One of the men represented by Stafford Smith and Reprieve was Ahmed Errachidi, a Moroccan chef who had worked in London for 18 years before his capture in Pakistan, were he had traveled as part of a wild scheme to raise money for an operation that his son needed. What made Ahmed’s story so affecting were three factors: firstly, that he was bipolar, and had suffered horribly in Guantánamo, where his mental health issues had not been taken into account; secondly, that he had been a passionate defender of the prisoners’ rights, and had been persistently punished as result, although he eventually won a concession, when the authorities agreed to no longer refer to prisoners as “packages” when they were moved about the prison; and thirdly, that he had been freed after Stafford Smith proved that, while he was supposed to have been at a training camp in Afghanistan, he was actually cooking in a restaurant on the King’s Road in London.

“The Cook Who Became The General” was the proposed title of a book telling Ahmed’s story, which Clive suggested I should write with him, after I wrote an article that Ahmed picked up on after his release in Morocco in March 2007. This never came about, although I remained in touch with Ahmed, and I sometimes regret that I have been too desk-bound in my Guantánamo work, and missed out on having Ahmed tell me his story while cooking for me at his home in Tangiers. However, I was delighted when Ahmed wrote his story anyway, in Arabic, and when I saw an English translation last year. I thought that this was to be published by Cageprisoners, and hoped, once again, that I might work on it (as an editor), but as it happens Ahmed’s memoir, A Handful of Walnuts, has been picked up by Chatto & Windus, and will be published next year.

In the hope of providing some publicity for Ahmed and his story, I’d like to encourage my readers to seek out the latest issue of Granta (issue 116, entitled, “Ten Years Later”), which features an excerpt from A Handful of Walnuts and an introduction by Clive, which I’m cross-posting below. Below that is a short example of Ahmed’s extraordinary writing, as found on the website, Here Be Monsters.

Ahmed Errachidi: the chef in Guantánamo Bay
By Clive Stafford Smith, Granta 116, Autumn 2011

When I first went to see Ahmed Errachidi in early 2005, the soldiers at Guantánamo warned me that he was one of the very worst: a bitter terrorist; Osama bin Laden’s general, his main man. I was intrigued.

We brought the original litigation against the lawlessness of Guantánamo Bay in February 2002, shortly after it opened for its sordid business. By mid-2004, the Supreme Court had ordered that lawyers be allowed access, and I was able to visit for the first time. Soon, I was requested to represent Ahmed.

He didn’t seem bitter. He laughed: a deep-chested laugh. He told me that he was a chef who had worked in London for eighteen years. I was not sure I believed him, but Ahmed’s story — stranger than fiction — turned out to be entirely true. I took the Tube from one restaurant to another on his list, and each manager described his cooking.

He said he was bipolar, and I obtained the medical records of his first mental breakdown, following the death of his father. I spoke with the immigration lawyers who had been trying to secure him permanent leave to remain in the UK. I obtained copies of his plane tickets from London to Morocco and Pakistan. At the time he was meant to have been at the al-Farouq terrorist-training camp, in July 2001, he was temping on the King’s Road in Chelsea.

On 18 September 2001, Ahmed Errachidi left his home in England to visit his wife and children in Morocco. He was particularly keen to see his youngest son, one-year-old Imran, who needed an urgent heart operation to repair a blocked artery. This condition is often fatal without surgery, and Ahmed saw his young son struggling to breathe, his face turning blue. But he could not afford to pay for treatment. So he hatched a plan and sank all his savings into a new business venture, flying out to Pakistan to buy silver jewellery — the profit from sales back in Morocco would pay for the medical care.

It was during his stay in Pakistan that Ahmed watched CNN news footage on a television at a nearby mosque of the US bombings and found himself moved by the plight of the Afghan refugees.

The interrogators in Guantánamo didn’t believe him, but the story made sense to me. The bombs that were about to fall on Afghanistan were thousands of miles away to Ahmed, and his grandiose plans were all explained by a statement he made early on, openly, without the stigma common in the West: he is bipolar. My father, too, was bipolar and while his dreams might have landed him in jail for fraud many times, they were very real to him. Likewise, to Ahmed, anything was possible, even this dangerous mission: ‘I entered Afghanistan to help the poor children and the women and to partake in their calamity, to taste what they tasted, to fear as they feared, and to be hungry as they were hungry.’

He told me that the Pakistanis had sold him to the Americans. I obtained copies of the American bounty leaflets promising $5,000 for ‘terrorists’, with a photograph of a bearded Arab, looking very similar to my client. ‘I am a traded commodity,’ said Ahmed. ‘No matter how long it takes, the dust will settle and the buyer and the seller will be known, and only the anecdotes and the memories will remain.’

Ahmed was taken from Pakistan to Bagram air base where he spent nineteen consecutive days being tortured and interrogated before he was sent to Guantánamo Bay. There, he became a leading force in the intermittent prisoner protests against the abusive Guantánamo regime. As a result he was held in punitive isolation in Camp Delta for almost three years — the longest period served in isolation by any Guantánamo prisoner.

At a certain point, Ahmed had another breakdown. The military, seemingly oblivious to his condition, continued interrogating him through his psychotic haze. When asked whether he knew bin Laden, Ahmed indignantly assured them that he was bin Laden’s superior officer. The interrogators wrote it down, and passed it on. They omitted, however, the next thing he said — that there was a large snowball that was about to envelop the earth, and that the officers should warn their families to make their peace with God.

As with most people who have been liberated so far — 562 of the 601 who have been sent home — Ahmed was set free due to public pressure rather than the court of law. We showed how risible the allegations against him were, and embarrassed the authorities into returning him to Morocco.

Guantánamo itself remains open. President Obama has rejuvenated the tainted military commissions and this year put forward a law that justifies detaining prisoners indefinitely without trial, subject to regular reviews by so-called periodic Administrative Review Boards. Forty-eight prisoners have been labelled ‘too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution’, partly because their confessions have been obtained under duress. As things stand, they are fated to remain in Cuba indefinitely, without trial and without judgment.

An excerpt from A Handful of Walnuts by Ahmed Errachidi

Steel surrounded and captivated me. There was no horizon, no life and nothing to see. So I began to fly out of the cell with my thoughts and my imagination into the vast world of existence. I would put myself on the horizon, imagining that I was looking at this sun and its rays; I would travel to see birds and trees, imagine bees collecting nectar from flowers, and long for their honey. I would imagine the colours and scents of roses so that I wouldn’t forget them. I travelled into the scenery of clouds as they moved through the sky, as if they were ships sailing in the still blue sky, before breaking up and dispersing. I travelled to the moon, enjoying its quiet beautiful light, which did not disturb those who wanted to sleep. I imagined the stars sailing through the darkness of night, and felt their beauty and presence. I remembered every beautiful thing that I had known or experienced in the universe. I imagined the sunrise, a ray of light drawing a line on the horizon, slowly expelling the dark of the long night. I imagined newborn plants splitting the ground, fruits emerging from their skins. I imagined leaves falling to the ground, the sea and the fish, the rocks and corals. I imagined cattle and sheep as they grazed, and wondered how their milk could be such a brilliant white even though the grass they ate was green. Thoughts were not restricted, even though hands and feet were shackled.

Ahmed Errachidi’s memoir, A Handful of Walnuts, will be published by Chatto & Windus in 2012.

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, 700,000-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.

As I also explained, a video recording of the event is available here (via RealPlayer), as is an audio recording, but in the hope of bringing the words of Omar and Terry to a wider audience I’m cross-posting a transcript of the event here. Part One featured Omar’s story, in which he provided some detailed insights into Guantánamo that many people will never have heard before. In Part Two, Terry told his story, and he and Omar then engaged in discussions that touched on other disturbing aspects of the prison’s history, included the use of menstrual blood by a female interrogator. In this third and final part, Omar and Terry discuss other aspects of Guantánamo, including the deaths of three prisoners in Guantánamo in June 2006, which has a great resonance as the fourth anniversary of that dreadful day approaches, in light of disturbing revelations in an article by Scott Horton for Harper’s Magazine in January this year.

Almerindo Ojeda: A question for Omar: you were there when the three suicides took place in one night [on June 9, 2006]?

Omar Deghayes: Yeah, I was there when that happened. The three suicides and there is another person who died, we don’t know what happened exactly but some people — We know that it was sexual abuse, it did happen because the policy where … they did something sexual really badly to those people. I remember speaking to one of them, the man who died afterwards. Amin, I talked to Amin [perhaps Mani al-Utaybi]. I remember him being very angry and annoyed and he was shouting behind the windows and he said, “Are they doing the same things to your block as what they did to us?” And I said, “Yes, they are,” and after that he died, a couple of days after that.

The three people, Yasser Al-Zahrani and the others [Mani al-Utaybi and Salah Ahmed al-Salami], they hated them so much because of their continuous resistance. They were young men, most of them were very young, like 18, 19 when they were locked up [Yasser al-Zahrani was just 17 years old when he was captured]. They had lots of problems because of interrogation, because, like what Mustafa was saying, when they entered their cell they used to fight back and they really hated them so much and they designated them to [severe] mistreatment.

I remember one of them had problems, he needed an operation on his — He had a very serious problem. They abused him again, because he was so sick, they did the operation and then they used it against him and then they locked him up in very severe, cold conditions, and he was really badly physically affected. And then we had one day, the three of them died. And yeah, I was there and it was a really sad, sad day when that happened. And after that happened, the treatment — people were subjected to even more abuse, and more restricted, very hard conditions. So it was a really bad time, I remember that really well.

Almerindo Ojeda: There’s been recent controversy about that and it was printed [in] a new study [by Scott Horton for Harper’s Magazine], questioning whether it was suicide.

Omar Deghayes: Yeah, that’s right. I also don’t think it was suicide. That’s why I don’t use the word “suicide.” What happened to them is very unclear. These three people, Yasser al-Zahrani, Ali Abdullah Abee [Salah Ahmed al-Salami] and Mani al-Utaybi, were for long time subjected to, designated for specific mistreatment. And what really happened that night, I’m not sure. Because I know one of them, he was hanged and his hands were tied and there was cloth filling his mouth and his hands were tied behind his back. I heard about the article that was written about them and it’s hard to believe some of the stuff [put forward by the authorities].

Terry Holdbrooks: Omar, personally I don’t think that those could have been suicides. Just having worked there, as you touched on earlier, it was a requirement that at least hourly we had to take notes upon what was going on in the block. Me, just being antsy and bored like I am most of the time, I would walk up and down the block probably every three minutes. With the monitoring system that was in place just in the poorly constructed camps, let alone Camp 5 and Camp Echo, which are under constant video surveillance, there’s no way that a suicide could take place. There was a number of suicide attempts while I was there, but we always caught them.

Omar Deghayes: I never said that I believed that these were suicides even though I heard. I was there when it did happen, and I never said it was suicide and I never believed it was suicide. But I can’t say otherwise because I wasn’t completely inside the cell. But as you say, it’s impossible to do anything like that inside the cell.

Almerindo Ojeda: One of the things I noticed is that the three of them were taken to a special camp that hadn’t been described up to that point and the official name of that camp was Camp No because if they asked you if it exists, you had to say no. Have you heard of that camp?

Omar Deghayes: Yeah, I heard about that once.

Amy Goodman: Mustafa, did you hear about that camp?

Terry Holdbrooks: That perhaps might be what I was told was the General’s Cottage. There was a place just past Camp Iguana, along the ridge line when you’re going toward the satellite towers. I probably shouldn’t be that specific … There was another camp that’s down there, you can see it if you use Google Earth and you look really carefully, you can see it. It’s a small camp, very small, couldn’t hold maybe more than four detainees. There was another place that I always suspected that when people disappeared for long periods of time, it’s where they had to go. Shaker Aamer [the last British resident, who is still held] and Ahmed Errachidi [a Moroccan, resident in the UK for 18 years, who was released in 2007] were two of the closest detainees with me. There were points in time where they left, where they weren’t in Camp Delta anymore and they weren’t in Camp Echo. “Where have you been, man? Where did you go?” “I don’t know, they put a blindfold on me and put me in a van and drove around for an hour.” It doesn’t take an hour to get anywhere in the place, it’s 54 square miles and the majority of it is water, so it doesn’t take an hour to get anywhere. They probably drove around in circles for a while, but nonetheless there had to have been somewhere else, that’s probably Camp No, if that’s what it’s called. I was always told it was the General’s Cottage. Kind of a twisted name for a place to torture.

Amy Goodman: Omar Deghayes, describe the day you got out of Guantánamo. What was it like?

Omar Deghayes: Well, we were very happy, but anything that in Guantánamo [supposedly] happens you disbelieve until it really does happen. So even when I was told that I would be released, I was happy but I wasn’t completely happy, because some people were taken in the planes … It was used psychologically, they were taken in the planes and then they were taken back to prison. They’d say the plane had problems. So until we came back to England I was[n't] completely happy. And I met my family and it was one of those happy days.

Almerindo Ojeda: Did you meet any other guards that were kind to you?

Omar Deghayes: There were some decent people inside prison and some people who more willing to commit atrocities and they were motivated by their own hatred and feelings. There are a few people inside who didn’t intend to cause harm unless they were commanded to do that, and there was of course the generals, who were leading those. Like Miller that Mustafa was talking about, and others, afterwards, who came. They had a policy where they used the guards against the prisoners. If they saw any, like Mustafa was describing, if they saw any guards speaking to one of the prisoners too much or he’s befriending them, the next thing you know that same guard will be commanded to enter your cell with other groups of guards to beat you up badly. Because they had that mistrust, they didn’t even trust their own guards, I think even the guards were under surveillance and they had videos and they had informers within the guards themselves. So the people who generated Guantánamo itself, I mean, the top people who made Guantánamo were people who used both the guards and prisoners, and that’s why I think those people, not the guards, not the simple guards who were used and abused themselves, but those people who should be brought to accountability for their actions.

Amy Goodman: Mustafa, do you agree?

Terry Holdbrooks: Well that would be an absolutely amazing act if everybody who’s responsible for the atrocity, for the stain that is Guantánamo — it would be quite an amazing accomplishment if everybody responsible could be convicted or tried or even remotely punished in this life. That would be an amazing act. I would love to see it happen, personally.

Like he was saying, with Guantánamo being designed for even the guards to be used as tools … Just before we went to Guantánamo, literally the day that we were going, we stopped, we had this little, you know, lay-over, so to say, in New York City. “Hey, you know, wow, check it out, we got two buses, we’re going to take you to Ground Zero, we’re going to let you read all the comments on the wall and while we’re there we’re going to tell you that it was Muslims that blew this place up and it’s Islam that is the enemy. And remember, we’re going to guard the worst of the worst. Remember that. These are the worst of the worst so when we get there don’t talk to them, don’t be friends with them, they are the worst of the worst.”

I was fed that nonsense, oh God, every day the entire year that I was there was that these are the worst of the worst or they’re dirt farmers; they’re dumb dirt farmers. Don’t talk to them. Well, if they are dumb dirt farmers, why are they lawyers and doctors? And why can they speak seven different languages properly when I can’t even speak English properly and I grew up in America? How are they dumb? How does this correlate here? I don’t understand.

Omar Deghayes: General Miller used to go around and used to say to the guards before they entered your cell and beat you up badly, “Don’t forget September 11th,” and used to go around and incite that kind of hatred. And the same general who afterwards — the top people like Dick Cheney and Bush and whoever was putting those people to work thought he did a good job in Guantánamo, they moved him to Abu Ghraib in Iraq. And he was the same person who said, “Let’s Guantánomize Abu Ghraib,” and then, you know, the pictures that came out from Abu Ghraib and all of this was at the same period that this same general, Miller — who they thought his policies was successful in Guantánamo in breaking people down — they moved him to Iraq to do the same job.

And, you know, probably, as I say, here even Mustafa and some guards don’t know so much about what went on inside some of these prisons. I mean, even interrogators were kept away, there were certain guards who were used, as you said, their job was only to take you to the interrogation cells and then go back and then they come and take you and pick you back up again they didn’t know what happened inside the interrogation cells. Even some of the interrogators that we had — one of the late[r] interrogators, he was a guy from Florida and he was a kind, generous person compared to many of the other interrogators and he tried to help and he tried to and do things different. He said, “I might be in your position one day,” and he was different than other interrogators and even, as I say, even interrogators that I wanted to say were different, they used some of them to do certain acts and some of them didn’t even know that those acts and those things did happen.

That’s why it’s always, the more I speak to people who worked in Guantánamo they were given different jobs to do. There were people who were inside those interrogations, there were people who were sexually, you know, raped and abused, there were four people in Bagram base, four of them were chained in a tent and four of them were sodomized in front of each other for embarrassment. There [was] somebody in the “Dark Prison” [a CIA prison in Afghanistan], an African guy — I don’t want to mention his name — an African guy who was sexually abused, sodomized, and then after that they said to him, “We realize it’s a mistake, you’re not the guy.” They released him. And they said to him, “You’re a brave man.” They said to him, “You’re a brave man” just to psychologically try to amend what they have done to him.

And again, the same thing inside Guantánamo Bay. There were people who were chained down to the floors. I don’t want to mention his name because some of those people told me those stories because of my work with lawyers inside prisons, but they insisted I don’t give their names. This man was a young Yemeni boy, and one day he was held in those prisons, his trousers was pulled back, and — you know, there are lots of abuses like that, sexual abuses. Like, another guy from China, a young boy from China, I’m not going to, you know, detail the horrible stuff that happened to him — and so on.

So there are many stories and, as I say, each prisoner is treated different than the other prisoner. If you’re young, and you come from the Middle East, certain things are done to you more than if you’re [an] older person and come from Europe, for example. You’re subjected to a different kind of torture. It was different. Every torture was engineered to use the most harm that can be done to you psychologically, sometimes physically.

Amy Goodman: What do you mean they told you these stories because you had legal background?

Omar Deghayes: Yeah, I had legal background and when Clive Stafford Smith came in, Clive did lots of good work, he was more brave to publish [information about the prison], he was sensitive to so much of the things [and] he was active in speaking and he did lots of good work. And when we saw the results of his work, people started to confide in him, to me inside the cells. They used to send me messages and letters in different ways and forms. Like Mustafa said, we have different ways to communicate with each other even though we weren’t allowed to communicate with each other. They were starting to send to me confidential things that happened to each one of them on the condition that I wouldn’t mention exactly their names, I could mention who they are like generally. There was another Saudi/Bahraini guy who was chained down to the floor and he was sexually abused by a female interrogator and things like that.  So they mention their stories, but because they are so embarrassed to tell this stuff, I myself I am not able even to describe in detail because I feel ashamed and embarrassed of describing the stuff.

Amy Goodman: What has been most difficult thing to adapt to since you’ve been free?

Omar Deghayes: When I was free there was many things I needed to fix and amend. Because we were so many years far away from freedom we had lots of things. Our family was away. We had to try to communicate with my family who was lost, my wife and child was lost. I didn’t know where they were, in Pakistan or Afghanistan borders, and I had to search for them. It was so difficult because every person you communicate with in Pakistan would be under surveillance because of my background. It was so difficult to make communication with them and then you have lots of [other] things.

You have to speak with people again and you have to become normal, because I was locked up more than five years, and most of those years I was in isolation cells. So it was very difficult to learn how to communicate again with people, to talk in a normal way and socialize in a normal way. It was difficult to go back to work, to wake up in a normal way, to sleep in a normal way. We had and we still do experience lots of psychological hardships, dreams, bad dreams. Sometimes some incidents trigger memories, back inside the cells. Our emotions is different, psychologically our feelings, we’re more cold than when we used to be. We can’t express our feelings easily to our families and friends. Suspicion, and we suspect everyone and everything.  Many, many things that, as I say, that’s why, when I started in the beginning, the physical damage that was caused to us probably is more apparent and is hard, but the psychological wounds and injuries inside each one of us is more deeper and probably longer than the physical abuse.

Amy Goodman: And Terry Mustafa, how do you actually go through the conversion process and then what was the response of the Guantánamo officers, the military, to your conversion to Islam?

Terry Holdbrooks: When Al-Jazeera interviewed me they asked this question and then off the record they said, “This is really the money question. If you could put a lot of detail in this, this is the money question.” Yeah, well, unfortunately, it’s really not that much of a money answer. To tackle that initially, the process of converting to Islam, I think one should have a full understanding, or at least you know as much as [you] are mentally capable of having, of what Islam is, of what it entails, of the Pillars of Faith [the profession of faith, prayers, fasting, alms, and the pilgrimage to Mecca] and everything that comes along with it. I think that should be there. But it’s a simple process of saying your shahadah [or profession of faith], of declaring that there is no God except for Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger and meaning it, wholeheartedly, you know, meaning it in your heart and full with clear intent and clear mind and good intentions. You should have obviously two other believers present, but it’s a simple process, so to say. Errachidi and I battled about that one for a couple weeks.

Almerindo Ojeda: Ahmed Errachidi, a prisoner…

Terry Holdbrooks: Yeah, sorry, everybody. Ahmed Errachidi was a prisoner in Guantánamo.

Omar Deghayes: He actually lost his mind inside prison. They mistreated him so badly, that he — I don’t know, you left, I think, the prison at the time?

Terry Holdbrooks: No, no, no. I was there for watching his downfall.

Omar Deghayes: Yeah, he lost it completely. He was injected with injections and stuff that he completely lost his mind. I remember looking at him and seeing him, like talk in a garbage way. It was very sad to see that nice man, intelligent man, and then broke down, because of the abuse he was subjected to.

Terry Holdbrooks: Errachidi himself, personally, had a reputation. We called him “The General.” He was the general of the detainees because he was the type of individual that –

Omar Deghayes: It’s crazy how he was being described as being a general and they thought he was somebody very important in [al-]Qaeda, even though he was working as a cook.

Terry Holdbrooks: Right, right, right. It wasn’t so much because of that though. I mean, the military had their ideas that he was a leader, but the reason why we called him “The General” was because you could have a block that was rioting and he could walk into that block and say one sentence and everybody would be calm.

Omar Deghayes: That’s true. But the interrogators really meant it. I mean, like Shaker Aamer, locked up inside prison.

Terry Holdbrooks: Right.

Omar Deghayes: For nine years, Shaker Aamer — the same way. They call him “[The] Professor” because he was loved by people, because he was loved for different reasons, like Errachidi. It’s because they speak good English and good Arabic and they were older in age and they used to translate for people and they used to try to help them.

Terry Holdbrooks: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. They were problem solvers.

Omar Deghayes: And because of that, people respected them and loved them. And just because of [them] showing that they respected him a lot they started calling them names like “Generals” and “Professors” — and really intelligent people inside. The interrogators really did believe that kind of talk. And just because of that, some of them are still in prison. Just because people respect them and how they look at them inside prison. Not because of what they acted and what they’d done before. I have seen Shaker’s accusations and the things that they accused him of in the papers and it was like flimsy stuff. Stuff which they shouldn’t be kept for nine years just because of that.

Terry Holdbrooks: Yeah, we had some colorful and loving pet names for some of the detainees, obviously. Getting back to the question, Errachidi actually didn’t necessarily accept or like the idea, initially, of me approaching Islam. I told him, I was like, “Hey, I think I want to convert, I think I want to actually take up faith.” I had never had faith in my life and Islam is the one and only faith that’s ever made sense to me. He just kind of looked at me the day that I first approached him. He turns his head, he looks at me, and he’s like, “No.” He just waves his hand and wouldn’t say anything else to me for the rest of the day. I was like, “Are you serious? Dude, we sit and talk for like six hours at a time, you’re just gonna wave your hand and say no? Ugh. Come on.” And he wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the day.

I saw him a week later and asked him about it and he still said no. And finally, one night, I was working a night shift, and I came up on him and I talked to him. I was like, “You know I’ve got my P’s and Q’s, I know about it, I want to take my shahadah. And he sits me down and we talk for about two hours, just discussing all of the stipulations you come across in Islam and in regards to American society and how living as a proper Muslim totally are not going to go hand in hand with each other. But after a long sit-down conversation he eventually gave in and he transliterated the shahadah for me so I was able to say it. And as for the military …

Omar Deghayes: But Mustafa, there’s a number of guards that became Muslim, and people don’t realize that. They think that you’re the only person that did become Muslim inside Guantánamo. There is a number of guards who became Muslim there, and there is one female guard we’re still in contact with. And she sends us messages. She said she is wearing a hijab and that she has become Muslim lately.

Terry Holdbrooks: Al-Hamdulillah!

Omar Deghayes: And she sends messages. But she is so scared to come out in the open.  And we asked if it’s possible for her to speak about it and we’re in contact with her. There are a number of people who, inside prisons …

Almerindo Ojeda: We would be happy to have her testimony anonymously.

Omar Deghayes: Yeah, I’ll tell her that because she sends a good message to Moazzam Begg, and she said, “Just tell your friends in London that the things that [I] experienced in Guantánamo changed [my] life completely.” And one of the things she said, she said, “I remember somebody who comes weak to the cells, from another prison, and you have the support you have, and the camaraderie you had inside those prisons was just admirable.” She was impressed by that, and how people helped each other inside those horrible conditions.

Amy Goodman: Omar, we’re about to come to the end of this conversation. The video-conference will close but in the last few days you questioned whether you wanted to participate in this at all. Can you explain why?

Omar Deghayes: It was by coincidence. I was looking at my Facebook and somebody sent me a message on Facebook. And he sent me a videotape where an American soldier — I looked at the videotape and in that videotape there was an American soldier in Iraq who was raping a civilian, a woman, an Iraqi woman, and he filmed that incident, and he was bragging about it. It was so sad to see that these atrocities are still happening inside Iraq. And because American soldiers are doing these things by command, by Generals and others — [as well as] what happened in Abu Ghraib and many other pictures probably they had — I thought it wasn’t acceptable that I should be speaking to people who were still committing these atrocities inside those countries. Especially when we know that Obama has refused to publicize some of those pictures they have in their hand, in their possession. I mean, the Department of Defense has in their possession even worse pictures of American individuals who committed those criminal acts, and Obama, even though he is a lot better than Bush and the previous administration — But these people haven’t been put to accountability.

This man’s picture is in the Internet, and he’s doing those crimes. It’s so horrible if you just look at it, and he is probably at large, nobody has done anything to him. And he is bragging about it. And if America wants to respect itself, this is the message, and if they want people to take them seriously, that this war, it is a moral war — if they want a moral ground, they should prosecute those criminal people who have committed those atrocities. So that was the reason that made me think, maybe I shouldn’t be participating in this.

Amy Goodman: How do you know the video is real?

Omar Deghayes: Yeah, I think it is real because this is not the only video, there are more, I’ve seen a couple of videos before. Some of them were women speaking in Al-Jazeera, like, for example, Sabrina Janadi, an Iraqi young woman who described what happened to her and it is verified fact. And there are many, many others in Iraq. I’ve seen tapes of American guards bragging and speaking, everybody knows of the photographs that the Department of Defense refused to release, because they said if they release them it will cause even more agitation in the Middle East because how much bad those pictures and those videos were, and this means that this was happening inside those prisons and inside observation of offices and people’s superiors, but those people who committed those crimes probably were encouraged to do that. Otherwise we haven’t heard of anyone properly brought to account.

Amy Goodman: So what made you decide to participate then?

Omar Deghayes: When Almerindo talked to me he said it is better to speak to the people about this, about everything. We are not those same people, we are different, we are trying to convince the people in the United States about the atrocities that did happen under this so-called “War on Terror.” We are trying to show the people and explain the truth and, Omar, if you don’t participate in this, all you are doing is disappointing us who are trying to organize this and trying to explain to the people what the reality is and what really is happening on the ground. Because people usually only hear one side of the story. And to make a proper judgment, we need to hear both sides of the story.

Almerindo Ojeda: Omar, is reconciliation possible?

Omar Deghayes: I think definitely it’s possible. Of course. I mean, we humans, nobody wants war. I don’t think that the Afghani people want war. They’ve been badly affected by war. No people in Iraq want their country to be occupied and shelled and tortured and bombed. But reconciliation, we must learn to respect each other, and we must learn to resolve our problems not by might and force. We should respect people’s perspectives. I mean, some people have different ways of looking at things in life. We, as Mustafa was saying about his transformation to Islam, we have different values, we look at things differently, but this doesn’t mean that we have to fight each other. We can sit down and negotiate and we can understand. As I said, you know, things can and will probably get worse when you use might and force to solve problems. All of us have families and we know that even in our own families, when we try to force our children, or force people who are weaker than you in a family to do something, it never succeeds. What it does is it causes rebellion and makes things worse.

Amy Goodman: Omar Deghayes, is there anything else you’d like to add? The video will probably go off at any point.

Omar Deghayes: Yeah, I just really want to thank all of you for coming here. It has been a pleasure. I’m so happy to know people like yourselves who are brave enough to stand by their principles and advocate, I hope, for what is right, and advocate [for] understanding and listening to the other side. It has been a pleasure to participate and I am pleased that I have changed my mind and did participate. I hope you are able to change things to the better in the United States and probably in the world. Thank you very much for having me here, it’s been a pleasure.

Amy Goodman: Mustafa Abdullah, is there anything you would like to say to Omar Deghayes?

Terry Holdbrooks: You really think reconciliation is possible? This could totally turn into an absolutely off conversation. We should probably just have it over Facebook or something, via email. The amount of restructuring that would be required in America, both socially as well as our educational system … There is so much that would have to be done to revamp it, to make any kind of ground work, to lay a bridge of connection between the East and the West. It’s inspiring to me to hear that you have hope that reconciliation could be possible. Quite frankly, I’m always surprised and shocked to hear of another detainee who has gotten out and has not decided to retaliate. I think it is amazing. It is certainly something that I commend all of you for. And in regards to that sister that you were speaking of, just let her know, it’s the responsibility of all of us Muslims, if we know of social injustice and whatnot happening to our brothers and sisters, it’s our responsibility to take some type of action towards it. Even if she speaks anonymously, she’s still speaking and taking action and that’s what is going to help facilitate change.

Amy Goodman: Mustafa, the response of other soldiers, officials, officers to your conversion?

Terry Holdbrooks: I managed to actually keep my religious views and affiliations to myself and relatively quiet. There were only two individuals that were in Guantánamo that had any knowledge of that and they were individuals that I could trust. There were very far and few that I could trust. A lot of the same side-effects that Omar was mentioning from being in Guantánamo, I had as well. I still have nightmares about that place; I suffered mass amounts of alcoholism trying to forget it. It’s awful. But I kept it a secret until we got back to Fort Letterwood. When we got back to Fort Letterwood, nobody cared what I was doing at that point, they were back with their families and they had their beer and their play stations and everything else. They didn’t care what I was doing. So, I became irrelevant at that point and that was the point in time that I became comfortable enough to talk about it. Family and friends haven’t had anything negative to say about it, they’ve been supportive of me and what I do. At least the people I still talk with. If they want to have a conversation with me, then they are my real friends. If they don’t, then they weren’t friends to begin with.

Amy Goodman: So what are your plans now?

Terry Holdbrooks: Hopefully, to get my book out. I have another four drafted in my mind that I would like to write. The next four will be fictitious, however. But I have four more books I would like to write that will point out a lot of comparisons and contrasts between the United States and the Middle East and hopefully help bridge the gap between the East and the West, help try to create some type of understanding.

Amy Goodman: And Omar, your plans now?

Omar Deghayes: Now my plans are simple. Just continue to live my life and try to achieve what is good and try to help those who are left behind in Abu Ghraib and many others in secret prisons and I think it’s a call to mission to help to release them. I graduated — when I was young I always wanted to do human rights law and I did, and now I think I may be in a better position to work as I am working now as a human rights lawyer to help many, many others who are less fortunate. Because in my whole life, I have experienced how oppression can be. When it happened to my father and family in Libya and when I grew up and went to Guantánamo. There is a lot that can be achieved by talking and by advocating for those rights.

Amy Goodman: We want to thank you both for taking this time and really participating in this historic event of a prison guard and prisoner at Guantánamo talking to each other and sharing with all of us your experiences there. Thank you very much.

Terry Holdbrooks: Absolutely.

Almerindo Ojeda: Thank you very much for your attendance. Outside the door there are books by Amy Goodman and books by some other author you might know. Both of them are interesting for people who have attended this meeting. Please look them up. Amy will be signing copies of her book and the other author will be signing copies of his book as well.

Amy Goodman: And maybe next time Mustafa will be sitting next to us, signing his book as well.

Terry Holdbrooks: Inshaallah.

Note: Omar Deghayes features prominently in the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington) and has been touring the film with Andy in the UK since February this year. Copies of the DVD of the film are available here, and also see here for clips of Omar discussing the involvement of the British intelligence services in his interrogations in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.

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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and currently on tour in the UK), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

• To help coordinate assistance to prisoners who remain beyond the rule of law, who are often subjected to torture and abuse;

• To assist former prisoners to reintegrate into society in a positive and peaceable manner, many of them in countries with limited available resources, and with governments hostile to human rights;

• To assist the family members of those being held.

The launch was trailed on Wednesday, when Sami al-Haj, the al-Jazeera cameraman released in May 2008, who now heads the Human Rights Desk at al-Jazeera in Qatar, told the Associated Press that the Centre “aims to help over 500 men who have been released from the prison get medical and psychological treatment and find jobs.” Al-Haj explained that “only one in 20 former inmates has a job, and many have received no psychological or medical assistance,” and stated, “If you lock someone up in a normal prison for six months they need help. These people have been in jail for more than six years in an institution that’s much worse than a normal jail.”

He added that released prisoners “have received no explanation or apology, despite having never been charged with a crime,” and also explained that the organization will “lobby for the release or court trial of the 229 remaining inmates,” and, in the longer term, will “explore ways” of suing Bush administration officials for ordering the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo.

At the launch itself, which was extremely well-attended, Moazzam Begg began by explaining that returning British ex-prisoners had support from families, activists, community members and individuals, but that those returning to developing countries had little help. “Whether they are in Bermuda, Morocco, Mauritania or Yemen, the story is pretty much the same,” he said, as Reuters described it. “Where is the welfare for the people who have been tortured? Where is the support system for people who have endured cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment? The fact of the matter is — rarely does it exist.”

Adding that former prisoners face the stigma of having been held at Guantánamo every single day, Begg said, “How do you remove that from your head? How do you tell people that I am not a criminal, but I endured criminality? How do you explain that to anybody? When Guantánamo, by its definition, means that you must have been guilty of something because the world’s most powerful democracy could not have got it wrong. Even though we know it has got it wrong, we still carry that stigma with us, every single one of us.”

Describing the extent of the stigma, Sami al-Haj added, “My son does not deal with me as a normal father and even my wife and our close family like brothers and sisters and even our friends are keeping away from me because they do not want to put themselves in trouble.”

Binyam Mohamed, speaking for the first time in public since his release from Guantánamo in February, explained that he was not involved with the GJC “to win compensation,” and asked, “How much money can you give me that would make me forget the seven years I have gone through?” He also explained to reporters that, during an interrogation in Karachi shortly after he was seized at the airport in April 2002, his US captors explained how the US approach to the law had changed after 9/11. They told me, “You are guilty until you are proven innocent,” he said.

Describing his difficulties in readjusting to life after Guantánamo, and “at times struggling to control his emotions,” as the BBC described it, he said that he would “automatically” treat ordinary questions as an “interrogation,” and explained, “You have to live it to explain it. It’s very hard. If I enter a room and the light turns off for some reason I wonder if I’m back in the ‘Dark Prison.’” Mohamed was referring to the secret CIA prison near Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was held for several months in 2004 after being tortured in Morocco for 18 months on behalf of the US authorities.

He also said, “What the world doesn’t understand is that most people love to hear about torture stories — somebody hanged here, beaten there, blood over here, blood over there, but that’s physical torture. What remains [on release] is, each time you see a rope, you always go back to the time you were hung. That doesn’t go away.”

Adding, “I cannot fit into society,” he described the opening of the Guantánamo Justice Centre as “an important event” for the former prisoners, saying, “We are here and we are living in torture — a world of torture,” and, insisting that it was not a political organization, stated bluntly, “From my point of view, there’s a mess that has been done and someone has to fix it.”

Like all the other ex-prisoners, Mohamed was concerned not primarily with relating his own difficulties adjusting to freedom, and the ghosts of torture that still haunt him, but with the plight of others. He explained that he had recently spoken on the phone to Mohammed El-Gharani, the Chadian national — just 14 years old when he was seized in Pakistan — who was released from Guantánamo in June, and that El-Gharani was now “sleeping on the streets, rejected by his family, branded as a terrorist although he was released by the US and cleared of any wrong-doing.” “I realized that he can not talk to others, like his lawyers, as he can to me,” Mohamed said. “So I have to speak out for him here.”

Returning briefly to his own ordeal, he explained, “No one knows that what stays after torture is the memories. Lawyers speak about my rights in court, but I can only think about Military Commissions and about having no rights. After four years I can only think of things in terms of Guantánamo. No institution or medical foundation in the world can change how I feel.” He then added, poignantly, “And how about in Chad, where there is nothing to help El-Gharani?”

This was a theme reiterated by Jamil El-Banna, released in December 2007, who also spoke for the first time in public since his release. El-Banna explained, “The only people who can help are those who went through this,” and, as Victoria Brittain described it in the Guardian, “told the story of Ahmed Hassan, a Jordanian who lost most of both sight and hearing from torture in Guantánamo. He spoke of the moment when Hassan trusted him as they spoke on the phone and he was able to tell him he had found a doctor here who will help him. Hassan had previously found no material or medical support in Jordan, but only promises, which disappeared into thin air. El-Banna emphasized that Hassan’s was just one of many, many stories of deep disappointment on release.”

Moazzam Begg also spoke on this theme, explaining that the Yemenis, who make up the largest single group of remaining prisoners in Guantánamo (about a hundred of the remaining 229), were of particular concern to the new organization because Yemen lacked the facilities necessary to care for people traumatized by their long and brutal imprisonment.

He explained that former prisoners from Western countries were suffering too, and described how two men now living in London “were unable even to communicate with other people due to psychological and physical damage.” “One of them lives in a room that is so tiny it is close to the size of his cell where he spent five years. That is the difficulty in the UK,” he said, but he added, “Our own situation is much better than the vast majority of people who were held there.”

The former prisoners also read out messages of support from other ex-prisoners. Ahmed Errachidi, a Moroccan who had lived for nearly 20 years in the UK, and was repatriated from Guantánamo in March 2007, wrote that “the life of ex-detainees is simply a life on pause,” and from Qatar Jarallah al-Marri (released in July 2008) explained, “Freedom is more than walking away from a world of cells, shackles and beatings. It is a state of mind, a state of being that takes time to develop.”

As the meeting wound up, Moazzam Begg added further details about the Centre’s aims, explaining that it would partner with NGOs in the Middle East and in African countries who were well placed to deliver care on the ground, and that it was looking for funds from sources in the Gulf, Europe and elsewhere, and Ramzi Kassem, a US lawyer who represents prisoners in Guantánamo and in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, described the prisoners of George Bush’s “War on Terror” as the “victims of an ill-conceived policy” and criticized the Obama administration for retaining the system of Military Commissions introduced by its predecessor. “They only exist for one reason and that’s to whitewash torture,” he said, adding — in a sign that the GJC’s work will not be solely concerned with Guantánamo — that the estimated 600 prisoners in Bagram, unlike those in Guantánamo, are still being denied the right to challenge their detention in court.

For a short interview with Binyam Mohamed, see this BBC video, and see below for two reports on the GJC’s launch, from Al-Jazeera and Press TV (via YouTube):

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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

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).

On the one hand, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, close adviser to Dick Cheney and convicted perjurer, had his two and a half year sentence –- for covering his boss’s ass and lying about the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame –- conveniently dismissed by the President, who called it “excessive.” Libby, sensitive news outlets informed us, will still have to pay a fine of $250,000 and suffer two years of probation, but while his story, which emerged on 2 July, was still dominating the media, Independence Day itself was marked by an Associated Press article which focused on those at the other end of Bush’s scale of justice: the “enemy combatants” of Guantánamo Bay, who, we learned from the recently installed prison commander Navy Rear Admiral Mark H. Buzby, may, after 2,000 days of illegal imprisonment without charge and without trial, be allowed to watch a movie once a week.

Buzby explained that this privilege would initially be extended to the “best-behaved” prisoners, the 45 men –- mostly Afghans –- held in Camp 4, a communal block reserved for the “most compliant” prisoners, and explained that the authorities had recently started allowing these prisoners to watch soccer matches and other programs vetted for jihadi content, including nature documentaries and episodes of “Deadliest Catch,” a Discovery Channel series about crab fishing crews off the Alaskan coast. Buzby added that there were even plans to introduce TV-watching privileges to the 330 or so prisoners held in Camps 5 and 6, the blocks modeled on “Supermax” prisons on the mainland, where the prisoners are held in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day in windowless cells.

After describing plans to increase the almost non-existent recreational areas in both these camps, Buzby said that the authorities were considering a way to allow the prisoners in Camp 6 –- “and possibly Camp 5,” reserved for the “least compliant” prisoners, or those with purported “intelligence value” –- to watch some television, perhaps putting the TV set on a cart so that they could watch programs in the recreation area. “We’re proceeding cautiously forward with these initiatives and as long as everybody behaves themselves we will probably be able to provide these things,” the commander added.

There is, of course, more to this story than is at first apparent. What Buzby failed to mention was that those held in solitary confinement in Camps 5 and 6 include at least 80 prisoners who have been cleared for release for at least a year, and that, unlike prisoners on the US mainland –- say, for example, convicted mass murderers –- who are regularly allowed visits by family members, and, typically, have unlimited access to books, TV, music, pens and paper, the prisoners in Guantánamo have, for five and a half years, only been allowed to have a copy of the Koran, have never been allowed family visits, have persistently had all correspondence to and from their families either “misplaced,” delayed or heavily censored, have only had sporadic access to books, have had no access to TV, except when granted as a reward for cooperation by their interrogators, and have had no access to music –- with the exception of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” which was played every morning in the early days of Camp X-Ray, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which, until 2005, was regularly broadcast to interrupt evening prayers, and, it should be noted, the songs by, amongst others, Eminem, Li’l Kim and Rage Against the Machine that were regularly played at deafening volume, and for many long hours, as part of the process of “setting the conditions” for interrogations that were introduced by Major General Geoffrey Miller during his tenure as the prison commander in 2002 and 2003, when this aural assault was frequently accompanied by strobe lighting, and took place in rooms where the prisoners were short-shackled in painful positions and frequently left alone until they soiled themselves.

As for writing materials, a forthcoming book of poems by Guantánamo prisoners, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, edited and compiled by law professor Marc Falkoff, who represents 17 Yemeni prisoners, notes that poems written in Guantánamo by a wrongly imprisoned Afghan poet were scratched into a Styrofoam cup with a pebble and were then passed in secret from cell to cell. When the guards discovered what was happening, they smashed the cups and threw them away, fearing that it was a way of passing coded messages. As the military explained, poetry “presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defense] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language,” out of a fear that poetry’s allegorical imagery could be used to convey coded messages to militants outside.

Such is the military’s paranoia that when Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of the charity Reprieve, who represents several dozen prisoners in Guantánamo, met with Ahmed Errachidi, the wrongly imprisoned Moroccan chef who was recently released, he realized that there was no way that the recipes that Errachidi eagerly wrote out for him during their meetings would get past the military censors. Because Errachidi dared to speak out about the prisoners’ treatment in Guantánamo, he was regarded, erroneously, as an al-Qaeda commander, and Stafford Smith realized that his recipes would undoubtedly be construed by the authorities as coded plans for the construction of a nuclear bomb.

Small wonder, then, that when asked by the Associated Press for comments on the latest developments at Guantánamo, Marc Falkoff declared, “These Band-Aid measures are going to do nothing to help alleviate the hopelessness and despair that many of our clients are fighting,” and added, “I hope that learning about these ‘improvements’ will help the public understand how harsh our clients’ lives have been for more than five years.”

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

As published on CounterPunch.

Zachary Katznelson, Senior Counsel at Reprieve, a London-based legal charity representing one of the Tunisians, Abdullah bin Omar, immediately denounced his client’s enforced repatriation, stating that he was “cleared by the United States –- found not to be a threat and not to have information about terrorism. But the US has not apologized and set him free after five years in Guantánamo. Instead, he has been shipped to Tunisia, where abuse and possibly torture await. What has happened to American justice? How are we any safer by sending cleared men back to notorious regimes in the dead of night?”

A 50-year old former railway engineer, bin Omar left Tunisia in 1989 because of religious persecution, and settled in Pakistan, where he was living when he was convicted by a Tunisian court, in absentia, and sentenced to 23 years in prison for belonging to Ennahda, a moderate Islamist political party and just one of the many valid organizations and worthy individuals persecuted over the last 20 years by the Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. He arrived in Guantánamo after being captured in Pakistan in April 2002, during a frenzied few months when all manner of innocent Arabs were rounded up in Pakistan, and was sold to the Americans for $5,000, although much of his subsequent story is unknown. He never took part in any tribunals in Guantánamo, and the US authorities only allowed Katznelson to meet him once, on 1 May 2007, when he “expressed severe concerns that were he to be returned to Tunisia, the authorities there would torture him to force him to confess or to become an informant.”

In the light of his story –- and the secretive Tunisian dictator’s well-reported history of political repression –- Katznelson was undoubtedly correct to point out that bin Omar “finds himself a guinea pig in a potentially deadly diplomatic experiment. The United States is so desperate to send people out of Guantánamo Bay, they are willing to ignore Tunisia’s horrific human rights record.” His opinion was reinforced by Jennifer Daskal, the advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, who noted, “the United States got diplomatic assurances from Tunisia –- a no-torture promise from a country with a documented record of torture. How are they enforced? Who is doing the monitoring?”

These are not the only cases in which the rights of prisoners cleared for release from Guantánamo are being trampled on by two administrations desperate to wash their hands of their own failings. On Saturday, the Times (in the UK) ran an affecting, if slightly misleading article about the former Guantánamo prisoner Ahmed Errachidi, who was flown back to Morocco on 27 April. A 41-year old chef, who suffers from bipolar disorder and has a history of mental breakdowns, Errachidi had been living in the UK, where he had been granted indefinite leave to remain, for 16 years, working in hotels and restaurants. However, in September 2001, with an impetuousness that is a hallmark of those suffering from the illness that afflicted him, he set off for Pakistan on a hare-brained mission to buy silver jewelry to sell in Morocco to raise money for an essential heart operation for one of his two young sons. Sidetracked by the humanitarian crisis that followed the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, he took a bus to Afghanistan –- “to help the poor children and the women, and to partake in their calamity,” as he later told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director –- but soon discovered that there was nothing he could do to help the Afghan people, and returned to Pakistan, where he was promptly captured by bounty hunters and sold to the US military for $5,000.

For the next five years and five months, Errachidi was subjected to some of the more egregious excesses of the administration’s post-9/11 detention system. First he was “rendered” back to Afghanistan and held for 19 days in the “Dark Prison,” the CIA’s vile torture dungeon near Kabul, where, as well as enduring brutal interrogations, rotten food and dirty water, prisoners were held in total darkness, hung on the walls by their wrists and blasted with music 24 hours a day. He was then transferred to the military-run prison at Kandahar airbase, where Chris Mackey, the pseudonym of a chief interrogator in Afghanistan, who later wrote a book about his experiences (The Interrogator’s War, with the journalist Greg Miller), recalled interrogating him. Regarding his mental illness as a ruse, Mackey wrote, “The only thing that gave this claim even a modicum of credibility was the fact that he managed to name the pharmacological drug he was taking.”

After another 26 days at the prison in Bagram airbase, where, Errachidi said, he was “tortured and interrogated in his own hell,” because someone –- presumably another prisoner –- claimed that he had received military training at the Khaldan camp near Khost in August 2001, he was transferred to Guantánamo, where his mastery of English, and his refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice, meant that the prison authorities named him “The General.” Unable to understand that he had gained a reputation as an authority figure among the prisoners because of his language skills and his willingness to speak out about the prisoners’ treatment, the authorities concluded that his status confirmed the allegations about his “al-Qaeda training” that had been made in Afghanistan. “The cook has become the General,” Errachidi told Clive Stafford Smith, who related his story in his recent book Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons. “In the minds of the Americans, the crack of an egg has become the explosion of a bomb.”

Held in isolation for two of his five years in Guantánamo, Errachidi was repeatedly interrogated about his alleged training in Afghanistan, even while suffering mental breakdowns. During February and March 2004, he became psychotic and was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs, but his interrogations continued, even though there was nothing to be gained from his claims that he was Jesus Christ, that Osama bin Laden was his student, and that a giant snowball was about to envelop the earth. He was only cleared for release after his lawyers found the documentation to prove that he had been working at the Westbury Hotel in London’s Bond Street when he was supposed to have been training at Khaldan.

Even then, however, Errachidi’s troubles were far from over. In February 2007, his lawyers were informed that both he and another British resident, Ahmed Belbacha, had been “approved to leave Guantánamo, after diplomatic arrangements for their departure had been made,” because they had been “cleared by a panel of military officers whose job was to determine whether a prisoner represented a threat to the US or its allies and whether there were other factors that could form the basis for continued detention, including intelligence value and any law-enforcement interest.”

Belbacha, like Errachidi, was innocent of any wrong-doing. A former professional footballer in Algeria, he had worked as an accounts clerk for a government-owned oil company, but had been repeatedly threatened by Islamic extremists. After escaping to the UK in 1999, he settled in the seaside town of Bournemouth, where he found a job as a waiter in a hotel. In autumn 2001, he took a month’s vacation to visit Damascus, Tehran and an Afghan refugee camp, but was captured in Pakistan and falsely accused of attending a training camp in Jalalabad and meeting Osama bin Laden on two occasions, even though, at the time, 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.

Despite both men’s innocence, the Foreign Office callously refused to accept them back. “We’re not making any moves with these individuals or the other British residents at Guantánamo,” a spokesman said in March. “Because they are not British citizens, we’re not providing any consular or diplomatic assistance.” When asked how he imagined they might ever be able to leave Guantánamo, the official replied, “It has got nothing to do with us.”

The outline of Errachidi’s story was well covered in the Times article, and Sean O’Neill, who interviewed him in Tangier, reported sympathetically on his long years of wrongful imprisonment. Where he was misled, however, was in accepting Errachidi’s explanation that he was now a free man. As O’Neill described it, “The Red Cross had asked him before he left Guantánamo if he would not rather stay than go back to Morocco where there was a risk of torture. He found the question insulting and says that in his homeland the police received him with kindness, courtesy and mint tea. After seven days, he was sent home to his family in Tangier.” What Errachidi failed to mention was that, before being returned to his family, he was arrested on terrorism charges and brought before a court on 2 May. Although the charges were dropped after representations by Moroccan lawyers acting on information provided by Reprieve, Clive Stafford Smith told the BBC immediately afterwards that the Moroccan Interior Minister had announced that Errachidi would face new charges, relating to “membership of an unauthorized group,” in a trial that was scheduled to begin in July, and Zachary Katznelson confirmed to me on 19 June that this was still the case.

Morocco has a mixed record when it comes to dealing with its Guantánamo prisoners. Of the nine men returned prior to Errachidi, all but two are reportedly at liberty, although it has taken them many years to escape from the courts and prisons of their homeland, and there is a very real fear that Errachidi will suffer the same fate. Three of the five men transferred to Morocco in August 2004, for example, were only finally cleared of the “terrorist” charges against them in January this year, and three other men –- transferred in February 2006 and sentenced to between three and five years in prison in November 2006 for “membership of a criminal gang” and “falsifying documents” –- had to wait until last month for an appeal court to dismiss all the charges against them.

In the meantime, while Ahmed Errachidi waits to hear from the Moroccan courts, Ahmed Belbacha remains in Guantánamo, unsure whether, in the wake of the UK’s refusal to accept him, he will be returned to Algeria, where, according to Zachary Katznelson, the Algerian intelligence services have stated that they cannot ensure that he will be safe from their own personnel. In Belbacha’s case, what makes the British government’s intransigence all the more shocking is that, having insisted for five years that they would not act on behalf of British residents in Guantánamo, they had already broken their own rules, accepting the return to Britain, four weeks before Ahmed Errachidi was sent to Morocco, of Bisher al-Rawi, a 37-year old British resident from a wealthy Iraq family, who had fled Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1984 and had come to Britain with his family. Having retained his Iraqi citizenship in the hope that the family might one day be able to reclaim their property in Iraq, al-Rawi –- who was kidnapped by CIA agents while undertaking a business venture in the Gambia, rendered to the “Dark Prison,” and held in Bagram and Guantánamo for over four years –- was freed because the British government could no longer disguise the fact that he had actually been working for the British intelligence services at the time of his arrest, and that –- with a callousness that beggars belief –- MI5 had, at the same time, fed false information about him to their American counterparts.

While al-Rawi has been reunited with his family, however, his business partner and fellow British resident, Jamil El-Banna, who has also been cleared for release, remains incarcerated in Guantánamo, and is yet another victim of the latest attempts by the Americans and the British to return prisoners to countries where they are at risk of torture and abuse. A 45-year old Jordanian refugee with a British wife and five children, El-Banna came to Britain in 1994 and was granted refugee status in 2000. His problems stem from the fact that, unlike al-Rawi, he refused to be enlisted by MI5, and has continued to do so in Guantánamo, where British and American agents have persistently tried to recruit him, using a mixture of bribery and threats to his family.

In an attempt to pave the way for his enforced return to Jordan, which, as in the case of Abdullah bin Omar and his home country, he left because of religious persecution, the British government has resorted to claiming that his leave to remain in the UK has expired. Last week, in a parliamentary written reply, the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne, had the nerve to state, “Mr Banna was recognized as a refugee by the UK in 1997 and was granted indefinite leave to remain in 2000. That leave has now lapsed.” One of El-Banna’s son’s, 10-year old Anas, promptly delivered a letter to Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister-in-waiting, in which he declared, “I hope you won’t say that my Dad isn’t British so you can’t help him. My Dad was treated unfairly and kidnapped and even if he isn’t British, we, his five children, are. I hope you won’t say that my dad was away from the country for more than two years. My Dad was only out of the country because he was locked up over there.” El-Banna’s solicitor, Irene Nembhard, added, “As a refugee recognized by the UK, his status does not lapse. He has a legal entitlement to return to the UK.”

As with the cases of Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, Abdullah bin Omar, Ahmed Errachidi and Ahmed Belbacha –- and others whose stories will no doubt surface in the months to come –- it remains to be seen whether justice will triumph, when the governments of both the US and UK have so little regard for international treaties, and are dedicated, instead, to demonstrating a voracious appetite for sacrificing individuals to cover up their own mistakes.

For more on Guantánamo, “extraordinary rendition,” and the prisons at Kandahar and Bagram, 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.

As published on CounterPunch.