As I have been explaining since the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo a year ago, it is now appropriate to regard most of, if not all of the remaining 171 prisoners as political prisoners, given that the Obama administration, Congress and the judiciary have all made sure that Guantánamo may never close, and that few, if any of the remaining prisoners will ever be released, even though 89 of them were cleared for release (or, technically, “approved for transfer”) by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established in January 2009.

The situation is no better for the other 82 prisoners, who are either scheduled to face trials that, in most cases, show no signs of materializing, or, in 46 cases, have been specifically designated as prisoners to be held indefinitely without charge or trial by President Obama, in an executive order last March. Although the President promised periodic reviews for these prisoners, his executive order essentially enshrines the indefensible –  indefinite detention without charge or trial — as an official policy of his administration, even though he and senior officials have been at pains to point out that it applies only to these men, and is not to be construed as lending credibility to indefinite detention in general.

That is a not an entirely convincing argument, of course, but in stepping back and looking at the situation facing all the men still held, it is, I believe, appropriate to focus not only on the injustice specifically facing these 46 men, but, as I mentioned above, to describe all the remaining detainees as political prisoners, because it makes no difference whether they have been cleared or not, as it ends up with the same result — indefinite detention, with no end in sight.

While the stories of the British ex-prisoners — eight of whom came to the Observer‘s offices to be interviewed, and to take part in a photoshoot — are fascinating, as they recall their horrendous experiences in US custody, and their struggles to rebuild their lives, it is Shaker Aamer, the charismatic, eloquent activist for the prisoners’ rights, who hovers over the proceedings, and it is Shaker, of course, who, like the 170 other men still held at Guantánamo, can now be regarded as a political prisoner, unlikely to be freed even though the Obama administration cleared him for release, and even though the British government has asked for him to be returned to the UK, where he has a British wife and four children.

Below, I’m cross-posting Tracy McVeigh’s article about the released prisoners, and an additional Observer article about Shaker, in which, sadly, it is revealed that senior White House sources have said that the Obama administration “will not risk releasing Shaker Aamer” before the Presidential election in November, because, as one said, “We’ve taken enough hits from the right; we can’t risk any more.” The article also notes that the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta — and therefore, by extension, the administration as a whole — has been “unwilling” to secure Shaker’s release by overcoming the main obstacle to the release of cleared prisoners — Congressional demands that the defense secretary certifies that any country to which prisoners are to be released is “safe,” and that released prisoners will not be able to “return to the battlefield.”

Given that this involves the UK, America’s staunchest ally in the “war on terror,” it is depressing that the administration is unwilling to tackle Congress, and it is to be hoped, therefore, that there is genuine reason to be encouraged by the Observer also noting that, with regard to the UK, “it is believed that the foreign secretary, William Hague, has called an urgent meeting early in the new year to discuss what more the British government can do to bring Aamer home.”

Securing Shaker’s return is not only a matter of justice, of course; it may also be a matter of life or death, as his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, noted after visiting him in November. In the Independent, Paul Cahalan, who has closely followed Shaker’s case, spoke to his father-in-law, Saeed Siddique, who also raised alarm bells about Shaker’s condition. “In the 10 years Shaker has been there he has become old,” he said. “His hair has turned white and he is very ill. His children are growing now and it is difficult for them. The youngest one is nine and has never met his dad. He doesn’t know why, and he tells his mum, ‘My father doesn’t love me because he never sees me.’” He added, “Since Shaker has gone, my daughter has become very ill. She has been treated for depression and hearing voices. When she is very bad, I have to look after her and the children for weeks. It is very hard for her and all the children. When he was captured, Shaker offered to let my daughter divorce him, but she said, ‘No, I will wait for you.’ She is still waiting.”

Britain’s Guantánamo survivors are suffering a toxic legacy
By Tracy McVeigh, The Observer, January 1, 2012

After years of imprisonment, victims of America’s ‘icon of lawlessness’ were released without charge, but their lives have been shattered.

They call each other “brother” and the warmth between them is tangible. Not close friends as such, they come from different walks of life, cultures and backgrounds, but have been thrown together by a shared experience. They are Britain’s survivors of Guantánamo, the detention centre that has been called the “gulag of our times”.

All were imprisoned, interrogated and held without charge or trial; some allege that they were tortured; all have suffered lasting effects to their mental and physical health.

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the first detainees arriving at Guantánamo Bay detention camps, where the open-mesh and barbed-wire cells became synonymous with the abuse of human rights and the scandal of illegal rendition. The camp was called an “icon of lawlessness” by Amnesty International because inside its high-security fences all conventions of international justice, from the Geneva Convention to access to legal representation, were ignored.

Still in operation despite Barack Obama’s pre- and post-election pledges to close it, Guantánamo now houses 171 prisoners, including the last remaining British resident, Shaker Aamer. In total nine British citizens and six British residents were among the 779 adults and children imprisoned in Guantánamo camps, built on a US naval outpost on the southeastern tip of Cuba to house the “enemy combatants” of George Bush’s war on terror.

All bar Aamer were released back to the UK without charge. All were interviewed by the British authorities on their return and allowed to go back to whatever remained salvageable of their lives and were later awarded out-of-court compensation for their extrajudicial ordeal. Four have had their travel outside the UK restricted.

Any involvement the men may or may not have had with the fighting in Afghanistan or with any terror plots has never been proved. Most, says Guantánamo expert and author Andy Worthington, were “a bunch of nobodies”.

“One tries to stay very objective in taking an overview of Guantánamo, but at the end of the day it’s pretty evident that all but a handful of the people caught up in the trawling approach the Americans took post-9/11 in Afghanistan were not terrorists,” he said.

“Some were hanging out in Afghanistan because it was a cheap place to live or study, some young idealistic men might have gone to training camps to get involved in fighting against the Northern Alliance but, not to be too flippant, it was a bunch of boy scouts with AK47s. A combination of drifters and footsoldiers. The Americans were so busy cranking up the significance of what they were doing and hanging on to people they should have let go, it became a colossal waste of resources.”

On 14 February, 43-year-old Aamer will have spent 10 years in Guantánamo, without charge or trial, and two years after he was cleared for release by the US authorities. The day will be the 10th birthday of the youngest of his four children, Faris, who has never met his father. The family, who live in Battersea, south London, have had a difficult time coping. Aamer’s wife, Zin, suffers from depression and the children have been badly bullied because of who their dad is. Faris is struggling at school.

In a recent letter to the outside world from Aamer and six other prisoners, he wrote: “After these years of hardship that we have spent here, we want you to consider our cases as soon as possible and give us the right to a just and a public trial or set us free without restriction.”

Aamer, who worked for an Islamic relief organisation in Bosnia and Afghanistan, claims he was told by MI5 officers he could either spy on jihadists in the UK or stay in American custody. The US has accused Aamer of being Osama bin Laden’s personal interpreter, although he denies ever meeting him. In 2007 he was cleared for release.

His continuing detention is causing great concern among human rights campaigners, MPs and the British government, which has petitioned the US for his immediate release. His lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, who visited Aamer in November, has expressed deep concern about his declining health, made worse by several hunger strikes.

As part of the detainees’ financial agreement with the justice secretary, Ken Clarke, a sum is believed to have been set aside for Aamer, Britain’s last link to the discredited detention camp.

“We are all worried about Shaker,” said Asif Iqbal, 40, one of the “Tipton Three” who were among the first wave of British men to be released from Guantánamo in 2004 after two years in custody. All three were accused of visiting training camps for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and handling weapons. “We know what it is like to be there and there is only so long a man can survive. He was a figure of support to everyone in Guantánamo, he really looked out for people and fought for prisoners’ rights. That is probably why they won’t let him go now.”

Campaign groups such as Reprieve and Cageprisoners and charities such as the Helen Bamber Foundation are working to provide support for the traumatised men who return from Guantánamo.

“Coming back to Britain, you are branded, you live like a guilty man. You assume they are listening to every call, every conversation,” said Feroz Ali Abbasi, 31, from Croydon, who was imprisoned in Guantánamo in 2002 after being picked up in Afghanistan.

The US authorities say he fought alongside al-Qaida and the Taliban and attended training camps. His lawyers argue that Abbasi is one of a small group of idealistic young Muslim men who found themselves caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was released in 2005.

“When 7/7 happened I waited for them to kick down my door. I want to go to university and I’ve to think really carefully about what course I take. Can it be misconstrued, can it be linked to terrorism? When the authorities have behaved without logic, with such stupidness, you still believe they are after us, just waiting for an opportune moment,” he said.

“It’s hard when Britain didn’t look after you. I don’t think we [ex-detainees] are wanted in this country, we’re made not to feel wanted. But they took liberties in Guantánamo Bay, and if we do not speak out they will take liberties with someone else, Muslim or not.”

The experiences of being inside the camps have not left any of the detainees. Several who came to the Observer photoshoot still find it difficult to talk about what happened, including Tarek Dergoul, 34, from east London, who lost an arm and his toes in an US airstrike in Afghanistan where he said he was on a business trip to buy property. He has talked about his torture before, but today says he cannot and politely refused to be photographed. “Sometimes you can talk and sometimes it sticks in your throat,” he said.

Abbasi recognised how Dergoul is feeling: “For me, speaking English broke a lot of barriers, because if you speak to the guards you become a person. I had two years in isolation, so you had to talk to soldiers.

“I spent a lot of time analysing them and realised that for Americans they have to believe they are right. You have to be a terrorist. They assume you are both Taliban and al-Qaida, there is no doubt in their minds, and in their view they have a right to treat you badly, seeking their retribution.

“I remember looking through my cage at another man who had a wife and child and thought how lucky I was to be a single man so I could concentrate on myself surviving. You are on edge 24/7, your senses are tuned to what they will do to you next, a footstep, a bolt opening, the creak of a door. Once I’d left, my mind did strange things. I’d be walking down the street and see buildings on fire, cars on fire. I had this impulse to hit out at people, even my mother. It was very troubling. Over time I’m becoming myself, but I did forget who I was. You are in one consciousness all the time, one survival mode.”

The bonds created between the survivors are strong and all the men are here in order to support the campaign for the release of Shaker Aamer.

“The pain of Guantánamo is made much worse by the pain of people left there,” said Bisher al-Rawi, 44, an Iraqi living in Derby, who was released in 2007 after almost five years. “When Guantánamo started I was living in London and watching all about it on TV. Back then I truly believed that the people in Guantánamo were terrorists. It’s funny, but I did.”

Bisher said he was on a business trip to Gambia with his business partner, Jamil el-Banna, when he was arrested by the Gambian National Intelligence Agency in November 2002. They were later handed on to US authorities, who sent them to Bagram airbase and from there to Guantánamo Bay. US files show they were believed to have been in possession of bomb-making devices.

“It is like being thrown into a very dark grave. The level of fear it is possible to experience and survive is something terrible. I tried very hard to preserve my body and my mind and thought I had done a good job until I was released. The emotions involved are still very personal and overwhelming, there is a real deep pain. I try not to remember the faces of the people who hurt me, so I can concentrate on those who are left behind.”

Al-Rawi said he too was glad he did not have a family. “I’d been really hoping to get married and it didn’t work out; that was something I was very thankful for when I was in Guantánamo. The families suffered so much, I was glad that was not my family.”

The “no smoke without fire” approach has dogged all the survivors back in the UK. Omar Deghayes had to have CCTV fitted at his home by police because of months of racist attacks by local youths.

For Deghayes, 42, six years’ imprisonment in Guantánamo also destroyed his marriage. His wife in East Sussex wrote to him in prison, but her letters were never delivered and neither were his to her. Both believed they had been abandoned and she returned to her family in Afghanistan. It was, he has said, one of the cruellest things that happened to him during his detention.

The other was the loss of sight in one eye after a guard allegedly tried to gouge out his eyeballs with his fingers. Deghayes, a law graduate, fled Libya for the UK as a child after his father was executed by the Gaddafi regime. He had been living in Pakistan with his wife and child when he was picked up by the Americans.

Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Deghayes now lives in Brighton and works with human rights group Reprieve and other survivors of Guantánamo on the ongoing court cases against the UK government’s alleged complicity in human rights abuses at Guantánamo and other detention centres around the world.

An inquiry into the involvement of British intelligence services in torture and rendition has opened but is not due to begin calling witnesses until all those cases have concluded. All the British detainees, and charities including Amnesty International, have announced they will boycott the Detainee Inquiry, headed by Sir Peter Gibson, because of concerns that it will not be open and transparent.

“We may never get a public inquiry and examination of what happened at Guantánamo,” said Worthington. “But we do know it has left a toxic legacy. Guantánamo was an aberration.”

Abbasi’s verdict was simple and damning: “Guantánamo was an excuse to take away the rights of ordinary people. It must not happen again.”

Last British resident held in Guantánamo Bay faces another year’s captivity
By Tracy McVeigh, The Observer, January 1, 2012

The last British resident being held in Guantánamo Bay faces at least another year in detention because of wrangling in a US presidential election year. Senior White House sources have said the Obama administration will not risk releasing Shaker Aamer before November. “We’ve taken enough hits from the right; we can’t risk any more,” one said. Another said: “There will be no rocking of boats from now on in.”

As the 10th anniversary of the opening of the detention camp in Cuba approaches, it is believed that the foreign secretary, William Hague, has called an urgent meeting early in the new year to discuss what more the British government can do to bring Aamer home.

He will complete his 10th year in Guantánamo on 14 February, although he has never been charged or faced trial. His British wife, Zin, last saw her husband when she was pregnant with their fourth child. Aamer has never met his son, Faris.

Campaigners are stepping up efforts to draw attention to Aamer’s case, after his British lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, found the 43-year-old former charity worker in poor health during a visit to the prison in November.

“I do not think it is stretching matters to say he is dying in Guantánamo Bay,” said Stafford-Smith, director of the human rights charity Reprieve. Although Aamer was cleared for release by the US authorities in 2007 there have been no further moves to return him to the UK. He was first picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 where he said he worked for an Islamic charity. But the US suspected him of both Taliban and al-Qaida connections, accusing him of being a translator for Osama bin Laden.

New US legislation has also proved to be a stumbling block to his release with the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, now responsible for certifying that Britain is a safe place for him to return to, and that he will commit no crimes there — something Panetta has been unwilling to do.

Stafford-Smith said: “Britain has the best record of any country with former Guantánamo prisoners, with nobody released committing any offence, and Shaker Aamer has never committed a crime of any kind. Why does Britain pretend it has a special relationship if a British resident is still in this shameful position?” He said Aamer had suffered “unfathomable abuse”.

Jane Ellison, Tory MP for Battersea, where Aamer’s wife and children live, is writing to Barack Obama to urge his immediate release. “People forget that behind this is a family in deep distress and a man in poor health,” she said. This is a human tragedy as much as a political embarrassment. The family of Shaker Aamer are hurting and they need him home.”

She has tabled several questions in the Commons drawing attention to Aamer’s plight and believes the UK Government is committed to bringing him home but is up against a lack of political will in the US.

“After 10 years, the bottom line should be that if they aren’t going to charge him, they should release him. That is the way we have conducted ourselves in Britain since the Magna Carta.”

But Aamer’s own campaigning spirit may be working against him. “The irony is that Shaker may be the victim of what he has done inside Guantanámo rather than anything he might be suspected of doing previous to his captivity. He has been a thorn in the side of the prison authorities, organising hunger strikes and fighting for prisoners’ rights. By all accounts he is a charismatic and eloquent man,” said investigative journalist and author Andy Worthington.

*****

The following is also from the double-page feature in the Observer:

The men America freed

Asif Iqbal, 40, of Tipton, West Midlands

Released in March 2004 after two years. On arrival at Guantánamo, a soldier told him: “You killed my family in the towers and now it’s time to get you back.”

Jamil el-Banna, 59, a Palestinian from Jordan

Has UK refugee status. He has five children, the last one born while he was in captivity. Released in 2007.

Jamal al-Harith, 45, from Manchester

A backpacker arrested by the Taliban who ended up in US detention. The web designer was freed in 2004 after two years.

Feroz Ali Abbasi, 31, from Croydon, south London

UK citizen born in Uganda. In 2002 the British Court of Appeal found his detention “legally objectionable”. Freed in 2005.

Bisher al-Rawi, 44, Iraqi-born

British resident living in Derby with wife and two young children. Picked up in Gambia in 2002 and freed in 2007.

Shafiq Rasul, 44, of Tipton, West Midlands

Released March 2004. US supreme court case Rasul vs Bush established detainees could challenge whether their detention is constitutional.

Rhuhel Ahmed [Ruhal Ahmed], 40, of Tipton, West Midlands

Held without trial or charge for more than two years. One of the Tipton Three who released a report detailing abuse and torture.

Martin Mubanga, 38, from Wembley, north London

Victim of extraordinary rendition, held for 33 months accused of al-Qaida links after his passport was found in a Pakistan base.

Moazzam Begg, 43, from Birmingham

After three years in US custody, he is now director of the London-based prisoners’ rights charity Cageprisoners Ltd and an outspoken critic of anti-terror legislation.

Tarek Dergoul, 34, from London

Claims to have gone to Afghanistan to buy up properties from fleeing refugees. Lost an arm and toes in an allied bombing raid. Although he attended the photoshoot to support his fellow detainees, he is deeply shy and politely refused to be photographed.

Omar Deghayes, 42, from Brighton

The Libyan-born British citizen was blinded, beaten and sexually assaulted between 2002 and 2007, despite having never been charged with an offence.

Richard Dean Belmar, 32, from London

Returned to the UK in 2005 after three years imprisonment, first in Pakistan, then Bagram and finally Guantánamo. Converted from Catholicism to Islam and had enrolled in a religious school in Afghanistan.

Binyam Mohamed, 33

An Ethiopian national who moved to the UK in 1994, he spent seven years in custody, four at Guantánamo. He was released in 2009. He is taking the government to court over British alleged complicity in his torture.

Sameur Abdenour [Abdulnour Sameur], 38, from London

Fled persecution from the military dictatorship in his native Algeria and was granted asylum in this country in 2000. He was detained in Guantánamo from 2002 to 2007.

… and one they still hold

Shaker Aamer, 43, Saudi-born

Next month Aamer will mark the 10th anniversary of his detention in Guantánamo. He worked as a legal translator in the UK and married a British woman in 1994. He claims to have been in Afghanistan working for a Saudi charity when he was picked up in 2002 and handed over to the Americans. He is thought to have angered the prison authorities by going on hunger-strike protests. He was cleared for release by the US in 2007 but remains in isolation.

Note: For further information, and to sign up to a new movement to close Guantánamo, please visit the new website, “Close Guantánamo,” which you can join here, and also please sign a new White House petition on the “We the People” website calling for the closure of Guantánamo. 25,000 signatures are needed by February 6.

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, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see 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.

According to the latest reports, they are on board a chartered aircraft along with a doctor and officers from the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit, as well as uniformed officers, whose presence was requested by the Foreign Office. According to the Guardian, a police spokesman was “not prepared to discuss” whether the men would be held on arrival like the nine British nationals released in 2004 and 2005, and British resident Bisher al-Rawi, who was released in March this year.

Omar Deghayes’ sister, Amani, said that she was “extremely relieved” to hear the news of her brother’s release and added that he had been on the receiving end of “brutal and illegal treatment,” as reported here. She also said, “Our family has always said that Omar was totally innocent – one of the hundreds of people taken to Guantánamo by the Americans for no good reason.” Speaking to the BBC, she said that his family would be concentrating on helping him to put his ordeal behind him. “I’m extremely relieved that Omar’s ordeal is finally coming to end after over five years of suffering in Guantánamo,” she said. “We’re looking forward to spending the Eid as family together.”

Celebrations by campaigners for the three men will be tempered by the knowledge that the other three British residents have been left behind: Saudi-born Shaker Aamer, who is seeking repatriation to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, now reportedly suffering from severe mental deterioration, whose requested return to the UK was refused by the US government, and Algerian-born Ahmed Belbacha, who has been cleared for release from Guantánamo, but whose return was not requested by the British government because he was not technically an official resident at the time of his capture.

The struggle for justice for these men continues.

For more on the stories of the Britons in Guantánamo, see my newly published book 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

For articles dealing with the Spanish government’s subsequent attempts to extradite Omar Deghayes and Jamil El-Banna to Spain, see here, here, here and here.

Note:

The prisoners’ numbers (and variations on the spelling of their names) are as follows:

ISN 905: Jamil El-Banna
ISN 727: Omar Deghayes
ISN 659: Abdulnour Sameur (Abdenour, Abdennour)

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the eleven prisoners released from February to June 2009, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here).

I was at a mosque in Glasgow on Friday evening, talking about Guantánamo to a large, engaged crowd in the company of James Yee, the former Muslim Chaplain at the prison, who was wrongly imprisoned as a spy in 2003. In an attempt to demonstrate that Guantánamo was not an issue related solely to American foreign policy, I briefly outlined the stories of the six British residents still held in Guantánamo. What I said was along the following lines:

Saudi-born Shaker Aamer, 38, who has been a British resident since 1996, is married with five children, the youngest of whom was born after his capture. In 2001, he travelled with his family from his home in south London to Afghanistan, where he shared a house in Kabul with released British national Moazzam Begg and his family, and worked to establish a girls’ school. After 9/11 and the US-led invasion, he arranged for his family to flee Afghanistan, but was captured in Jalalabad and sold to the Northern Alliance, who in turn sold him to the Americans.

In Guantánamo, his charisma, his mastery of English and his relentless campaigning on behalf of his fellow detainees led the US authorities to conclude, erroneously, that he was “The Professor,” a major player in al-Qaeda. Since leading a short-lived “Prisoners’ Council” in August 2005, which was encouraged and then suppressed by the authorities, he has been held in solitary confinement, and has been on a hunger strike for the last year, a desperate course of action, which has provoked a savage response from the prison’s commanders.

Like all the long-term hunger strikers (of whom there are several dozen), twice a day Shaker is strapped into a restraint chair –- a process that involves 18 separate straps –- and force-fed liquid food through a thick tube inserted into his stomach through his nose. This is an agonizing process, made worse by the authorities’ insistence –- as an attempt to “break” the strikers –- that the tube is removed after each feeding, and not kept in place as it was in the early days of the hunger strikes.

Omar Deghayes, 37, was born in Libya, and arrived in the UK with his family as a teenager in 1986, after his father, a prominent lawyer and trade union activist, had been tortured and murdered by Colonel Gaddafi’s secret police. A law student at Wolverhampton University, he took a break from his studies in 2000 to travel to Afghanistan, where he married an Afghan woman and had a child, but was captured after crossing into Pakistan after the US-led invasion began.

Blinded in one eye during an assault by armed guards in Guantánamo, he has also been threatened by Libyan intelligence agents, who were flown to Guantánamo on a CIA-chartered plane. The only justification for his continued imprisonment is a claim that he was identified on a videotape as a Chechen militant, even though his lawyers in the UK, with the help of journalists from the BBC’s Newsnight, proved in 2005 that it was a case of mistaken identity.

Jamil El-Banna, 45, who was born in Jordan, arrived in the UK in 1994, and was granted asylum in 2000. Like Shaker Aamer, he is married with five children, and his youngest child was born after his capture. With Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident from Iraq, El-Banna was seized in November 2002 by US agents in the Gambia, where the two men had travelled to establish a mobile peanut-processing plant with al-Rawi’s brother Wahab.

Shockingly, they were captured after the British intelligence services provided false information to their American counterparts, claiming that both men were involved in terrorism (which they were not), neglecting to mention that al-Rawi had been working for MI5 as an informer, keeping tabs on the radical cleric Abu Qatada, and ignoring the fact that both men had been informed, before their departure, that they were not under suspicion.

“Rendered” to Afghanistan, El-Banna and al-Rawi were first held in the “Dark Prison,” a secret, CIA-run prison near Kabul, whose medieval savagery was supplemented by the addition of non-stop amplified music and noise, and were transferred to Guantánamo in March 2003.

Under pressure from the men’s lawyers, who discovered the part played by the British intelligence services in their kidnapping and “extraordinary rendition,” the government broke with its long-standing declaration that it would not act on behalf of the British residents in Guantánamo, and accepted the return of Bisher al-Rawi in March 2007, although it refused, initially, to press for the return of El-Banna, even though a military review board had cleared him for release.

Despite the fact that El-Banna has a British wife and five British children, and that the intelligence services were complicit in his capture, the government initially hoped to test its newly unveiled attempts to shred international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture by returning El-Banna to Jordan (which he had fled because of religious persecution), on the basis of a “memorandum of understanding” –- allegedly guaranteeing that any returned nationals would be treated humanely –- which lawyers and human rights activists have condemned as worthless.

Binyam Mohamed (known to the Pentagon as Binyam Mohammed al-Habashi), 29, a refugee from Ethiopia who arrived in the UK with his father in 1995, was a janitor at a mosque in west London. Captured in Pakistan in April 2002, he was then handed over to the US authorities, who, in what appears to be one of the most devastatingly inept failures of intelligence in the whole of the “War on Terror,” decided –- apparently based on a “confession” extracted under torture by Abu Zubaydah, a “high-value” al-Qaeda suspect, who had recently been captured –- that he was a major al-Qaeda terrorist, who was planning to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a US city.

In a successful attempt to force a confession out of him, Mohamed was “rendered” to Morocco, whose notoriously brutal interrogators, working on behalf of the Americans, tortured him for 18 months, repeatedly cutting his penis with razor blades, and he was then transferred to the “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan. Scheduled to face a Military Commission (a show trial in which secret evidence is withheld from the accused), his case was dropped in June 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled that the Commissions were illegal, and has not been reinstated.

Abdulnour Sameur, 34, an Algerian refugee, was granted asylum in the UK in April 2000, after deserting from the Algerian army, because, he said, he was “made to go in the streets and shoot innocent people.” He had been living in the London suburb of South Harrow, but travelled to Afghanistan after a crisis of faith, when someone he met at a mosque suggested that he would find a purer life in Afghanistan, and that, if he liked it, “he would help me figure out how to build a house there.”

Accused of having advance knowledge of 9/11, he explained in Guantánamo that he made this up in the US prison in Kandahar airbase, when the interrogators threatened to withhold medical treatment. “I told them this in Kandahar during the interrogations because the interrogators were dogs,” he said. “I had an injury in my leg. I had metal sticking out of my leg and they would not clean the wound; they would not give me treatment … I just told them anything, whatever they wanted to hear because I wanted them to treat my leg. I saw other people whose legs had to be cut off. I did not want my leg to be cut off … If you were in my place, if you were in Kandahar you would have done the same thing. Just like a small child.”

Ahmed Belbacha, 37, is a former professional footballer in Algeria. After retiring from the game, he worked as an accountant for a government-owned oil company, Sonatrach, but was called up for military service and threatened by members of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the Islamist militants opposed to the government. Fearing for his safety, he fled to the UK in 1999, and settled in the seaside town of Bournemouth, where he found a job as a waiter in a hotel, and where, after being vetted by MI5, he was working during the Labour Party conference in 1999. According to a Guardian article in 2006, “His friends recall[ed] his pride at receiving a £30 tip and a personal letter of thanks from John Prescott,” after he had helped the Deputy Prime Minister during the conference.

In autumn 2001, Belbacha took a month’s vacation to visit Pakistan and an Afghan refugee camp, but was captured near Peshawar, after crossing back into Pakistan, by villagers who sold him to the Pakistani authorities. Once he was in American custody, he was transported to the prison in Kandahar airbase, where he was “repeatedly beaten,” and was then taken to Guantánamo, where he was falsely accused of attending a training camp in Jalalabad and meeting Osama bin Laden on two occasions, even though, at the time of his vacation, he was waiting to hear from the British government if his application for asylum had been successful. With a grim irony, his application was turned down, but he was granted exceptional leave to remain in the UK in June 2003, when he had already been in Guantánamo for over a year.

What I didn’t realize, while I was explaining these men’s stories and encouraging the audience to take action on their behalf, was that the BBC was about to break the news that four of these men were soon to be released. As the BBC described it, Jamil El-Banna, Omar Deghayes and Abdulnour Samuer were to return to the UK, while Shaker Aamer would return to his native Saudi Arabia.

While this seems to be extraordinarily good news for those who have campaigned for the men’s release for nearly six years – and also for Gordon Brown’s government, which broke with its predecessor’s refusal to act on behalf of the residents by formally requesting the return of five of the men in August –- it’s also apparent that an announcement is not the same as the realization of these men’s freedom. While various news sources began speculating immediately on the date of their return (they “could be back by Christmas,” chirped the Daily Mirror), the BBC scrupulously maintained that the British government had “not confirmed” the move and that a release date was “unknown.”

This was indeed the case. When the Foreign Office finally issued a statement, a spokesman cautiously declared, “We have held detailed discussions with the Americans. We considered the circumstances of each case with the US and we are in contact with the families and the legal representatives of the five. While the discussions are ongoing we are not going to make further comment.” Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, the legal charity that represents dozens of Guantánamo detainees, including the British residents, explicitly told the BBC, “There’s no doubt that the agreement has been struck, that they will return home. The question is, when? There’s no reason why they couldn’t come home tomorrow, but the US are insisting on a lot of red tape.”

Even if the men are home by Christmas, however, Shaker Aamer’s repatriation to Saudi Arabia remains troubling. A source close to his family explained to me that Shaker has “expressed for some time that he would like to be returned to Saudi Arabia,” pointing out that, if he were to return to the UK, it is feared that he “would face a travel ban, if not some form of control order, which would prevent him from being reunited with the rest of his family in Saudi Arabia, or moving back at some point in future should he wish to do so.” Given that the Saudi government has shown a commitment to helping former detainees to reintegrate into Saudi society after a period of “reeducation,” even going so far as to provide financial assistance as the men begin to rebuild their lives, it’s understandable that Mr. Aamer has chosen this option, although, as my source also explained, it remains unclear “how easy it would be for his wife and children to settle there or visit him in this period” –- a potentially appalling trade-off for someone who, as Moazzam Begg has pointed out, was absolutely devoted to his family.

More troubling still, of course, is the ongoing detention of the two residents who are not scheduled to be released: Binyam Mohamed, the only one of the five whose return was requested in August, and Ahmed Belbacha, whose return was not requested at all.

As the Independent explained, “the reasons for Mr. al-Habashi’s continued detention remain unclear,” but “the US is believed to be determined that he should face one of Guantánamo’s military commissions … which could jail him for life.” Describing his predicament, Clive Stafford Smith reiterated that there was “no evidence” against his client. “He was taken to Morocco and had a razorblade taken to his penis,” he explained. “Naturally, as any human being would do, he made statements saying whatever they wanted to hear. They [the US authorities] believed that stuff.” He added, “I’ve seen no evidence in Binyam’s case that isn’t evidence that was tortured out of him. The bottom line is that we’re happy for him to face a fair trial, if that’s what everyone wants to do. But the problem we do have is that trying him using torture evidence, using secret evidence, is giving him an unfair trial. The British Government has made it perfectly clear, the military commissions are unfair.”

In the case of Ahmed Belbacha, who, like Jamil El-Banna, has officially been cleared for release from Guantánamo, the British government has refused to act on his behalf, because, technically, he was not actually a British resident at the time of his capture. In August, I wrote to the Foreign Office to complain, explaining that “the refusal to act on Mr. Belbacha’s behalf would, I believe, portray the new administration, of which you are a key part, in a very unfavourable light, and would suggest that the government is only prepared to act –- as in Mr. al-Rawi’s case –- when faced with the possibility of being shamed by revelations that the detainee in question was actually working for the British intelligence services.”

In September, I received a reply from Nicolas Jankowski, of the Counter Terrorism Policy Department, who explained that the decision to request the return of the British residents was “limited to those who were lawfully resident in the UK prior to their detention. We believe we have identified all of those to whom this relates who are currently detained at Guantánamo Bay. Mr Ahmed Belbacha does not fall into this category.”

As I wrote at the time, I was disappointed by the “meanness of spirit expressed on behalf of the Foreign Office by Mr. Jankowski,” and added that, “because, technically, Mr. Belbacha was not a British resident at the time of his capture, this innocent man, who has been through five and a half years of extraordinarily bleak treatment at the hands of his US captors, will not be rescued from the prospect of further ill-treatment in the country of his birth because the government has turned its back on the decision it made to welcome him to stay in Britain while he was suffering in Guantánamo. This rather makes a mockery of the supposedly principled stance made by Gordon Brown’s new administration when it requested the return of the other five men, and does little to persuade me that the government is as concerned with justice as it is with PR.”

My opinion has not changed. While I await the release of four of the residents, and urge anyone concerned with the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo not to forget that Binyam Mohamed remains mired in a dark and disturbing netherworld of spectral allegations obtained through torture, in which the British intelligence services were at least partly complicit, I also maintain that the government’s intransigence in Mr. Belbacha’s case shows, only too clearly, the hard, unyielding edge of the government’s policy towards refugees. It’s a situation faced every day by families and individuals in the UK, who are threatened with being returned to countries where they face the risk of torture or worse, and is highlighted in Mr. Belbacha’s case by the fact that he would rather remain in Guantánamo –- in one of the most lawlessly isolated prison environments in the western world –- than return to the country of his birth.

Notes

Readers who are concerned about Binyam Mohamed’s continued imprisonment, and the refusal of the British government to act on behalf of Ahmed Belbacha, are encouraged to make their feelings clear by writing to the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who can be reached at: milibandd@parliament.uk

A template for a letter about Mr. Belbacha can be found on the website of the National Guantánamo Coalition.

The profiles in this article are drawn partly from an article I wrote when the British government first requested the return of the residents in August, which includes additional information about the government’s attempts to return foreign nationals –- held without charge or trial in the UK –- to countries where they face the risk of torture. This article, plus others relating to Ahmed Belbacha and Omar Deghayes can be found here, and another article looking in depth at the story of Jose Padilla, Binyam Mohamed’s alleged co-conspirator in the “dirty bomb” plot, can be found here.

For further information, see my newly published book 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

As published on Indymedia and CounterPunch.

Declaring that it had “reviewed its approach to the group in the light of its aim to see the closure of the center and recent steps taken by the US government to reduce the numbers of detainees held there,” the Foreign Office announced, in a statement, “The Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary have reviewed the Government’s approach to this group of individuals in light of these ongoing developments, our long-held policy aim of securing the closure of Guantánamo Bay, and the need to maintain national security. They have decided to request the release and return of the five detainees who have links to the UK as former residents, having been granted refugee status, indefinite leave or exceptional leave to remain prior to their detention.”

Although the Foreign Office “cautioned that the release and return of the men may take some time,” this is extraordinary news, and reflects a genuine break with the militant refusal of Tony Blair’s administration to fulfil its obligations to act on behalf of the British residents in Guantánamo. As Jamil El-Banna’s solicitor, Irene Nembhard, noted in June, the rights of refugees recognized by the UK are not negotiable, and all have “a legal entitlement to return to the UK.”

The struggle for the rights of the British residents in Guantánamo has a long and turbulent history. Having secured the return of nine British nationals in 2004 and 2005, the Blair government then pointedly refused to act on behalf of the British residents, arguing that it had no obligation to do so. This was in spite of evidence –- which emerged through grass-roots campaigns and, eventually, through declassified reports from lawyers representing the detainees –- that they were innocent men, who had suffered egregious human rights abuses in American custody, and who had either been sold to the Americans for bounty payments, or, more shockingly, had been betrayed to the Americans on the basis of patently false intelligence material supplied by the British intelligence services.

Briefly, the men’s stories are as follows:

Shaker Aamer

38-year old Shaker Aamer, born in Saudi Arabia, had been a British resident since 1996, and is married with five children, the youngest of whom was born after his capture. In 2001, he traveled with his family from his home in south London to Afghanistan, where he shared a house in Kabul with released British national Moazzam Begg and his family, and worked to establish a girls’ school. After 9/11 and the US-led invasion, he arranged for his family to flee Afghanistan, but was captured in Jalalabad and sold to the Northern Alliance, who in turn sold him to the Americans. Held in the notorious, CIA-run “Dark Prison” near Kabul, he was eventually transferred to Guantánamo, where his charisma, his mastery of English and his relentless campaigning on behalf of his fellow detainees led the US authorities to conclude, erroneously, that he was a major player in al-Qaeda. Since leading a short-lived “Prisoners’ Council” in the summer of 2005, which was first encouraged and then suppressed by the authorities, he has been held in solitary confinement, and has been on a hunger strike since December 2006.

Omar Deghayes

37-year old Omar Deghayes, born in Libya, arrived in the UK with his family as a teenager in 1986, after his father, a prominent trade union activist, had been tortured and murdered by Colonel Gaddafi. A law student at Wolverhampton University, he took a break from his studies in 2000 to travel to Afghanistan, where he married an Afghan woman and had a child, but was captured after crossing into Pakistan after the US-led invasion began.

Blinded in one eye during an assault by armed guards in Guantánamo, he has also been threatened by Libyan intelligence agents (who flew to Guantánamo on a CIA-chartered plane), and the justification for his continued imprisonment relies on claims that he was identified on a videotape as a Chechen militant, even though his lawyers in the UK, with the help of journalists from the BBC’s Newsnight, proved in 2005 that it was a case of mistaken identity.

Jamil El-Banna

45-year old Jamil El-Banna, born in Jordan, arrived in the UK in 1994, and was granted asylum in 2000. Like Shaker Aamer, he is married with five children, and his youngest child was born after his capture. With Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident from Iraq, El-Banna was seized in November 2002 by US agents in the Gambia, where the two men had traveled to establish a mobile peanut-processing plant with al-Rawi’s brother Wahab.

Shockingly, they were captured after the British intelligence services provided false information to their American counterparts, claiming that both men were involved in terrorism (which they were not), neglecting to mention that al-Rawi was working for MI5 as an informer, keeping tabs on the radical cleric Abu Qatada, and ignoring the fact that both men had been informed, before their departure, that they were not under suspicion. “Rendered” to Afghanistan, and held, like Shaker Aamer, in the “Dark Prison,” they were transferred to Guantánamo in March 2003.

Binyam Mohamed

29-year old Binyam Mohamed, a refugee from Ethiopia who arrived in the UK with his father in 1995, was a janitor at a mosque in west London. Captured in Pakistan in April 2002, he was then handed over to the US authorities, who, in one of the most devastatingly inept failures of intelligence in the whole of the “War on Terror,” decided that he was a major al-Qaeda terrorist, and “rendered” him first to Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months, and repeatedly had his penis cut by razor blades, and then to their own “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan. Scheduled to face a Military Commission, his case was dropped in June 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled that the Commissions were illegal, and has not been reinstated.

Abdulnour Sameur

34-year old Abdulnour Sameur, an Algerian refugee, was granted asylum in April 2000, after deserting from the Algerian army, because, he said, he was “made to go in the streets and shoot innocent people.” Accused of having advance knowledge of 9/11, he explained in Guantánamo that he made this up in the US prison in Kandahar airbase, when the interrogators threatened to withhold medical treatment.

“I told them this in Kandahar during the interrogations because the interrogators were dogs,” he said. “I had an injury in my leg. I had metal sticking out of my leg and they would not clean the wound; they would not give me treatment … I just told them anything, whatever they wanted to hear because I wanted them to treat my leg. I saw other people whose legs had to be cut off. I did not want my leg to be cut off… If you were in my place, if you were in Kandahar you would have done the same thing. Just like a small child.”

Negotiations between the US and UK governments

In tracing the history of the British government’s refusal to help its residents in Guantánamo, and the shifting patterns of its relationship with the US authorities, the first major insight occurred in October 2006, when, in an article in the Guardian, Ian Cobain and Vikram Dodd revealed that, after months of secret negotiations, the US administration had offered to return “nearly all” the British residents in the summer of 2006, but the British government had refused the offer. Cobain and Dodd pointed out that senior officials not only maintained that the residents had “no legal right to return,” but also dismissed the US authorities’ demands that the prisoners be “kept under 24-hour surveillance if set free” as “unnecessary and unworkable.”

The documents on which the Guardian article was based were witness statements from David Richmond, director general of defence and intelligence at the Foreign Office, and William Nye, director of counter-terrorism and intelligence at the Home Office. Cobain and Dodd reported that, on June 27, 2006, after a meeting between UK officials and representatives of the US State Department, the Department of Defense and the National Security Council, David Richmond wrote, “The US administration would only be willing to engage with the UK government if it sought the release and return of all the detainees who had formally resided in the UK (i.e. regardless of the quality of their links with the UK), rather than just a subset of the detainees falling in that category.”

William Nye added, “The US administration envisages measures such that the returnees cannot legally leave the UK, engage with known extremists or engage in support, promote, plan or advocate extremist or violent activity, and further have the effect of ensuring that the British authorities would be certain to know immediately of any attempt to engage in any such activity.”

Nye also declared, “I am not satisfied it would be proportionate to impose … the kind of obligations which might be necessary to satisfy the US administration.” He explained that the measures demanded by the Americans would have to be enforced by MI5 and would divert vital resources away from countering more dangerous terrorist suspects. “The use of such resources … could not be justified and would damage the protection of the UK’s national security,” he wrote, adding, crucially, that the Guantánamo prisoners “do not pose a sufficient threat to justify the devotion of the high level of resources” the US would require.

Refusing the American offer, the British officials explained that they were only interested in the return of one resident, Bisher al-Rawi. Clinging to their story that he was “now known to have helped MI5 keep watch on Abu Qatada” –- and refusing to acknowledge, as documents released by his lawyers in March 2006 revealed, that both he and Jamil El-Banna had actually been betrayed to the Americans by British intelligence –- they remained true to their word, and al-Rawi returned safely to the UK on 30 March 2007, to be reunited with his family.

In the meantime, however, the status of three of the British residents had changed since the summer of 2006, when Washington’s “all-or-nothing” offer was turned down. In February, lawyers for Ahmed Errachidi, a Moroccan who had been working as a chef in London for 16 years, and Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian ex-footballer who had been working at a hotel in the seaside resort of Bournemouth, were informed that they had been cleared for release from Guantánamo, “after diplomatic arrangements for their departure had been made,” because a review board had determined that they no longer represented a threat to the US or its allies and no longer had any “intelligence value.” Callously, however, the British government refused to accept the men back, maintaining that, “Because they are not British citizens, we’re not providing any consular or diplomatic assistance.” On May 25, lawyers for Jamil El-Banna were informed that he too had been cleared for release. As with Errachidi and Belbacha, however, the British government refused to take him back.

Britain’s Guantánamo: Belmarsh and control orders

It was at this point that the plight of the British residents in Guantánamo coincided with the stories of those held in Britain’s own “mini-Guantánamo”: the 17 foreign prisoners –- some arrested as early as November 2001 –- who were held without charge or trial in a maximum security prison in Belmarsh, in south London, until December 2004, when the Law Lords ruled that their imprisonment was in breach of human rights law. While this immediately prompted a constitutional crisis, and right-wing commentators ranted about the need to ditch European human rights legislation, more astute observers revealed how chaotic and arbitrary the whole process had been. They noted that six of the 17 –- who included Abu Qatada and Abu Rideh, a Palestinian refugee, but who were otherwise anonymous and dehumanized, known only by initials, such as Detainee “A” –- had already been released.

In April 2004, one of these men, a Libyan known only as “D,” who was allowed to stay with his wife in Britain after judges ruled that there was no evidence that he was a terrorist, explained to the Guardian that most of the Belmarsh prisoners had become deranged and suicidal. He was speaking on the same day that another prisoner, a disabled Algerian known as “G,” was returned to his home, under strict bail conditions, because he was “too mentally ill to stay in prison.” Two others took advantage of a provision that allowed them to leave Britain. One went to Morocco, and the other to France, although the Home Office refused to explain why, if they were such a threat, neither was arrested after leaving the UK.

In response to the Law Lords’ ruling, the government refused to free the eleven men who remained in Belmarsh at the start of 2005, instead concocting a series of draconian control orders, which involved releasing them from Belmarsh but keeping them under what was essentially house arrest, with conditions that included being electronically tagged at all times, being forced to stay at home from 7 pm to 7 am, and having their passports taken away and their phone lines cut. Those who were forced to live under the orders soon complained that they were routinely woken in the middle of the night by unannounced visits from police and the security services, that they had inadequate access to mental healthcare, and that the lives of their families were ruined.

Although the control orders were widely condemned, they have, in the last two years, been extended to another 21 prisoners, including at least seven British citizens, even though six were nullified in the High Court in June 2006, when a judge ruled that they were incompatible with laws established by the European Court of Human Rights, and even though they have also proved almost impossible to enforce; at least seven suspects have absconded since August 2006, providing acres of scare-mongering fodder for the tabloid newspapers.

What’s most disturbing about the control orders, however, is not that they were designed to imprison men who had never been charged in coffin-like isolation in their own homes, but that they actually had a darker purpose, which dove-tailed horrendously with the plight of dozens of prisoners in Guantánamo –- including the British residents –- and was clearly conceived in conjunction with the US administration.

Return to torture: attempts by the US and UK governments to sidestep international treaties

This darker purpose, whereby the control orders were designed to override international treaties preventing the return of prisoners to countries where they face torture or even death –- laws that the British government, like that of the US, regards as failing to take into account the unprecedented terrors of the post-9/11 world –- was implemented by the British government in two ways. The first was to torment some control order suspects to such an extent that they would volunteer to return to their countries of origin, even though they feared appalling treatment on their return, but the second was even more direct.

In August 2005, the government rearrested Abu Qatada and eight other control order suspects (mostly Algerians), announcing that they were to be repatriated to their home countries. The figleaf for this latest abrogation from international law was a series of “memoranda of understanding,” signed with countries including Jordan and Libya, which apparently guaranteed that, “If arrested, detained or imprisoned following his return, a returned person will be afforded adequate accommodation, nourishment and medical treatment, and will be treated in a humane and proper manner, in accordance with internationally accepted standards.” What the memoranda did not make clear, however, was whether these “standards” would be those of the pre-9/11 world, or those that the Americans and the British had debased in the years since, in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Belmarsh. In any case, as human rights lawyers immediately contended, agreements with dictators were not worth the paper on which they were printed.

Where this new policy coincided with the wishes of the Americans was in Guantánamo. Since 2004, when the US authorities had first cleared some prisoners for release, but had concluded that they could not be sent back to their countries of origin because of fears that they would be tortured or killed, they had struggled to find a solution to this problem of their own making. At first this was a relatively principled process. Although the Americans refused to accept any of the cleared (i.e. innocent) prisoners as their own responsibility, allowing them to settle in the US, and all their major allies also refused to accept them, one country –- Albania –- was bribed sufficiently to accept five Chinese Uyghurs (persecuted Muslims from the Xinjiang province) in May 2006, and three other innocent but problematical men –- an Algerian doctor, an Egyptian cleric and an ethnic Uzbek from the former Soviet Union –- followed in November.

Unfortunately for the Americans, however, they discovered that they were holding dozens more innocent men in Guantánamo who had legitimate fears about being returned to their countries of birth, and, whether through a reticence on the part of Albania, or a desire –- as in the UK –- to smash international safeguards preventing the return of prisoners to such allies in the “War on Terror” as Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi (a formerly implacable enemy who was rehabilitated in 2004), Tunisia’s dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and the regimes in Algeria and Jordan –- all of whom have notorious secret services and torture prisons –- they decided that they, like the British, would try to break this deadlock through phony “memoranda of understanding.”

In Guantánamo, these decisions impacted directly on Ahmed Errachidi, Ahmed Belbacha and Jamil El-Banna. With the British government refusing to accept them back, the Americans decided to return them to their countries of birth instead. A month after Bisher al-Rawi returned to the UK, Ahmed Errachidi was stealthily returned to Morocco, where he was arrested on terrorism charges, which were only dropped after representations by Moroccan lawyers acting on information provided by his lawyers in the UK.

Belbacha and El-Banna, however, remained in Guantánamo, with El-Banna fearing that he would be returned to Jordan, which he had fled 13 years before because of religious persecution, and Belbacha fearing that he would be returned to Algeria, which he had fled to avoid reprisals from Islamist militants, while he was working for a government-run oil company, and where, according to his lawyers, the Algerian intelligence services stated that they could not ensure that he would be safe from their own personnel.

Sarah Teather, the feisty Liberal Democrat MP who is El-Banna’s representative in parliament, and who has campaigned tirelessly for his release, delivered a damning verdict on the government’s position, saying, “Jamil’s wife, Sabah, is very happy that he has been cleared for release, but at the same time exceedingly worried that he will be sent back to Jordan … This country gave Jamil refugee status because we accepted that he had been tortured in Jordan and that his life would be in danger were he to be returned there. What kind of process of moral decrepitude has gripped this Government that it now sees fit to risk his life by sending him to Jordan, rather than returning him to his five British children?”

Sarah Teather’s fears were well-grounded. In June, lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York –- and Edward Markey, a member of the House of Representatives –- sought to prevent the US authorities from returning a cleared Libyan prisoner in Guantánamo, Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, to his home country, because he was afraid that he would be imprisoned “for no reason” (he is still in Guantánamo at the time of writing), and his case is clearly related to attempts by the British government to do the same with two Libyans who were held without charge or trial in the UK.

In the case of these men, a glimmer of hope was provided on April 27, when the members of the UK’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) delivered a stern rebuke to the callous new policies of the US and UK governments, revealing their contempt for the supposed validity of the “memorandum of understanding” with Libya by ruling that the two men could not be returned to their home country because they were at risk of torture. And just last week, in a move that may have impacted directly on the new administration’s decision to act on behalf of the remaining British residents, appeal court judges in London delivered another blow to the government, ruling that three Algerians could not be returned to their home country because they too were at risk of torture.

Elsewhere, however, fears that the “memoranda of understanding” were irredeemably flawed, and that prisoners would face horrendous ill-treatment on their return to their home countries, were brutally confirmed in the case of Abdullah bin Omar, a Tunisian prisoner who, like Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, was cleared for release from Guantánamo but was unwilling to return home. Bin Omar, who had been living in Pakistan for 13 years, was forcibly returned to his home country on June 17, despite fears that, because he had been sentenced in absentia to 23 years in prison for belonging to a moderate Islamist political party, he would be tortured on his return.

What has come to light since has confirmed what Zachary Katznelson, one of his lawyers, noted at the time of his transfer; that bin Omar was “a guinea pig in a potentially deadly diplomatic experiment.” Another of his lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith, recently explained that the US authorities had prevented him from meeting bin Omar before he was repatriated, to warn him of the sentence he had received in absentia, and reported that Tunisian human rights observers had revealed that, on his return, bin Omar was immediately imprisoned and tortured by the Tunisian authorities, who told him that if he did not agree to make false confessions about non-existent crimes, his wife and daughters would be raped.

The case of Abdullah bin Omar reveals, tragically, that the new arrangements negotiated by the British and the Americans are neither morally defensible (as his torture confirms) nor legally sound (as revealed by the verdicts of SIAC and the UK appeals court), and confirms that the fate of two groups of men –- those who are completely innocent of any wrong-doing, who have already been imprisoned in horrendous conditions in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, and others who have been imprisoned in the UK without ever being told the charges against them –- should not be the subject of such an unprincipled high-stakes lottery; one in which, literally, the outcome could either be life or death.

With the British government belatedly acknowledging its responsibilities to the British residents in Guantánamo, it seems that Jamil El-Banna will finally be liberated from the threat to send him to Jordan, that Omar Deghayes and Abdulnour Sameur will not have to face the prospect of being returned to Libya or Algeria, and that the long and brutal persecution of Binyam al-Habashi and Shaker Aamer is coming to an end. I congratulate the government on rediscovering its principles, but still fear for the many other cleared detainees in Guantánamo –- including Abdul Rauf al-Qassim and Ahmed Belbacha, whose lawyers are currently pursuing his case with the US Supreme Court –- and the control order suspects in the UK, who still have valid concerns about being returned to torture in their home countries.

For more on Guantánamo, “extraordinary rendition,” and the British residents, see my book 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on the Huffington Post (as “British Government’s Request for Return of Five Residents from Guantánamo Rocks Dubious Deals with Dictators”) and American Torture.

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportation and extradition, see   Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009).

For further information about the shocking treatment of Shaker Aamer, Jamil El-Banna, Omar Deghayes and Binyam Mohammed al-Habashi, see the detailed Cageprisoners article, British Residents in Guantánamo Bay. For other information about Jamil El-Banna and Ahmed Belbacha, see my recent article The Perils of Return: Repatriated to Torture. Not mentioned in these articles is Abdulnour Sameur, and to mark 2000 days of Guantánamo I shall tell something of his story.

A deserter from the Algerian army –- because, he said, he was ‘made to go in the streets and shoot innocent people’ –- Sameur, who was born in Algiers in 1973, sought asylum in the UK in 1999 and was granted leave to remain in 2000. After travelling to Afghanistan in summer 2001 –- primarily, it seems, to investigate what he had been told was a pure Islamic state –- he was captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. In Guantánamo, he responded to an allegation that he had claimed that he had prior knowledge of 9/11 by saying, “I told them this in [the US prison in] Kandahar during the interrogations because the interrogators were dogs … I had an injury in my leg. I had metal sticking out of my leg and they would not clean the wound; they would not give me treatment. So I told them whatever they wanted to hear. They just wanted anything. Any information. I just told them anything, whatever they wanted to hear because I wanted them to treat my leg. I saw other people whose legs had to be cut off (amputated as a result of injuries). I did not want my leg to be cut off … If you were in my place, if you were in Kandahar you would have done the same thing. Just like a small child.”

This is the text of the letter, and its signatories:

Dear Prime Minister

We, the undersigned, relatives of British residents detained in Guantánamo Bay detention facility, former Guantánamo prisoners, lawyers for the prisoners, and concerned individuals, call upon you to use all means at your disposal to obtain the return to this country of all British residents illegally detained at Guantánamo Bay. All have made homes in this country; some, like Omar Deghayes after fleeing possible torture and death in Libya. They have now been detained for five years or more without charge or trial, in a prison where UN officials have documented torture and abuse. We are very concerned about their physical and mental well-being.

Today Americans celebrate their Independence Day, rightly highlighting the concepts of equality, liberty and rights enshrined in their Constitution. Today, the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay sadly celebrates its 2000th day. The Guantánamo Bay prisoners are denied those cherished rights: the ‘unalienable rights’ to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, the rights to a speedy trial, humane treatment and due process contained in the US Bill of Rights. Instead, 375 people are still subjected to arbitrary and indefinite imprisonment, denied the rights that mark civilised society and the rule of law. This is having a devastating effect on the physical and mental health of the detainees. At least four detainees have died within the last 13 months. We are marking this day with the launch of an exhibition and public meeting on Guantánamo at the House of Commons and welcome you to attend.

Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell recently said he would have Guantánamo closed ‘this afternoon’ rather than tomorrow. We call for you, likewise, to add your voice to the calls for its closure.

No-one has been released from Guantánamo as a result of a legal process. The British government’s refusal to act on behalf of the British residents leaves them in a legal black hole. We ask that the British Government accept its moral responsibility for these men and negotiate for them to be reunited with their families here or in a safe place of their choosing.

We urge you to make this a priority in the first days of your premiership. To ignore such abuses will set back any ‘war on terrorism’. Please do everything you can to bring back the British residents before their health and lives are irretrievably damaged.

Yours sincerely

Moazzam Begg, former Guantánamo detainee, Cageprisoners
Ruhal Ahmed, former Guantánamo detainee
Bisher Al Rawi, former Guantánamo detainee
Airat Vakhitov, former Guantánamo detainee
Mourad Benchellali, former Guantánamo detainee
Shafiq Rasul, former Guantánamo detainee
Mrs El-Banna, wife of British Resident held in Guantánamo, Jamil El-Banna
Amani Deghayes, sister of British resident held in Guantánamo, Omar Deghayes
Mrs Aamer, wife of British resident held in Guantánamo, Shaker Aamer
Prof. Dr. Manfred Nowak, LL.M, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor for International Human Rights Protection, University of Vienna, Director, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights
Baroness Sarah Ludford MEP
Lord Nazir Ahmed
Baron Dholakia
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC
Baroness Frances D’Souza
Dr. Adnan Siddiqui, Cageprisoners
Clive Stafford Smith, Legal Director, Reprieve (counsel to many prisoners)
Zachary Katznelson, Senior Counsel, Reprieve
Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK
Jean Lambert MEP
Sajjad Karim MEP
Caroline Lucas MEP
Clare Short MP
Salma Yaqoob MP
Geoffrey Bindman, Chair of the British Institute for Human Rights
John Pilger, Journalist, author & film-maker
Tahir Butt, Metropolitan Police, Spokesman for Association of Muslim Police
Professor Bill Bowring, Barrister, Professor of Law, Birkbeck College
Louise Christian, Christian Khan
Shami Chakrabarti, Liberty
Natalia Garcia, lawyer for British resident in Guantánamo, Tyndalwoods
Phil Shiner, Public Interest Lawyers
Vanessa Redgrave, Actress
Corin Redgrave, Actor, Guantánamo Human Rights Commission
Kika Markham, Actress
Liz Davies, Chair, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers
Yvonne Ridley, Journalist
Dr Azzam Tamimi
Tariq Ramadan, Senior Research Fellow, Oxford St Anthony’s College, Lokahi Foundation (London), Visiting Professor, Erasmus University, Holland, Doshisha University (Japan)
Ian Macdonald QC, Garden Court Chambers
Naim Malik, Birmingham Guantánamo Campaign
Nusrat Chagtai, Director, British Muslim Human Rights Centre
Richard Hermer, Doughty Street Chambers
Mudassar Arani, Arani & Co Solicitors
Javaid Rehman, Professor of International Law and Director of Research, Brunel University
Dr David Nicholl, Birmingham Guantánamo Campaign
Estella Schmid, CAMPACC
Dr A. Sivanandan, Writer, Institute of Race Relations
Ian Waller, Human Rights and Social Justice Research Institute, London Metropolitan University
Lindsey German, National Convenor, Stop the War Coalition
Imran Khan, Imran Khan & Partners
Victoria Brittain, Author and playwright
Matt Whitecross, Revolution Films, Director, The Road to Guantanamo
Aki Nawaz, Fun Da Mental
Andy Worthington, Author, The Guantánamo Files
Ruhul Tarafder, 1990 Trust
Naima Bouteldja, Journalist
Linda Rogers, Peace & Progress
Errol Walters, Director of Black Londoners Forum
Karen Chouhan, 1990 Trust
Helen Shaw, Co-Director, INQUEST

For more on the British residents in Guantánamo, see my book 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.