Archive for July, 2010

Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Yemeni Seized in Iran, Held in Secret CIA Prisons

On Thursday, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Paul Friedman took the tally of victories by the Guantánamo prisoners to 37, out of 51 cases decided, when he granted the habeas corpus petition of Hussein Almerfedi, a 33-year old Yemeni, and instructed the Obama administration to “take all necessary and appropriate steps to facilitate the release of petitioner forthwith.”

Judge Friedman’s unclassified opinion has not yet been released, so it is not, at present, possible to know why he granted Hussein Almerfedi’s habeas petition, but clues can be found in publicly available documents released by the Pentagon, which I drew on for my explanation of his story in my book The Guantánamo Files.

Extraordinarily, Almerfedi was one of ten prisoners transferred to Afghan custody by the Iranian government in early 2002, and then handed on to US forces, in circumstances that have never been explained. One of the ten, an Afghan taxi driver named Aminullah Tukhi, who was released from Guantánamo in December 2007, said that the Iranians had delivered six Arabs, two Afghans, an Uzbek and a Tajik to the Afghans.

Although six of these men ended up in Guantánamo, it is not known what happened to the other four — one of the Arabs, one of the Afghans, and the Uzbek and the Tajik.

However, it would be surprising if their stories ended well, because Aminullah Tukhi, Hussein Almerfedi and the four other men were all held in secret prisons run by the CIA before being sent to Guantánamo, even though most, if not all of them appear to have been nothing more than random foreigners seized opportunistically.

Hussein Almerfedi’s story

In Guantánamo, Almerfedi stated that he had been a student in Yemen, and had traveled to Pakistan in the hope of using members of Jamaat-al-Tablighi, an enormous missionary organization with headquarters in Pakistan, to help him emigrate to Europe. As the New York Times explained on Thursday, he said “he left Yemen because life was intolerable there and that he wanted to go to Europe and seek asylum in a more open, Western society.”

When he found that the Tablighi organization was unable to help him, he “paid a smuggler to take him through Iran and into Turkey and then Greece,” but was seized in Tehran. He added that “he had never been in Afghanistan until the Iranians handed him over to the United States military.” This was disputed by the US authorities, but in an unconvincing manner that was undoubtedly dismissed by Judge Friedman. Unidentified sources — often revealed in previous cases to have been other prisoners subjected to torture or other forms of coercion — alleged that Almerfedi “was seen” at al-Qaeda guesthouses in Afghanistan and described him as “an old junior al-Qaeda member,” and, in desperation, the authorities resorted to declaring, as they have in numerous Guantánamo cases, that although Jamaat-al-Tablighi, which has millions of members, is a “legitimate” organization, it was also used “as cover to mask travel and activities of terrorists including members of al-Qaeda.” This allegation is so vague and sweeping that the authorities might as well have substituted the word “Islam” for “Jamaat-al-Tablighi,” and thereby have attempted to justify imprisoning any Muslim who came into US custody.

Torture in secret CIA prisons

In Guantánamo, Hussein Almerfedi also explained that he was held for a total of 14 months in three prisons in Afghanistan — “two under Afghan control and one under US control,” although he added that they all “seemed to be under US supervision.” One of these prisons was Bagram, and another was the “Dark Prison” near Kabul. Almerfedi stated that he was only interrogated on three occasions in Afghanistan, and that on each occasion he was told that the authorities knew he was innocent and would soon be released.

Almerfedi’s claims that he was not tortured tend to reinforce the suggestion that he was a nobody seized so that he could be sold to US forces — or used as a pawn in some sort of diplomatic deal — as most of the other men seized with him who ended up in Guantánamo have stated that they were tortured extensively in CIA custody, as described in a recent UN report on secret detention:

Wassam al-Ourdoni, a Jordanian released in April 2004, was seized with his wife and child while returning from a religious visit to Pakistan. In 2006, he told Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal action charity Reprieve, that the CIA “put me in jail under circumstances that I can only recall with dread. I lived under unimaginable conditions that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.” He said that he was first placed in an underground prison for 77 days, in a cell that “was so dark that we couldn’t distinguish nights and days,” and was then moved to “prison number three”, where the food was so bad that his weight dropped substantially.

Walid al-Qadasi, a Yemeni transferred to Yemeni custody in April 2004, was held in the “Dark Prison” near Kabul. He told UN representatives that US officials “cut his clothes with scissors, left him naked and took photos of him before giving him Afghan clothes to wear. They then handcuffed his hands behind his back, blindfolded him and started interrogating him. The apparently Egyptian interrogator, accusing him of belonging to al-Qaeda, threatened him with death. He was put in an underground cell measuring approximately two meters by three meters with very small windows. He shared the cell with ten inmates. They had to sleep in shifts due to lack of space and received food only once a day. He spent three months there without ever leaving the cell.”

Rafiq al-Hami, a Tunisian released in Slovakia in January this year, explained in Guantánamo that he was held in secret prisons for “about a one-year period, transferring from one place to another. I was tortured for about three months in a prison called the Prison of Darkness or the Dark Prison.” He added, “Back in Afghanistan I would be tortured. I was threatened. I was left out all night in the cold … I spent two months with no water, no shoes, in darkness and in the cold. There was darkness and loud music for two months. I was not allowed to pray. I was not allowed to fast during Ramadan. These things are documented. You have them.”

No release from Guantánamo

Despite Hussein Almerfedi’s victory in court, which means that the Guantánamo prisoners have now won 73 percent of the cases decided, this success rate will mean little to him, as ten other prisoners who have won their habeas petitions are still held.

Moreover, as a Yemeni, Almerfedi is in an extraordinary, and, frankly, unjustifiable position, apparently doomed to be held for an unknown amount of time (even if the government does not appeal the ruling) because of a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo that was issued by President Obama in January.

In a craven display of capitulation to political bullying, the President allowed critics to assert that, because the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, had apparently been recruited in Yemen, it was acceptable not to release any Yemenis from Guantánamo — even if they had been cleared for release by military review boards under the Bush administration, by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, and by a US court, because no Yemeni could be trusted, and they were all potential terrorists.

The President did not use these words of course, but the subtext of his decision was unmistakable to anyone prepared to look beyond the bullish rhetoric at the time about Yemen as a failed state, which might need a good dose of US military aggression to sort it out.

When President Obama issued his moratorium, two Yemenis who had won their habeas petitions were still held, although one of these cases — that of Mohammed al-Adahi — had been appealed by the government (and was won today), and since the moratorium three more Yemenis (including Hussein Almerfedi) have won their petitions, putting the administration in a quandary of its own making.

Two weeks ago, government spokesmen told the Washington Post that, in the case of one of these men — Mohammed Hassan Odaini, a student seized in a house raid in Pakistan in March 2002, who was just a guest of other students on that particular night — the administration was prepared to lift the moratorium. One of the spokesmen stated that this was because senior officials were “comfortable” with making an exception for Odaini “because of the guy’s background, his family and where he comes from in Yemen,” thereby admitting that the perception of a prisoner’s family background is now more important than whether he is innocent or not. However, it was also because he was so clearly an innocent man seized by mistake and held for eight years that, for a change, it was embarrassing having to try to justify his detention. “This is a bad case to argue,” one of the officials explained. “There is nothing there. The bottom line is: We don’t have anything on this kid.”

Even so, Odaini was not released until today, even though it beggared belief that the US military could not spare one plane to accomplish the task of returning him immediately to his family. Moreover, the administration must now grapple with further problems relating to its moratorium, as highlighted by Judge Friedman in the case of Hussein Almerfedi.

Defending the detention of prisoners already cleared for release

In the New York Times, Charlie Savage explained that the administration was now in a truly ridiculous place because “[t]he suspension on transfers meant that habeas corpus lawsuits that had been frozen since the detainees were due to be released anyway started to move forward, putting the Justice Department in the position of fighting to keep the detainees imprisoned.” In other words, the Justice Department is arguing in court that the administration should be allowed to continue holding men that it has already conceded it has no reason to hold.

The scale of this problem is extraordinary. In its review of the prisoners’ cases last year, Obama’s Task Force approved 66 of the remaining 97 Yemenis for release, although 30 were put in a novel category — “conditional” detention — pending an improvement in the security situation in Yemen. Seven of the remaining 36 were freed last year, leaving 29 who may well have been freed had it not been for the moratorium.

Three weeks ago, the officials who spoke to the Washington Post acknowledged that these men presented a problem for the administration. One of the spokesmen stated that President Obama “may come under further pressure to quickly release Yemenis besides Odaini,” because “As many as 20 more Yemenis could be ordered released by the courts for lack of evidence to justify their continued detention.” The official added, “There is a group of Yemenis who are going to win their habeas cases. Some of them will not be as clear as this case, but some will be, and that poses a real dilemma.”

According to Charlie Savage, the truth may be even bleaker for the administration. Savage noted that all 59 of the men cleared for release by the Task Force “present weak cases for continued detention,” and secured advice from Robert Chesney, a national security law expert at the University of Texas, who explained that the moratorium had created “a difficult policy dilemma”:

If the administration lifts the moratorium to avoid losing those cases, it could be attacked by conservatives for sending detainees to Yemen whom it had not been ordered to release. But if it keeps the moratorium, it could face a string of defeats that will undercut its effort to keep holding other detainees.

Chesney added:

The coverage of the Odaini case made them look ridiculous. Imagine them experiencing some 50-plus individual defeats. By the time they are done, the narrative of the innocent detainee being blindly or stupidly detained by the administration would be so entrenched that there would be real strategic harm to the administration’s case that there are people they actually need to and can justify keeping in military detention.

Ridiculous, blind, stupid: These are hard words to have directed at you if you’re an administration struggling to clean up a mess inherited from the previous President, but when courage and principles are lacking — and at stake is the freedom of men unjustly deprived of their liberty for up to eight and a half years — the words are entirely appropriate.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation (as “Freeing the Innocent from Guantánamo”). Cross-posted on Eurasia Review, Campaign for Liberty, Uruknet, New Left Project, Rebel News and GCN.

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009), 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantánamo Lawyer (November 2009), Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere) (November 2009), Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait (December 2009), What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo? (December 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit (December 2009), Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois (December 2009), Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit (April 2010), An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition (April 2010), With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo (April 2010), How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (May 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo (May 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web (May 2010), No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court (June 2010), Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo? (June 2010).

Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009), Bagram Isn’t The New Guantánamo, It’s The Old Guantánamo (August 2009), Obama Brings Guantánamo And Rendition To Bagram (And Not The Geneva Conventions) and Is Bagram Obama’s New Secret Prison? (both September 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions (February 2010), The Black Hole of Bagram (May 2010), What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part Two): Executive Detention, Rendition, Review Boards, Released Prisoners and Trials (June 2010).

Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Updated for Summer 2010)

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In March 2009, I published a four-part list identifying all 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002, which I updated in January this year. To keep up with developments over the last six months, I have now updated it again, and the four parts of the list are available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.

As I explained when I first compiled the list, the original product of my research was my book The Guantánamo Files, in which, based on an exhaustive analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon (plus other sources), I related the story of Guantánamo, established a chronology explaining where and when the prisoners were seized, told the stories of around 450 of these men (and boys), and provided a context for the circumstances in which the remainder of the prisoners were captured.

The list provides references to the chapters in The Guantánamo Files where the prisoners’ stories can be found, and also provides numerous links to the hundreds of articles that I have written over the last three years, for a variety of publications, expanding on and updating the stories of all 779 prisoners. In particular, I have covered the stories of the 199 prisoners released from Guantánamo between June 2007 and May 2010 in unprecedented depth, as well as the 50 prisoners whose habeas corpus petitions have been the subject of rulings in the District Court in Washington D.C. (see “Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List” for links to all my articles, and to the judges’ rulings). I also covered the stories of the 27 prisoners charged in Guantánamo’s Military Commission trial system under the Bush administration (and have covered the handful of cases revived, falteringly, by President Obama) in more detail than is, or was available from most, if not all other sources.

In addition, the list also includes links to the 12 online chapters, published between November 2007 and February 2009 (see the links in the left-and column), in which I told the stories of over 250 prisoners that I was unable to include in the book (either because they were not available at the time of writing, or to keep the book at a manageable length).

As a result — and notwithstanding the fact that the New York Times had made a list of documents relating to each prisoner available online — I maintain that I am justified in stating that the list is “the most comprehensive list ever published of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo,” providing details of the 591 prisoners released (and the dates of their release), and the 181 prisoners still held (including information on those cleared for release by military review boards under the Bush administration or by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force), for the same reason that my book provides what I have been told is an unparalleled introduction to Guantánamo and the stories of the men held there: because it provides a much-needed context for these stories that is difficult to discern in the Pentagon’s documents without detailed analysis.

This update to the four parts of the list draws on the 150+ articles that I have published in the last six months, tracking the Obama administration’s lamentable failure to close the prison as promised, to thoroughly repudiate the Bush administration’s policies, and to hold anyone accountable for introducing torture as official policy. Throughout this period, I have reported the stories of the 17 prisoners released, and have also covered the habeas petitions in unprecedented detail. I am pleased to report that 37 habeas cases have now been won by the prisoners (out of 51 in total), but I remain concerned that the District Court judges are obliged to approve the ongoing detention of soldiers at Guantánamo, when they should be held as prisoners of war, and I’m also disappointed that President Obama has only released 59 prisoners since he took office.

Of the 181 prisoners who remain, 97 have been approved for release by the Task Force and 35 are scheduled to face trials, but 48 others have been designated as suitable for indefinite detention without charge or trial — a distressing development that may well mark the nadir of President Obama’s promise to mark any kind of meaningful change from his predecessor. One other man, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is serving a life sentence after a one-sided trial by Military Commission in 2008 (although his sentence is being appealed), and another — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani — was transferred to the US mainland to face a federal court trial in May 2009, before Congress descended into the kind of cynical scaremongering that regards trial for terrorists — and respect for the Constitution — as somehow quaint and obsolete.

As for my intention, it remains the same as it did when I first published the list. As I explained at the time:

It is my hope that this project will provide an invaluable research tool for those seeking to understand how it came to pass that the government of the United States turned its back on domestic and international law, establishing torture as official US policy, and holding men without charge or trial neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trial in a federal court, but as “illegal enemy combatants.”

I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.

To this I would only add that, nearly a year and a half after President Obama took office, I hope that the list and its references provide a useful antidote to the administration’s apparent paralysis, and to the cynical scaremongering of lawmakers that I outlined above.

Nearly six months on from President Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo by his self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, it now seems almost inconceivable that so many of us once thought it possible, because of the extent to which the administration has lost its purpose, and the extent to which lawmakers (and media pundits) delight in channeling the lies and distortions of former Vice President Dick Cheney, with an arrogant disregard for how ridiculous this appears to the rest of the world.

Six months ago, I mentioned that there was no reason for complacency. That was perhaps optimistic, as now I can only exhort those who oppose torture, arbitrary detention and political bankruptcy to resist despair. However, as the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, it remains imperative — for those of us who call for the full reinstatement of the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war, federal court trials for terrorists and accountability for those who authorized torture — that we maintain the pressure to close Guantánamo, and to charge or release the prisoners held there, as swiftly as possible.

Andy Worthington
London
July 12, 2010

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Cross-posted on My Catbird Seat, Dissident Voice, Common Dreams, The Public Record, United Progressives, Uruknet and What Really Happened. It was also linked to on the front page of Antiwar.com, and was “Website of the Day” on CounterPunch.

The Guantánamo Archive: 3 Years, 650 Articles Listed Chronologically

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Yesterday I published a list, with links, of all my articles over the last six months in chronological order, as the latest installment of a project to list all my articles in chronological order, which I began in January, when I published five lists covering the period from May 2007 (when I began blogging on a regular basis) to December 2009. The category page for all these articles (which can easily be bookmarked) is here, and the six parts are here: Part One (May to December 2007), Part Two (January to June 2008), Part Three (July to December 2008), Part Four (January to June 2009), Part Five (July to December 2009), and Part Six (January to June 2010).

My hope is that these articles — made readily available in this manner — will prove useful to students, lawyers, activists and anyone else interested in knowing the story of Guantánamo and the men held there. I still recommend my book The Guantánamo Files as the best introduction, but am delighted to have been online for the last three years, finding websites interested in publishing my work, building up an audience through my website, and continuing to report the stories of the men held in Guantánamo and of the maneuvering of the Bush administration, and, in the last 18 months, the Obama administration, as senior officials have continued to alternate between trying to close the prison, and keeping it open. As I have regularly explained, this has happened partly through a mistaken belief that some men can be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and partly through political expediency in the face of cynical scaremongering by lawmakers and large parts of the media, and insufficient outrage from those parts of the media that ought to care.

Tomorrow, I’ll be publishing an update to my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, which I first published in March last year, and updated in January this year, which is intended as another useful research tool, providing updated information about the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo throughout its long and malignant history (181 of whom remain), either through references to the chapters in my book where their stories can be found, or, increasingly, through links to articles discussing their release, their habeas petitions, their life after Guantánamo, and, in a handful of cases, their death in Guantánamo or their trials by Military Commission.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me over the last three years — reading, commenting, linking, cross-posting and sharing my work through social media like Facebook and Twitter. I’m in Technorati’s Top 20 World Politics Blogs because of you, but most importantly, your support helps me to keep chipping away at what sometimes seems to be an impossible task, even though it should be straightforward: hold accountable senior officials who redefined torture and authorized its use by the CIA and the US military, charge men suspected of terrorist activities in federal courts, release everyone else, and, in future, hold those involved in military activities against the United States as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions.

I hope to see you tomorrow for the unveiling of the updated prisoner list, and in the meantime, if you haven’t yet written a letter to a prisoner in Guantánamo, please see this list of the remaining 181 prisoners, or visit this Facebook page, put together by Shahrina Ahmed-Amatullah and Mahfuja Ahmed, to see which prisoners are being sent letters, and then, if you have the time, send a letter or two yourself, and encourage your friends to do the same. It’s a small gesture, but as former prisoner Omar Deghayes has explained, it’s also one that can mean a great deal to men held without charge or trial for over eight years, who, unlike convicted criminals, have never been allowed to have family visits.

Andy Worthington
London
July 11, 2010

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Cross-posted on The World Can’t Wait.

The Guantánamo Files: An Archive of Articles – Part Six, January to June 2010

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For over four years, I have been providing detailed information about the prisoners in Guantánamo, first through my book The Guantánamo Files, which tells the story of the prison and around 450 of the prisoners held, and then through 12 online chapters, which provide information about the majority of the other 329 prisoners (see the links in the left-hand column). Alongside this project, I have been working assiduously as a full-time independent journalist, covering stories as they develop, and focusing in particular on the stories of released prisoners, the Military Commission trial system, and the prisoners’ progress in the courts, through their habeas corpus petitions. I have also focused unerringly on the crimes of the Bush administration and, since January 2009, on the failures of the Obama administration to thoroughly repudiate those crimes, to hold anyone accountable, and, increasingly, on its failure to charge or release prisoners, and to show any sign that Guantánamo will eventually be closed.

My intention, all along, has been to bring the men to life through their stories, dispelling the Bush administration’s rhetoric about the prison holding “the worst of the worst,” and demonstrating how, instead, the majority of the prisoners were either innocent men, seized by the US military’s allies at a time when bounty payments were widespread, or recruits for the Taliban, who had been encouraged by supporters in their homelands to help the Taliban in a long-running inter-Muslim civil war (with the Northern Alliance), which began long before the 9/11 attacks and, for the most part, had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism. As I explain in the introduction to my four-part Definitive Prisoner List (which I will be updating next week), I remain convinced, through detailed research and through comments from insiders with knowledge of Guantánamo, that “at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total” had no involvement with terrorism.

However, as this is a blog, rather than a website, I recognize that it’s increasingly difficult to navigate, as there are so many “Categories,” and, most crucially, there is no access to articles in anything other than reverse chronological order. In an attempt to remedy this shortcoming, and to provide easy access to the most important articles on the site, I put together five chronological lists of all my articles in January this year, covering the periods May to December 2007, January to June 2008, July to December 2008, January to June 2009 and July to December 2009, in the hope that they would provide a useful tool for navigation, and would provide researchers — and anyone else interested in this particularly bleak period of modern history — with a practical archive.

This latest list, combined with the forthcoming update to my definitive prisoner list, brings the story up to date, although I’m sad to report that, for the most part, it has not been a period that reflects well on the Obama administration, beginning, as it did, with an unjustifiable — and politically motivated — moratorium on the release of any cleared Yemeni prisoners for an unspecified amount of time (following the failed mission of the Nigerian would-be plane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and revelations that he was recruited in Yemen), and the President’s failure to meet his self-imposed deadline for closing Guantánamo. This coincided with the publication of the Guantánamo Review Task Force’s report on the prisoners’ “disposition,” with its shocking recommendation that 48 men should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

The period covered by this archive was also distressingly notable for a pitiful downturn in the numbers of prisoners released. Even though the Task Force recommended over half of the remaining prisoners for release (114 of the 198 men held at the start of this period), only 17 were freed between January and June.

The prisoners were more successful in the District Court in Washington D.C., where, since October 2008, judges have been ruling on their habeas petitions. 12 cases were decided in this period, with six won by the prisoners, and six won by the government. In a major project in April and May, “Guantánamo Habeas Week,” I produced a definitive list of the rulings to date (34 for the prisoners, 16 for the government), which included detailed analyses of seven of these rulings, and throughout this period I also covered other rulings in depth, because, as I explained back in April, the judges’ rulings are “the single most important collection of documents analyzing the failures of the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ detention policies — and Obama’s refusal, or inability to thoroughly repudiate them.” This is true, even though the rulings are plagued by a structural problem — the reliance on the Congress- approved Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed the week after the 9/11 attacks — which obliges the judges to approve the ongoing detention of soldiers in Guantánamo, when they should be held as prisoners of war.

On torture, this was a distressing period, with the shameful manipulation of a long-awaited internal Justice Department report on the conduct of the lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel (John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee) who wrote and approved the “torture memos” in August 2002, which purported to redefine torture, so that they were found to have exercised “poor judgment’ rather than being found guilty of “professional misconduct.” Nevertheless, the distressing story of Abu Zubaydah (for whom the torture program was developed) continued to leak out, revealing more about how he was not a member of al-Qaeda at all, and the six-month period ended with a complaint filed in Texas against one of the architects of the torture program.

Moreover, in February, the United Nations produced a major report on secret detention. This contained a detailed section on the history of the US program of rendition and secret prisons, which I cross-posted last month in three articles here, here and here.

Elsewhere, there were revelations from Bagram, in the form of the first official prisoner list, and, more distressingly, in allegations regarding a secret prison, as well as other bad news — the denial of habeas corpus to foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries — and slightly better news, as Obama introduced a new review process, and began releasing prisoners in significant numbers.

The period was also notable for claims, first aired by Scott Horton in Harper’s Magazine, that three prisoners at Guantánamo, who died in June 2006, had not committed suicide, as alleged, but had been killed — either deliberately, or as part of a torture session that went too far. This deeply disturbing story was largely ignored in the mainstream US media, although I covered it, as did other bloggers, and I also tried to keep the story going, on the 4th anniversary of the men’s deaths this June, when I also made a point of reviving discussions of the other unexplained deaths at Guantánamo in 2007 and 2009.

In the UK, former prisoner Omar Deghayes and I undertook a major tour of campuses and other venues (including Amnesty International’s London HQ and the National Film Theatre), screening the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by filmmaker Polly Nash and myself), to great acclaim from those who saw it. Polly and I also visited Oslo in February to show it at a human rights film festival, and in April it was screened as part of the London International Documentary Festival.

In May, the General Election promised some improvement on the dire human rights record of the Labour government, and, within weeks of taking office, foreign secretary William Hague announced an inquiry into British complicity in torture, but it remains to be seen how much the new government will deliver — and Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, is still held, for no adequate reason.

On the work front, this has been a successful period for me, as I continued writing for the Guardian and Truthout, continued writing a weekly column for the Future of Freedom Foundation, and also began working for Cageprisoners as a Senior Researcher. I was also interviewed on Democracy Now! and Russia Today, did a BBC show on torture in February, and also took part in numerous radio shows, which can be found here. In addition, numerous sites began cross-posting my work, including Eurasia Review and others, which helped me to become listed as one of Technorati’s Top 20 World Politics Blogs, and also to be listed in the Top 100 Politics Blogs and the Top 100 US Politics Blogs (Nos. 17, 84 and 53, at the time of writing). As ever, though, much of my work is unpaid, so any contributions (via the PayPal button above) will be gratefully received.

In conclusion, I can only wish that my work wasn’t so necessary, and that President Obama would find the courage that he has failed to show since his first few days in office, when he indicated that he would be providing a clean break with the policies of his predecessor. Not only has this promise not come true, but in many ways those of us who abhor torture and arbitrary detention are even more disappointed than we were in the days of Bush and Cheney, as pragmatism and political maneuvering, rather than fanatically misconceived ideology, seem to be running the show, and are much more difficult to combat.

An archive of Guantánamo articles: Part Six, January to June 2010

January 2010

1: Guantánamo media: Guantánamo: The Definitive Prisoner List (Updated for 2010) (see Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four)
2. Military Commissions: Afghan Nobody Faces Trial by Military Commission (Obaidullah)
3. Yemenis in Guantánamo: Guantánamo and Yemen: Obama Capitulates to Critics and Suspends Prisoner Transfers
4. Yemenis in Guantánamo: Yemenis in Guantánamo are Victims of Hysteria
5. Recidivism: Guantánamo Recidivism: Mainstream Media Parrot Pentagon Propaganda (Again)
6. Video: On Democracy Now! Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo, Yemen, Lies, Hysteria and the False Recidivism Report
7. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (Ghaleb al-Bihani)
8. Guantánamo anniversary: On Eighth Anniversary, Guantánamo Allows Little Hope
9. Video: Guantánamo: Shaker Aamer’s Daughter Delivers Letter to Gordon Brown (Video)
10. Interviews: An interview with Andy Worthington about Guantánamo, on the Eighth Anniversary of the Prison’s Opening (with Elizabeth Ferrari)
11. Guantánamo anniversary: Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary
12. Video: On YouTube: Guantánamo Guard and Ex-Prisoners Meet (via the BBC)
13. Closing Guantánamo: BBC Interviews Matthew J. Olsen, the Head of Obama’s Guantánamo Task Force
14. Deaths in Guantánamo: Murders at Guantánamo: Scott Horton of Harper’s Exposes the Truth about the 2006 “Suicides”
15. Closing Guantánamo: Obama’s Countdown to Failure on Guantánamo
16. UK anti-terror laws: Compensation for control orders is a distraction (in the Guardian)
17. Bagram, torture: Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List
18. Omar Deghayes: The Guardian interviews Omar Deghayes: “The spirit is what makes us who we are”
19. Closing Guantánamo, preventive detention: Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention
20. UK anti-terror laws: Control Orders Take Another Blow: Libyan Cartoonist Freed (Detainee DD)
21. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Two Algerian Torture Victims Are Freed from Guantánamo
22. Bagram: Bagram: The Annotated Prisoner List (A Cooperative Project) (Note: See the annotated list here)
23. Torture: UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?”
24. Iraq: The madness of Tony Blair, the futility of the Chilcot inquiry

February 2010

25. Military Commissions: Lawyers Appeal Guantánamo Trial Convictions (Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul)
26. Uighurs in Guantánamo: Swiss Take Two Guantánamo Uighurs, Save Obama from Having to Do the Right Thing
27. Bagram: Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions
28. Recidivism: White House Repeats Pentagon Lies About Guantánamo “Recidivists”
29. “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”: Taking Guantánamo to Norway: “Human Rights, Human Wrongs” Film Festival Report
30. Moazzam Begg: Defending Moazzam Begg and Amnesty International
31. Shaker Aamer: Shaker Aamer’s Wife Speaks: “Since he has been away there is no colour in life”
32. Shaker Aamer: Torture in Afghanistan and Guantánamo: Shaker Aamer’s Lawyers Speak
33. Binyam Mohamed: Binyam Mohamed: Evidence of Torture by US Agents Revealed in UK
34. Torture: Andy Worthington Discusses Torture on BBC1’s “The Big Questions”
35. Moazzam Begg: Moazzam Begg’s dignified explanation of why he is not attending Amnesty’s screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”
36. Binyam Mohamed, Omar Khadr: Binyam Mohamed on Omar Khadr: A Scapegoat for a Failed “War on Terror”
37. Moazzam Begg: Sunday Times misrepresents views of Amnesty’s Sam Zarifi
38. “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”: A full house for Amnesty screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”
39. UK anti-terror laws: Control Orders: Solicitors’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010
40. UK anti-terror laws: Control Orders: Special Advocates’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010
41. UK anti-terror laws: Will Parliament Rid Us of the Cruel and Unjust Control Order Regime?
42. Moazzam Begg: Moazzam Begg Responds To His Critics
43. Shaker Aamer: As Police Launch New Torture Inquiry, It’s Time for Shaker Aamer to Come Home from Guantánamo
44. Torture: Torture Whitewash: How “Professional Misconduct” Became “Poor Judgment” in the OPR Report
45. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Four prisoners freed from Guantánamo: three in Albania, one in Spain
46. Kuwaitis in Guantánamo: US Military Lawyer: Kuwait Needs to Speak Up on Guantánamo
47. Torture: On Torture, New York Times Calls for Bush Officials to be Held to Account
48. Binyam Mohamed: Judges Restore Damning Passage on MI5 to the Binyam Mohamed Torture Ruling
49. UK anti-terror laws: Don’t renew control orders, CAMPACC, JUSTICE and the Joint Committee on Human Rights tell MPs

March 2010

April 2010

May 2010

98. Shaker Aamer: Shaker Aamer’s 3000 Days in Guantánamo: Moazzam Begg Speaks
99. “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”: Great feedback from screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” in New York
100. Military Commissions: David Frakt’s Damning Verdict on the New Military Commissions Manual
101. Omar Khadr, Military Commissions: Prosecuting a Tortured Child: Obama’s Guantánamo Legacy
102. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court
103. UK torture: UK Appeals Court Rules Out Government’s Use of Secret Evidence in Guantánamo Damages Claim
104. UK election: UK Election: The MPs Who Care About Human Rights
105. “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”: “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” – A Pre-Election Trip to Birmingham
106. Aafia Siddiqui: Gareth Peirce’s Statement in Support of Aafia Siddiqui
107. UK election: As Hung Parliament Looms, This Was a Bad Election for Human Rights
108. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Abandoned in Spain: The Palestinian Freed from Guantánamo
109. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (Suleiman al-Nahdi, Fahmi al-Assani)
110. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo (Omar Mohammed Khalifh)
111. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: After “Guantánamo Habeas Week,” Analysis of Successes and Failures Continues
112. UK election: Can David Cameron’s Coalition Government Deliver Justice?
113. Omar Khadr, Military Commissions: The Torture of Omar Khadr, a Child in Bagram and Guantánamo
114. UK election: 98 MPs Who Supported Human Rights While Countering Terrorism
115. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who is the Syrian Released from Guantánamo to Bulgaria?
116. UK anti-terror laws: UK Terror Ruling Provides Urgent Test for New Government
117. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web (Ravil Mingazov)
118. UK anti-terror laws: An uncivilised society (in the Guardian)
119. UK torture: William Hague Orders a Judicial Inquiry into British Complicity in Torture
120. Shaker Aamer, Ahmed Belbacha: New letter to William Hague, asking him to secure the return from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer
121. Shaker Aamer, UK anti-terror laws: New letter to MPs asking them to oppose the use of secret evidence in UK courts, and to support the return from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer
122. Closing Guantánamo: House Kills Plan to Close Guantánamo
123. Bagram and habeas corpus: The Black Hole of Bagram
124. Guantánamo and US Congress: More “Congressional Depravity” on Guantánamo
125. Interviews: An interview with Andy Worthington for Labour Briefing: Guantánamo, Torture and “Outside the Law”
126. Deaths in Guantánamo: The Third Anniversary of a Death in Guantánamo

June 2010

127. Guantánamo media: Omar Deghayes and Terry Holdbrooks Discuss Guantánamo (Part One): Omar’s Story
128. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Why is a Yemeni Student in Guantánamo, Cleared on Three Occasions, Still Imprisoned? (Mohammed Hassan Odaini)
129. Guantánamo media: Omar Deghayes and Terry Holdbrooks Discuss Guantánamo (Part Two): Terry’s Story
130. Bagram: What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part One): Torture and the “Black Prison”
131. Guantánamo media: Omar Deghayes and Terry Holdbrooks Discuss Guantánamo (Part Three): Deaths at the Prison
132. Bagram: What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part Two): Executive Detention, Rendition, Review Boards, Released Prisoners and Trials
133. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Palau President Asks Australia to Offer Homes to Guantánamo Uighurs
134. Uighurs in Guantánamo: No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court
135. Torture: New Report Reveals How Bush Torture Program Involved Human Experimentation
136. Deaths in Guantánamo: Suicide or Murder at Guantánamo?
137. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Guantánamo Uighurs Thank Bermuda; Supporters Ask UK to Give Them Passports
138. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: A Voice from Iraq: Former Guantánamo Prisoner Speaks
139. Closing Guantánamo: Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo?
140. Deaths in Guantánamo: Murders at Guantánamo: The Cover-Up Continues
141. Torture: UN Human Rights Council Discusses Secret Detention Report
142. Torture: UN Secret Detention Report (Part One): The CIA’s “High-Value Detainee” Program and Secret Prisons
143. Torture: UN Secret Detention Report (Part Two): CIA Prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq
144. Torture: UN Secret Detention Report (Part Three): Proxy Detention, Other Countries’ Complicity, and Obama’s Record
145. Torture: Obama, the Supreme Court and Maher Arar: No Accountability for Torture
146. UK anti-terror laws: BBC Broadcasts Bleak Insight into Life of Terror Suspect under House Arrest (Hussein Alsamamara)
147. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: 2 Years, 50 Cases, 36 Victories for the Prisoners
148. Shaker Aamer: Campaigners Ask David Cameron to Secure Return to UK of Shaker Aamer, the Last British Resident in Guantánamo
149. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Obama Thinks About Releasing Innocent Yemenis from Guantánamo (Mohammed Hassan Odaini)
150. Shaker Aamer: An open letter to David Cameron demanding the return from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer
151. Guantánamo campaigns: Write to the Forgotten Prisoners in Guantánamo (lists the remaining 181 prisoners in Guantánamo)
152. Torture: Abu Zubaydah and the Case Against Torture Architect James Mitchell
153. Torture: The Torture of Abu Zubaydah: The Complaint Filed Against James Mitchell for Ethical Violations
154. Torture: UN Secretary-General and Torture Experts Issue Statements on International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
155. Guantánamo media: Amnesty International Blasts Obama for Delays and Injustice on Human Rights, Guantánamo and Terrorism
156. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Three Neglected Ex-Guantánamo Prisoners in Slovakia Embark on a Hunger Strike
157. Torture: Calling for US Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
158: Guantánamo media: Guantánamo as an “Intelligence Squeezing” Center: Pakistan Media Interviews Col. Morris Davis
159: Torture, Closing Guantánamo: Obama’s Moral Bankruptcy Regarding Torture
160: Guantánamo campaigns: Activists’ Letter to the Justice Department on Guantánamo, Torture and Accountability

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

A Cautious Welcome for British Torture Inquiry

Human rights campaigners have reacted with cautious optimism to the British government’s official announcement of a judicial inquiry into the involvement of the British security services — MI5 and MI6 — in torture and rendition since the 9/11 attacks, although many pressing questions are, as yet, unanswered.

These concern the scope of the inquiry, its transparency (or lack of it), how the issue of compensation for the victims of British involvement will be played by the government, whether the inquiry involves a thinly-veiled attempt to gag the courts, which have been openly critical of British involvement in torture, and, perhaps most crucially, whether the inquiry will lead to a genuine renunciation by the government and the security services of any further involvement with torture, which, lest we forget, is not only illegal, but also counter-productive, morally corrosive, and fundamentally unreliable.

First, the good news: After years of obstruction and obfuscation by the Labour government, almost any kind of inquiry would be welcome. However, as Ian Cobain explained in yesterday’s Guardian, although “Leading figures within both parties of the coalition had concluded that an inquiry was inevitable because of the noxious position they had inherited,” without bold action by foreign secretary William Hague, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Prime Minister David Cameron, there would either have been no inquiry at all, or something so perfunctory that it would have been both insulting and inadequate.

It was Hague — critical of the Labour government as shadow foreign secretary, but never quite calling for an inquiry — who got the ball rolling, in the following exchange on the BBC, which took place shortly after the General Election, when he was asked about an inquiry:

Hague: We have said again in the coalition agreement that we want a judge-led inquiry.
BBC: So will there be an inquiry of some form?
Hague: Yes, both parties in the coalition said they wanted that. Now what we’re working on is what form that should take.

According to Ian Cobain, Hague’s remarks “came out of the blue”. He added, “The intelligence agencies and senior figures in the Cabinet Office were stunned. They had no idea that Hague was about to make such an announcement.”

In a frantic “rearguard action,” senior officials in the security services, noting that the foreign secretary had not committed the government to a judicial inquiry, tried to ensure that a political figure rather than a judge — “someone more malleable,” in Cobain’s words — would be appointed to head the inquiry.

The government then consulted senior figures in the judiciary and legal experts in academia, in an attempt to work out what form the inquiry should take. According to Cobain, David Cameron was reportedly committed to an inquiry, and “had been minded to appoint a judge to lead it,” but just a few weeks ago, following talks with senior figures in the Cabinet Office who are closely connected to the security services, “he experienced what one observer called ‘a wobble.’” His sources advised him to be careful not to replicate the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday, which “could drag on for a decade or more at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds.”

It was presumably as a result of the “wobble” that, two weeks ago, a source in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office briefed journalists that the inquiry “would examine only one case — that of Binyam Mohamed — and that Cameron had already concluded that the country’s intelligence agencies were guilty only of errors of omission, not commission.”

The source also explained that the plan, at the time, was that “the allegations would be examined briefly, and in secret, by a commission sitting over the summer.” According to Ian Cobain, it was at this point that Nick Clegg weighed in, persuading the Prime Minister that “such a commission would be seen as a whitewash, one that would do nothing to end the mounting litigation,” leading to the announcement on Tuesday that there would be a judicial inquiry, and that it would be led by Sir Peter Gibson, a former appeal court judge who monitors the activities of the intelligence agencies, assisted by Dame Janet Paraskeva, head of the civil service commissioners, and Peter Riddell, a former Times journalist and a fellow of the Institute of Government.

The scope of the inquiry: problems with secrecy and transparency

On the scope of the inquiry, David Cameron signaled that it would be thorough, allowing the victims and their representatives to give evidence during open sessions, as well as representatives of human rights groups. In the House of Commons, he explained that he had asked Sir Peter Gibson to “look at whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees held by other countries that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11,” noting that, although there was no evidence that any British officer was “directly engaged in torture,” there were “questions over the degree to which British officers were working with foreign security services who were treating detainees in ways they should not have done.”

Nevertheless, the scope of the inquiry is clearly limited by the fact that, as Richard Norton-Taylor explained in the Guardian, “It will not summon witnesses from foreign countries, such as current or former CIA officers. And it will not be able to compel any individuals to give evidence.” Norton-Taylor added that, on Tuesday evening, Whitehall officials said that “former Labour ministers, including Tony Blair, will not be asked to give evidence, even though the treatment of British citizens and residents under investigation happened on their watch,” and even though, as was alleged last June, former Prime Minister Tony Blair “was aware of the existence of a secret interrogation policy which effectively led to British citizens, and others, being tortured during counter-terrorism investigations.”

Moreover, doubts about the transparency of the inquiry are in place from the very beginning, as the Prime Minister also announced that most of the inquiry would be held in secret and stated, “Let’s be frank, it is not possible to have a full public inquiry into something that is meant to be secret.”

This provoked a sharp response from Reprieve, the legal action charity whose lawyers represent dozens of Guantánamo prisoners. In a statement, Reprieve explained:

The scourge of the last government was the fact that they tried to cover up all the facts relating to torture complicity cases. In particular, the Binyam Mohamed litigation revolved around the government claiming public interest immunity in materials which were simply embarrassing. Now, the Prime Minister is saying that much of this inquiry will be held in secret. The only way in which public confidence is going to be restored in the intelligence services is if the public is able to see this inquiry functioning properly.

Reprieve also took exception to other elements of secrecy surrounding the plans, noting that it appeared that the judge would see all the relevant documents, but that the Prime Minister would decide what will be made public. “[W]e will only see what the government wants us to see,” Reprieve stated, adding, “This was the problem with the last government, and as long as politicians are making these decisions the national embarrassment/ national security problem will remain.”

In its most significant complaint, Reprieve asked why the inquiry will not be held under the Inquiries Act of 2005, noting that the Baha Mousa inquiry (into the murder, in British custody, of a hotel clerk in Iraq) was held under the Act and has been “a model of an inquiry functioning efficiently, including the hearing of secret evidence.” Reprieve lamented that, under the current plan for the torture inquiry, “there is no formal mechanism for civil participation — so Reprieve and other civil organisations will not be allowed access to documents and proceedings,” whereas, under the Inquiries Act, “document classification review proceedings are sophisticated and rightly allow the judge to balance the need for national security against the need for transparency.”

Questions of compensation – and the urgent need for Shaker Aamer to be returned from Guantánamo

Two of the most pressing questions in the wake of David Cameron’s announcement concern the timing of the inquiry, and the question of compensation for the victims. In the House of Commons, David Cameron complained that the security services were “paralysed by paperwork,” primarily relating to a civil claim for damages filed by six former Guantánamo prisoners, and ongoing investigations by the Metropolitan Police into the conduct of intelligence officers in the cases of Binyam Mohamed, Shaker Aamer, and a third man who has not been publicly identified, but who may well be Rangzieb Ahmed, the British citizen, reportedly tortured in Pakistan, who has just been given leave to appeal his conviction in December 2008, in a trial in which all mention of his alleged torture was excluded.

Announcing the inquiry, David Cameron stated that it would not begin “until civil claims have been resolved through mediation or settled with compensation,” as the Guardian explained, and until the Metropolitan Police investigations had concluded.

Although he expressed his hope that the inquiry would start before the end of the year, and would conclude its investigations with 12 months, there are two fundamental problems with this scenario. The first, as identified by Reprieve, is the possibility that, if the civil claims are to be settled by the end of the year, “this will mean that the claimants will be paid off and that no disclosure [or] documents will come out of those cases. This, together with a secret inquiry, will mean that information will never reach the public.”

Or, as former prisoner Omar Deghayes explained to the Daily Mail:

It feels a little bit like blackmail in a way. They want us to keep quiet and shut up … If you listen to David Cameron’s speech in its entirety, it seems that a condition of us accepting the compensation will be that we drop the civil cases and then keep quiet about everything … This is not a compensation issue. I must stress that we did not begin civil proceedings to get a bit of money, we did it to raise awareness and try and stop the same thing happening again. It is not acceptable that we be required to keep quiet and not talk about torture again.

The second problem is that, according to David Cameron’s plan, the Metropolitan Police are supposed to conclude their investigation into Shaker Aamer’s claims of torture while Mr. Aamer himself remains held in Guantánamo. This is completely unacceptable — not only because the physical presence of Mr. Aamer (who was cleared for release by the US authorities in 2007, but is still mysteriously held) is essential for the police inquiry, but also because it is inconceivable that any of the cleared prisoners will agree to cooperate with the government at all while he remains in Guantánamo. As a result, the very first thing that David Cameron, Nick Clegg and William Hague need to do is to secure Shaker Aamer’s return.

Gagging the courts?

Allied to the general problem of secrecy is the government’s approach to the courts, which, of course, have done so much to expose complicity in torture, and to exert exactly the kind of pressure that has led to this inquiry in the first place. Primarily, this pressure has emerged in the case of Binyam Mohamed, when, for 18 months, former foreign secretary David Miliband fought to prevent two high court judges from revealing a summary of documents relating to Mohamed’s torture in Pakistan that had been provided to the British security services by the CIA. Miliband argued that doing so would imperil the intelligence-sharing relationship between the US and the UK, although the High Court judges disagreed, as did the Court of Appeal when, in February this year, they finally ordered David Miliband to release the summary, which demonstrated that MI5 knew that Mohamed had been subjected to treatment “at the very least cruel, inhuman, and degrading.”

David Cameron was evidently acutely conscious of this in the House of Commons on Tuesday, when he told his fellow MPs that, next year, the government will “publish a green paper which will set out our initial proposals for how intelligence is treated in the full range of judicial proceedings, including addressing the concerns of our allies”. At the heart of the plans for the green paper is an attempt to make sure that, in future, there will be no more opportunities for judges to order the release of information provided by foreign intelligence services (whether the US or anyone else), although another obvious motivation is the cost of legal proceedings. It is surely no coincidence that, in the civil damages claim brought against the government by six former prisoners, a high court judge had set a deadline of this Friday for MI5 and MI6 to provide a list of 250,000 documents relevant to the case.

Whether through a desire to cut costs, or as seems more probable, through a desire to prevent the courts from delivering the kind of condemnation of the security services’ activities that came from Lord Neuberger in February, in Binyam Mohamed’s case, when he stated that MI5 did not respect human rights, had not renounced participation in “coercive interrogation” techniques, deliberately misled MPs and peers on the intelligence and security committee, and had a “culture of suppression” in its dealings with Miliband and the court, the government‘s proposal for a green paper cannot, in all reality, be seen as anything other than a cynical attempt to shield future wrongdoers from judicial scrutiny. As Reprieve explained, “There is already ample opportunity — much increased recently — for evidence to be heard in secret. There is no need to expand this dangerous practice.”

Renouncing torture, or leaving loopholes open?

On the final point — the renunciation of torture — the government is also on thin ice. It is all very well for David Cameron to state that what is at stake is the UK’s reputation “as a country that believes in human rights, justice, fairness and the rule of law,” but grave concerns remain about the guidelines issued to the security services. This long-running saga, triggered by questions surrounding what advice had been given to a British operative known only as “Witness B” for his interrogation of Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan in May 2002, was revived last June, when the Guardian reported that, in January 2002, MI5 and MI6 officers in Afghanistan were told they could not be “party” to torture and must not “be seen to condone it,” but that because prisoners were “not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this.”

Following the Abu Ghraib scandal in April 2004, the guidelines were rewritten, but although Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated in March 2009 that these guidelines would be released, he left office without doing so. On Tuesday, just before the new government’s torture inquiry was announced, attempts by Reprieve to launch a judicial review of the guidelines were quashed after the government stepped in at the last minute with a claim that new guidelines would be published “very shortly,” just after Mr. Justice Collins had stated that, if the allegations about how British agents interrogated prisoners held overseas were true, they “indicated that there may well have been complicity in acts of torture.”

The new guidelines were published on Tuesday, at the same time that the inquiry was announced, but, as Reprieve noted, two troubling points remain unanswered. The first concerns the fact that “the previous policy has not been published,” which “suggests that there is something within it to be hidden.” Reprieve added, “The judge will see that, but will we? Will we know whether unlawful acts carried out in the past were authorised by that policy [or] guidance?”

The second point, more worryingly, concerns the new guidance. As the Guardian explained, there is “concern that the government’s new interrogation guidelines … contain[] a number of loopholes that could still lead to it being used to facilitate torture,” or, as Reprieve put it, the new policy still ”allows ministers to authorise torture.” The key to this, as the Daily Mail explained in an analysis of the new guidelines, is that, although the guidelines state unambiguously that “In no circumstance will UK personnel ever take action amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” the perception of such treatment “will cover a wide spectrum of conduct and different considerations and legal principles may apply depending on the circumstances and facts of each case,” and that the final approval for what may be regarded as “torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” rests with government ministers, who must be “consulted.”

As Reprieve noted, “This is illegal under the Convention Against Torture. Was this clause also in the previous guidance? If so then ministers must be held accountable for allegations of complicity in torture.”

In conclusion, then, the announcement of the inquiry is welcome, but issues of secrecy, compensation, the need for the release of Shaker Aamer and the seeming inability of the government — any government — to prohibit torture without leaving loopholes open, look likely to dog the inquiry’s every move. While the government is to be congratulated, ministers also need to be careful, as many people are scrutinizing their every move, and will not settle for anything that resembles a whitewash.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Eurasia Review.

Bin Laden Cook Accepts Plea Deal at Guantánamo Trial

Ibrahim al-Qosi at a pre-trial Military Commission hearing at Guantanamo, July 15, 2009 (sketch by court artist Janet Hamlin) In an alleged victory for the Military Commission trial system for terror suspects at Guantánamo, revived by President Obama last year despite the fact that he suspended the Commissions on his first day in office, a Sudanese prisoner, Ibrahim al-Qosi, accepted a plea bargain yesterday, and made a guilty plea on one count of conspiracy and one count of providing material support to terrorism.

In the six years since al-Qosi, now 50 years old, was charged in the first incarnation of the Commissions (which were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006), he has been accused of serving as the accountant for a company run by Osama bin Laden in Sudan from 1992 onwards, of visiting Chechnya to fight in 1995, with bin Laden’s support and permission, of serving as a bodyguard, cook and driver for bin Laden in Afghanistan from 1996 onwards, and of fighting in Afghanistan as part of a mortar crew. He was seized in December 2001, crossing the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Charged again in February 2008, and again last November, he had, until yesterday, taken part in several inconclusive hearings, and had, for the most part, watched as the government largely failed to secure any legitimacy for the Commissions, winning only three dubious victories: David Hicks (via a plea deal) in March 2007, Salim Hamdan after a trial in August 2008, and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, after a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defense, in November 2008.

At his hearing on Wednesday, the final picture that emerged, as the Miami Herald explained, was of a man who left Sudan to follow bin Laden to Afghanistan, taking his wife and children with him, and who “admitted that his work for al-Qaeda was his family’s only means of support.” He also admitted that he “went to Pakistan for al-Qaeda and met the Taliban’s top leader, Mullah Omar, who used to stop by the terrorist compound on holidays,” that he “drove a caravan of vans when bin Laden and his associates went to Kandahar, where married and single terrorists were separated into groups in two-room apartments,” and where he “cooked for the bachelors,” and that he “also spent more than a year on the front lines, getting bombed on the Pakistan border and coming under fire from US helicopters in Jalalabad.”

During the hearing, he told the judge, Air Force Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, that “he acknowledged his offenses and he understood his plea deal,” as the Associated Press explained, although he “did not speak at length.” The details of the deal, which have spared him from facing additional charges at a trial, were not disclosed, although rumors of a deal have circulated for several months, and it was understood that a plea deal would also prevent him from receiving a life sentence, as may have happened had his case proceeded to trial. The Miami Herald noted that the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite news network, “[c]iting two anonymous sources who read the plea agreement,” reported that he “agreed to a maximum of two more years in prison before he is sent home to Sudan.”

A panel of military officers is scheduled to deliver al-Qosi’s sentence on August 9. Navy Capt. David Iglesias, a spokesman for the Prosecution Office of the Military Commissions, explained that “[m]ilitary legal authorities can reject the panel’s sentencing decision if it exceeds what was agreed upon as part of the plea deal.” He “declined to say how much more time, if any, the prisoner could serve under the agreement,” but stated, “Both sides reached an agreement that they felt was fair and it would be against the interests of justice not to accept it.”

Iglesias also said that al-Qosi “admitted to knowing [bin Laden] personally, helping him and was willing to follow him around. He was somewhere between a foot soldier and less than a general. We are not talking about robbing a 7-Eleven in Hialeah. We are talking about war crimes.” This analysis, which was perhaps acceptable until it came to Iglesias’ conclusion about “war crimes,” was strongly challenged by critics who have opposed the Commissions throughout their generally dismal eight-year existence, and who were dismayed when President Obama decided to revive them last May, conveniently forgetting how much he had opposed them as a Senator in 2006 and 2007.

Stacy Sullivan, a senior counter-terrorism advisor for Human Rights Watch, said, “He’s a cook who served as a driver and possibly a bodyguard, Can you imagine if, during Nuremberg, they prosecuted cooks and drivers? It didn’t happen. They consider the fourth conviction in eight years a victory?” She also noted, as the Miami Herald explained, that al-Qosi’s “accusations of abuse, including that he was wrapped in an Israeli flag and subjected to loud music, was not mentioned in court,” and nor was there any mention of claims made in 2005 by Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, who was assigned to represent al-Qosi at the time, who ”characterized his treatment as possibly torture but certainly inhumane treatment; he was held in stress positions for protracted periods, subjected to military dogs and sexually humiliated.”

Adding to the criticism, Daphne Eviatar, a senior associate in Human Rights First’s Law and Security Program, stated, “This is not a victory for the military commission system. In fact Mr. al Qosi’s case is a textbook example of the inability of the military commission system … to achieve swift justice. The case has dragged on for more than six years without a trial.”

Given how shambolic al-Qosi’s last hearing in December was, it is unsurprising that the administration chose to pursue a plea deal rather than a full-blown trial. On that occasion, as I explained at the time, Lt. Col. Paul resisted the prosecution’s attempts to push back the start date of al-Qosi’s alleged crimes from 1996 to 1992, noting that:

although the rules regarding proposed changes in the new Military Commissions Act appeared to provide no guidance on this point, the relevant passages in the 2006 Act, which were drawn substantially from passages in the US military’s Rules for Court-Martial, were clear that the government’s request constituted a “major change” to the charges, and that “major changes may not be made over the objection of the accused unless the charges are withdrawn and re-referred.”

She added that the proposed amendments were “troubling in nature as the four-year extension of time and addition of overt acts dramatically changes the nature of the offense alleged,” noted that the request disrupted trial preparation which “has been ongoing for almost 2 years,” and, in conclusion, denied the request because the changes “are essentially new and additional offenses and contain substantial matters not fairly included in those previously referred,” and, additionally, because they bring “unfair surprise to the Accused.” In the courtroom, as Devon Chaffee [an observer for Human Rights First] explained, Lt. Col. Paul made a point of adding that, five years after the government first filed charges against al-Qosi, the defense still “doesn’t even know what the charges are going to look like.”

With the plea deal, further embarrassments like these will presumably be avoided (in al-Qosi’s case at least), as will legal challenges to the charges themselves — of conspiracy and material support — which have both been subjected to serious criticism, leading to doubts about whether either charge will stand up on appeal.

In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case in which the Supreme Court shut down the Commissions’ first incarnation, Justice John Paul Stevens, in an opinion in which he was joined by three other justices, made a point of mentioning that “conspiracy” has not traditionally been considered a war crime. Moreover, on the charges of material support, which are currently being appealed in the cases of Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, senior administration officials proposed to Congress last summer, as the Commissions were being revived with lawmakers’ support, that the charge of material support for terrorism should be dropped. As I explained last December:

Assistant Attorney General David Kris conceded (PDF), in Congressional testimony in July, that “there is a significant risk that appellate courts will ultimately conclude that material support for terrorism is not a traditional law of war offense, thereby reversing hard-won convictions and leading to questions about the system’s legitimacy.” The Justice Department’s position was echoed by the Pentagon, where General Counsel Jeh Johnson also accepted in July (PDF) that “material support is not a viable offense to be charged before a military commission because it is not a law of war offense.”

The irony, as I also noted at the time, was “not only that David Kris and Jeh Johnson failed to persuade Congress to drop the charge of material support for terrorism, but also that Congress ignored Kris’ additional suggestion that ‘material support charges could be pursued in federal courts where feasible.’”

With this in mind, it may be worth watching out for more plea bargains in the Military Commissions, while everyone who should know better — or who has influence but no insight — continues to ignore the fact that the Commissions should never have been revived, and that any trials should take place in federal courts.

Note: The courtroom sketch above, by Janet Hamlin, is courtesy of Janet Hamlin Illustration.

Cross-posted on Common Dreams, Eurasia Review, The Public Record and The Smirking Chimp.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Predictable Chaos As Guantánamo Trials Resume (July 2009), David Frakt: Military Commissions “A Catastrophic Failure” (August 2009), 9/11 Trial At Guantánamo Delayed Again: Can We Have Federal Court Trials Now, Please? (September 2009), Torture And Futility: Is This The End Of The Military Commissions At Guantánamo? (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Military Commissions Revived: Don’t Do It, Mr. President! (November 2009), The Logic of the 9/11 Trials, The Madness of the Military Commissions (November 2009), Rep. Jerrold Nadler and David Frakt on Obama’s Three-Tier Justice System For Guantánamo (November 2009), Guantánamo: Idealists Leave Obama’s Sinking Ship (November 2009), Chaos and Confusion: The Return of the Military Commissions (December 2009), Afghan Nobody Faces Trial by Military Commission (January 2010), Lawyers Appeal Guantánamo Trial Convictions (February 2010), When Rhetoric Trumps Good Sense: The GOP’s Counter-Productive Call for Military Commissions (March 2010), David Frakt’s Damning Verdict on the New Military Commissions Manual (May 2010), Prosecuting a Tortured Child: Obama’s Guantánamo Legacy (May 2010), The Torture of Omar Khadr, a Child in Bagram and Guantánamo (May 2010).

Torture Complicity Under the Spotlight in Europe (Part Two): Germany and France

Last week, in the first of two articles examining how “War on Terror”-related complicity in torture is under intense scrutiny in Europe, I ran through the history of Britain’s post-9/11 involvement in US torture, and its extensive forays into holding people without charge or trial in the UK, attempting to send foreign nationals back to countries where they face the risk of torture, using information derived from torture in other countries (sometimes with direct British involvement) and subsequently using this information operationally and even in judicial hearings.

The trigger for this article was an announcement by the British government that the terms of a judge-led inquiry into British complicity in torture — first announced by foreign secretary William Hague on May 20 — have been agreed. This is welcome news, as it indicates that the UK may be the first Western country prepared to conduct an official inquiry into the whole of its post-9/11 policies, as they relate to torture — although it was worrying to hear that Prime Minister David Cameron had “suggest[ed] that the inquiry would examine only one case — that of Binyam Mohamed — and, in addition, that he “had already concluded that the country’s intelligence agencies were guilty only of errors of omission, not commission.” The official announcement of the inquiry this week has done little to alleviate these fears, with David Cameron explaining that most of the inquiry will be held in secret, and adding, “Let’s be frank, it is not possible to have a full public inquiry into something that is meant to be secret.” As Reprieve stated in response to the announcement:

The scourge of the last government was the fact that they tried to cover up all the facts relating to torture complicity cases. In particular, the Binyam Mohamed litigation revolved around the government claiming public interest immunity in materials which were simply embarrassing. Now, the Prime Minister is saying that much of this inquiry will be held in secret. The only way in which public confidence is going to be restored in the intelligence services is if the public is able to see this inquiry functioning properly.

A second trigger for the article last week was the publication of a report by Human Rights Watch, “‘No Questions Asked’: Intelligence Cooperation with Countries that Torture,” which not only covered the UK, but also Germany and France, and in this second article, I examine Human Rights Watch’s timely reminder that, although the UK may well have been the Bush administration’s closest Western ally in the “War on Terror,” the involvement of other countries also deserves detailed analysis, and calls for accountability and the reform of currently flawed systems that fail to conform to those countries’ obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment.

German complicity in torture

Murat Kurnaz German complicity in the dubious practices of the “War on Terror” has long been apparent, primarily through the involvement of the intelligence services, the security services and/or law enforcement personnel in the detention in Afghanistan and Guantánamo of the Bremen-born German resident Murat Kurnaz, the kidnap in Macedonia and imprisonment in CIA “black sites” in Afghanistan of German citizen Khaled El-Masri, and the detention and torture of German citizen Muhammad Haydar Zammar, seized in Morocco in October 2001 and then transferred to Syria, where he was reportedly “interrogated by a group of German intelligence and law enforcement personnel while he was detained in the notorious Palestine Branch (Far’Falestin prison) in Damascus.”

These cases have received widespread coverage over the last few years, and one notable organization that has maintained a focus on the Germen government’s activities is the United Nations, which, in a major report on secret detention, published in February this year, included Germany as one of at least 40 countries who were “complicit in the secret detention” of prisoners seized in the “War on Terror.”

Among the damning allegations against the government, as described in the Human Rights Watch report, are Kurnaz’s claim that “he was mistreated by members of the German Special Forces Commando (Kommando Spezialkräfte, part of the German Army) while in US custody in Afghanistan prior to his transfer to Guantánamo Bay” and that two soldiers “forced him to lie on the ground with his hands tied behind his back, while one pulled him up by the hair and then hit his head on the ground,” El-Masri’s claim (denied by the government) that “he was visited during his detention in Afghanistan by an official with the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA),” and the conclusion of the UN, in its report on secret detention, that “the German government was complicit in Zammar’s secret detention in Syria because it knowingly took advantage of the situation to obtain information.” This follows up on a claim, in the European Parliament’s 2006-07 inquiry into European complicity in the US extraordinary rendition program, that the BKA provided information to the FBI that facilitated Zammar’s capture in Morocco.

Moving beyond these high-profile cases, Human Rights Watch is to be commended for conducting a far more sweeping investigation, demonstrating how, as in the UK, the government both actively seeks and passively receives intelligence information from regimes that systematically use torture, and then justifies using this information for operational purposes, and also in judicial hearings, despite being a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, and, since December 2008, a signatory to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, which “creates an international system to monitor places of detention worldwide, and a parallel domestic monitoring system in each country that ratifies it.” In Germany, this led to the creation of a Federal Office for the Prevention of Torture in November 2008.

The most disturbing revelation of the Human Rights Watch report on Germany is the extent to which the government works closely with Uzbekistan, where, as the UN has repeatedly explained, the use of torture is “systematic” and “routine.” Nevertheless, apparently concerned by the possible activities in Germany of the Uzbek Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), the German government has maintained close ties with the Uzbek government, having “worked actively to ease EU sanctions imposed in the wake of the May 2005 massacre in Andijan, in eastern Uzbekistan,” and allowing generally despised figures in the Uzbek government to visit Germany.

Most importantly, German law enforcement officials directly interrogated at least one detainee in Uzbek custody — Sherali A., who was questioned about the IJU in a prison in Tashkent by BKA officers In September 2008 — and also questioned another Uzbek suspect, in a prison in Astana, Kazakhstan, in July 2008.

Moreover, these interrogations were not only used for operational purposes, which is itself dubious, as it “bring[s] into question Germany’s commitment to the prevention and eradication of torture worldwide” and “can create demand” for information obtained through torture. The information was also used in preliminary hearings against four men — the so-called “Sauerland cell” — whose trial took place in 2009, as was information extracted from Aleem Nasir, a German citizen of Pakistani origin.

Nasir, who received an eight-year sentence in July 2009 for providing support to a terrorist organization, had originally been seized in Lahore, Pakistan in June 2007, and was then held for two months in the custody of Pakistan’s notoriously brutal Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), where, he claims, he made a false confession after being repeatedly beaten. Nevertheless, in this two-month period, he was “visited and questioned by a German consular official” (and has also claimed that he was interrogated by British and American intelligence officials), and he later told journalists that his Pakistani interrogators had been “fully briefed” by the German authorities, and that he was “repeatedly shown” photos of one of the men accused of being part of the “Sauerland cell.”

Although Nasir’s release was ordered by the Pakistani Supreme Court, he was arrested on arrival in Germany in August 2007, and subsequently put on trial. It then transpired that the ISI had sent the German authorities three reports of Nasir’s interrogations — headed, “From: Friends, To: Friends,” and tagged, ‘We assure you our fullest support, with best regards” — but although these were excluded in court, on the basis that they contravened Article 15 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which obliges signatories to “ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made,” the trial did include evidence from the consular official who visited Nasir in ISI custody, and also from a house search, undertaken while Nasir was held in Pakistan, which “appears to have been based on information from the ISI and the report of the consular official.”

In Human Rights Watch’s analysis, the most blatant example of manipulating Article 15 of the Convention Against Torture took place in the trial, in 2005, of Mounir El-Motassadeq for complicity in the 9/11 attacks, when the court’s interpretation “place[d] an undue burden on the individual against whom the evidence is invoked to demonstrate that the statements were in fact obtained through torture.” Disturbingly, the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg allowed as evidence summaries of the interrogations of three men — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Mohamedou Ould Slahi — who were held in US custody, even though the US “refused to disclose the whereabouts of the detainees or anything about the circumstances under which the interrogations were conducted.”

This is, of course, deeply alarming, given that the court acknowledged that KSM and bin al-Shibh were “held in secret, incommunicado detention” (both men were among the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 — bin al-Shibh had been held in secret detention since September 2002, KSM since March 2003). Slahi, who was seized in Mauritania in November 2001, was held in Jordan for eight months, where he has claimed he was tortured on behalf of the CIA, before his transfer to Guantánamo, where, as has also been established, he was one of a handful of prisoners subjected to a torture program devised specifically for him.

Nevertheless, the Hamburg court twisted the meaning of Article 15, accepting the men’s statements on the basis that it was “UN impossible to establish that torture had been used,” which provoked the following criticism from Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture:

[T]he Hamburg Court failed to shift the burden of proof to those Government authorities who actually invoked the contested evidence. In light of well-founded allegations of the torture and enforced disappearances of the witnesses in United States custody, it was the responsibility of the Prosecutor (or the Court) to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the testimonies were not extracted by torture, rather than to prove that they were actually obtained by torture (emphasis added).

French complicity in torture

If the situation in Germany resembles that in the UK, where information obtained through torture is actively sought or passively received, and then makes its way into operational practices and judicial proceedings, the situation in France — although involving fewer allegations of complicity with the US — is even more worrying on a domestic level because of the relationship between judges and the security services, and because of what Human Rights Watch describes as the “aggressive prosecution of alleged terrorist networks before specific acts are committed or even attempted.”

As the report explains, despite signing up to the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture in November 2008 (and establishing a national mechanism for its enforcement, as in Germany), the French government’s “preemptive approach to countering terrorism rests on continuous intelligence gathering” with countries “with poor records on torture,” including former colonies Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Following recent concerns about “returnees from combat or training in countries such as Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Human Rights Watch also notes that France has engaged in “close intelligence and judicial cooperation with countries in the Middle East, and Central and South Asia.” Bernard Squarcini, the head of the Central Agency for Domestic Intelligence (Direction central du renseignement intérieur, DCRI), has “characterized intelligence services in Yemen, Turkey and Syria as ‘friends’ from whom the DCRI receives valuable information.”

Disturbingly, despite requests for an interview, Squarcini never responded to Human Rights Watch, whose researchers were therefore “unable to ascertain whether French intelligence services have written or oral guidelines regarding information-sharing arrangements with services with records for torture, appropriate evaluation of information where there are reasonable grounds for believing it may have been obtained under torture, or participation in interrogations abroad.”

A counter-terrorism official explained that information obtained through torture was “unacceptable because [it] is not reliable and will ultimately be ruled inadmissible in court,” but in fact the particular set-up in France — whereby investigating judges initiate cases, using DCRI agents as a “judicial police force,” in addition to their role as an intelligence-gathering agency — leads to “a continuous exchange of information and joint strategizing between the investigative judges and security service agents,” in which, as Human Rights Watch explained:

The specialized investigating judge may authorize any number of investigative steps, including arrests, on the basis of intelligence information alone. In doing so, the judge will normally not know — or take any particular interest in — the sources or methods used to acquire the information. The goal is to acquire corroborating evidence through judicially-authorized acts. French counterterrorism prosecutor Philippe Maitre has said, “There is no judicial control over the intelligence services. It’s the judicial procedure that verifies the information that begins as intelligence … The origin of the intelligence is not important.”

Human Rights Watch also noted, “This approach, in which intelligence material is uncritically used for operational purposes in order to collect other kinds of evidence, embraces the possibility and legitimacy of using the fruits of the poisoned tree: information collected as a result of investigations prompted by statements obtained under torture.”

Understandably, Human Rights Watch was alarmed both by the ease with which material obtained through torture enters the judicial system, and also by the conflicting rules of the DCRI — “the fact that agents can perform both intelligence-gathering for operational purposes as well as judicially-authorized investigations with a view to producing evidence.”

In an illustration of the first problem, the report looks at the case of two men arrested in October 2005, on the basis of information extracted in Algeria from M’hamed Benyamina, an Algerian living in France, whose arrest in Algeria in September 2005 may have involved the cooperation of the French security services. Given the notoriously poor record of the Algerian secret service when it comes to torture, it is disturbing that information extracted from Benyamina would have been credited as trustworthy at all.

On the conflicting roles of the DCRI, the report noted that questions regarding these conflicts of interest arose in the trials of five men held in Guantánamo and released in 2004 and 2005. The case of these men, which has already led to a conviction overturned on appeal (with another trial ordered by a higher court in February this year), has focused on whether “the interrogations conducted at Guantánamo Bay were illegal because the agents had acted in their capacity as judicial police, collecting information later used to justify and substantiate the judicial investigation against the men” — and, along the way, has also revealed that the DCSI agents failed to “disclos[e] the material [from the interrogations] to the defense as required.”

In further analysis of how information obtained through torture has been incorporated into trials, the report cites the case of Djamel Beghal, an Algerian, who “was convicted in March 2004 of membership in a terrorist organization, based in part on statements he made under torture and ill-treatment in the United Arab Emirates, where he was arrested in September 2001.” Despite recanting his tortured confessions on arrival in France, the French court allowed these confessions to be used as evidence, apparently on the basis that “statements made under coercion have value insofar as corroborated by other elements, including statements made to the French investigating judge” (an Appeals Court later excluded the UAE confessions, but upheld Beghal’s conviction anyway).

In a final example, Human Rights Watch focused more sharply on the problems — as also seen in the UK and Germany — of rebutting information derived from torture in other countries, which, again, reveals how the French courts have “allowed as evidence in some cases statements allegedly made under torture by third persons, without taking steps to evaluate the circumstances in which they were obtained.” This final example involved the 2006 trial of the so-called “Chechen Network,” 27 people accused of undergoing training in Georgia for attacks in Europe, and key evidence came from statements made by a Jordanian, Abu Attiya, while detained in Amman. Despite the fact that torture in Jordan is well-known, a statement made by Abu Attiya — which, he said, he was not even allowed to read before signing — was used in the trial.

Even more alarmingly, the investigating judge actually traveled to Amman and submitted questions for Abu Attiya to the Jordanian authorities. When confronted by Human Rights Watch, who informed the judge that Abu Attiya had alleged ill-treatment in Jordanian custody, he simply replied, “I don’t know anything about that.” As Human Rights also noted, “The same French judge also traveled to Syria with a list of questions for a man named Said Arif, who would become one of the main figures in the Chechen Network trial. These questions were presented at the trial accompanied by ‘answers’ in parenthesis. All of the evidence emanating from Arif’s detention in Syria was eventually excluded from trial because the court accepted Arif’s claims that he was tortured throughout the year he spent in the custody of the Syrian secret service.”

Given Syria’s truly abysmal human rights record, this should also have come as no surprise, but in common with the other dealings with untrustworthy regimes exposed in the Human Rights Watch report, and described in these two articles, it is a sign of what happens when, in the rush to safeguard national security at all costs, pillars of the European establishment, like the UK, Germany and France, forget their obligations to resist any involvement with torture whatsoever, arguing that information derived from torture cannot be ruled out, allowing it into operations and trials, and, as a result, finding ways to avoid asking difficult questions about whether it is reliable, and whether its use is creating a market for more information derived from torture.

It remains to be seen how Germany and France will respond to the Human Rights Watch report, and whether, in the UK, the promised inquiry into complicity in torture will lead to an honest evaluation of how flirting with torture is incompatible with morality, justice, and — perhaps most practically — the need for accurate information. Those of us who abhor the use of torture, its corrosive effect on notions of civilization, and its global web of victims, inspired by America’s post-9/11 flight from the law, need to hold firm to our demands that our governments change their ways of operating, and no longer seek to justify the use of torture under any circumstances.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on Eurasia Review, The Public Record, Uruknet and United Progressives.

Calls for Review of Punitive Sentences for Ex-Guantánamo Tajiks

Back in August 2007, I reported the story of Muqit Vohidov and Rukhniddin Sharopov, Tajik prisoners in Guantánamo, released in March 2007, who had just been sentenced to 17 years in “high-security penal colonies” (aka labor camps) for “serving as mercenaries in Afghanistan.” The two men were convicted of aiding the Taliban by fighting for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), and for taking part in “illegal border crossing.”

As I explained at the time:

After passing sentence, the Supreme Court judge, Musammir Uroqov, said that both men had maintained their innocence, and added, “In their last words, they said they didn’t expect such consequences for acts they committed.” After five years and four months in US custody — first in Afghanistan, and then in Guantánamo — this was probably something of an understatement. In Guantánamo, both men had admitted in their tribunals that they had been involved with the IMU, but claimed they had been tricked into doing so.

As I also explained in my article, drawing on what was known of the men’s stories from reports in Guantánamo:

As Vohidov and Sharopov begin their long sentences in a Tajik prison, it seems hard to believe that they have received anything approaching justice, either during their 64 months in US custody, or in the court rooms of their homeland, and they join many others whose lives have been permanently blighted by the taint of Guantánamo, where the presumption of guilt — untouched by due process — contaminates all who have ended up in the Bush administration’s most visible gulag.

Nearly three years on from that punitive sentence, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting has revisited the story, explaining how the men’s families have been campaigning for a review of the verdict, and how prosecutors may now be prepared to review their case. Although arguments have been made that the sentence was justifiable because the men “committed acts that violate national law,” it has also been noted that the time they served in Guantánamo was not taken into account during the sentencing.

Moreover, other observers remain deeply critical, and their insights reflect badly not only on the Tajik authorities but also on the US government. As the IWPR article explains, Payam Foroughi, until recently a human rights officer with the OSCE in Tajikistan, “believes due process was not followed,” pointing out that the men “had not enough, or any, time to sufficiently and seriously discuss and properly prepare their case with a lawyer — and one of their choice — prior to their court hearing.” He also believes that the court “should have probed further into the allegation that Vohidov and Sharopov willingly became members of the IMU,” adding, “If anything, the evidence points to them having been victims of human trafficking.”

Criticism of the US has come, inadvertently, from the judge in the men’s trial in 2007, who told IWPR, “We could not determine, even from the defendants, on what legal basis they were detained at and released from Guantánamo. We could not get hold of any documents. So we reached a verdict based on the documents that we had.” Highlighting this problem more explicitly, a local lawyer told IWPR that “the lack of documentation from Guantánamo was a recurring problem in countries to which detainees are repatriated.” He might have added that in most countries the authorities’ response was to let the men go.

Review Urged for Ex-Guantánamo Tajiks
By Dabiri Kabir, Daler Gufronov and Parvina Khamidova, Institute for War & Peace Reporting (RCA Issue 618), June 23, 2010

Legal experts say there is little justification for the continued detention of two former Guantánamo detainees serving long prison terms in Tajikistan after being repatriated by the United States in 2007.

Muqit Vohidov and Rukhniddin Sharopov, both 29, were arrested and sent to trial immediately after they were sent back to Tajikistan in March 2007 after spending five years and four months initially in Afghanistan and then at the Guantánamo detention facility. They were sentenced to 17 years in jail for serving as mercenaries with the banned Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, IMU, and illegally crossing the national border.

IWPR understands that Tajikistan’s prosecution may conduct a review of the case, at which time it could consider seeking shorter sentences.

The two were detained in the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan in November 2001 by anti-Taleban forces of the Northern Alliance, and were later handed over to US custody.

The US authorities have released unclassified documents containing testimony from the two detainees in 2004, which show they were accused of being members of the IMU, which is on the US government’s list of terrorist organisations.

The documents state that Vohidov was transported by helicopter from eastern Tajikistan to Afghanistan in January 2001, and Sharopov travelled there at around the same time.

This testimony, from a Guantánamo tribunal review of Vohidov’s case in which Sharopov appeared as a witness, indicated they were recruited by the IMU in 2000 and taken to a camp in eastern Tajikistan. They then had their passports taken away and were made to perform menial tasks, before being taken to Afghanistan.

The men told the tribunal they thought they were being recruited into Tajikistan’s national army and had never heard of the IMU until they arrived in Afghanistan.

The IMU emerged from Islamists active in the Uzbek city of Namangan in the early Nineties, who shifted to Tajikistan following a government crackdown. The Tajik civil war was then in full swing, and the IMU developed as a guerrilla force allied with the opposition forces. After that conflict ended in 1997, the IMU evolved into a separate force whose stated agenda was to make war on governments in Central Asia, primarily Uzbekistan. To this end, IMU guerrillas launched a series of raids into Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in 1999 and 2000.

Forced out of Central Asia, the IMU relocated to Afghanistan where it joined forces with the country’s Taleban rulers. When the US-led Coalition arrived in late 2001, IMU fighters put up stiff resistance in Kunduz. Some were killed, others captured and many escaped to a new stronghold in northwest Pakistan.

Umar Abdulayev, photographed in Guantanamo by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross There were a total of 12 Tajikistan nationals listed at Guantánamo. Of the 11 sent back to Tajikistan, all but three, including Vohidov and Sharopov were released on their return. The 12th, Umar Abdulloev {aka Abdulayev], is still in Guantánamo. His lawyer Matthew O’Hara says Abdulloev is concerned about what happened to Vohidov and Sharopov, and has asked not to be repatriated [Note: For the full story, see here].

O’Hara believes that his client should be given asylum in some third country.

“US officials have a legal … and a moral obligation not to repatriate Umar to Tajikistan under the circumstances of his case,” he said, adding that a commitment by the Tajik authorities to protect his client’s rights “is plainly not enforceable and does not protect a person’s human rights in practice.”

He added, “The US State Department and respected NGOs all agree that human rights conditions in Tajik prisons and the Tajik justice system are poor, and that torture occurs with impunity in Tajik prisons. These are the reasons for our concerns.”

In its annual human rights for 2009 published in March this year, the US State Department said Tajikistan’s human rights record remained poor, noting problems such as the torture and abuse of detainees by the security forces, the denial of the right to fair trial, harsh and life-threatening prison conditions, and lack of access to prisoners for international monitors like the Red Cross.

Campaign for release based on mitigating circumstances

The parents of both Vohidov and Sharopov have been campaigning for a review of their cases since their imprisonment. Last year, their mothers pressed their case in a letter addressed to President Imomali Rahmon and published in a local newspaper.

They argue that evidence brought at Guantánamo and the subsequent trial in Tajikistan does not show that the two, both born in 1981, were involved in combat or in acts of terrorism, so the sentences are disproportionate.

Vohidov’s father Valikhon says the Tajik court did not take extenuating circumstances into account.

“These two suffered for five years. They are very young and inexperienced,” he told IWPR. “They did not take part in the war and they didn’t kill anyone. This is unjust.”

Another former Guantánamo detainee sent back to Tajikistan, Ibrohim Nasriddinov, was given a 23-year sentence in 2007 for murder and weapons offences, to which he pleaded guilty [Note: It has not been possible to identify Nasriddinov, as his name does not correspond to the names of any of the Tajiks held in Guantánamo].

Legal experts argue that given the nature of the offences and under other circumstances, Vohidov and Sharopov received too harsh a punishment, and that the time they spent at Guantánamo should have been taken into account.

Dushanbe-based lawyer Abduqayum Yusufov says that under international agreements on detention, the Tajik court should have subtracted the men’s five years of incarceration at Guantánamo from the sentence it imposed.

A former chairman of the Supreme Court, Mahmadali Vatanov, who now sits in parliament, declined to comment on these specific cases, but he agreed that under Tajik law, any previous time in detention should be taken into account.

Payam Foroughi, an independent expert and until last year a human rights officer with the OSCE in Tajikistan, has followed the cases, and believes due process was not followed.

“It appears they [defendants] had not enough, or any, time to sufficiently and seriously discuss and properly prepare their case with a lawyer — and one of their choice — prior to their court hearing,” he told IWPR. “In my opinion, there may not be sufficient evidence to keep them behind bars and that the two men may thus deserve to be freed, as they very likely pose no danger to their government and society.”

After arriving in Tajikistan in March 2007, the men were swiftly prosecuted and put on trial, and the verdict was announced in August the same year.

Foroughi believes that the court should have probed further into the allegation that Vohidov and Sharopov willingly became members of the IMU.

“If anything, the evidence points to them having been victims of human trafficking,” Foroughi said, noting that it is not clear whether they had any idea which group in reality recruited them.

“They claim that they had thought they were joining the Tajik military, and this is not far-fetched. There is indeed a high possibility that they were deceived, and once they found out the nature of the people who had recruited them, their passports had already been forcefully taken away from them and they were forced to go to a place they later found was Afghanistan and it was literally impossible to return. In short, they were tricked, trafficked and trapped,” he said.

Musomir Urakov, the judge who presided in the trial of Vohidov and Sharopov, rejects suggestions that the trial was based on poor evidence.

“During the trial and appeal process, all their [defence] arguments were checked out, and as presiding judge, I can say the verdict was a fair one,” he said. “It’s generally the case that objections are raised. I think that if trial participants disagree [with the verdict], it is because not everyone is familiar with the law and its provisions.”

Asked why the time Vohidov and Sharopov spent at Guantánamo was not taken into account, Judge Urakov said the court had no documentary information relating to their detention there.

“We could not determine, even from the defendants, on what legal basis they were detained at and released from Guantánamo. We could not get hold of any documents. So we reached a verdict based on the documents that we had,” he said.

A Dushanbe-based lawyer who wished to remain anonymous said the lack of documentation from Guantánamo was a recurring problem in countries to which detainees are repatriated.

“If no charges are brought against them, then generally they are sent back home and are not given documentary confirmation,” he said.

IWPR contacted the US embassy in Tajikistan, but staff were unable to say whether former Guantánamo inmates were issued with documents confirming they had spent time there.

Azizmat Imomov, who was a deputy justice minister in 2007 and is now member of parliament in Tajikistan, insists it was correct to detain, question and prosecute the men on their return, and says they were guilty under national legislation.

“Despite the fact that these citizens were regarded as innocent abroad, within Tajikistan they committed acts that violate national law, and they should be punished,” he said.

Prosecutors now looking at possible review

However, it now looks at least possible that the men’s cases will be reviewed. On May 26, their parents met Prosecutor General Sherkhon Salimzoda and asked him to review their cases and consider cutting their prison terms in view of the time they spent at Guantánamo.

A representative of the prosecutor general’s office, who wished to remain anonymous, told IWPR that following the meeting, the prosecutor’s office asked the Supreme Court to send it the case files so that it could look into the possibility of a review.

“We intend to look at all the details of this case again, and we will then give a more detailed answer,” said the official.

Dabiri Kabir is a pseudonym for a Tajik journalist; Daler Gufronov is an IWPR-trained reporter; and Parvina Khamidova is an IWPR editor in Tajikistan.

Note: In August 2007, the two men were identified as Muqit Vohidov and Rukniddin Sharopov. In addition, the US authorities referred to Sharopov as Sharipov, and Vohitov was known, rather confusingly, as Sobit (Abdumukit) Valikhonovich (Vakhidov), and was later identified by his US lawyer as Wahldof Abdul Mokit.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Guantanamo, Life after Guantanamo, Tajiks in Guantanamo
7.7.10
2 Comments

Who Are the Three Ex-Guantánamo Prisoners on Hunger Strike in Slovakia?

A week last Thursday, three former Guantánamo prisoners who were released in Slovakia in January this year, after the US government concluded that it was unsafe for them to be returned to their home countries, which all have poor human rights records, embarked on a hunger strike to protest about the conditions in which they are being held, in a detention center in the south west of the country.

One of the men “described their living conditions as poor — having only beds and a sink at their disposal and being allowed to leave their rooms for only an hour per day,” and explained that they “are not allowed contact with anyone except for personnel in the facility and their lawyer.” The men are also protesting about the fact that their status in the country has not yet been finalized, and about what they regard as a broken promise to find housing for them in a town with a Muslim community, so that they can begin to build new lives for themselves.

On Friday, as IPS reported, the former prisoner elaborated on the conditions under which the three men are held. “Conditions here are worse than in Guantánamo, I can say that with no hesitation,” he said. “In Guantánamo I was allowed to be outside for 20 hours a day. Here I am allowed to go out only for one hour. I have no idea why. In Guantánamo I was allowed to pray with other Muslims … but here that is not allowed either. They say it would be a security risk. Why? I do not understand. No one from the Slovak authorities has spoken to us. When I ask about all these things they keep saying the same thing — that they do not have time to talk to us.” He added, “In other countries people like us get spending money, housing and Internet connections. We are not allowed the Internet. Why not? They will not tell us.”

Until this story broke, the identities of the three men were unknown, but their spokesman identified himself immediately as Adel Fattough Ali El-Gazzar. A 44-year old accountant and former Egyptian army officer, with a master’s degree in economics, El-Gazzar, who is also fluent in English, was first cleared for release from Guantánamo by a military review board in 2006 or 2007, and was then cleared again last year by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed the cases of all the Guantánamo prisoners, and recommended, at the time of his release, that 114 of the 198 men still in Guantánamo should be released (although only 17 men, including El-Gazzar and his two companions, have been released since the review was completed).

El-Gazzar had traveled to Pakistan in 2000 as a missionary, and had spent a year traveling around the country, meeting different people and spreading the word of Allah until the 9/11 attacks occurred. Throughout that period, he had, over a two-day period, also visited a military training camp run by the militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, but in Guantánamo he swiftly dealt with groundless allegations that he was a member of the group. In his tribunal in 2004, he gave the authorities a brief history lesson about how the Pakistani army had used LeT as one of its proxy armies in the Kashmir struggle, how LeT had a history of discord with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and how unimpressive he found the group’s arrangements in Pakistan. “I didn’t train there,” he said. “I was an Egyptian officer, I don’t need that type of training. It is not actually a camp, it is a joke … it is several tents on the top of a mountain.” He also explained that LeT “take people from the streets and give them training on the AK-47 then send them to Kashmir to fight. About 95 percent of them are killed crossing the border by India.”

Speaking of his arrest, he explained that, after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, as thousands of Afghan refugees streamed towards the Pakistani border, he went to the area to see how he could help, and signed up with the Saudi Red Crescent, volunteering to go into Afghanistan to help the refugees. However, just two hours after he crossed the border, when he was at a large refugee camp, it was bombed by US forces.

“I saw a light and heard a voice and then I lost consciousness,” he said in his tribunal. “When I woke up I was in a Pakistani hospital. I lost my coat, my passport, my money, everything. And I lost my leg also. Then I found myself in Pakistani custody.” Kept in the hospital for a month, he was visited by Pakistani army officers and even the governor of Quetta, and was then told that he would be taken to “a large modern hospital with good facilities and surgeons to take care of my leg,” but was handed over — or sold — to the Americans instead, possibly as one of five men taken from the hospital who were identified by US authorities as the “Quetta Five.”

In Guantánamo, in the following exchange with one of the officers in his tribunal, he explained why he thought he ended up in US custody:

Q: Do you have any theories about why the governor and the Pakistani intel folks would sell you out and turn you over to the Americans?
A: Come on man, you know what happened. In Pakistan you can buy people for $10. So what about $5,000?
Q: So they sold you?
A: Yes.

According to his lawyers at Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity, “He was then moved to [the] US prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where the routine included severe beatings, exposure to freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation for days on end, and the suspension of prisoners by their wrists.” He “endured eleven days” of this before being transferred to Guantánamo, but on arrival “it was almost six weeks since he had sustained his injures. They had gone untreated in US military custody and, as a result, he was infected with gangrene so severe that his left leg had to be amputated.”

A cooperative prisoner, El-Gazzar was soon found to have no links to terrorism, but despite being told that he would be “one of the first to leave” Guantánamo, he was held for eight years. In Guantánamo, he was also respected as a natural leader by his fellow prisoners, and in the summer of 2005, during a brief period when the authorities toyed with implementing the Geneva Conventions, he was part of a six-man “Prisoner’s Council,” which also included the British resident Shaker Aamer.

In contrast to Adel El-Gazzar, the identities of the other two men were not disclosed when the hunger strike started, but they were recently revealed in the Slovakian media, and I believe, as with El-Gazzar, that it is important to explain what is known of their stories, to counter any possible suggestion that they were connected with terrorist activities.

The first is Poolad Tsiradzho (also identified as Polad Sabir Sirajov), a 35-year old economist and translator from Azerbaijan (the only Azerbaijani held in Guantánamo), who said that he went to Afghanistan to study the Koran, and was wounded by the Northern Alliance while working as a guard at a Pakistani food warehouse in northern Afghanistan. According to his mother, who spoke to the Azerbaijani press in April 2006, he graduated in 1992 from a university in Turkey, and then worked as a translator for a Turkish construction company. She added that he had disappeared on February 16, 2001, and that she only heard that he was in Guantánamo through the International Committee of the Red Cross. She also expressed doubts that he would have joined any kind of radical group because he had “not received any religious education,” and “was not a member of any religious organization.”

In contrast to these claims, the US authorities alleged that Tsiradzho had traveled to Afghanistan to fight, after spending a year and a half in the Azerbaijani army, had trained at al-Farouq (the main training camp associated with Osama bin Laden), and had then fought on the Taliban front lines, before retreating to Kunduz and surrendering to the Northern Alliance. However, given that he was, at one point, accused of being a translator for Osama bin Laden, and given that there is ample evidence that very few allegations should be taken at face value, as the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions have demonstrated, because they largely consist of dubious statements made by the prisoners themselves or by their fellow prisoners, it is wise to regard the government’s story with suspicion, especially as Tsiradzho was cleared for release last year by the Guantánamo Review Task Force.

The other man, 41-year old Rafiq al-Hami (or Alhami), is originally from Tunisia, but explained in Guantánamo that had been working in restaurants in Germany, and had traveled to Pakistan in 1999 to study with the vast missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi. Disturbingly, he is one of six men who ended up in Guantánamo after being seized in Iran and transferred to US custody in the early months of 2002 in a deal that has still never been publicly explained. Of the five men seized with him, two — both Yemenis — are still held, but two others, a Jordanian and a Yemeni, were released in 2004, and a third, an Afghan taxi driver, was released in December 2007.

This man, Aminullah Tukhi, explained that 10 prisoners in total — six Arabs, two Afghans, an Uzbek and a Tajik — had been delivered to the Americans by the Iranian government. Although six of these men are accounted for above, it is not known what happened to the other four — one of the Arabs, one of the Afghans, and the Uzbek and the Tajik — although it would be surprising if their stories ended well, because Rafiq al-Hami and the other men were all held and tortured in secret prisons run by the CIA before being sent to Guantánamo.

In a lawsuit filed last April, which has still not had the impact it should on claims that the CIA’s torture program did not begin until the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued its notorious “torture memos” on August 1, 2002, al-Hami stated, as the Associated Press described it, that, from December 2001, he was held in three CIA “dark sites,” where “his presence and his existence were unknown to everyone except his United States detainers,” and where, at various times, he was “stripped naked, threatened with dogs, shackled in painful stress positions for hours, punched, kicked and exposed to extremes of heat and cold.” He also stated that his interrogators “sprayed pepper spray on his hemorroids, causing extreme pain.”

As I explained in an article last year, in which I attempted to expose how “CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months Before DoJ Approval”:

It’s likely that all of al-Hami’s claims are true. In my book The Guantánamo Files, I wrote about him … noting [that, when] speaking of his experiences before his transfer to Guantánamo, [he] explained, “I was in … Afghan prison[s] but the interrogation was done by Americans. I was there for about a one-year period, transferring from one place to another.” He added that one of the prisons was the “Dark Prison” near Kabul, which is known, in particular, from the story of the British resident Binyam Mohamed, who spent four or five months there after being tortured for 18 months in Morocco. I have previously described the “Dark Prison” as “a medieval torture dungeon with the addition of ear-splittingly loud music and noise, which was pumped into the cells 24 hours a day,” based on accounts by prisoners who were held there, including Binyam Mohamed, who described his time there as “the worst days of his captivity” — worse than the 18 months in Morocco, where the CIA’s proxy torturers regularly sliced his genitals with a razorblade.

[Al-Hami] told his tribunal that he was tortured for three months in the “Dark Prison,” where, he said, “I was threatened. I was left out all night in the cold … I spent two months with no water, no shoes, in darkness and in the cold. There was darkness and loud music for two months. I was not allowed to pray … These things are documented. You have them.”

In the allegations against al-Hami, the US authorities claimed that he had admitted attending a military training camp in Afghanistan, but he later refuted the statements, explaining — understandably — that they had been extracted through the use of torture.

As he and his companions attempt to put pressure on the Slovak government to remove them from the detention center in which they are currently held, and to begin integrating them into normal life, I hope that these insights into their stories — and Rafiq al-Hami’s in particular — will enable those who hold their futures in their hands to understand that, after all they have been through, the last thing they need, to begin dealing with the trauma of their time at Guantánamo, is to be held in conditions that remind them of those eight years.

It may be, as Branislav Tichý, the director of Amnesty International Slovensko, explained to IPS, that Slovakian government officials “have not had this kind of situation before and so there is nothing that they can compare it with.” Tichý added, “The normal processing time for asylum applicants is three months, but the authorities say that they are not in any asylum procedures, so their status is unclear.” However, as he also explained, “This is what we, and the three men, want resolved. Amnesty has been calling on the authorities to resolve this from the day they arrived here.”

According to IPS, the Interior Ministry has “suggested the men may now be moved to a boarding house.” If this is the plan, then officials need to inform Adel El-Gazzar as soon as possible. As IPS also explained, he “remains defiant and says that until someone from the Slovak authorities speaks to him and resolves his lack of freedom and status in Slovakia, he will continue to refuse food.” As the hunger strike continues, it is perhaps fortunate for President Obama that Adel El-Gazzar has not directed his frustrations at the US, which bears the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the welfare of men who were wrongly detained, subjected to torture and other ill-treatment for eight long years, and then — it seems — unceremoniously dumped in other countries, to avoid America having to take responsibility for its own mistakes.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on Eurasia Review, United Progressives, Uruknet and Zakiraah.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 59 prisoners released from February 2009 to May 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain.

Fighting Ghosts: An Interview with Husein Al-Samamara

Three weeks ago, as I explained in an article at the time, the BBC’s Newsnight broadcast an extraordinary insight into the bleak conditions under which Hussain Alsamamara, a Jordanian terror suspect held under a form of house arrest, is obliged to live. Like a few dozen other terror suspects — both British and foreign nationals — who are confined to their homes for up to 18 hours a day on control orders or deportation bail, Mr. Alsamamara is held on the basis of secret evidence that has not been fully disclosed to him, and deprived of his liberty without being charged or tried. As a follow-up to this broadcast, I’m pleased to cross-post below an interview with Mr. Alsamamara (described as Husein Al-Samamara), which was conducted by Frances Webber last October, and published by the Institute of Race Relations on July 1.

Fighting ghosts: an interview with Husein Al-Samamara
By Frances Webber, Institute of Race Relations, July 1, 2010

Below we publish an interview with Husein Al-Samamara, currently subjected to draconian immigration bail conditions in the UK as he fights against his deportation to Jordan, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

Husein Al-Samamara was interviewed by Frances Webber in October 2009, but legal issues prevented publication. He recently decided to “go public” about his situation, and a filmed interview was shown on BBC’s Newsnight on 16 June 2010. He was facing revocation of his bail for that filmed interview. However, at a Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) hearing, the judge ruled that he could remain on bail — on the ground that he did not wish to make a martyr of Al-Samamara.

Husein Al-Samamara: My name is Husein Al-Samamara. I am a Palestinian. I was born in Jordan, and I was there until I was 23 years old. Before that I’d been in trouble with the Jordanian authorities for talking against them in the mosque. I arrived in this country in May 2001 and claimed asylum straight away, at Heathrow airport. I was so scared of being sent back to Jordan, I gave false details — false name, false story, everything false except for my date of birth, because I didn’t want to say anything which would send me back to Jordan.

Frances Webber: When did your problems here start?

Husein Al-Samamara: My problems started in this country in 2004, when I was arrested under the Terrorism Act. I went to work as usual, and my manager said there were people who needed to speak to me in the main manager’s office. I went to the office, and I found two men in civilian clothes, and they said, “We’re police, you’re under arrest under the Terrorism Act.” I was so shocked, I asked, “What’s going on?” They said, “We have to handcuff you”. I said, “Listen, you don’t need to, people are going to look at me.” But then I looked through the window and there were about fifteen police cars in the car park. So I said, “OK, my workmates already know”, so I let them put these cuffs on. They took me to Halesowen police station, and started questioning me. They asked if I knew bin Laden. I said, “Yes, I know him, he’s on TV every day. He’s on the news all around the world.” They asked me about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He said al-Zarqawi came from the same city I came from. I said, “Does that mean I had to know him?” He said, “And he was in the same prison.” I said I’d never seen him and he wasn’t in the same prison.

[Mr Al-Samamara was questioned about a will and CDs found in his room in the house he shared with other asylum seekers.]

I was held in that police station for five days and released without any charge. Their questions showed that they knew who I was — they knew I wasn’t “Abdullah”, and they were asking about Jordan [not the West Bank, where Mr Al-Samamara had claimed to be from in his asylum claim]. So I realised that they must have got the information from the intelligence service in Jordan. What confirmed this was that a month after my release I went to sign on at the Home Office [as a refused asylum seeker] and found people waiting for me there. They said they need to speak to me. The older guy introduced himself as from MI5, and there was an Asian man and one woman from North Africa. They said, “Your name’s Husein, it’s not Abdullah.” I said, “OK”, and the older guy started questioning me again about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He started showing me photographs of myself taken in the GDI (secret service) building in Jordan. He told me, “We work together with the GDI.” He continued showing me photos, some taken in the same GDI building, some in the police station and some in prison in Jordan. He said he was sorry I had had a hard time in Jordan. I told him that what I lived through in Jordan, I wanted to forget, it was in the past, and I didn’t want anybody to be sorry for me. He was saying things like, “We can help you, we’re not asking you to do anything, just be good, be nice to us and we can help you. We can help you stay in this country.” I said that I didn’t need help from anyone. I wanted to be free of the whole situation I was in in Jordan. As I left the building, the Asian man said he needed to search the car. We went to the car park and he started searching the car. And the lady said, “Come on, just tell us, all the questions he asked you, is all that true?” I said I hadn’t said anything to him and I wasn’t going to say anything to her, there in the car park, just because she was a nice lady.

Frances Webber: By this time you’d been in the UK three years?

Husein Al-Samamara: I’d made many friends. Apart from these problems, things were OK. After my release I had gone back to work, and that was OK, I stayed there until December 2005, when I decided to leave to start my own business, which I did in January 2006, buying damaged cars, breaking them down for parts and sending them abroad. I bought a fork lift and a recovery truck, I passed my UK driving test and then started doing the truck licence. Until July 2006 … I’d met my wife in 2005 and we married in October. After we got married she moved from London to Birmingham. She came into this country to do her Masters degree, in Business Administration. After we married she left her studies. We decided just to have a family life.

On 13 July 2006 our first baby, a daughter, was born. I was in the hospital during the birth. And then I had a call from a police station in Birmingham, telling me they needed me to go in and make a statement about an incident I had reported to them where someone sold me fake insurance for my car. So I said, “OK, I’m in the hospital now, and my wife just gave birth. I’ll come tomorrow”, which was Friday. The officer went silent for a second, and then said, “You know what, just come in Monday [17 July].”

So Monday, I did a small party for my baby girl. She was just three days old at the time. The appointment with the officer was at 5pm. I called before I went, and asked if it was going to take long because we’re having a party. He said, “Just ten minutes maximum.” A friend drove me down and I said, “Stay in the car, I’m not going to be long, ten minutes.” I went inside the police station where the officer was waiting for me. He put me in a small room and said, “Just give me two minutes, I’ll be back.” He went outside, then he came back with something like ten officers, all wearing like helmets, and he said to me, “You are under arrest, your asylum claim has been refused and you’re going to be deported back to your home country.” That was it. They never asked me any questions. I asked if I could speak to my lawyer, they said, “We will inform your lawyer.” I said, “OK, can I speak to my wife?” They said, “No, not now, later on.” So they took me to a cell. The next morning, they said if you want to speak to your wife you can, but only in English. I said, “But I speak Arabic, she speaks Arabic, why do I have to speak in English with her?” They said, “You have to, otherwise you don’t speak to her.” So I spoke to my wife. She gave birth by caesarean, she wasn’t really well. I told her, “Don’t worry, it’s just an immigration problem.”

They transferred me from the police station to Long Lartin high security prison. There I realised I was not in a detention centre. I’d never been in prison [in the UK], and I was aware that if you have immigration problems you go to detention, not a prison. There were eighteen detainees — I was told later the unit was just opened for us, after being closed for fifteen years. They started telling me about SIAC [the Special Immigration Appeals Commission], secret evidence, and all that, and I didn’t believe them. I said, “That’s rubbish, what secret?” and they said, “Yeah, you’re going to be here for a long time, don’t worry.” They were laughing at me. So I called my solicitor, I remember the first time she explained to me about SIAC, and secret evidence, and she said, “I’ll try to get you out, but … ” I was in shock. For the first six, seven months I was still having a hope that this was wrong, and I was going to be released. But after that, you know …

[Bail was refused by SIAC in December 2006 and July 2007, on the basis of “closed” evidence, despite the judges accepting that Mr Al-Samamara's imprisonment was severely affecting his wife and baby daughter.]

I spent two years in Long Lartin. After Abu Qatada won his case in the Court of Appeal, because he’s Jordanian, the same as me, the court contacted my solicitors and told them to apply for bail.

Frances Webber: Were you released straight away?

Husein Al-Samamara: The Home Office said they didn’t need any surety. But the court said, “No, we need a surety.” Mr Mitting [the chairman of SIAC] said he wanted my friend, who had offered before. My friend was in Pakistan. The judge said, “That’s fine, just send him a fax to sign.” He was in a village, and he had to travel to a place where they had a fax. When he went there the electricity was down, so he had to go back again and he had to do the same again. It was very difficult. But in the end he got the statement, signed it and faxed it back.

Then the Home Office wouldn’t let me go back to the flat where I used to live. They said they were looking for a house for me. I waited [in prison] for nearly two months for the Home Office to come up with a place. [Mr Al-Samamara's lawyers went to court over the Home Office' continuing failure to find alternative accommodation for him to enable him to be released.] The judge gave them one week, and they came up with the house where I was rehoused.

That place was completely isolated. I’d lived in Birmingham for five years before I got arrested, but I never saw that area before. The Home Office lied, they said the house had got access to a halal butcher and a mosque. They pointed these two places out on a map. We went there. My solicitor went before me and she was looking for this mosque and this halal butcher and she couldn’t find either. She said probably I’m unfamiliar with the area, we’ll look again. So I got released and moved to that house. It was completely isolated. There were no Asian people at all in that area, which is fine, but it wasn’t that nice. There were so many racist incidents. My wife was attacked in that area.

[In one incident Mrs Al-Samamara took her daughter to the swings and white mothers immediately removed their children from the swings.]

Frances Webber: Why did they do that?

Husein Al-Samamara: Because her face is covered. She wears the veil. She used to get sworn at in the street, every single day. One time, I was in the hospital for an operation on my thigh, and she had to go out to get some bread and some stuff. She went with our daughter. On the way back, in the alleyway leading from the main street to where I live, a white man stopped her and was swearing at her and calling her names, and he was in a position to attack her, and she had a mobile in her pocket and she called the police. The man left.

Another time, we were physically assaulted. I went out with my wife and daughter, in the two hours I have, just to have a walk on a sunny nice day.

Outside the Select and Save shop, which is the only shop we have in the area, there were three men and they started calling my wife names. To be perfectly honest, I ignored them as I didn’t want to get into trouble because of my situation. I went into the shop to get bread, but they were still calling my wife names, she was in the car with our daughter. So I said, “Just have some respect. What’s wrong with you, you’re calling a lady names?” And then one of them just pushed me and swore at me. So I held him by the hand. Another man came from behind, and he punched me, and another one came at me, just attacked me with a stun gun. I fell onto the ground and my head hit the pavement. I just was stunned for a few seconds. I woke and my wife was screaming, crying, my daughter was crying.

[The racial abuse and attacks were so bad that the police told Mr Al-Samamara to carry a mobile phone on him at all times to report the incidents, unaware of the fact that he was not allowed one. Mr Al-Samamara's lawyers went to court for an order for the Home Office to rehouse them, but it was refused.]

Before this attack happened, I had been reporting every single incident [of racist abuse] to the police and to the Home Office. We’d been trying, asking them, pressing them, saying, “This is what we’ve been through.” But the Home Office had refused to move me from that area. But straightaway after that last incident the police informed the Home Office that they had to move me immediately.

[Eventually Mr Al-Samamara was moved out of Birmingham. He currently lives in a multi-racial area of London with his wife, daughter and infant son.]

Frances Webber: How do the bail conditions affect you?

Husein Al-Samamara: The conditions are so hard, to be honest, it’s not for a human being. I’m only allowed out for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. Then, I’m not allowed to go anywhere I want. It’s only within a certain area the Home Office give me. I can’t cross the boundary, that would be a breach of bail. I have to wear a [electronic] tag twenty-four hours a day. I have to sleep with it, I have to live with it, I have to walk with it. I have to report [to the security company] when I leave the house and when I come back. And I’m not allowed to have a mobile phone, I’m not allowed to have a computer, I’m not allowed to have anything which can be called a storage device, anything you can record on, I’m not allowed to have in the house. I’m not allowed to have a camera, I’m not allowed to have visitors unless they apply for clearance from the Home Office — even doctors.

My wife got ill, she got really mentally ill, and the doctors and the nurses needed to come to see her regularly. But they were rejected by the Home Office unless they applied for clearance. And these people were shocked, to be asked to give their personal details. They said, “But we are doctors.” Just today it happened again. My solicitor contacted me in the morning, because we asked the midwife to come, as my wife has just given birth recently, and again, the Home Office replied today saying no, they have to apply individually for clearance, and give their personal details. So these are the conditions I’ve lived under for nearly one and a half years, since my release, July 2008. The only visitors I’m allowed to have regularly, without clearance, are the police — and they come every couple of days and search the house, upside down, they go through everything.

Frances Webber: Have you any idea how long this is going to go on?

Husein Al-Samamara: I have no idea, to be honest with you. The case I’m fighting, it’s like I’m fighting a ghost. I don’t know what I’m fighting. Everything is secret. I’m not allowed to see anything. The evidence they say they have against me is held in secret.

[The Home Office asserted that Mr Al-Samamara had undertaken terrorist training in Afghanistan, associated with Islamist extremists in the UK and overseas, and had links with al-Zarqawi, but refused to provide any particulars or evidence, and SIAC upheld the refusal.]

Frances Webber: In your appeal against deportation, which SIAC rejected, they were talking about material that was found in your 2004 arrest, weren’t they? They were talking about this will.

Husein Al-Samamara: This will I wrote when I was in prison in Jordan, and I wasn’t hiding that will anyway. I just had it on the shelf. When they raided my house in 2004 they found it. And they were also talking about the CD-Roms, which they said were in my room in the house [in 2004]. They said they were some al-Qaida manual. I never saw them but this is what they said was on them. I said these were not mine, I didn’t even have a computer then.

Frances Webber: But you were questioned about both items in 2004 and released without charge.

Husein Al-Samamara: Yes. This is the only thing they told me about in the open. If there was any other evidence, it was secret.

Frances Webber: So what’s happened to your case since? Because that was about a couple of years ago.

Husein Al-Samamara: Yes, nearly two and a half years ago now. Since then, nothing, except these terrible conditions. I’m still living under these conditions. I appealed to the Court of Appeal, and I’ve been waiting all this time for a hearing. Until just yesterday [19 October 2009], I had a hearing in the Court of Appeal about the grounds.

Frances Webber: In Abu Qatada’s case, and in your case, I think SIAC accepted that people accused of terrorism in Jordan were tortured systematically –

Husein Al-Samamara: Yes, by the GDI.

Frances Webber: But why did they still say that you could go back to Jordan?

Husein Al-Samamara: I have no idea. They said, “We are promised by the Jordanians that they won’t torture you”, and on that assurance SIAC said, “You can go back.”

Frances Webber: So you’re waiting to hear from the Court of Appeal, and in the meantime you’re still living under these conditions. How has your life, your wife’s life been affected by living like this?

Husein Al-Samamara: My family life, my wife and daughter, have been affected so badly. Recently my wife spent nearly two months in the hospital. She’s got really mentally ill, she’s got agoraphobia now, she can’t go out at all now, unless if I go with her. This is how badly it’s affecting my wife. She was released from hospital about a month ago but she’s still bad, and the mental health team have visited her, for the first two weeks every day, now twice a week. We have to go to the hospital once every two weeks to be seen by the senior doctor, because of her problems.

Frances Webber: And before all of this started, what sort of person was she?

Husein Al-Samamara: She was a very, very active woman, she used to be happy, and when I started that business with the cars, she used to be cooking, cleaning the house, and even helped me in the car business. She used to do work on the computer …

Frances Webber: Do you think your daughter has been affected?

Husein Al-Samamara: Absolutely. I’m really close to my daughter. After I was released, I have built up a good relationship with her. Recently, a friend of my wife took her to her house to play. I called my wife’s friend and I asked her to give me my daughter to speak to her on the phone. And she just wouldn’t, she was crying, “I don’t want to speak, I don’t want to go back, I don’t want to go back.” She didn’t want to come back to the flat. Sometimes she wants me to take her out and I can’t because of the curfew. She’s only three and a half, she doesn’t understand why I can’t take her out. Sometimes she says, “I need to have some crisps, I need to have some drink, take me to the shop.” I say, “I can’t.” We Muslims say inshallah, that means, “If God wills it.” She starts hating that word, every time I say, “We’ll do it tomorrow, inshallah”, she says, “No, don’t inshallah, no inshallah.” She doesn’t understand even what inshallah means, but she knows that when I say it, it means there are going to be delays, it’s going to be tomorrow. So this is how bad it is. It’s affecting the whole family. And me personally, but I’m trying to show them I’m strong, I’m OK.

Frances Webber: One of the things you’ve done to keep your own sanity and strength is building with your matchsticks. Tell us a bit about that.

Husein Al-Samamara: Yes. I never thought in my life I would do anything like build with matchsticks. When I was in Long Lartin for the first time in my life I saw people doing this, building with matchsticks, so I started doing these projects, just to keep my brain occupied, and I really enjoyed it. I managed to do a jewellery box first, for my wife, then I did the mosque for her. Then I did the boat, and the boat and the mosque were exhibited last year. The boat was sold at an auction, and I gave the money to the charity who exhibited them.

[In a glass display case is a beautiful mosque, with a central dome, pillared courtyards and four minarets, made entirely from matchsticks (see photo above). Another of Mr Al-Samamara's matchstick creations, a traditional sailing boat with a curved prow, was sold at a Cageprisoners auction for £3,000.]

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.