Archive for February, 2011

Last week I returned from Poland, where I had been touring the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash), and discussing the importance of an ongoing investigation into the complicity of the Polish government in the establishment of a secret CIA torture prison in Poland in the early years of the “War on Terror.”

The investigation is of enormous significance, as the Polish Prosecutor has granted “victim” status to two men held at the prison — the “high-value detainees” Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (in October) and Abu Zubaydah (just three weeks ago) — meaning that the Polish government possesses information identifying both men and their presence at the prison, almost certainly between December 2002, when they were flown to the prison from Thailand, and September 2003, when they were moved elsewhere — possibly to Guantánamo, where a secret prison-within-a-prison existed until March 2004, when the “high-value detainees” were moved again.

Despite this, progress in Poland, since the investigation opened in 2008, has been painfully slow, as those affected by it have refused to acknowledge the prison’s existence, and have ridiculed anyone who has attempted to expose its existence, or to suggest that senior officials had knowledge of it.

Although, personally, I believe that the granting of “victim” status to al-Nashiri and Zubaydah means that the Polish investigation cannot be effectively stifled — and made a point of telling this to audiences in Poland — I understand concerns that it will go the way of a similar investigation in Lithuania, where another secret CIA prison also existed, but where an investigation fizzled out just a month ago.

As Amnesty International reported, in a call for the investigation to be reopened, although a Lithuanian parliamentary inquiry “issued a report in December 2009 concluding that the secret prisons existed and that SSD [State Security Department] officials should be investigated for ‘abuse of power’ under Lithuanian law,” the Lithuanian Prosecutor General closed the investigation last month, feebly noting that SSD officials “had committed ‘disciplinary offenses’ by failing to notify top government officials of the operation,” but claiming that a statute of limitations on the investigation had run out.

While I was in Poland, however, I also had other reassuring news for the audiences at the screenings. The first was that, despite attempts by the Obama administration to suppress a judicial investigation in Spain into the conduct of six senior Bush administration lawyers responsible for providing the flawed legal advice that underpinned the torture program, the case, which started in March 2009, is still ongoing. The lawyers in question are David Addington, Jay S. Bybee, Douglas Feith, Alberto Gonzales, William J. Haynes II and John Yoo, and the Center for Constitutional Rights (along with the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights) recently filed two briefs in Spain — not only in connection with the case against the lawyers, but also in another investigation into the torture program.

This second case was initiated by Judge Baltasar Garzón in April 2009, when he opened a preliminary investigation into what he termed “an authorized and systematic plan of torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of any detainee, set out and required by applicable international conventions,” in US detention facilities, and CCR’s recent submission outlines the complicity in torture of Guantánamo’s former commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge during the worst of the torture at the prison in 2002 and 2003, requesting that a subpoena be issued for Miller to testify before the judge who has taken over the case from Judge Garzón.

The second piece of good news was that, while I was in Poland, a court case began in Macedonia, in which Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen who was seized in Macedonia on New Year’s Eve 2003 and rendered to a secret CIA torture prison in Afghanistan for five months until the US government realized that he had been seized by mistake (because he had the same name as a man who allegedly provided support to the 9/11 hijackers), is suing the Macedonian government for 50,000 Euros ($70,000) in damages.

Although Clara Gutteridge, an investigator with Reprieve and the Open Society Justice Initiative, who testified on the first day of the hearings last week, complained that “the strategy of the Macedonian government in this case is not to address the evidence that has been presented to them, but [to] simply continue to deny, deny and deny,” the case is expected to last two years, and lawyers I have spoken to have suggested that it may meet with success, because the Macedonian government does not have an array of high-powered lawyers able to effectively block investigations.

It was, however, a third piece of news that particularly brightened up my last few days in Poland, when I was able to tell audiences that George W. Bush had just cancelled a proposed trip to Switzerland on February 12, because two former victims of his torture program — the al-Jazeera cameraman Sami El-Hajj (who was released from Guantánamo in May 2008) and Majid Khan, a “high-value detainee” who was moved to Guantánamo in September 2006, after years in secret CIA prisons — had filed criminal complaints against Bush for his involvement in their torture, prepared by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, with support from the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

This was enormously significant, as Vince Warren, the Executive Director of CCR, explained in an article in the Huffington Post:

Swiss law requires the presence of an alleged torturer on Swiss soil before a preliminary investigation can be open. Because Bush canceled, the complaints could not be filed as the basis for legal jurisdiction no longer existed. However, the fact that Bush authorized torture remains … In the long run, ducking a charge of torture is not as easy as ducking a shoe thrown at a press conference.

Warren also announced that, on the day that the criminal charges were to be filed in Switzerland — which was also the 9th anniversary of the day in 2002 when the former President decided that “the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the conflict with al-Qaeda or to so-called ‘unlawful combatants’” — CCR publicly released the Preliminary Bush Torture Indictment, which “provides a strong factual and legal basis to hold Bush accountable — in any of the 147 countries which have ratified the [UN] Convention Against Torture (CAT) — for having authorized torture. In addition, the Indictment compiles more than 2,500 pages of publicly available supporting material, and has the support of two Nobel Peace Prize winners, more than 60 NGOs, and two former UN Special Rapporteurs on Torture and on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers.”

Warren concluded his article with a very pertinent question, asking why, when “the rest of the world gets much smaller for George W. Bush … is Eric Holder comfortable with allowing him safe haven here in the United States?”

The answer to that question is half-submerged in a miasma of fear, cowardice and political expediency on the part of the Obama administration, which is grim news for those, like myself, seeking the closure of Guantánamo and the thorough and necessary repudiation of the violent and arrogant face of America’s deluded sense of exceptionalism, which defined the Bush years. However, despite these profound disappointments, the fact that the torturer-in-chief has been made unwelcome in Europe — and, in theory, anywhere outside the US –  is heartening news indeed.

Note: For further information about European complicity in secret detention and torture, see Amnesty International’s recent report, “Open Secret: Mounting Evidence of Europe’s Complicity in Rendition and Secret Detention” (PDF).

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

On Saturday, I published an article, Battle for Britain: Fighting the Coalition Government’s Vile Ideology — and Praise for UK Uncut, in which I summarized many facets of the coalition government’s “unprecedented assault on almost every aspect of British society — hard-pressed middle class and working class people, students, schoolchildren, the working poor, the unemployed and the disabled; everyone, in fact, except the rich and the super-rich.” I also noted how, “[d]riven by a repusive ideological desire to smash the British state, and to privatize whatever was not privatized under Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the government was “ferociously pursuing the biggest ever hatchet job on the British state on the basis of economic necessity, counting on the sloth and indifference of the public to disguise their true intentions, and to prevent anyone from scrutinizing how those responsible for the financial crisis — the banking sector, and the corporations committed to wholesale tax avoidance — are not being held accountable.”

In that article, in which I also wondered how, or if a powerful coalition opposed to the cuts would emerge (and praised the campaigning of UK Uncut, which has honed in specifically on the banks and tax avoiders), I mentioned that I would address, in a separate article, the government’s plans to privatize the NHS by stealth, and am pleased to do so below.

Of all the wretched plans put forward by a government that combines arrogance and stupidity to an alarming degree, the biggest gamble is the privatization by stealth of the NHS, which may well alienate voters in huge numbers (as well as endangering the health of the health service) as the effects of health secretary Andrew Lansley’s deranged plans begin to bite. As the Guardian explained when the health and social care bill was unveiled on January 19, the aim is “to abolish all of England’s 152 primary care trusts,” and ten strategic health authorities, “which currently plan services and decide how money should be spent,” and to transfer all of these decisions to GPs, who will form consortia “which will take control of 80% of the NHS budget [£80 bn a year], buying services from providers in the public, private and charity sectors.”

The privatization of the NHS

No one outside the government appears to like the plans. As the Guardian reported on February 4, in an article entitled, “Is anyone in favour of Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms?” Lansley’s plans to transform the NHS in England “have united in opposition doctors, health thinktanks (and the right-of-centre thinktank Civitas), unions representing the 1.4m-strong NHS workforce, health academics, MPs on the health select committee, the NHS’s major employers, and patients’ representatives,” and “Even David Cameron’s brother-in-law, an NHS cardiologist, thinks the government has got it wrong,” as the Prime Minister admitted the week before. As another article on February 1 explained:

We might expect Unison boss Dave Prentis to claim that “this titanic reorganisation threatens to sink the NHS”. But not the British Medical Journal to run an editorial headlined “Dr Lansley’s monster”, branding the changes “mad” and its chief architect “deluded”. Or the King’s Fund health thinktank’s famously forensic economist John Appleby to in effect accuse Lansley and David Cameron of exaggerating the NHS’s quality of care relative to France to help justify their colossally risky experiment.

As the Guardian explained bluntly, critics are convinced that, because the GPs’ consortia will be “able to opt for treatment from ‘any willing provider’ –- NHS, private healthcare or charity” –- the result will be nothing less than the privatisation of the NHS (see this article by Polly Toynbee for examples of how it will work, and this article by Oliver Huitson on Open Democracy). The Guardian provided criticism from GPs, Midwives, Nurses, Hospital doctors, Public health experts and NHS managers — all of which are worth reading — but what particularly impressed me was a column by Dr. Kailash Chand OBE, a GP who chairs Tameside and Glossop NHS, who, on January 31, under the heading, “NHS reforms are this government’s poll tax,” spelled out both the bigger picture and the problems with the small print. Dr. Chand wrote:

This proposed bill is the biggest challenge to core NHS values. The coalition is planning to turn the NHS over to a plethora of private companies who either commission or provide services, or both. The government’s dismantling of the National Health Service has a genealogy running from Margaret Thatcher through the years of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to David Cameron’s coalition. The last Labour government laid the groundwork for everything the coalition is planning to do to the NHS. Market structures, foundation trusts, GP consortia and the introduction of private corporations into commissioning were all products of the ill-conceived Labour vision of “public service reform”.

The idea that competition breeds excellence and market forces make everything more efficient is a myth anyway. Two successive governments have now shown that simulating a market ethos in the NHS might bring blips of success, but it carries the potentially fatal consequence of producing erratic behaviour from otherwise sensible people. [...]

Why do I have serious misgivings? Apart from the threat of piecemeal privatisation, there seems to be no clarification on what happens if GPs run out of money before the end of the financial year. What happens if GPs will not refer patients to the hospital of their choice because of cost? If a patient is referred to the cheapest provider on financial consideration, will he/she get the best treatment? If hospitals cannot attract “business” from GPs, will they be privatised? How will the conflict of GPs — who are both providers and purchasers — be managed, and what impact might this have on their local hospital?

The legislation proposes a market-based approach that must involve competition between “any willing providers”. This supposes that GP consortia would be able to favour their local provider and build excellent local services. The consortia of GPs established to spend £80 billion on commissioning will become rationing committees, choosing which services should be cut and which groups of patients should lose out. Patients’ lives are about to rest on the bottom line of the GP’s budget.

There is likely to be intolerable pressure on clinicians to dilute their needs-led approach to patient care and instead consider all manner of economic and other factors. Patients should be worried, because GP practices are not set up to do this. They are clinical enterprises, not businesses. Saying “no” to patients does not come easily to GPs.

At the heart of Lansley’s agenda may be the complete privatisation of the NHS — a process that has deep roots in Thatcherite ideology. We may be witnessing the end of the NHS as a publicly provided, publicly financed body. We are moving away from the traditional health service to one ruled by bogus choice, competition, market forces and supplier diversity. And in this sort of health service the chronically and terminally ill, the mentally ill, those from lower socio-economic groups and the elderly are likely to lose out.

Job losses

On jobs, Lansley’s plans aim “to cull more than 24,000 management staff to reduce bureaucracy,” but while this may please those who have seen the NHS as being too dominated by managers, it is still a huge job loss, and it also disguises the fact that, despite all kinds of promises to protect the NHS, the government is not only privatizing by stealth, but is also happy to see ten percent of the total NHS workforce — at least 100,000 people — put out of work.

This has not been widely reported in the mainstream media, although the Daily Mail managed to note on November 12 that “Tens of thousands of doctors and nurses are facing the axe despite Government promises to protect the NHS from cuts,” and that “Almost 100,000 hospital posts could be at risk across the country, the vast majority of them frontline staff who are caring for patients,” and on February 3 the BBC reported that “Barts and The London NHS Trust is to cut 635 jobs over the next two years as it tries to reduce costs,” explaining that this will involve “200 compulsory job losses” and that “Nearly 10% of nursing posts and 100 beds will go and there will be 290 fewer corporate and back-office roles.”

It is also clear that, behind the headlines, ten percent cuts across the board are taking place everywhere, with large numbers of job losses expected by the end of the financial year. As with much of the government’s butchery, however, it appears that no one will realize until the damage has been done, and an NHS insider I spoke to noted ruefully that it has failed to cause ripples within the unions, as those who still have jobs are content to keep their heads down and hope that they will remain safe.

Will the destruction of the NHS be a rallying call for protestors, as Stuart Weir urged on Open Democracy on Thursday, noting the results of polls showing that it was by “far and away the most popular institution in the country”? Or are we condemned, by the selfishness and indolence of our culture, to watch the Egyptian people rise up in revolt, but do nothing ourselves? As Weir noted:

Lately we have had protests over tuition fees, the abolition of education maintenance allowances, library closures and the sale of forests — the middle class influence seems evident to me.

What astonishes and alarms me is that there is as yet no sign of major protest over the government’s plans for the NHS. The brazen breaking of Liberal Democrat promises to combat and remove tuition fees inspired the rage that fuelled the student protests. Yet … the Conservatives are incubating as great a betrayal over the NHS, an issue which deeply affects the whole population, without creating a similar reaction.

It’s a long time until the major TUC rally and march in London on March 26, entitled, “March for the Alternative: Jobs, Growth, Justice,” but maybe that will be the opportunity for protestors against all the government’s outrageous cuts and “scorched earth” reworkings of existing bodies, as with the NHS, to come together to form a new coalition, and a new way of thinking. The Labour party clearly hopes to galvanize support, as it was revealed on Thursday that Ed Miliband is expected to speak at the rally’s conclusion in Hyde Park, but I’m not convinced, given the scale of the challenges we face as a nation, that the Labour party has the answers — for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that some of the coalition government’s cuts are following up on moves initiated by the Labour government.

What we need, difficult though it may be to imagine, is a revolutionary new political movement that puts people, jobs and “the common good” before ideology and an ingrained servitude to big business and the City, and a truly radical vision of how to achieve that, and not, as we have at the moment, a coalition government committed to making as many people as miserable as possible, and with no clue whatsoever about how to create new jobs, and an opposition party that lacks vision.

Note: For further information on the coalition government’s plans for the NHS, and opposition to those plans, please see the websites of Keep Our NHS Public, Coalition of Resistance and Health Emergency.

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Regular readers will know that I have long been concerned by the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist whose story is one of the murkiest in the whole of the “War on Terror.” Dr. Siddiqui disappeared with her three children in Karachi in March 2003, and for five years neither the US nor the Pakistani authorities acknowledged holding her, even though she was reportedly seen in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. In July 2008, she mysteriously reappeared in Ghazni, Afghanistan, where she was arrested for behaving strangely, and then reportedly tried to shoot at a number of US soldiers, but only ended up being shot herself. She was then rendered to the US, where she was put on trial in New York for the alleged incident in Ghazni, and not for any of the al-Qaeda allegations that had been put forward during her lost years, and where, last September, she received an 86-year sentence.

Getting to the bottom of what actually happened to Dr. Siddiqui — and, specifically, whether she was held by the US, or by Pakistanis, and whether, as it appears, the entire Ghazni scenario and the subsequent trial and sentence was a sham and a cover-up, designed to silence her forever without actually killing her outright — has been a long, hard struggle for those seeking the truth, and it is with great pleasure, therefore, that I’m cross-posting below a compelling article by the journalist Victoria Brittain discussing the recent emergence of tape recordings of conversations in Pakistan between someone concerned by Dr. Siddiqui’s case, and a source who explained how she — and two of her children, who reappeared in 2009 and 2010 — were indeed held by the ISI, although undoubtedly with the full knowledge of the US, as is made clear from an analysis of the trial by one of Aafia’s lawyers, Linda Moreno.

The Aafia Siddiqui Case: A New Turn As Lawyers Release Explosive, Secretly Recorded Tape
By Victoria Brittain, CounterPunch, February 14, 2011

In 2003 an MIT-educated expert in children’s learning patterns, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, disappeared with her three children in Pakistan. Was she, as the Americans said, an Al-Qaeda operative who in 2008 emerged after five years undercover, carrying a handbag full of chemicals and plans for major terror attacks in the US, and then attempted to shoot US soldiers? Or was she, as her family, and most people in Pakistan have always maintained, seized by Pakistani agents for reasons unknown?

Now new evidence of the kidnapping of Dr Siddiqui prises open part of one of the most shocking of the myriad individual stories of injustice in the “War on Terror.” It also underlines the recklessness and perfidy of a key United States’ partner in the “War on Terror,” which carries its own threat of explosion.

Dr. Siddiqui was sentenced in a New York court last year to 86 years for the attempted murder of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Her mysterious five-year disappearance before that, her reappearance in Afghanistan in 2008, her subsequent trial in the US, and the confusion surrounding all these events, have made Dr. Siddiqui’s a symbolic case in much of the Muslim world. Now a senior law enforcement officer has claimed to have been involved personally on the day she was seized, with her three children, by Pakistani police agents in Karachi in March 2003 and handed over to the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI.

The FBI put out a “wanted for questioning” alert for Dr. Siddiqui just before she disappeared. She was later high on the US wanted list, with the US claiming that she was living undercover as an Al-Qaeda agent. She was a “clear and present danger to the US”, the then-US Attorney General John Ashcroft said in 2004. For all these years the Pakistani government repeatedly denied holding her, and after her arrest in Afghanistan in 2008 spent $2 million on US lawyers for her trial. After her conviction, the Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani committed himself to work for her return from a US prison. Dr. Siddiqui had become “the daughter of the nation” and the centre of a popular cause he could not afford to ignore.

The new evidence, on a secretly recorded audio tape, is a potential earthquake in the chronically unstable political situation in Pakistan, where rage against the US runs deep and wide, especially as civilian casualties mount with the use of drone aircraft. Already the case of Aafia Siddiqui has periodically brought tens of thousands of people out on the streets in the last two and a half years in protest at what has been done to her by the United States’ military and legal systems since she reemerged, in US custody and seriously wounded, in 2008.

The Pakistani media have always claimed that the ISI was responsible for her disappearance and that the Americans were involved too. The tape reopens the whole question, not just of Dr. Siddiqui, but of the corroding effect of the US alliance with Pakistan’s military and intelligence elite in a “War on Terror,” which has had so many Pakistani victims. The ISI has run its own agendas, hand-in-glove with various US officials at various periods, ever since the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then becoming godfathers of various Afghan factions tearing that country apart. There are plenty of astute Pakistani journalists with the language skills to use this tape to the utmost to embarrass their own security services and the government.

For the US too there are questions to answer about the extensive cover-up of what happened to Dr. Siddiqui and her three children — two of whom are US citizens, and appear to have spent five traumatized years separated from their mother and from each other, in various prisons. It is scarcely credible that high officials in the Bush and Obama administrations over the years were unaware of what their troublesome allies in Pakistan had done with her and her children.

On April 21 2003, a “senior U.S. law enforcement official” told Lisa Myers of NBC Nightly News that Siddiqui was in Pakistani custody. The same source retracted the statement the next day without explanation. “At the time,” Myers told Harpers Magazine, “we thought there was a possibility perhaps he’d spoken out of turn.”

According to the Associated Press, “[t]wo federal law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, initially said 31-year-old Aafia Siddiqui recently was taken into custody by Pakistani authorities.” But later, “the US officials amended their earlier statements, saying new information from the Pakistani government made it ‘doubtful’ she was in custody.”

An FBI spokesperson also formally denied that the agency had any knowledge of Dr. Siddiqui’s whereabouts, stating that the FBI was not aware that she was in any nation’s custody.

Dr. Siddiqui’s mother was visited by an unknown man a few hours after her disappearance and warned to keep her mouth shut if she ever wanted to see her daughter and grandchildren again. In 2003, in a closed hearing when the FBI had subpoenaed some documents from Dr. Siddiqui’s sister, an FBI official confirmed to her family that she was alive and well, but would answer no questions on her whereabouts.

The new audio evidence was secretly taped in a social situation last year; children can be heard in the background. It was given, unsolicited, to one of the many lawyers involved in Dr. Siddiqui’s case in the US. The source, whose identity has been protected, told lawyers at the International Justice Network that he had made the tape after a social evening when he had heard shocking things about Pakistani counter terrorism, about the fabrication of evidence, and about Dr. Siddiqui’s disappearance, discussed casually by a senior official. He felt outraged and returned for a second evening with a recorder and got some of the previous discussion repeated. “If it can help anyone I had to do it,” he said to the IJN Executive Director Tina Foster who has represented Dr. Siddiqui’s family since January 2010. IJN are experienced hands in war on terror cases. They represent a number of prisoners in Bagram air base prison in Afghanistan, some of them rendered from Abu Ghraib, Dubai and Thailand by the CIA, as well as several disappeared people in Pakistan.)

The witness is a Pakistani/American and he has been extensively interviewed by IJN’s lawyers, who tell me they are entirely  confident of the tape’s authenticity, the source’s account and thus the identity of the prime subject.

IJN’s source says he was introduced by a mutual friend whose home he was visiting, to a man he identified to lawyers at the International Justice Network as Imran Shaukat, the Superintendent of Police for Sindh province.

A full report, and the four hour tape, in Urdu, Punjabi and English, was released by the International Justice Network in the United States at 6am EDT on Monday February 14, and can be accessed here with the permission of the witness. Portions of the tape concerning Dr. Siddiqui were made available to this reporter and were independently translated for this article.

Mr. Shaukat (who is voice 2 on the tape) says, “I am stationed in Karachi. I head the counter terrorism department for Sindh province.”

In the key passage in the tape for the Siddiqui case he is asked by:

Voice 1 (who is the witness): ”Did you arrest her?”

V2: “Yes, I arrested her. She wore glasses and a veil … When she was caught she was travelling to Islamabad … She was hobnobbing with clerics …

V1: “ So what happened after the arrest. Did ISI ask for her custody?”

V2: “Yes, we gave her to ISI”

V1: “ISI or something else?”

V2: “ISI, so we gave her to them.”

Mr. Shaukat also describes her as “stick thin” and “a psycho”, and, elsewhere as “not a handler, a minor facilitator” — presumably for Al-Qaeda — and he mentions a connection to Osama Bin Laden. Asked then why couldn’t she help them get Bin Laden, he replies, “Well, they are not fools. They wouldn’t inform her of their forwarding address.” And he says too about the children, “we took them with us. They were American nationals, children are American nationals, they were all born there.”

There is some discussion on the tape about the return of her daughter, Maryam. (Two unidentified voices are also heard.)

V1: Oh, another thing. They found her daughter yesterday.

V2: She’s home already.

V1: Yes, she’s home. She speaks English only. She was in the prison. She is seven or eight years old. And she only speaks English.

UM1: Eight years old?

V1: Yeah. Children were in prison and they spoke to them in American English.

UM1: Is she home?

V1: Yeah. They got her home.

V2: It’s five or six months.

UM2: Is she in Karachi?

V1: She got home today, yesterday.

V2: Well, it goes back to before I came here.

V1: I read the news just yesterday, today. Maybe, in the night.

V2: It’s two or three months old.

All that has been reported in the public domain to date is that Maryam was returned a day or two before the recording. But, according to the childrens’ lawyer, Tina Foster, Mr. Shaukat’s description is consistent with how Maryam was repatriated to Pakistan.

Elsewhere in the tape Imran Shaukat talks about how the Pakistani police and ISI work to “disappear” or to use people they have taken into custody. According to Amina Masood Janjua at Defence for Human Rights, there are currently about 500 people who have disappeared in Pakistan as part of the “War on Terror” — this does not include Sindhi and Balochi separatists. Part of the audio describes the doctoring or manufacturing of documents, creating false identities, using body doubles, with reference to various terrorist attacks, including Mumbai. “This is a game of double dealing, direct them right and exit left,” Mr. Shaukat says at one point.

Such details are an explanation of the extraordinary litany of contradictory stories about Dr. Siddiqui, including curious reported sightings by family members, that were launched into the public domain over the five years after her disappearance. In this John Le Carré world of ruthless manipulation of the vulnerable, it is impossible to know how, or whether, she could have been used in counter-terrorism’s goal at the time of finding Osama Bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

From other sources it has been established that Dr. Siddiqui was separated from her children for the five years of her ordeal, and that the two older children, born in 1996 and 1998, were not together, but in separate prisons, and that the third child, Suleman, who was six months old on the day of the disappearance, probably died then.

For nearly eight years now, manufactured confusion has surrounded the disappearance and the subsequent whereabouts of Dr. Siddiqui and her three children.

The confusion only deepened with the second section of the story, which was her mysterious reappearance in 2008 in Afghanistan, and the bizarre circumstances of her being seriously wounded by two shots to the stomach by a US soldier. John Kiriakou, a retired CIA officer with extensive background in Al-Qaeda-related work, told ABC News, “I don’t think we’ve captured anybody as important and as well connected as she since 2003. We knew that she had been planning, or at least involved in the planning of, a wide variety of different operations.” Such statements set the tone for the Western media on her return under arrest to the US.

Her subsequent trial in New York, ending with the 86-year sentence, is the third section, when, extraordinarily, Al-Qaeda and terrorism were not made part of the case against her, which was narrowly focussed on the alleged attempted murder incident.

Dr. Siddiqui’s background was an unexceptional one of a highly-educated young woman from a privileged, professional family, some of them settled in the US and most of them educated in the West. She spent a decade studying at universities in Texas, and at MIT — where she graduated in biology summa cum laude — and at Brandeis, where she took a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. She specialized in the science of how children learn, and in addition had a class teaching dyslexic children. Besides her academic work she lived a busy life in the Muslim community in Boston, attending cake sales and auctions to raise money for Muslim refugees in the Bosnian war. She was married to a doctor from Pakistan in a classic arranged ceremony conducted by phone. The couple had two children.

Life in Boston soured when her marriage began to break down. There are reports from her professors in Boston that they saw her with bruises on her face. And her husband, Dr. Amjad Khan, told Harpers Magazine reporter Petra Bartosiewicz in 2008 that his wife had once had to go to hospital after he threw a bottle at her. There are photographs of her with a deep cut across her face. She returned home to Pakistan in late 2001. In a brief reconciliation back in the US a few months later she became pregnant with her third child. On August 15, 2002, after an incident in which witnesses claim that Dr. Khan pushed him, Dr. Siddiqui’s father collapsed and died of a heart attack. A few days later, while Dr. Siddiqui was still pregnant with their youngest child, Suleman, Amjad Khan separated from her and immediately married again. Dr. Khan gave custody of the children to Dr. Siddiqui on condition they received an exclusively Islamic education.

Dr. Khan came under FBI suspicion in May 2002 for various items purchased by him on the internet when the couple were living in Boston. He said they were for big game hunting, and he was not arrested, but both he and his wife had come under suspicion.

In March, 2003, a global alert went out with both of them wanted for questioning by the FBI. A few weeks after Aafia Siddiqui disappeared, her husband had a four-hour interview with US and Pakistani agents, and US suspicions of  Dr. Khan were dropped. About two months later Dr. Khan travelled to Saudi Arabia for some time.

Dr. Khan told Harpers Magazine that his “contacts in the agencies” informed him then that Dr. Siddiqui had gone underground. He went on to say that he had no idea where his children were — a claim he would later contradict. He also told Harpers that he and his driver saw Dr. Siddiqui in a taxi in Karachi in 2005. But they did not follow her. After her arrest in 2008 Dr. Khan told a reporter from the Pakistani daily News that he thought his former wife was an “extremist” and that of course she had been on the run. After Ms. Bartosiewicz left Pakistan, she had an email from Dr. Khan saying that he had received “confidential good news” from the ISI that Mariam and Suleman were “alive and well” with their aunt Fowzia. (In fact at that point one was in prison and the other was dead.)

Dr. Siddiqui’s disappearance in March 2003 came amid a feverish whirl of arrests and disappearances in Pakistan, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has claimed to have been the mastermind of 9/11, and many other Al-Qaeda related attacks, and has been named as the killer of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was important enough to the Americans to be water-boarded 183 times. Shortly after Dr. Siddiqui’s disappearance, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi [aka Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali], was arrested in connection with 9/11. The two men were taken to Guantánamo Bay, then to various CIA-run secret prisons known as “black sites” for torture, before being returned to Guantánamo Bay.

US officials then had Dr. Siddiqui on an Al-Qaeda “wanted” list and linked her to Baluchi, claiming he was her second husband. Her family, and other sources in Pakistan have denied the marriage, but it remains probably the most repeated detail about her and the one that has given her an indelible image as a terrorist. This was not the only lurid story about her — she was also alleged in a UN report to have been a courier of blood diamonds from Liberia for Al-Qaeda with a sighting reported there in June 2001. Her lawyer, Elaine Sharp, stated that Dr. Siddiqui had been in Boston at that time and she could prove it. That story died away, but the further damage to her reputation was done.

For five years nothing sure was in the public domain about what happened to her and the children, though the rumours grew, turning her into a tragic martyr for many, or a poster for Al-Qaeda ruthlessness for others. Several former detainees at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan claimed to have seen her there, while US officials quoted in WikiLeaks denied she had been.

A senior Pakistani journalist, Najeeb Ahmed, followed the story for five years and reported witness testimony of someone who claimed to have been part of the arresting team, which he said was a joint operation with the FBI. (Mr. Ahmed made a public statement about his research in 2009, but died the next day, reportedly of a heart attack.)

In mid-July 2008 Pakistanti lawyers filed a habeas corpus claim for Dr. Siddiqui in Islamabad. And within days, in Act 2 of the drama, Aafia Siddiqui reappeared, in Ghazni, in Afghanistan, allegedly carrying in her handbag chemicals, instructions for making biological weapons, and plans for terrorist strikes with mass casualties in the US. She was then involved in a shooting incident in a police station in Ghazni in which she was badly wounded by a US soldier. It is uncontested that she was seated behind a curtain in a small room, where, according to the US soldiers, one of them put down his gun and she came from behind the curtain, seized it and attempted to shoot. She says she merely looked round the curtain. None of the soldiers or FBI personnel present were hurt, but she was hospitalized with two shots in her abdomen and brought under arrest to the US.

Act 3 was her trial in New York for attempted murder of soldiers and FBI agents with an M4 rifle, picked up from the floor near a US soldier. There were no charges of terrorism or Al-Qaeda links.

Dr. Siddiqui had a tangle of high-flying legal teams, several of whom were not on good terms. Her first court-appointed lawyer, Liz Fink, a famous New York political lawyer, withdrew, and the second team, appointed by the court, was headed by Dawn Cardi, an expert in matrimonial and family law. The lawyers funded by the Pakistani government were led by Linda Moreno, an attorney with successful experiences in two high- profile war on terror-related cases, those of Professor Sami Al-Arian and Ghassan Elashi, and who is a Guantánamo Bay defence lawyer with security clearance. Ms. Moreno is also known for earlier political work as one of the lawyers for the American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier. Her team included Charles Swift, formerly a military defender of Guantánamo detainees who made a reputation as a critic of the Military Commission system, and Elaine Sharp.

Even the narrow grounds of the case on the shooting was full of curiosities and contradictions: there was no physical evidence on the gun of Dr. Siddiqui having held it, no bullet casings from it or holes in the walls of the small room where it took place, except from the other gun which wounded her. Defence counsel made two visits to Afghanistan to get the forensic evidence, which could, and should, have got the whole case dismissed. Linda Moreno described the defence forensic case as “very compelling, with no physical evidence whatsoever that she ever touched the gun … no DNA, no fingerprints, no bullets recovered, no bullet holes.” The military and FBI witnesses, Ms. Moreno said, contradicted each other, and under cross-examination even contradicted their own earlier stories. She went on to say that “the government wanted to scare the jury with stories of her alleged terrorist past, and steered away from the actual case.”

One key piece of evidence was not in the trial and only emerged from WikiLeaks, which revealed a Defense Department report that was not released by the military, so was unavailable as evidence in Dr Siddiqui’s defence. The incident report does not say Dr. Siddiqui fired the gun she is alleged to have snatched and fired, merely that she “pointed” it. “Six American soldiers took the stand — powerful testimony for a jury. I argued, what happened at the front, stays at the front. The WikiLeaks document would have added to my argument about the dubious credibility of the soldiers,” Ms. Moreno told me.

Dr. Siddiqui’s relations with her lawyers were impossibly difficult and she tried repeatedly to fire them. Most never saw her except in court. Linda Moreno told me,  “She was clearly damaged — extraordinarily frail, very tiny. It broke my heart when Aafia did not trust anyone, me, the other lawyers … although I could understand it. She reminded me of American Indian resisters I worked with way back … her resistance was clearly to the legal process and she saw all the attorneys as part of that process.”

Against the lawyers’ strongest advice, Dr. Siddiqui spoke in court herself. She said that she had been tortured, and rendered to the US, and that her children were also tortured in “the secret prison.” The government never rebutted these allegations. But she lost the jury, who looked openly sceptical. “Sadly, she came over as sometimes arrogant and capricious, and sometimes rambling,” according to Ms. Moreno. Another observer said, “she was very articulate, intelligent, well-spoken, and people mistook that for well-functioning.”

With so much confected fear and prejudice against her going back years, a media that did not hold back in its characterization of her as Al-Qaeda Mommy, and the impact of six soldiers testifying against her, a New York jury’s guilty verdict was probably a foregone conclusion. But Judge Berman’s sentence that would put her away for life was not. Ms. Moreno described the event: “In my 30 years of trials I have never seen anything like what happened on sentencing day — the judge walked into court and handed out pre-printed power point presentations on how he had come to decide on 86 years …”

Two veteran lawyers not connected with this case, but with extensive experience in other cases related to the “War on Terror,” described the sentence, respectively, as “extraordinary”, “ridiculous … outrageous”, and one described the case as “absolutely full of holes.” An appeal is planned.

Meanwhile part of the story of the missing five years is in the heads of two of her three children — the two older ones who are US citizens. When they emerged — separately — in Pakistan, they were reunited with Dr. Siddiqui’s mother, and her sister, Fowzia, who is a Harvard-trained child psychiatrist and neurologist, in Karachi. They have never told their stories, but even the little that is known hints at the horror this family has lived through.

The older one, Ahmed, then aged 12, told his aunt that he only met his mother the day after she was picked up in Ghazni, and that he did not recognize her after five years apart. Fuzzy film footage of them together, being questioned in a press conference the day after his mother was found, has long circulated on the internet. This was the morning before the shooting incident.

Ahmed remembers nothing about what happened to him next, only that he was visited by a US consular official in Afghanistan who told him that he was a US citizen. The official also told him that his brother, Suleman, was dead.

Ahmed remembers being taken out of the taxi where he was with his mother and siblings five years before, and remembers, before he lost consciousness, seeing the baby, six month old Suleman, lying in the road and bleeding. Ahmed told his aunt that he had been called Ali, and several other different names, while he was in custody, and that when he was told his name now was Ahmed, he knew that meant he was going to be moved again. She initially reported that he was suffering from PTSD and that he needed extensive psychological help.

His sister Maryam reappeared nearly two years later, in April 2010. She spoke perfect English with an American accent and no Urdu. She was simply dropped off outside the family home in Karachi with a note on a string around her neck. At some stage the Afghan prime minister Hamid Karzai was contacted by the family for help in getting both children back.

There are very powerful vested interests that have worked to prevent Dr. Siddiqui from ever giving an account that would be believed of what happened to her. The same interests are still at work trying to prevent the two children from ever becoming witnesses in this back story of the “War on Terror.” Late last year a kidnap attempt was made on the children, despite the family home being guarded by armed Pakistani police 24 hours a day. Two men, carrying firearms and holding big sacks, were found behind the door of the children’s bedroom by their grandmother. The men ran off when she screamed, and were driven away by a waiting car nearby, before the police guards to the house could catch them.

The release of the tape gives a lever to Pakistani public opinion and Pakistani opposition politicians such as Imran Khan, who have long supported the family, towards forcing an end to this sinister ordeal, with the return home of Dr. Siddiqui.

And there is another lever just now. Tina Foster of IJN has written to the Interior Minister Mr. Rehman Malik, reminding him that in over a year of meetings he has been promising to help in Dr. Siddiqui’s repatriation. The letter says that now, when the US is demanding the return of the US government employee Raymond Davis, held after a shooting incident in Pakistan in which he is alleged to have killed two men, is the government’s best ever chance to negotiate an exchange. The new threat by some congressmen to withhold aid from Pakistan if he is not returned, Hilary Clinton cancelling a meeting with Pakistan’s foreign minister, and the report of possible espionage charges against Davis, ratchet up a pressure that could change the prospects for Dr. Siddiqui.

Whether Dr. Siddiqui will ever be able to tell the full story of what happened to her over five years is another question. It is hard to imagine making anything close a recovery from such multiple personal and family trauma, in which she was isolated from every solid link with her past identity. Did the ISI use her, or her identity, on errands to Al-Qaeda? “A minor facilitator”, as the tape calls her? The contradictions in her own reported words, such as allegedly telling FBI agents while she was in a military hospital shot through the stomach and in restraints, that she was indeed married to the notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew Baluchi, are manifold, but not any guide to the truth.

In her initial weeks in a US prison in Brooklyn, she exhibited deeply disturbed behaviour such as saying she was saving her food for her children. Her mental state has since deteriorated and is very unpredictable, according to lawyer Elaine Sharp, who has visited her several times. She is now incarcerated in solitary confinement in the Carswell Federal Medical Centre at Fort Worth, Texas, the only US prison medical facility for women. She has no contact with the outside world. Three of the four prison psychiatrists who interviewed her for the court said they believed she was “malingering” and that her mental illness was faked. But, given the record of some doctors’ contribution to government work in the “War on Terror,” it is hard to find this persuasive in the face of the known facts of her separation from her children in traumatic circumstances, her long isolation, and the documented brutal procedures of the ISI in many other cases.

In the US, none of the lawyers, doctors, politicians and intelligence agents who devised and participated in the horrors done to so many individuals as part of the “War on Terror” have paid any price in public for it. But in this case there is the force of public opinion in Pakistan, which will demand nothing less than public trials of those responsible for ordering Dr. Siddiqui’s kidnapping, as well as those who carried it out, and were part of the vast charade that has been played with her over those years.

Victoria Brittain is a former associate foreign editor of the Guardian, and a Patron of Cageprisoners. Her books include Hidden Lives, Hidden Deaths and Death of Dignity. She has spent much of her working life in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Last week, I had the pleasure of talking to Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio about my recent week-long visit to Poland, with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, to tour a sub-titled version of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash. The 24-minute interview — my 22nd with Scott — is available here.

This is how Scott described the show:

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, discusses his week long tour of Poland, home of a “black site” secret CIA prison, during which he tried to convince the Polish government to accept Guantánamo prisoners who can’t be released to their home countries (for fear of torture); the prison’s ignominious history as “a Soviet-era compound once used by German intelligence in World War II;” the difficulty in getting information from foreign governments complicit in the CIA’s rendition and torture program; how former US officials traveling abroad risk criminal indictments; and the secret CIA prison in Romania that remains … secret.

This is a fair précis, although to add a little more information I explained how everyone in a position of authoritiy in Poland has been refusing to admit the existence of the secret CIA prison in Poland, even though it has been established without a doubt that at least two “high-value detainees,” Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, were flown to the facility from another secret prison in Thailand in December 2002. Both men were recently granted “victim” status in an ongoing investigation into the complicity of the Polish government in the establishment of the prison, which, in itself, demonstrates that evidence clearly exists to prove that both men were indeed held at the prison.

I also spoke about how difficult it is to pursue investigations in countries complicit in torture in the “War on Terror,” because, of course, they were involved in criminal activities, for which they can — and should — be prosecuted, mentioning the recent shutdown of the Lithuanian investigation into its own secret prison, but pointing out that the honesty and integrity of the Polish prosecutor — and the lawyers working for al-Nashiri and Zubaydah — has been echoed in, for example, the UK, where lawyers and judges have all stuck doggedly to the torture story, despite political pressure not to do so.

I also discussed how the indictment for torture prepared against George W. Bush, which prevented him visiting Switzerland last week, was a real boost during my visit to Poland, helping me to persuade audiences that, despite the widespread feeling  that the investigation will not be allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion, prosecuting torturers (and those complicit in torture, as in Poland) is a hard task, requiring patience and endurance, and we must all, therefore, take great hope from George W. Bush’s realization that, in future, he may not be able to visit Europe at all.

Scott and I also spoke about the torture in Egypt of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (which led to a false claim that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein on obtaining chemical and boiological weapons, later used as a justification for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003), and the crucial role, in the rendition and torture program that was the dark heart of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” that was played by Egypt, and especially by intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, designated as Vice President by Hosni Mubarak before his fall from power on Friday, as I explained in my articles, As Egyptians Call for Mubarak’s Fall, He Appoints America’s Favorite Torturer as Vice President, Revolution in Egypt – and the Hypocrisy of the US and the West and As Mubarak Resigns, Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Mamdouh Habib Reminds the World that Omar Suleiman Personally Tortured Him in Egypt.

There’s even more that we managed to cram into the show, including discussions of the ongoing torture investigations in Spain, how Germany dropped an investigation due to pressure from the Bush administration, and how Romania is in denial about its own torture prison, but as I explained in closing, so long as some avenues remain open, there is hope that what I have prevously described as the battle for the soul of America — the struggle to hold to account the senior officials and lawyers in the Bush administration who conceived and approved the torture program — will be won not by the “dark side,” but by those in the light.

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Hopes by those seeking sweeping changes in the Middle East that, after decades of oppressive rule, the power of the people’s revolution in Egypt, which toppled Hosni Mubarak after 30 years of dictatorship on Friday, would spread next to Algeria received a setback at the first hurdle in Algiers on Saturday, when, as Karima Bennoune, an Algerian law professor in New Jersey, explained in a poignant article for the Guardian (cross-posted below), peaceful protestors were beaten up and arrested, although they were subsequently freed.

Public protests are banned in Algeria, but protestors remain hopeful, and those who turned out on Saturday know that, as in Egypt, unemployment, rising food prices, and the harsh realities of life in a brutal authoritarian state (the legacy of the unspeakingly horrific civil war in the 1990s, which, as in so much of the region, involved the meddling of the West) mean that the regime of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is vulnerable to a movement of mass opposition, if a trigger can be found that will enable the people to overcome their fear. As the Algerian psychologist Cherifa Bouatta told Bennoune, while watching the scenes in Tahrir Square, “I have been waiting for this for years. This is the beginning. From the years of terrorism [the 1990s] and what came after, everything seemed lost. Our hopes for a just society were dying. But now the possibilities are fantastic.”

Yesterday Egypt, today Algeria
By Karima Bennoune, The Guardian, February 12, 2011

Algiers — In the wake of Friday’s historic events in Cairo, over 1,000 peaceful demonstrators defied a ban on protests in Algiers on the Place de 1er Mai on Saturday. The goal of the National Coordination Committee for Change and Democracy, the organisers of what was supposed to have been a march to Martyr’s Square, was to call for an end to the 19-year state of emergency, for democratic freedoms, and for a change in Algeria’s political system. Invigorated by Cairo’s great event, this Saturday in Algiers they chanted slogans like “Djazair Horra Dimocratia” (“A free and democratic Algeria”), “système dégage” (“government out”) and indeed, “Yesterday Egypt, today Algeria”.

There were small echoes of Egypt. Thousands of police in full riot gear painted the square blue in their uniforms, attempting to occupy the space and prevent the demonstration, yet the protestors remained, for hours risking arrest and beatings, shouting slogans and singing effervescently. A large group of young men, with the obvious cooperation of the police, entered the scene violently, chanting in favour of President Bouteflika (in power since 1999) and attempting to provoke fights with the protestors. (This was so reminiscent of Cairo, that for a moment, one half-expected a charge of men riding camels like in Tahrir Square.) At one point, these youths rushed the bench where I stood taking photographs with journalists, and we all toppled to the ground. Later, the pro-government provocateurs started throwing large stones.

The single most moving part of the day was the women’s demonstration. A group of about 50 of the many women present — a few young women in hijab, many other young women in jeans, older, seasoned feminist activists wearing khaffiyehs and dresses — took up position next to the bus station at 1st of May Square holding a large Algerian flag. One of these women, prominent psychologist Cherifa Bouatta, told me on Friday as we watched the celebration in Cairo:

“I have been waiting for this for years. This is the beginning. From the years of terrorism [the 1990s] and what came after, everything seemed lost. Our hopes for a just society were dying. But now the possibilities are fantastic.”

On Saturday in 1st of May Square, she and the other women explored those possibilities. They occupied the street; they called for profound political change; they ululated (what Algerians call “pousser les youyous”; a high-pitched glottal chanting); they sang “Kassaman”, the national anthem, and “listiqlal” (independence), a song of the anti-colonial movement that freed the country from French rule in 1962 at the cost of a million martyrs. Most importantly, they refused to cede to the police. The pro-Boutef youth repeatedly confronted them, and even began shouting in favour of an Islamic state at one point as a confused riposte to the women.

The most surreal moment came as I watched the unyielding female activists attacked by a group of young policewomen in pants and boots — their own career paths only imaginable thanks to the hard work of some of the very women activists they hit and shoved. A young policewoman, the age of one of the students I teach, slapped me for taking a picture as this occurred. The women protesters’ only “crime” had been to stand peacefully on the sidewalk of their own capital city singing the national anthem and calling for democracy.

Reportedly, as many as 350 were arrested during the day. Many were roughed up, including the prominent, 90-year-old lawyer Ali Yahia Abdennour, who is the honorary president of the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights (LADDH). Cherifa Khaddar, the redoubtable human rights activist and president of Djazairouna, an association of the victims of the fundamentalist terrorism of the 1990s, whose brother and sister were brutally murdered in 1996 by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), was arrested twice. I watched in horror as policewomen manhandled her — unfortunately, not an oxymoron.

Just before she was arrested the first time, Khaddar was attacked by a group of the young pro-government “protesters”, some of whom attempted to pull her clothes off while another attempted to simulate sex with her. A policewoman dragged her away from this melee, only to help a group of male cops throw her to the ground and arrest her, rather than the perpetrators. Later on, at the police station, she found herself in a cell with 20 other women. Together, they continued the protest, chanting and singing: “My brothers do not forget our martyrs. They are calling you from their tombs. Listen to their voices, you free ones.” The police became enraged and attacked the women in the cell, dragging one away by her hair.” Khaddar was later released.

The situation is fluid. As the protest waned, the square was taken over by a large group of mostly young male protesters, many from the surrounding neighbourhood. Some of them had previously chanted pro-government slogans and insulted the women demonstrators, but now took up anti-government slogans themselves, talked supportively with the freed Khaddar and challenged the police alone. Hundreds of riot police then brought out their guns, marched in formation and shut down the square altogether. It looked like a scene out of the Costa Gavras film “Z”.

I hope that what happens in Algeria in the coming period will be watched carefully, notwithstanding the understandable preoccupation with events to the east in Egypt. The contexts are different, but the struggles are the same. Moreover, the brave Algerian activists of 1st of May Square — women and men, young and old — also deserve solidarity and support on the road ahead. Algerian writer and journalist Mustapha Benfodil said that this demonstration’s goal was to turn 1st of May Square into an Algerian Tahrir Square, and that what occurred on Saturday was a very important step in that direction. But he noted that much work remains to be done to that end.

Clearly, the wall of fear needs to be broken down here — perhaps a harder task than elsewhere, given the terrible violence of the 1990s that killed as many as 200,000 people and terrorised the entire society. The opposition needs to be united and organised. Additionally, activists need to build critical links with broader segments of the society to achieve the political change so clearly needed in the country and which the police overreaction only underscored — change that Tunisia and Egypt have proven to be entirely possible.

For now, perhaps it is more accurate to say, “Yesterday Egypt, tomorrow Algeria …”

Note: On Al-Jazeera English, Elias Filali, an Algerian blogger and activist, said that “human rights activists and syndicate members were among those arrested at the scene of the protests,” which were organized by the National Co-ordination for Change and Democracy (CNCD), “a three-week-old umbrella group of opposition parties, civil society movements and unofficial unions inspired by the mass protests in Tunisia and Egypt.”

Speaking from the scene of the protest in Algiers, Filali said, “I’m right in the middle of the march. People are being arrested and are heavily guarded by the police.” He also said that the demonstrators “were determined to remain peaceful,” but that the police “want the crowd to go violent and then get them portrayed as a violent crowd.”

Before the protest, he explained, “The timing is absolutely perfect. [Mubarak's departure] couldn’t have come at a better time. This is a police state, just like the Egyptian regime [was].” He added that Algeria’s government was “corrupt to the bone, based on electoral fraud, and repression. There is a lot of discontent among young people … the country is badly managed by a corrupt regime that does not want to listen”. Noting that the government had assigned 30,000 police officers to the protest, he also said, “The regime is frightened. And the presence of 30,000 police officers in the capital gives you an idea of how frightened the regime [is] of its people.” One sign of President Bouteflika’s fears is that, earlier this month, as Al-Jazeera explained, he “said he would lift emergency powers, address unemployment and allow democratic marches to take place in the country, in a bid to stave off unrest.”

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

With Hosni Mubarak gone, the celebrations in Egypt on Friday night, and into Saturday morning, were a wonder to behold. Over 18 days, the protestors in Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the 18-day people’s revolution that ousted the hated dictator after 30 years, demonstrated to the world that, if enough people press for change, anything is possible — not only the toppling of a dictator, but also the disarming of foreign regimes that, as a rule, are committed to meddling significantly in the affairs of the Middle East.

Now, however, with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces running the country, it remains to be seen whether enough people will stay out on the streets, and continue to engage in strike action, to ensure that a second key element of the protestors’ aims — primarily, the establishment of a civilian-controlled interim administration prior to free and fair elections, and an end to the state of emergency that was in force throughout Mubarak’s 30-year reign — will take place sooner rather than later — or, in the gloomiest scenario, not at all.

In seeking to reassure the protestors, the Supreme Council delivered a fourth message to the people — Communique No. 4 — on State TV, in which a senior officer, General Mohsen el-Fangari, stated that the military will “guarantee the peaceful transition of power in the framework of a free, democratic system which allows an elected, civilian power to govern the country to build a democratic, free state,” and pledged that “The Arab Republic of Egypt is committed to all regional and international obligations and treaties” — which will obviously reassure Israel (and its many Western allies) that the 1979 peace treaty still stands. The Council also stated that the current government would continue to perform its duties until a new government was elected, asked the people to return to their responsibilities towards the country, and also asked the people to cooperate with the police.

However, because the Supreme Council failed to present a timetable for the transition to civiian rule (or whatever civilian-military hybrid might emerge from open elections), many of the protestors in Tahrir Square refused the request to return home — understandably, from my point of view. Although it appears that Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s chosen Vice President (and the hated chief torturer of the Mubarak regime, and of its US allies) is not part of the interim picture, the current situation remains too vague for the protestors to take on trust.

After all, the Supreme Council consists solely of Mubarak’s former allies, and the acting ruler, the 76-year old former defence minister, Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, was appointed as deputy prime minister by Mubarak on January 29 as part of a futile reshuffle to placate protestors, and was noted, in a US diplomatic cable from March 2008, which was published by WikiLeaks, as being “aged and change-resistant”. The diplomatic cable stated that both Tantawi and Mubarak “are focused on regime stability and maintaining the status quo through the end of their time. They simply do not have the energy, inclination or world view to do anything differently.”

As a result of fears that there is, effectively, nothing to prevent the Military Council from failing to fulfil the protestors’ full demands if they abandon Tahrir Square and cease to exert pressure on the country’s leaders, some of the organisers of the revolution “announced they had formed a council to negotiate with the military and to oversee future demonstrations to keep up the pressure on the army to meet the demand for rapid democratic change,” as the Guardian explained. One of the organisers, Khaled Abdel Qader Ouda, said, “The council will have the authority to call for protests or call them off depending on how the situation develops.”

As people “continued to pour in to Cairo’s Tahrir square, in part to celebrate at the epicentre of the revolution against the Mubarak regime,” the Guardian also reported that there was “concern among some of the core group of activists,” because of the army’s “apparent intent to control the political transition.” As the Guardian proceeded to explain:

A group of the activists issued what they called the “People’s Communique No 1″ — mirroring the titles of military communiques — listing a series of demands. They included the immediate dissolution of Mubarak’s cabinet and “suspension of the parliament elected in a rigged poll late last year.” The reformists want a transitional administration appointed with four civilians and one military official to prepare for elections in nine months and to oversee the drafting of a new constitution.

The Washington Post noted similar concerns, explaining that “the armed forces signaled there were limits to how much change they would tolerate, ignoring demonstrators’ demands to dismantle the institutional legacies of former President Hosni Mubarak.” The Post also stated:

Many of Egypt’s revolutionaries … vowed … to continue their peaceful occupation of Tahrir Square, saying their demands for democracy and accountability were still unmet. Smaller but still vibrant crowds packed the square in central Cairo to take stock of their improbable success at ousting Mubarak and to contemplate what might come next. Soldiers remained posted outside the square, ostensibly to maintain order, but they grinned approvingly at the spectacle unfolding before them.

Another organizer of the protests, Issa Adel Issa, stated, “We don’t want a military government. We want a democracy with civilians in charge.” As the Post described it, he “ticked off a list of demands: the dissolution of Mubarak’s handpicked parliament; the dissolution of his ruling National Democratic Party; the release of thousands of political prisoners; and prosecution of those responsible for the deaths of an estimated 300 demonstrators who were killed during the 18-day revolution.” He added, “We have to sentence those responsible for these crimes.”

Ahmed Abed Ghafur, a 36-year-old computer engineer who had been in Tahrir Square for four days, said he had “no intention of leaving … until the military made more specific promises about institutionalizing a true democracy.” He explained, “This is a revolution, not a half-revolution. We need a timetable for elections. We need an interim government. We need a committee for a new constitution. Once we get all that, then we can leave the square.”

I have to say that, at present, I agree with Issa Adel Issa and Ahmed Abed Ghafur more than I agree with Khaled Abdel Qader Ouda, who spoke of sporadic protests to ensure the transition to democracy. Mubarak fell through the sustained pressure of millions of people, and there ought to be enough suspicions about the history of the military leaders — as well as the aims of Egypt’s foreign allies (however much they are praising the outcome of the revolution in public) — for the Egyptian people, who achieved this 18-day miracle, to remain wary — and to remain wary in large numbers.

What took place in Egypt over the last two and a half weeks was so significant, and so inspirational, that it must not be compromised by false hopes, or a sense of false security. The world is still watching, and for many millions of those watching, the triumph of the people over a long injustice — and one deliberately propped up by the West — is one of those all too rare moments in human history when the power base shifts to those with hope and clarity, rather than those with dark aims, and disdain for the people they claim to rule.

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Compared to the Egyptian revolution’s extraordinary toppling of the dictator Mubarak, the people’s occupation of the country’s public spaces, the workers’ strikes and the array of emotions pouring forth (everything from anger to exhilaration), Britain appears to be in a state of denial, despite the fact that revolutionary impulses may well be the only valid response to the coalition government’s unprecedented assault on almost every aspect of British society — hard-pressed middle class and working class people, students, schoolchildren, the working poor, the unemployed and the disabled; everyone, in fact, except the rich and the super-rich.

Driven by a repusive ideological desire to smash the British state, and to privatize whatever was not privatized under Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the coalition’s leading incompetents — David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg, aided by stooges like Vince Cable and Danny Alexander — are ferociously pursuing the biggest ever hatchet job on the British state on the basis of economic necessity, counting on the sloth and indifference of the public to disguise their true intentions, and to prevent anyone from scrutinizing how those responsible for the financial crisis — the banking sector, and the corporations committed to wholesale tax avoidance — are not being held accountable. What makes this even more alarming is the fact that the government does not even have an effective mandate for its cuts, with neither party having won a majority, and both having either lied about their plans or omitted to mention them entirely on the campaign trail last spring.

Last October, when George Osborne announced the government’s comprehensive spending review, gleefully cutting £81 bn of spending over the next four years, students, schoolchildren and university staff immediately responded to plans to triple tuition fees, to withdraw 100 percent funding from arts, humanities and social science courses, and to scrap the Education Maintanance Allowance for sixth-formers from poorer backgrounds by taking to the streets in numbers not seen since the last Conservative government — with the exception of the protest aganst the Iraq War in February 2003, which was by far and away the biggest protest in British history. When the measures were approved by Parliament in December, protestors — even those who were too young to remember — suddenly recalled the Poll Tax Riot of 1990, which helped to bring about Thatcher’s downfall, and was a shining example of hideous legislation that was abandoned through popular protest.

This year, however, the impetus established by the students and schoolchildren appears to be in danger of disappearing, even though there are countless reasons for the British people to come together in unprecedented numbers to fight the ongoing — and rapid — destruction of the state. Instead of occupying Parliament Square and calling for widespread strikes and walkouts, for example, the huge wave of job losses precipitated by the cuts is largely mentioned only in furtive, whispered conversations, as though it is somehow embarrassing to be complaining about a government that, despite its claims, has no idea whatsoever about how to create new employment to compensate for the loss of revenue and increased expenditure resulting from hundreds of thousands more unemployed people, which may well tip the country into further economic decline.

All over the country, people involved in charities, arts projects, youth projects, community projects, and other frontline projects dealing with the poor and disadvantaged are facing the axe. ConneXions, the project that helps motivate young people who might otherwise fall out of the system entirely, is facing huge cuts as careers advice and support is particularly hard hit, the Citizens Advice Bureaux issued 900 redundancy notices on January 27, hundreds of Sure Start children’s centres face closure this year and staff at 1,000 centres have been warned about the threat of redundancy, and even the Police are not immune, with 20,000 job losses expected over the next two years.

As I explain in a separate article to follow, plans to privatize the NHS by stealth also involve axing ten percent of the workforce — at least 100,000 people — despite government promises to protect the NHS, and on January 27, as Liverpool City Council announced 1,500 council job losses, the GMB, Britain’s General Union, which has over 600,000 members — mainly manual workers in local government and the health service — warned that the losses announced in Liverpool brought the number of job losses to 145,842 in 212 councils and authorities –  or 25 percent of the union’s total membership. A week later, Manchester City Council announced 2,000 job losses, and on Friday Birmingham City Council announced 7,000 job losses. On February 2, the GMB updated its estimates, describing 150,059 job losses at 260 councils, and warning that it was still waiting for notification of job losses “from 137 smaller shire district councils in England, from 22 larger councils in England (9 London Boroughs, 2 Met Boroughs, 2 Shire Counties and 8 Unitary Authorities), 21 councils in Scotland,18 in Wales and 44-plus other authorities.” For anyone wanting to keep track of the losses, UNISON, the biggest public sector trade union with more than 1.3 million members, has a dossier, “Con-Demned Jobs,” analyzing job losses by region and work sector, which is available here.

With all this misery, it is, in some ways, astonishing that a major protest movement has not yet emerged to fight back, but in a country that — like so many countries in the West — has seen all sense of community and solidarity steadily atomized over the last 30 years, it is perhaps not surprising. The trade unions, whose members are particuarly affected by the goverment’s butchery of jobs, have recently been discussing coordinated strikes — something not really seen since the darkest days of Margaret Thatcher — but they appear to be focusing primarily on hopes of bringing together a huge number of people for their “March for the Alternative: Jobs, Growth, Justice,” a day of action in London on March 26.

This rally and march will hopefully see all kinds of different groups and individuals uniting for the first time, and creating viable new networks for protest and action, but I must admit that, when it comes to tackling the government’s hypocrisy, stupidity and cruelty head-on, the most dynamic protest group to have emerged in the wake of the financial crisis, and the cynical manoeuvring of the coalition government, is UK Uncut, “the country’s fastest growing protest movement,” according to an article in the Guardian on Thursday.

Analysts love how the movement, which started in a London pub last October, with a group of friends looking for creative ways to protest about tax evasion by Vodaphone, has taken off through social networking sites, and through the appeal of its occupations of the retail outlets of major tax avoiders — beginning with Vodaphone (also see here), and moving on to Philip Green’s Arcadia empire (Topshop, BHS, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge), Boots (where the police used CS spray on protestors), Tesco, Walkers Crisps and Cadbury’s, Barclays, Lloyds and HSBC. However, while creative dissent is always a powerful tool — especially when it involves elements of theatre and ridicule, as has particularly been demonstrated by counter-cultural movements from the 1960s onwards — UK Uncut’s primary strength is its message. This, for example, is the group’s response to the government’s claims that “The cuts are necessary, there is no alternative”:

We are told that it is vital to reduce the deficit, and that the only way of doing this is to cut public spending. This is certainly not the case. There are alternatives, but the government chooses to ignore them, highlighting the fact that the cuts are based on ideology, not necessity.

• One alternative is to clamp down on tax dodging by corporations and the rich, estimated to cost the state £95bn a year
• Another is to make the banks pay for a crisis they created: last year they paid out over £7bn in bonuses and just four banks made £24bn in profit

The tax avoided and evaded in a single year could pay for the £81bn, four-year cuts programme.

And this is their response to the claim that “The cuts are fair, we are all in this together”:

Since the banking crisis:

• average pay of FTSE 100 directors has risen 55%,
• corporation tax has been cut,
• the government have not delivered on a manifesto pledge to clamp down on tax avoidance, instead cutting staff at HMRC,
• bank profits and bonuses are back in the many billions,
• there has been no reform of the banks.

David Cameron himself has said that the cuts will change Britain’s “whole way of life”. Every aspect of what was fought for by generations seems under threat – from selling off the forests, privatising health provision, closing the libraries and swimming pools, to scrapping rural bus routes. What Cameron doesn’t say is that the cuts will also disproportionately hit the poor and vulnerable, with cuts to housing benefit, disability living allowance, the childcare element of working tax credits, EMA, the Every Child a Reader programme, Sure Start and the Future Jobs Fund to name a few.

The facts speak for themselves; we are not all in this together, we are paying for the folly of reckless bankers whilst the rich profit.

The government are forced to claim that the cuts are necessary as they know that people would never accept them otherwise. By repeating the same lies over and over again, they hope to brainwash people into inaction.

There are alternatives to the cuts, and we are not all in this together. But unless we take action, and take the facts to our friends, our families and those around us, they will get away with it.

If you haven’t yet come across UK Uncut, I do urge you to check out their website, and get involved. After causing the temporary closure of more than 100 branches of tax-evading high street stores in the last five months, the group is staging its first national day of action against UK banks on February 19, combining, as ever, theatrical creativity with its hard-hitting Robin Hood-style message about the urgent need for wealth redistribution to save the many from suffering to enrich the few. As the Guardian reported on Thursday:

“The idea this time is not to shut these places down but to open up high street banks, occupying them and using them for things that may be more useful for the community,” said Daniel Garvin from the group.

He and other protesters have mobilised thousands of activists using the Twitter hashtag #UKuncut since the group was formed in October.

The protests, which come as banks reveal multimillion-pound bonus packages over the next few weeks, will involve a range of peaceful — and creative — direct actions.

“If libraries are being closed in their area, people may decide to stage a read-in in the bank,” said Garvin.

“The housing benefit cap means people are losing their homes, so some groups may opt for a sleep-in. Theatres are being shut, so others have talked about staging a play.

“Health provision is being cut, so what about setting up a walk-in clinic? Education funding is being savaged so how about holding a lecture series?”

Garvin said one local group concerned that a swimming pool was under threat was going to set up a paddling pool in a local bank.

A video about UK Uncut, produced for the Guardian, is below:

Note: Also see this article about Take VAT, a “UK Uncut-esque” action group, which was formed last month to raise awareness of companies that avoid paying VAT, and which was holding its first protests in London and Leeds on Saturday February 12.

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Less than 24 hours since he delivered a pompous, reality-defying speech, insisting that he would stay in power until elections in September, Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s dictator for 30 years, has stepped down, providing the first major victory for the people’s revolution in Egypt, now in its 18th day. In a brief announcement on Egyptian State TV, Omar Suleiman, the Vice President appointed by Mubarak just two weeks ago, indicated that he would not be assuming power personally, but would be handing control of the country to a military council.

I very much hope that this is the case, and that Suleiman will not try to keep control himself, as he is, if anything, an even more hated and hateful figure than the 82-year old Mubarak, as was explained today in a timely article in The Australian. In the article, Mamdouh Habib, the former Guantánamo prisoner who received a financial settlement from the Australian government last year for its role in rendering him to Egypt, where he was tortured prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, forcefully reminded the world why any transfer of power to Omar Suleiman would be disastrous for the people’s revolution, which must continue to call for nothing less than the removal of every aspect of Mubarak regime from the corridors of power.

As Egypt’s intelligence chief, Suleiman’s crucial role in torture has been exposed by a handful of perceptive journalists, who have pointed out — ever since Mubarak appointed him as Vice President — that he was in charge of the torture regime that has terrified Egyptians throughout Mubarak’s 30-year reign, and that, in addition, played a major role in radicalizing the Islamists who went on to form the core of al-Qaeda.

As has also been noted, and as I explained in my articles Revolution in Egypt – and the Hypocrisy of the US and the West and As Egyptians Call for Mubarak’s Fall, He Appoints America’s Favorite Torturer as Vice President (in which I cross-posted an analysis of Suleiman’s torture history by Stephen Soldz), Suleiman played a crucial role in the unholy alliance between Egypt and the United States in the “War on Terror,” when an unknown number of prisoners, seized by the Americans, were rendered for torture in Egypt.

It has not yet been confirmed that Suleiman was personally involved in the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan, who falsely confessed, under torture, that al-Qaeda was discussing the use of chemical and biological weapons with Saddam Hussein, but in 2006, the author Ron Suskind, in his book The One Percent Doctrine (which also first exposed the US government’s false claims about the supposed “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah), stated that Suleiman was directly involved in his torture, and it seems likely, given that Mamdouh Habib has stated that Suleiman was responsible for personally overseeing his own torture.

The importance of this cannot be overstated, as Suleiman, described by a former senior US intelligence official as having a “close and continuing” relationship with the CIA, would therefore be directly implicated in one of the most monstrous lies of the “War on Teror,” in which, whether by accident, or, more likely, by design, torture was deliberately inflicted not to protect the US and its allies from further terrorist attacks, but to provide a justification for the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Al-Libi, who was eventually returned to Libya, where he died in mysterious circumstances in May 2009, later recanted his tortured lies about the connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but not before Colin Powell had presented the fruits of his torture as evidence of the need to invade Iraq during a crucial presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003.

Mamdouh Habib, who was kidnapped from a bus in Pakistan in October 2001, and suspected of involvement in terrorism because he had allegedly been in contact with supporters of the jailed Egyptian terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”) was also tortured (subjected to electric shocks, nearly drowned, beaten, and hung from metal hooks) until he made a false confession — in his case, that he had personally trained some of the 9/11 hijackers. Although this lie was also patently untrue, the Bush administration was prepared to put him on trial at Guantánamo until Dana Priest and Dan Eggen of the Washington Post revealed the story of his torture in January 2005, and he was immediately released.

Speaking to the Australian, Habib explained that “it would be a disgrace if Mr. Suleiman became leader of Egypt given his personal role in overseeing the torture of terror suspects” from the mid-1990s onwards, when, under President Clinton, the US first started sending kidnapped terror suspects to Egypt, to be tortured. disappeared and/or tried and executed. In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer described how the program began — and how crucial Suleiman was to its development:

Each rendition was authorised at the very top levels of both governments … The long-serving chief of the Egyptian central intelligence agency, Omar Suleiman, negotiated directly with top [CIA] officials. [Former US Ambassador to Egypt Edward] Walker described the Egyptian counterpart, Suleiman, as “very bright, very realistic,” adding that he was cognisant that there was a downside to “some of the negative things that the Egyptians engaged in, of torture and so on. But he was not squeamish, by the way.”

Technically, US law required the CIA to seek “assurances” from Egypt that rendered suspects wouldn’t face torture. But under Suleiman’s reign at the EGIS [the Egyptian General Intelligence Service, or Mukhabarat el-Aama], such assurances were considered close to worthless. As Michael Scheuer, a former CIA officer [and head of the al-Qaeda desk], who helped set up the practise of rendition, later testified, even if such “assurances” were written in indelible ink, “they weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.”

Reinforcing these claims, Mamdouh Habib told the Australian, “This guy is an agent for the United States and the CIA. If Australia supports Suleiman, they are supporting torture and crime.” As the Australian described it, Habib said that, after he was rendered to Egypt, “Mr Suleiman helped torture him,” and explained that, in his book, My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, Habib “wrote that Mr. Suleiman had often been present during his interrogations.”

The following passages are taken from the article in the Australian:

“I was sitting in a chair, hooded, with my hands handcuffed behind my back. He came up to me. His voice was deep and rough. He spoke to me in Egyptian and English,” Mr Habib writes. “He said, ‘Listen, you don’t know who I am, but I am the one who has your life in his hands’.”

Mr Habib writes that Mr Suleiman had told him that he wanted him to die a slow death: “No, I don’t want you to die now. I want you to die slowly. I can’t stay with you; my time is too valuable to stay here. You only have me to save you. I’m your saviour. You have to tell me everything if you want to be saved. What do you say?”

When Mr Habib said he had nothing to tell him, he says Mr Suleiman had said: “You think I can’t destroy you just like that?”

They had taken Mr Habib to another room and then Mr Suleiman had said: “Now you are going to tell me that you planned a terrorist attack. I give you my word you will be a rich man if you tell me you have been planning attacks. Don’t you trust me?”

Mr Habib had replied that he did not trust anyone.

“Immediately he slapped me hard across the face and knocked off the blindfold; I clearly saw his face,” Mr Habib writes.

Mr Habib alleges Mr Suleiman said: “That’s it. That’s it. I don’t want to see this man again until he co-operates and tells me he’s been planning a terrorist attack.”

When you think that a similar process must also have taken place with Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, whose death in a Libyan prison in May 2009 suited three parties — the US, the Libyans, and the Egyptians, who had been somewhat humiliated by the revelations of his tortured lies — it becomes horrifically clear that the last person who should be anywhere close to a position of power in Egypt is the CIA’s most trusted foreign torturer.

Suleiman, like Mubarak, must go — and in his wake, those seeking an end to Egypt’s torture regime, and accountability for America’s repulsive alliance with the Mubarak regime in the torture program at the heart of the “War on Terror,” must focus not only on Omar Suleiman, but also on those who were feeding on the tortured lies emanating from Egypt’s dungeons — former US President George W. Bush, and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Note: On March 10, 2011, this article, which I wrote for free, was sponsored — for $50 — by a friend and supporter, George Kenneth Berger. This was an initative I launched during my quarterly fundraising appeal, as a way of trying to raise money to cover what I described as “the otherwise unpaid hours I spend writing the many articles that are published exclusively here.” I like it as a model for supporting bloggers, who often write for nothing (in between paid assignments, if they’re lucky!), and I’m grateful to George for picking up on it. It is, I hasten to add, a permanent offer!

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Amnesty International UK has just issued a press release deploring the “mockery of justice” in the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who has been held for nine years without charge or trial. The press release has been issued to mark the ninth aniversary of Shaker Aamer’s arrival at Guantánamo (after being held in Afghanistan for two months). According to weight records released by the Pentagon in 2007, which also include the prisoners’ dates of arrival at the prison, the date of Shaker’s arrival at Guantánamo was February 13, 2002.

I’m delighted to report that the press release also includes a mention of the forthcoming tour of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and myself), which focuses on Shaker’s story, as well as the stories of Binyam Mohamed and Omar Deghayes (both released). After I spoke at Amnesty’s Student Conference in November (where clips from the film were shown) and I invited student groups to arrange screenings, I received an enormously positive response, and Amnesty then agreed to support the tour, providing copies of the DVD and promotional materials to interested groups. Seven screenings for Amnesty student groups have been arranged so far, starting with Bristol on February 14, Durham on February 18 and Edinburgh on February 19, and another 18 are in the pipeline.

Amnesty’s press release is posted below (with links that I have added myself):

Amnesty International UK Press Release, February 11, 2011
Shaker Aamer: UK man’s nine years at Guantánamo has made a “mockery of justice”

Amnesty has denounced the treatment of Shaker Aamer, the former UK resident held at Guantánamo, as a “mockery of justice”, as supporters in the UK and elsewhere mark the ninth full year of his detention at the US military base.

Mr Aamer, 43, has been held without charge or trial at Guantánamo for exactly nine years this month — campaigners put the date of his arrival at the detention centre at 13 February 2002.

Aamer is the last recognised former resident of the UK held at Guantánamo and is currently the subject of a high-profile Amnesty campaign for him to receive a fair trial or be released back to his wife and children in the UK. Thousands of Amnesty supporters have written to the UK Foreign Secretary William Hague asking him to press for this to happen.

Meanwhile, human rights campaigner and Guantánamo author Andy Worthington is set to present special screenings in the UK this month of his documentary film “Outside The Law: Stories From Guantánamo” (see weblink below). Worthington, whose tour is supported by Amnesty, has said the tour is primarily designed to raise awareness of Shaker Aamer’s plight.

Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said:

“The treatment meted out to Shaker Aamer has made a total mockery of justice.

“It’s been nine years without charges, without a trial and, in many ways, without much hope for Shaker, and we are determined to see his basic human rights restored.

“Now there could be light at the end of the tunnel for Shaker. Thousands of people on both sides of the Atlantic have recently called on senior UK and US politicians to break the deadlock over his case.

“Currently all the signs point to heightened behind-the-scenes activity over Shaker’s situation and it’s vital that we say to politicians ‘we won’t rest until his case is fairly resolved’.

“Given the time involved, the lengthy spells in solitary confinement and the torture allegedly used against him, Shaker Aamer’s plight has been one of the worst of all the detainees held at Guantánamo.

“There are strong humanitarian and human rights grounds for the UK government to step up its efforts to secure a fair trial or a safe release for Shaker.

“Meanwhile, if the forthcoming inquiry into UK involvement in torture is to do its job properly, it is likely to need to hear from Shaker. The easiest way to do that is get him out of the cruel limbo of Guantánamo.”

Through his lawyer, Aamer has alleged that he was badly beaten and subjected to death threats in front of an MI5 officer as well as US intelligence officials while being secretly held and interrogated in Afghanistan in early 2002. In February 2002 Aamer was transferred to the notorious US military detention centre at Guantánamo Bay, where he has languished ever since. There are allegations that he was again tortured at Guantánamo, and he has spent long periods of his incarceration at the camp in solitary confinement.

Aamer is originally from Saudi Arabia but is married to a British citizen and has four British children. He had permission to live indefinitely in the UK when he was originally detained in Afghanistan by Afghan forces in the autumn of 2001.

Note to editors

In January 2009 President Barack Obama signed an executive order committing the US administration to resolving the cases of the detainees held at Guantánamo “as promptly as possible”, and to closing the detention facility “no later than one year from the date of this order”.

However 172 men are currently detained at Guantánamo. The majority have been held there without charge or trial for more than eight years.

The Guantánamo Review Task Force established under President Obama’s executive order recommended in January 2010 that 36 detainees be prosecuted by the USA, either in federal court or in military commissions; that 48 others continue to be held without charge or trial; and that the remainder be transferred out of Guantánamo, to countries other than the USA, either immediately or eventually.  Some of those who could not be returned to their home countries have been offered a new home in third countries in Europe and elsewhere.

The US administration continues to pursue trials by military commission in proceedings that do not meet international fair trial standards. To date, only one Guantánamo detainee has been transferred to the US mainland for trial in a civilian court.

For more information on “Outside The Law: Stories From Guantánamo” film screenings, please see: “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” — UK Tour Dates 2011: The “Save Shaker Aamer” Tour.

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Contrary to all expectations, Hosni Mubarak, the 82-year old Egyptian dictator, failed to stand down on Thursday evening, when he finally addressed the Egyptian people on State TV. In a speech that began with fulsome praise for the youthful protestors and a claim that he understood their concerns, Mubarak insisted that he would stay in power until September, when, he said, he would honor his earlier promise to stand down. He also spoke about handing some power to the recently appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman (the former head of intelligence, and the favorite torturer of both the United States and Mubarak himself), and spent some time discussing constitutional amendments designed to bring to an end the dictatorial Emergency Law, which has been in place throughout his long dictatorship — and, almost without a break, since 1967 — whose ferocious restrictions on any kind of dissent have led to the imprisonment without charge or trial of thousands of perceived dissidents, both political and religious.

Appearing on State TV after Mubarak, Omar Suleiman urged the protesters to return home. “Youth of Egypt: go back home, back to work, the nation needs you to develop, to create. Don’t listen to radio and TV, whose aim is to tarnish Egypt,” he said, oblivious to the fact that the protestors in Cairo’s Tahrir Square are in no mood to go home. Waving their shoes in the air, the protestors — who had been quiet during the start of Mubarak’s speech — suddenly responded in anger, raising a thunderous roar of “Down with Mubarak!” and promising “revolution till we die” — and, as a result, drowning out Suleiman entirely.

Speaking on Al-Jazeera English, John Bradley, the author of Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution, expressed dismay about the speeches, and fears of horrendous violence to come. in terms of the numbers of people involved, he said, the Egyptian revolution is one of the three biggest popular revolutions in history, along with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and yet the speeches of Mubarak and Suleiman were “an insult to the dignity of the Egyptian people.” He added, anticipating an extraordinary turnout of protestors all over Egypt tomorrow, “The revolution starts tomorrow,” but warned that much depends on the plans of the military, which, this afternoon, muddied the waters by issuing “Communique No. 1,” in which the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces stated that they had started taking “necessary measures to protect the nation” and to “support the legitimate demands of the people.”

The communique followed a visit to Tahrir Square by Lt. Gen. Sami Enan, the chief of the Armed Forces, who stated, “All your demands will be met tonight,” which triggered the belief that Mubarak would stand down. FT.com also reported the views of Mohamed Ramsy, a major in the army, who “joined the protestors in civilian clothes.” Ramsy said, “I’m here because I must be here, I’m a citizen, and it’s not logical to have the Egyptian regime against the citizens. Omar Suleiman was chosen by a president we don’t like. I will not return to my unit. I will stay here until Mubarak goes. I’m not afraid any more, it’s time to say what we think.”

However, on Al-Jazeera English, John Bradley explained his fears, based on a different scenario. “If the army moves against the people,” he said, “we might see on Friday one of the most violent revolutions in the history of the world.”

Bradley was also highly critical of what he perceived as the role of the US and Israel in maintaining the Mubarak regime, pending whatever transition might follow. He called it “one last desperate attempt to keep their puppet in power, and it’s going to backfire massively,” and also warned that other countries were vulnerable to the revolutionary demands expressed by the people of Egypt — specifically mentioning Yemen, Algeria, Jordan and Bahrain, and warning that unrest could spill over to Saudi Arabia.

For now, however, all eyes remain fixed on Egypt, and on the messy and confused response of the Mubarak regime to the incessant demands of the people for free and fair elections, and for the complete removal of power of Hosni Mubarak, Omar Suleiman and anyone else involved with the 30-year dictatorship whose time has clearly come to an end.

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.