Archive for February, 2008

It’s always a sure sign that something has gone horribly wrong when Tory politicians can only be persuaded with extreme reluctance to support anti-terror measures pursued by the Labour government. But this is exactly what happened on Thursday, when Conservative MPs joined with the government’s own MPs to extend until March 2009 the legislation authorizing the government to hold alleged terror suspects under control orders.

The vote to extend the control orders — which are currently used against 15 alleged terror suspects — passed by 267 votes to 60, but Tory MPs were clearly not bowled over by a hyperbolic statement made by Security Minister Tony McNulty, who, as though infected by the ghosts of previous Labour hard men John Reid and David Blunkett, claimed, “The threat (of terrorism) is clearly real, serious and represents a threat unparalleled in our country’s history.”

Speaking on behalf of his fellow MPs, the Tories’ shadow attorney general Dominic Grieve declared, “On balance, and with a considerable degree of reluctance, our view is we should allow renewal to take place this year.” Other notes of caution were sounded by Labour MPs. Alex Carlile, the government’s terror laws ombudsman, said that no control order should be extended beyond two years “save in genuinely exceptional circumstances,” and Andrew Dismore, the chairman of the joint Human Rights Committee, warned that the orders could create “Guantánamo-style martyrs” unless a maximum time limit was imposed. “Perhaps it is the gilded cage of Acacia Avenue rather than the harshness of a Cuban camp,” he said, “but we have still seen indefinite restrictions on their freedom.”

A very specific kind of personal prison, control orders were introduced in March 2005 after the government’s previous method of dealing with alleged terror suspects — holding them in high-security prisons, including Belmarsh, without charge or trial — was ruled illegal by the House of Lords. Generally involving curfews, electronic tagging, the requirement to report regularly to police, and restrictions on associating with others and using telephones and computers, they constitute a kind of house arrest, and have been criticized for contravening the European Convention on Human Rights (PDF). In April 2006 the high court ruled that placing a man known only as “S” under a control order without a fair hearing infringed Article 6 of the Convention, and in June 2006 a judge quashed the control orders against six other men, ruling that they were “incompatible” with Article 5 of the Convention, which prevents indefinite detention without trial.

The reasons for the government‘s insistence on using control orders were explained to the BBC by Labour MP John Denham in May last year. Denham said, “They were brought in because the courts prevented the government from jailing people who were believed to be terrorists, [and who] sometimes had a terrorist record overseas; we were stopped from jailing them because we didn’t have the evidence to convict them here.”

Critics, however, point out that holding men without charge or trial — with echoes of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay — is monstrously unjust, and that the control orders could be done away with if the government was prepared to join most other western countries in establishing ways of incorporating evidence collected by the security services in trials. At present, the government refuses to do so, leading to valid complaints that the quality of the evidence cannot be tested.

Ironically, the day after the legislation was extended for a year, the supposedly significant and sensitive intelligence used to justify imposing one of these control orders was revealed as a sham when a high court judge dismissed the control order against 25-year old British national Cerie Bullivant, ruling that there was no “reasonable suspicion” that he intended to take part in terrorism abroad. According to a report in the Guardian, MI5 had alleged that the “restriction of movement measures were necessary” because Bullivant “could be planning to travel to Iraq or Afghanistan to join up with terrorists.”

First subjected to a control order in June 2006, which was renewed last year, Mr. Bullivant became something of a terror suspect celebrity last May when he, along with two brothers, Lamine and Ibrahim Adam, disappeared after breaking the conditions of their control orders. The Adam brothers, whose other brother, Anthony Garcia, was sentenced to life in prison in April 2007 for his part in a fertilizer bomb plot, failed to report to a “monitoring company,” and Mr. Bullivant failed to turn up at a police station, which he was required to do on a daily basis. In all the hysterical reporting that followed, there was little, if any mention of the reason that Mr. Bullivant was regarded as so significantly dangerous that the government was prepared to imprison him without charge or trial, using a form of house arrest.

From L to R: Lamine Adam, Ibrahim Adam and Cerie Bullivant as they appeared in publicity issued after they absconded from their control orders in May 2007. The Sun’s headline was typical of the scaremongering that ensued: “Fury as ‘terror’ bruvs do runner.”

Yesterday, as Mr. Justice Collins quashed the control order, the government’s overreaction to the supposed “threat” posed by Mr. Bullivant was made clear. He had been subjected to a control order after he was stopped at Heathrow as he was about to board a flight to Syria with Ibrahim Adam. Mr. Bullivant said that he intended to study Arabic in Syria, but the security services decided that he and Adam intended “to carry out extremist Islamic activity,” and that they were possibly intending to travel on to Iraq or Afghanistan to fight against western forces, or to conduct a “martyrdom operation.”

Quashing the control order, Mr. Justice Collins said that it might have been “reasonable to assume that individuals with whom Bullivant associated might have been involved in terrorism, but that did not make it reasonable to suspect he had the same inclinations.” He added, “The dangers of guilt by association are obvious.”

Cerie Bullivant as he appeared on CCTV at Dagenham police station in May 2007.

Outside the court, Bullivant celebrated his freedom, but asked reporters to consider the other men who were still held under control orders. “Although I am very happy that this order has now been lifted,” he said, “this draconian legislation is still continuing to ruin the lives of others and their families.”

Andy is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. For further information about the control order regime, see my article, Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees.

As published on CounterPunch and Indymedia.

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, is to be commended for his confession on Thursday that US “extraordinary rendition” flights had refuelled twice at an airbase on the British colonial territory of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. Leased to the US in the 1960s, in exchange for cut-price nuclear weapons, the island is effectively under US control, although it remains a British sovereign territory, and the British government maintains a small base on the island, which houses 50 military personnel.

It would be slightly churlish to point out that Mr. Miliband only made his confession because he was shamed into it through the persistent pressure exerted on the government by Reprieve, the London-based legal charity that provides frontline investigation and legal representation to prisoners held without trial in the “War on Terror,” and by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, led by the Tory MP Andrew Tyrie. Last October, Reprieve published a report on the use of Diego Garcia as a secret prison, and the parliamentary group used the Freedom of Information Act to request the minutes of discussions between the British and American governments in Washington last September, which were refused by the British government on the grounds that releasing the information “would prejudice the defence” of territory by “exposing plans to counter possible terrorist attacks.” Just three weeks ago, Mr. Tyrie pledged to appeal against the Foreign Office’s decision, and Mr. Miliband’s confession therefore appears to have been timed to put some distance between the government and its increasingly vocal critics.

There are, however, two simple reasons for not bashing Mr. Miliband too hard: firstly, because any confession, however forced, is better than none at all, and secondly, because it also highlights the evasiveness of other senior government figures — step forward, former PM Tony Blair and former foreign secretary Jack Straw — who maintained between 2005 and 2007 that nothing of the sort had ever happened.

In December 2005, Jack Straw stated, “Careful research by officials has been unable to identify any occasion since 11 September 2001, or earlier in the Bush administration, when we received a request for permission by the United States for a rendition through UK territory or airspace, nor are we otherwise aware of such a case.” Tony Blair followed this up by saying, “I have absolutely no evidence to suggest that anything illegal has been happening here at all.”

In January 2006, Mr. Straw repeated his assertions, stating, “The US would not render a detainee through UK territory or airspace without our permission,” and this was followed in March 2007, when Tony Blair assured the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) that, as the BBC put it, “he was satisfied that the US had at no time since 9/11 rendered an individual through the UK or through our Overseas Territories.”

As a result, the ISC’s Report on Rendition, published on June 28, 2007, stated, “we are satisfied that there is no evidence that US rendition flights have used UK airspace (except the two cases in 1998 referred to earlier in the report) and that there is no evidence of them having landed at UK military airfields,” and Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch Brown asserted in July 2007, “The US authorities have given assurances that no terrorist suspects have passed through Diego Garcia.”

Mr. Miliband, of course, had an explanation for his predecessors’ refusal to engage with the concept that, by facilitating, or even by turning a blind eye to the use of British airspace for “extraordinary rendition” flights transferring “War on Terror” suspects to exotic locations where, on numerous occasions, they were tortured, the British government was itself complicit in torture. He had, he said, only just been informed about it.

“I am very sorry indeed to have to report to the House the need to correct these and other statements on the subject, on the basis of new information passed to officials on 15 February 2008 by the US Government,” Mr. Miliband explained. “Contrary to earlier explicit assurances that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights, recent US investigations have now revealed two occasions, both in 2002, when this had in fact occurred.” He added, “An error in the earlier US records search meant that these cases did not come to light. In both cases a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia. The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then.”

This is fine as far as it goes, but as I mentioned in October — the last time that the once tranquil island of Diego Garcia reared its ugly head as a rumoured base for a secret “War on Terror” prison — this story goes far deeper than profuse apologies for overlooking a twice-used pit-stop for terror planes.

To give just two examples from my earlier article, “In June 2006, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who produced a detailed report on ‘extraordinary rendition’ for the Council of Europe … concluded that Diego Garcia had been used as a secret prison. Having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, he told the European Parliament, ‘We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the “processing” of high-value detainees.’”

Even more compelling evidence came from Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, who is now professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy. As I described it in October, McCaffrey “has twice let slip that Diego Garcia has, as the administration’s opponents have struggled to maintain, been used to hold terror suspects. In May 2004, he blithely declared, ‘We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,’ and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, ‘They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.’”

As soon as the news broke, General Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, who recently admitted that the CIA had waterboarded “high-value” terror detainees who ended up at Guantánamo, stepped forward to deny that Diego Garcia had ever been used as a “War on Terror” prison. “That is false,” he said, adding, as the New York Times put it, that “neither of the two detainees carried aboard the rendition flights that refuelled at Diego Garcia ‘was ever part of the CIA’s high-value terrorist interrogation program.’” He also explained that one of the detainees “was ultimately transferred to Guantánamo,” while the other “was returned to his home country,” which was identified by State Department officials as Morocco. With remarkable insouciance, Gen. Hayden added, “These were rendition operations, nothing more.”

With apparent evidence that a secret prison had indeed existed on Diego Garcia shut out of the discussions — and no mention made of the name of the casually rendered Moroccan, or of the proof offered by Stephen Grey, the author of Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Rendition Programme, that on September 11, 2002, the day that 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh (a “high-value” detainee if ever there was one) was seized in Karachi, one of the CIA’s planes landed at Diego Garcia — it is no surprise that, before Mr. Miliband had the opportunity to sit down after his contrite performance, Reprieve immediately issued a press release calling for a public inquiry.

Andy is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

As published on Indymedia.

The following review of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison appeared in the January 2008 issue of New Internationalist.

According to recent reports, George Bush is looking for a pretext to close the abomination that is Guantánamo Bay. Together with its lesser-known satellites, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and various secret torture camps in eastern Europe, Guantánamo Bay has long been a symbol of Bush’s incoherent and botched ‘War on Terror’.

There have been previous attempts to pierce the fog of secrecy and lies that protects this illegal prison situated outside US judicial scrutiny on the soil of another country. Most notably, the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith wrote in Bad Men of the inhumane treatment of several of his clients and the horrific limbo of their existence as they are held for years, without trial or due process, as ‘illegal enemy combatants’, a designation recognized only by its inventor, the US.

Andy Worthington’s book, The Guantánamo Files is, as far as I am aware, the first to concentrate not on the processes of the camp but on the lives of those trapped within its walls and wire. Drawing on Pentagon documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and on the testimonies of the men themselves, Worthington pieces together their stories before, during and — for the fortunate — after their incarceration. From its inception in 2002, a central plank of the dehumanizing strategy at Guantánamo has been the withholding of information about its unfortunate inmates. Andy Worthington has done them and the cause of truth an inestimable service in telling the individual stories of these men, the vast majority of whom committed no crime more heinous than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A week ago, I was invited by the BBC to be a guest on Richard Bacon’s show on Radio 5 Live as part of an hour-long discussion about whether or not the six Guantánamo detainees charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks would receive a fair trial. The other guest was Michael Goldfarb, the online editor of WorldwideStandard.com, the Weekly Standard’s Blog, who subsequently published a post that attempted to undermine my point of view, by mentioning one of my articles, published on CounterPunch (and here with links), in which I reported claims made by one of the Guantánamo detainees, Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi, that he has been infected with AIDS during his imprisonment at Guantánamo.

Mr. Goldfarb was dismissive of the article, which came as no surprise to me, because it also revealed — as confirmed by the Chief Medical Doctor at Guantánamo — that Mr. al-Ghizzawi has contracted tuberculosis during his imprisonment, and that he also suffers from hepatitis B, which was dormant before his arrival at the prison.

Those who read the full article would also have discovered that Mr. al-Ghizzawi’s case is central to complaints made in sworn statements last year by military officers, who worked on the tribunals at Guantánamo, that the entire system was rigged, through the use of generalized and often generic information masquerading as specific intelligence against individual detainees, to rubber-stamp the administration’s untested claims that everyone who had ended up in US custody — however randomly — was an “enemy combatant,” who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

After the members of his first tribunal decided, based on the “paucity and weakness of the information provided both during and after the CSRT hearing,” that there was “no factual basis” for concluding that Mr. al-Ghizzawi was an “enemy combatant,” — and that, by extension, it was probable that the true story, as Mr. al-Ghizzawi explained, was that he was a shopkeeper, married to an Afghan woman, who was seized by Afghan bounty hunters and sold to the US military — the US military dismissed the members of his first tribunal and held a second, secret tribunal in which they concluded that he was an “enemy combatant” after all.

In the interests of shedding some light on Mr. Goldfarb’s opinions, I reproduce below a transcript of part of last Monday’s show, in which he helpfully described how, after 9/11, the US administration turned its back on 232 years of the law, replacing it with an ad-hoc system in which, to quote his exact words, “we’re making these things up as we go along.”

About twenty minutes into the show, Richard Bacon discussed the greater transparency that would be involved in the cases if they were transferred to US federal courts.

Richard Bacon: Why can’t they be tried in front of a jury in a federal court?

Michael Goldfarb: Well, frankly, there are security issues. You know, we’re not going to expose American citizens to sitting on a jury for al-Qaeda members […]

Richard Bacon: […] So a terror suspect has never been tried in the United States in a civil or federal court?

Michael Goldfarb: Terror suspects have been tried in a federal court …

Richard Bacon: Well, why was that jury exposed to them?

Michael Goldfarb: I mean, if you arrest someone in this country, we’ve dealt with these things differently. The fundamental issue here is that we’re making these things up as we go along. There was no way to do this. […]

Andy Worthington: It’s an extraordinary confession that “we’ve been making this up as we go along.” That’s exactly what seems to have been happening since 9/11 in terms of the detention, interrogation and prosecution of these detainees. You know, what interests me is the issue that you raised of successful prosecutions that took place in the United States of terrorists before 9/11, and this is something that seems to be missed out on, because we’re led to believe that the world started anew on 9/11. Whereas in fact, those of us who have longer memories will remember that there were the African embassy bombings and that there were earlier events, and that there were successful prosecutions.

Richard Bacon: And those juries were exposed to terrorists?

Andy Worthington: Yes, exactly, and it goes deeper than that …

Michael Goldfarb: And that really worked out to prevent 9/11, didn’t it? That really worked out to stymie the onslaught of these terrorists …

Richard Bacon: Are you saying that it somehow contributed to 9/11?

Michael Goldfarb: I’m saying it was an ineffectual response to terrorism, to simply put them in civilian courts and say, “oh, we’re going to treat this as though they’re just criminals like any others.” They’re not criminals like others.

Andy Worthington: I don’t see that that’s an issue at all, and I see that they are criminals like others, actually. And the point I wanted to raise is that there’s an interesting man named Dan Coleman, who was a former FBI interrogator, and he worked with a lot of these terrorist suspects before 9/11, and the interesting thing, the particularly interesting thing about the way Dan Coleman worked, which is germane to the whole thing we’re talking about here, is that he — and other FBI interrogators — said, you might be able to get some tiny bit of information by beating the crap out of somebody, by torturing them, but that is not how to get to dig to the real truth about what’s going on. You do that by building a relationship with the prisoners that you have, and a good interrogator can do that. And then you take them through the court system, because they’re criminals.

For further information, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

As published on the Huffington Post and CounterPunch.

In an important front-page story in the Guardian, Michael Semple, the Irish UN official arrested in Afghanistan at Christmas — along with British EU official Mervyn Patterson — and subsequently expelled for posing a threat to national security by making contact with the Taliban, has robustly defended his actions.

British Royal Marines in Helmand province. Expelled UN official Michael Semple insists, “There is no purely military solution to the current insurgency,” and advocates a policy of wooing insurgents away from the Taliban.

In an interview with Henry McDonald, the Guardian’s Irish correspondent, Semple — described just five months ago by the British Ambassador to Afghanistan as a man who “speaks fluent Pashtu, and understands the grain and granularity of Afghan society better than almost any other foreigner” — insisted that he and Patterson were the victims of local political rivalries, and pointed out, in a concise but significant critique of Western policy, that a purely military solution to the Taliban problem is impossible. He added that, given the potential fluidity of regional Afghan politics, two-thirds of current Taliban supporters could be persuaded to turn against the Taliban. As an example of how shifting political allegiances are not only significant, but have, historically, been overlooked and misunderstood by the West, he also spoke about the case of Haji Naeem Kochi, a tribal leader who was sent to Guantánamo and released in September 2004.

In the interview, Semple said that a local leader in Helmand province had falsely blamed him and Patterson for talking to “one of the irreconcilables” — i.e. insurgents linked to al-Qaeda. Insisting that they had done no such thing, he said that the local leader had “totally manufactured” the controversy to guard the resources given to him by the central government, for one simple reason: he was afraid that his power base would crumble if former insurgents and former Taliban members were brought into the peace process. “We were victims of local politics initially and being seen to take on the foreigners — in this case us — is seen as very popular in many places in Afghanistan. We were soft targets and the whole thing was spun well by him,” Semple said. He added, crucially, “There is a critical difference between what is discreet and what is covert. What we were doing was simply discreet because that was what was required. But it was totally in line with official policy to bring people in from the cold.”

As an example of bringing insurgents “in from the cold,” Semple told McDonald about Mullah Mamuk, a leader in Helmand province, whose local enemies told western forces in 2001 that he was a terrorist. When a reward was then offered for his capture on a widely-distributed “Wanted” poster, Mamuk approached the Taliban for protection, as Semple explained: “So naturally Mamuk goes to the Taliban to feel safe and takes those men he commands who are loyal to him with him, shows Taliban commanders the poster and says ‘It looks like I am now with you.’ He added, “The authorities simply got the wrong guy and drove him into the Taliban’s hands. Now he is currently fighting against the British in Helmand but in my opinion local leaders like Mamuk can be won back over again.”

Advocating the creation of a “network of patronage” to lure men like Mamuk away from the Taliban, Semple continued, “It’s worth remembering there are an awful lot of Mullah Mamuks out there who can easily switch sides away from the Taliban and that is why I firmly believe that with good management you could break two-thirds of the insurgents away from those irreconcilables.”

Providing examples, he explained that some of the men who were sent to Guantánamo during the first two years after the US-led invasion in October 2001 had in fact “switched sides to the Karzai government.” “Take Haji Naeem Kochi, someone I have known for a very long time in Afghanistan,” he said. “After 9/11 and the invasion he ended up doing time in Guantánamo Bay. When he came back … I met up with him. The first thing I asked him was did he learn any English and he replied: ‘Yes, but all I learned was sit up and sit down from the American guards.’ Yet despite doing time in Guantánamo he is now a member of the peace commission aimed at reconciling all Afghans.”

The case of Haji Naeem Kochi is significant, not only for what it reveals about the US-led forces’ misunderstandings about tribal allegiances in Afghanistan, but also because it led to large numbers of regional pro-Karzai leaders — several dozen at least, and possibly more — being sent to Guantánamo. Kochi was just one of many startling examples, as I explain in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. The following is an excerpt from Chapter 17:

“Having failed to round up a single Taliban leader throughout 2003, only one of the 90 men captured in this period was flagged as a significant catch — and even he turned out to be nothing of the sort. 62-year old Haji Naeem Kochi, a tribal elder of the nomadic Kochi tribe, was the object of a manhunt from the earliest days of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom,’ when the Americans bombed numerous locations in an attempt to kill him. Human Rights Watch reported that defense department officials told them that he ‘was a former Taliban official and a “scumbag” involved in smuggling arms over the Pakistani border,’ but when he was finally captured by US forces, on his way to meet President Karzai to discuss a tribal dispute on 1 January 2003, his reputation seemed to vanish like a mirage. Instead of validating the Americans’ concerns, this frail, unthreatening man, who suffered from diabetes and wore a surgical belt after one of his kidneys was removed, was so insignificant that he was released from Guantánamo in September 2004.”

At the conclusion of his interview, Semple drew a comparison between “what he and Patterson were seeking to achieve in Helmand and what the US had done in Anbar province in Iraq, where American forces opened talks with Sunni insurgents which resulted in setbacks for al-Qaeda,” as McDonald described it. “There are many people who served with the Taliban regime who are now well-placed inside the Karzai regime or else are pillars of Afghan society,” Semple said. “They are now living at peace with [it] even if they are critical of it, which is their right. Our mandate was to support the government’s reconciliation process — that’s what we were doing in Helmand before Christmas. There is no purely military solution to the current insurgency. There isn’t a serious actor in Afghanistan who says the only way forward is to fight your way out.”