when addressed by Aygol Ismailova, the Azerbaijani wife of Al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj, whose story was reported here –- accompanied by his latest letter from Guantánamo. Mr. al-Haj has been on hunger strike for nearly 400 days, and, like all the other hunger strikers in Guantánamo, is force-fed twice a day in a manner that, as described by his lawyer, is “tantamount to torture.”

His wife, as Reuters explained, “wept as she told the gathering how [her husband] has been urinating blood and [is] suffering from other health problems.” She added, “His son Mohamed always asks me, ‘Where is my father? Who took him? What is prison? What do they do there?’ And I don’t know how to answer him. Do people know that I have no way to contact my husband other than letters that reach him late and are censored? For more than six years I’ve not heard his voice, not seen him. This is torture.”

She also said that all the Guantánamo detainees deserved compensation and an apology, and, in the only upbeat moment of the whole speech, noted that Sudanese government officials had told her that they hoped that her husband would be released by the end of March.

Adel Hamad and another former Guantánamo detainee set up mock prison cells in the conference hall to demonstrate the cramped conditions in which they were held. Repeating claims familiar from other released detainees, Mr. Hamad explained, “Often they’d leave prisoners tied up in very, very cold rooms and refuse to allow them to go to the bathroom so they’d wet themselves.” Speaking of his imprisonment in Afghanistan, before he was transferred to Guantánamo, he added, “I was beaten, made to stand for long periods of time, deprived of sleep for three nights.”

13 Sudanese detainees have been held at Guantánamo. Two were released in April 2004, one in July 2005, and another two –- Adel Hamad and Salim Adem, another aid worker –- in December 2007. None of the seven men who remain –- including Sami al-Haj –- has been cleared for release, but it is to be hoped that some, at least, will be released during the course of this year. As Mr. Hamad’s lawyers have explained, both their client and Mr. Adem had been cleared for release in November 2005, but remained at Guantánamo for another two years because of inexplicable stonewalling on the part of the US State Department.

With this obstacle now, hopefully, overcome, it is clearly time for some of the other Sudanese detainees to be repatriated. Only one of the seven –- Ibrahim al-Qosi –- has ever been formally charged. Regarded as a bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, al-Qosi was put forward for trial by Military Commission in July 2003. The charges were dropped when the Commissions were judged to be illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, but Congress reestablished the Commissions in the Military Commissions Act in autumn 2006, and it is expected that the charges against al-Qosi will be reinstated.

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

On Tuesday, the BBC screened a Horizon programme, Total Isolation, which sought to recreate a controversial sensory deprivation experiment that was conducted 40 years ago. In a series of isolation cells, constructed in a former nuclear bunker in Hertfordshire, a group of six volunteers –- three left alone in dark, sound-proofed rooms, the other three in goggles and foam cuffs, with white noise piped into their ears –- were monitored to see what effect 48 hours of sensory deprivation would have on their mental and physical health.

Images from the BBC programme.

Professor Ian Robbins, head of trauma psychology at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, who has treated some of the British Guantánamo detainees and other victims of torture who come to the UK from around the world, oversaw the experiments, and stated, “It is important to look at the impact of sensory deprivation because of the number of places around the world where it is used as a weapon or to aid interrogation. We know that stimulating the brain helps increase connections in the brain that speeds up information processing, but we wanted to find out if the reverse occurs.”

Professor Robbins and his team were aware that the risks involved in the experiment were considerable. When it was carried out in the 1950s, by Canadian psychologist Professor Donald Hebb, it had to be abandoned after 48 hours, because the volunteers were unable to endure the conditions for a longer period of time. One subject described the sensory deprivation as being “as bad as anything Hitler had ever done to any of his victims,” and afterwards Professor Hebb reported that the “very identity” of his subjects had begun to disintegrate within two days.

One of the volunteers for the Panorama programme was comedian Adam Bloom, who explained, “I’m a very busy person, with a mind that is always racing with thoughts and ideas. My job involves coming up with new jokes all the time and I work by constantly observing my surroundings for anything that I could use on stage. I reckoned 48 hours wasn’t that long and I was sure I could cope.”

What happened instead came as a shock to the comedian. “I spent the first half an hour in the bunker talking, singing and making jokes, but that quickly got boring. So, I took to sitting on my bed, staring in front of me,” he told the Daily Mail. “My mind filled up with thoughts of my life outside, and I started to worry about my fiancée and family. What if something happened to them while I’m in here? Would anyone let me know? It didn’t take me long to feel more anxious that I usually would.”

Within a few hours, Bloom fell asleep, but when he woke up, he realized that the familiar anchors of reality had deserted him. “In the absence of a watch or sunlight, I’d totally lost track of time,” he said. “I dozed on and off for what I thought was a few hours, but when I woke up I had no idea whether it was day or night. It was really unnerving. Even eating the meals I was handed didn’t help me reset my body clock. I felt horrendously bored, and completely out of touch with everything.”

Just 18 hours after entering the bunker, Bloom began experiencing paranoia. “At one point, I started singing and then I burst into tears,” he said. “I can’t remember the last time I cried, and I felt my emotions were beginning to run out of control. Then, I found myself suspecting the whole experiment was a trick. How did I know who these people really were? What if they’d gone home and I was trapped down there forever? I knew I was being ridiculous, because setting up the experiment had taken months and involved lengthy meetings and e-mails, but I couldn’t shake the sense of paranoia.”

After 24 hours, Bloom felt that his brainpower was flagging. “Without light,” he explained, “it was almost impossible to stimulate myself and my brain felt as though it was going to sleep.” By 30 hours, he responded by pacing his room endlessly in a bid to keep himself occupied, prompting Professor Robbins to comment, “This behaviour is often seen in animals, as well as people, when they are kept in confinement. It’s a way of providing input into your life physically.”

Finally, after 40 hours, Bloom began to hallucinate. He said that he saw a pile of 500 oyster shells, and described them in detail. “I could see the pearly sheen on the oyster shells as clear as day,” he explained, adding, “Then I felt as though the room was taking off from underneath me. For the first time, I realized that the lack of stimulation was driving me close to insanity. I felt nothing but numbness, as though I was losing the will to live. I considered pulling out, but I told myself that at least I could comfort myself with the thought that my ordeal was soon going to be over. Some prisoners have had to endure these conditions for months, or even years.”

Artist Barney Ashton, one of the six volunteers. Two other volunteers experienced hallucinations, according to the BBC. Mickey, a postman, was frightened when he saw mosquitoes and fighter planes buzzing around his head, and Claire, a psychology student, didn’t mind the little cars, snakes and zebras, but was scared when she suddenly felt that somebody else was in the room.

Unlike most reality shows, “Total Isolation” at least had a valid point to make, and it is, I think, tremendously important that the terrible effects of sensory deprivation can be demonstrated, on mainstream TV, in the space of just 48 hours. When Bloom undertook psychological tests, after the experiment ended, the results showed that his ability to process information had been impaired, that his memory had been reduced, and, perhaps most significantly, given the programme makers’ stated intent to compare their experiment with the suffering endured by those facing “enhanced interrogation,” his suggestibility had increased.

I hope that the show was widely seen, and that it helps people to overcome the widespread delusion that sensory deprivation, solitary confinement, and the prolonged use of noise and darkness (or permanent light) are somehow inconvenient rather than examples of torture. By a curious coincidence, the programme screened on the same day that Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was once accused of plotting to detonate a “dirty bomb” in a US city, was sentenced instead for supporting terrorist activities abroad. For the three and a half years that the “bomb plot” allegations persisted –- before they were dropped, either because they were groundless or because exposing them would have revealed rather too much about the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the intelligence services –- Padilla had been held as an “enemy combatant” in a US military brig, where he had been subjected to prolonged solitary confinement and sensory deprivation.

Last September, in an article for the Christian Science Monitor, Warren Richey described in detail how Padilla was cut off from all external stimuli: “Padilla’s cell measured nine feet by seven feet. The windows were covered over. There was a toilet and sink. The steel bunk was missing its mattress. He had no pillow. No sheet. No clock. No calendar. No radio. No television. No telephone calls. No visitors. Even Padilla’s lawyer was prevented from seeing him for nearly two years. For significant periods of time the Muslim convert was denied any reading material, including the Koran. The mirror on the wall was confiscated. Meals were slid through a slot in the door. The light in his cell was always on.”

Richey added, “Those who haven’t experienced solitary confinement can imagine that life locked in a small space would be inconvenient and boring. But according to a broad range of experts who have studied the issue, isolation can be psychologically devastating. Extreme isolation, in concert with other coercive techniques, can literally drive a person insane, [which] makes it a potential instrument of torture.” When approved by [former US defense secretary] Donald Rumsfeld for use at Guantánamo, Defense Department lawyers warned that isolation was “not known to have been generally used for interrogation purposes for longer than 30 days.” This echoed the CIA’s findings, in a declassified 1963 handbook, when the agency warned of the “profound moral objection” of applying “duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage.”

According to Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist and “an expert on the debilitating effects of solitary confinement,” who conducted a detailed examination of Padilla for his lawyers, it was “clear from examining Mr. Padilla that that limit was surpassed.” After studying the daily activity logs relating to his incarceration, particularly during the period from November 2002 to April 2003, which Padilla himself described as the “terrible time,” Grassian discovered that it was “not unusual for Mr. Padilla to go four, five, or six days without even brief [visual checks] by the brig staff, who were, in any event, under instruction not to converse with him.” Richey added, “Other than the brief checks by brig guards, Padilla went through stretches of 34 days, 17 days and 15 days without any human contact,” and Grassian concluded that “when he did have such contact, it was inevitably with an interrogator.”

Given that two days of isolation induced paranoia, hallucinations and increased susceptibility in volunteers who knew that they were free to leave, it was not surprising, in Padilla’s case, that the results were rather more harrowing. As Dr. Angela Hegarty, a forensic scientist who spent 22 hours with him last year, explained to Democracy Now, “What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind.”

Because of his recent conviction, Padilla is the most topical example of a real-life prisoner whose experiences relate to the themes touched upon by the BBC last week, but he is not the only one. At Guantánamo, at the US prisons in Afghanistan where prisoners were “processed” for Guantánamo, and at secret, CIA-run prisons in Afghanistan and other countries, such techniques were widespread, and, as with Padilla, were applied well beyond a 48-hour time limit. Many of these cases are discussed in depth in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, but another example, which I came across recently, also springs to mind. In a recent interview, Damien Corsetti, a former interrogator at Bagram, one of the US prisons in Afghanistan, where several prisoners were murdered by US forces, explained the failures of an institutional policy of sleep deprivation, which also involved the allied evils of prolonged solitary confinement and sensory deprivation.

“We had those people going without sleep for a whole week,” Corsetti said. “After two or three days with no sleep, you believe anything. In fact, it was a problem. The interpreters couldn’t understand what they were saying. The prisoners were having hallucinations. Because, of course, this is not like if you or me go three days without sleep when we’re partying. I’ve gone five days without sleep when I’ve been partying. But this is different. You’re in a cell where they let you sleep only a quarter of an hour every now and then. With no contact with the outside world. Without seeing sunlight. Like that, a day seems like a week. Your mental capacity is destroyed.”

The following report –- on actions across London by the London Guantánamo Campaign and Cageprisoners to mark the sixth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo as a lawless “War on Terror” prison –- was published on the website of the National Guantánamo Coalition. I reproduce it here because it covers, in detail, the range of events on the day, and because it gives me the opportunity to post more of the fine photos taken by photographer Richard Wolff, who can be contacted at: rkwolff@googlemail.com. Thanks to Aisha for the report.

Friday 11 January 2008 marked the sixth year since the American Guantánamo Bay detention facility opened up to accommodate “enemy combatants” in the “war on terror”. Opened to detain and interrogate those deemed to be “dangerous men” involved in the 9/11 attacks, and attacks on the US in Afghanistan, no one held there has ever been charged in connection with the attack on the twin towers, and only one person has ever been convicted of a minor charge. Of the over 800 men who have passed through in the past six years, the vast majority have been released and returned home without charge or conviction. Five men, including three in their early twenties, have returned home in coffins –- four having died in uninvestigated, suspicious circumstances –- and the fifth died recently of cancer.

Deemed “enemy combatants” and thus not held under recognised international law, the detainees have sustained years of arbitrary detention with no real sign of an end in sight, and have been subjected to a regime of torture, sensory deprivation, and abuse of their human rights. They have also been deprived of adequate medical and legal assistance and access to their families –- all without any evidence of culpability or wrongdoing.

To mark this sad anniversary, on a damp Friday across the UK, demonstrations and actions were held in many towns, including Edinburgh, Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham and London. A variety of actions took place in London.

Campaigners in London from the London Guantánamo Campaign and Cageprisoners focused their actions on the British government, calling on it to act to bring the two remaining British residents in Guantánamo –- Binyam Mohamed and Ahmed Belbacha –- back to the UK, to urge the American government to close down Guantánamo Bay and to urge action by safe, third countries to accept innocent detainees who have nowhere to go upon release. In 2007, the British government took positive actions, resulting in four British residents being returned to the UK. The government must continue this course of action and back up its verbal declarations that Guantánamo must close down with concrete action.

At 11.30am, former Guantánamo Bay detainees Moazzam Begg (now a spokesman for Cageprisoners), Bisher al-Rawi, and Taher Deghayes, brother of recently released Brighton resident Omar Deghayes, headed a contingent of well-known activists to present a letter signed by prominent individuals and organisations calling for the British government to work to close down Guantánamo Bay. The letter also urged the government to take action to seek the release and return to the UK of British residents Ahmed Belbacha and Binyam Mohamed, the latter for whom the government has made representations but whose return was blocked by the US authorities. Having been cleared for release in February 2007 and deemed to pose no threat at all, the former has languished in Guantánamo Bay for almost a year for want of a safe country to be released to.

Outside Downing Street on a rainy morning, Messrs. Begg, al-Rawi and Deghayes were joined by Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP, Jean Lambert MEP, actors Joanna Lumley, Corin Redgrave and Kika Markham, Zachary Katznelson, senior counsel at Reprieve, the legal charity representing several dozen Guantánamo detainees, and journalists Yvonne Ridley, Victoria Brittain and Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files. After handing in the letter, those present held interviews with the press including ITV, Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, Press TV, Reuters TV and the Islam Channel.

Simultaneously, the London Guantánamo Campaign organised a “statues” event at various sites all over London throughout the day. Starting off at 8am in the cold and wet at Liverpool Street Station in East London and Paddington Station in West London, groups went around various parts of east, west, north, south and central London, with one or two people dressed in the orange jumpsuits now symbolic of Guantánamo Bay, and sometimes with their heads covered in black hoods posing as human statues, as other members of the group handed out leaflets and spoke to the public. Overall the public response from Londoners was positive, with many people expressing surprise that Guantánamo Bay had been open for so long and showing sympathy with the plight of the detainees. Some hostility was shown by City-working folk at the ever-busy Liverpool Street Station who showed little sympathy for victims of torture.

Politicians took part in the day’s events too with Martin Linton MP (Battersea) joining the South London group as they raised awareness about local man Shaker Aamer, who is still held in Guantánamo Bay, and other detainees outside the Asda supermarket in Clapham Junction.

In East London, after attending the handing in of the letter to Downing Street, Green MEP Jean Lambert joined the East London group outside the East London Mosque in Whitechapel, where the public were very receptive to the campaigners and the message they were putting across. Ms. Lambert stated, in a press release issued for this event, “The British government must aid the closure of the Guantánamo Bay facility and other illegal prisons and help repatriate detainees. It is outrageous that so many have been imprisoned for so long without charge. That America has allowed this situation to continue for six years represents a complete disregard for human rights”.

The Central London group visited various sites of historic and touristic interest, taking in Downing Street, Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the City of London, the Millennium Bridge and the Tate Modern, mingling among both Londoners and visitors to the capital.

Campaigners on the West London route met Karen Buck MP outside her constituency office in North Kensington where she called Guantánamo Bay “an abomination and [it] should be closed down”. Karen Buck, MP for Binyam Mohamed, who lived and worked in the West London area for over seven years, has agreed to meet campaigners from the London Guantánamo Campaign to work towards his release. In West London, campaigners also met individuals at the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre in Westbourne Park, who knew Mr. Mohamed.

In North London, campaigners were joined outside Brent Town Hall by several Liberal Democrat councillors. Brent, home to three former detainees –- Martin Mubanga, Jamil El-Banna and Abdelnour Sameur –- has been particularly supportive of the Guantánamo detainees, with local MPs taking positive action, including a sustained campaign by MP Sarah Teather to have her constituent Jamil El-Banna released, and the local council passing several motions in support of the detainees and the closure of Guantánamo Bay.

Outside Paddington Green police station.

The North London and West London groups joined forces outside Paddington Green Police Station, where many of the British nationals and residents have been detained upon their return to the UK, although none have been charged in Britain, before joining a demonstration outside the American Embassy organised by London Catholic Worker at 4-6pm.

Around 20 people attended this vigil, which included a candlelit vigil for the five men who have died at Guantánamo Bay. At 5pm, the names of all the men at Guantánamo Bay were read out, including their ages and their nationalities. This was a particularly poignant and effective moment and many passers-by stopped to watch for a while at least; reading the names of those the US has effectively sought to gag and make vanish was all the more relevant outside its own embassy, showing that the injustice and repression suffered at Guantánamo Bay has not gone unnoticed elsewhere.

Vigil outside the US embassy.

Over 150 people braved the weather and joined the London Guantánamo Campaign at 6-8pm in Parliament Square for a demonstration opposite the Houses of Parliament calling on the British government to act to close down Guantánamo Bay. Demonstrators were addressed by Victoria Brittain, Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP, Andy Worthington, Gareth Peirce, Moazzam Begg, Jean Lambert MEP, Bruce Kent, Yvonne Ridley, Hugo Charlton from CAMPACC, Stewart Halforty from the Stop The War Coalition, Jackie Chase from the Save Omar Campaign in Brighton and Chris Chang, an investigator from Reprieve.

Gareth Peirce.

All the speakers raised important points about the continuing regime of arbitrary detention at Guantánamo Bay. Baroness Sarah Ludford stated that the detainees must be released or tried and that there could be no third way out for the US. Speakers also emphasised the point that over the last six years, it is not just the lives of the detainees that have been destroyed, but also those of their families and all those who knew them. Several speakers drew parallels with the current situation in the UK and Britain’s own Guantánamo-style regime of arbitrary detention in Belmarsh and Long Lartin as well as through control orders. Gareth Peirce and several others addressed the hypocrisy of this country in its acquiescence to what is happening in Guantánamo Bay. Prisoners at other secret prisons in the “war on terror” were also remembered as well as those Guantánamo detainees who are now effectively refugees –- innocent men who cannot be released because their safety cannot be guaranteed in their countries of origin and need to find a safe third country to be sent to.

Bruce Kent.

The demonstration was sung out by Chris Chang performing his rap version of Guantanamera and chanting led by Daniel Viesnik from the London Guantánamo Campaign.

The message from this day of action in the UK and other protests in other parts of the world clearly got through to the American government as, on 13 January, during a visit to Guantánamo Bay, the American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said that he favoured the closure of Guantánamo due to the damage it had done to the US’s reputation.

While continuing to call for the closure of Guantánamo Bay and the return of Binyam Mohamed and Ahmed Belbacha to the UK, campaigners hope that there will be no anniversary to mark on 11 January 2009 and that, by then, Guantánamo and other American secret prisons will be confined to the waste bin of history.

Jackie Chase (left) of Brighton’s Save Omar campaign, with a picture of Binyam Mohamed, and Andy Worthington (right).

Special thanks to the Green Party, Wandsworth Stop the War, We Are Change, Barnet, Enfield and Palmers Green Amnesty, Peace and Justice in East London and all the volunteers on the day. For more photos of the petition at 10 Downing Street and the rally in Parliament Square, see this Cageprisoners page.

The news that US citizen Jose Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United States, although it is unlikely that there will be much more than a whimper of dissent.

The former gang member and convert to Islam –- whose arrest in May 2002 was trumpeted by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft as that of a “known terrorist,” who was “exploring a plan” to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a US city –- was once regarded as one of the most dangerous terrorists ever apprehended on American soil. Almost six years later, as he received his sentence, he was not actually accused of lifting a finger to harm even a single US citizen.

While this is shocking enough in and of itself, Padilla’s sentence –- in what at least one perceptive commentator called “the most important case of our lifetimes” –- is particularly disturbing because it sends a clear message to the President of the United States that he can, if he wishes (and as he did with Padilla), designate a US citizen as an “enemy combatant,” hold him without charge or trial in a naval brig for 43 months, and torture him –- through the use of prolonged sensory deprivation and solitary confinement –- to such an extent that, as the psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty explained after spending 22 hours with Padilla, “What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind.”

The photo of Jose Padilla’s sensory-deprived trip to the dentist that caused a shock when it was published by the New York Times in December 2006.

Padilla’s warders had another take on his condition, describing him as “so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for ‘a piece of furniture,’” but the most detailed analysis of the effects of his torture was, again, provided by Angela Hegarty in an interview last August with Democracy Now:

Juan Gonzalez: And have you dealt with someone who had been in isolation for such a long period of time before?
Dr. Angela Hegarty: No. This was the first time I ever met anybody who had been isolated for such an extraordinarily long period of time. I mean, the sensory deprivation studies, for example, tell us that without sleep, especially, people will develop psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, panic attacks, depression, suicidality within days. And here we had a man who had been in this situation, utterly dependent on his interrogators, who didn’t treat him all that nicely, for years. And apart from –- the only people I ever met who had such a protracted experience were people who were in detention camps overseas, that would come close, but even then they weren’t subjected to the sensory deprivation. So, yes, he was somewhat of a unique case in that regard.

As if this were not worrying enough, it was what happened after Padilla’s 43-month ordeal that sealed the President’s impunity to torture US citizens at will. When it seemed that his case was within reach of the US Supreme Court, the government transferred him into the US legal system, deposited him in a normal prison environment, dropped all mention of the “dirty bomb” plot, and charged him, based on his association with two alleged terrorist facilitators, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, with participating in a Florida-based plot to aid Islamic extremists in holy wars abroad. When the case came to court last summer, the judge, Marcia Cooke, airbrushed Padilla’s torture from history, insisting that it could not be discussed at all, and, after a trial regarded as farcical by many observers, Padilla and his co-defendants were duly found guilty.

Today’s sentencing, after an unusually protracted two-week debate, has apparently brought the whole sordid saga to an end, with Padilla’s torture only mentioned briefly in passing by Judge Cooke, who noted, “I do find that the conditions [for Padilla as an enemy combatant] were so harsh that they warrant consideration.” Nevertheless, he received a longer sentence than either of his co-defendants (who were sentenced to 15 years and eight months, and 12 years and eight months, respectively), even though two jurors admitted to the Miami Herald that the jury as a whole “struggled to convict Padilla because the panel initially viewed him as a bit player in the scheme to aid Islamic extremists, unlike his co-defendants.”

They certainly had a point. While the conviction of Hassoun and Jayyousi was based on coded conversations in 126 phone calls intercepted by the FBI over a number of years, Padilla was included in only seven of those phone calls. Groomed by his mentor, Hassoun, he had traveled to the Middle East and, in 2000, had applied to attend a military training camp in Afghanistan, using the name Abu Abdallah al-Muhajir. His application form, which, according to a government expert, bore his fingerprints, was apparently discovered during a CIA raid on an alleged al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan, but although the prosecution presented an alleged al-Qaeda graduation list with his Muslim name on it during the sentencing, they had been unable to provide any evidence during the trial that he had actually attended the training camp in Afghanistan.

In the end, Padilla’s conviction hinged on the jury’s determination that he had “joined the terrorism conspiracy in the United States before leaving the country.” This was based on a single recorded conversation, in July 1997, in which he stated that he was ready to join a jihad overseas.

17 years and four months seems to me to be an extraordinarily long sentence for little more than a thought crime, but when the issue of Padilla’s three and half years of suppressed torture is raised, it’s difficult not to conclude that justice has just been horribly twisted, that the President and his advisors have just got away with torturing an American citizen with impunity, and that no American citizen can be sure that what happened to Padilla will not happen to him or her. Today, it was a Muslim; tomorrow, unless the government’s powers are taken away from them, it could be any number of categories of “enemy combatants” who have not yet been identified.

For more on Jose Padilla and other US “enemy combatants,” see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

As published on AlterNet, the Huffington Post, Anti-war.com and American Torture.

This bleak but honest review, by Mike Phipps, appeared in Labour Briefing.

Who are Guantánamo’s detainees? They are generally not al-Qaeda members or other terrorists but aid workers, economic migrants or politically naïve Taliban foot soldiers –- mostly sold to the US by their allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some were known to be innocent of any involvement with the Taliban or al-Qaeda but were probably arrested to persuade them to turn informer.

The stories of some of those captured in Afghanistan are harrowing –- people buried alive or suffocated by the score in giant metal containers, or barricaded in buildings and set on fire. Those detained in that country faced horrific brutality from their captors –- including US soldiers. One [Northern] Alliance general said he saw US soldiers stabbing prisoners in the legs and cutting their tongues. Many were beaten to death, sometimes just for pleasure.

In Pakistan too, detainees complained of “beatings and harsh torture” in the presence of US military personnel. When transporting prisoners, US soldiers blindfolded them and bound them hand and foot, regularly throwing them from the planes on arrival: many were badly hurt. In detention, sleep deprivation was commonplace and whole groups of prisoners were collectively punished for any individual non-compliance. Detainees report routine humiliation, including being urinated on: and that the Red Cross did nothing. Some were blinded with glass or made to walk barefoot on barbed wire.

The US Administration had decided the Geneva Convention did not apply to detainees in its “war on terror”. Its interrogations were accompanied by violent beatings and death threats. CIA operatives allegedly stubbed cigarettes out on prisoners’ bodies, administered electric shocks to the genitals and carried out mock executions. At Bagram, detainees were suspended by their wrists for days on end, subjected to forced nudity, had petrol injected in their anuses and were threatened with rape by dogs. Two men were killed there, beaten to death.

When Guantánamo opened, prisoners were dragged in on their knees, wearing orange jumpsuits, blacked out goggles, surgical masks and headphones. They were housed in two metre square, floodlit cages, open to the elements, branded by the Administration as “among the best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth”. They were asked the same questions repeatedly, told they would never see their families again and subject to vicious beatings –- for praying, for shouting, for anything. One man had his leg broken in interrogation, another his back –- he is now using a wheelchair. Another was permanently blinded in one eye. Many have kidney problems, due to being forced to lie without blankets in freezing cold air conditioning. Men were denied toilet facilities, forced to soil themselves, then used as human mops to clean up cells and left in the same clothes for days. One man suffered a stroke after a soldier jumped on his head –- he received no medical attention for ten days.

Sexual humiliation was used on the most religious detainees. Some were wrapped in the Israeli flag, others were given a “mock baptism”. Some were medicated against their will, causing bodily collapse and mental distress. Others were denied vital medication by their interrogators. These abuses all met with warm approval from the Pentagon.

Worse was reserved for those rendered by the US to third countries, where they were brutally tortured by local interrogators and the CIA. Mutilation, electric shocks and permanent sleep deprivation were routine. Some prisoners went insane; others died.

Alongside the brutality there is the US ineptitude. Afghan men were detained for wearing olive green jackets, supposedly the Taliban uniform, but in fact widely on sale in the shops. Others were arrested for firing warning shots in the night at what they thought were burglars, who turned out to be US raiding parties. Such “aggression” was dealt with extremely harshly –- not even juveniles escaped the cruelty.

Legal challenges to the detentions in Guantánamo led to a gradual release of some prisoners, not because they were obviously innocent, but as a result of deals with their home countries. Conversely, British residents who lack UK citizenship continue to languish there because the Foreign Office has only just raised their cases with the US, after years of washing their hands of them.

Three detainees have been driven to suicide, described by the US Administration as “a good PR move”. One was just 17 at the time of his capture. There have been many more attempted suicides and hunger strikes. The 2005 hunger strike was dealt with extremely viciously: feeding tubes the thickness of a finger were shoved up detainees’ noses without anaesthetic, resulting in prisoners “vomiting up substantial amounts of blood”, according to declassified documents. As doctors watched, soldiers used the same bloody tubes, uncleaned, on different prisoners, who remained heavily shackled throughout the ordeal.

This book is one of the grimmest I have ever read. Its subtitle, The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, underlines just what a thorough job Andy Worthington has done in piecing together this shocking tale of depravity.

The Guantánamo Files is published by Pluto Press.