The screening has been arranged by Jean Lambert (UK Green MEP), with the support of Sarah Ludford (UK Liberal Democrat MEP) and Ana Gomes (Portuguese Socialist MEP), and the purpose of the screening is to raise awareness of the continued existence of Guantánamo, and its mockery of universal notions of fairness and justice, ten years after the prison opened, on January 11, 2002. Given President Obama’s very public failure to close the prison as promised, it is essential that other countries step forward to take cleared prisoners who cannot be safely repatriated, and one of the main purposes of the screening and the visit of Moazzam Begg and Andy Worthington is to encourage EU countries to re-engage with the process of resettling prisoners that was so successful in 2009 and 2010.

The screening is free, but anyone who wishes to attend needs to contact Rachel Sheppard, the Parliamentary Assistant to Jean Lambert MEP. If those wishing to attend do not already have an access badge for the European Parliament, they need to provide their full name, date of birth, nationality, passport number or ID card and number and also specify the type of document (passport, ID card) so that access badges can be arranged. Without an access badge, those wishing to attend the screening will not be allowed.

Moazzam Begg and Andy Worthington will be available to talk to the press along with Jean Lambert MP, Sarah Ludford MEP and Ana Gomes MEP. Moazzam and Andy will be available before the screening (between 4 pm and 6.30 pm) and afterwards (after 9 pm), and also on Wednesday morning, and, as mentioned above, they are hoping to have the opportunity discuss the need for European countries to revisit the generosity shown in 2009 and 2010, when many offered new homes to cleared Guantánamo prisoners who could not be safely repatriated.

171 prisoners are still held in Guantánamo, and 89 of these have been cleared for release by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force. 58 of these men are Yemenis, whose release is being prevented by President Obama, and by Congress, but others remain in need of new homes, and it is only the absence of offers from, for example, countries in Europe, that is preventing them from finally being freed.

As Guantánamo recently marked the 10th anniversary of its opening, with no sign of when, if ever it will close, given Congressional opposition, and the President’s refusal, or inability to assert his authority, it would be a powerful humanitarian gesture if European countries once more agreed to take cleared prisoners, to help to close this shameful icon of the Bush administration’s misguided “war on terror.”

Below are biographies:

Moazzam Begg is the director of the NGO Cageprisoners, and the author, with Victoria Brittain, of the book Enemy Combatant. He was held in US custody in Afghanistan and in Guantánamo from January 2002 until March 2005, when he was released without charge or trial.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, the author of The Guantánamo Files, and the co-director of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” He is well-known as a world authority on Guantánamo. His website is AndyWorthington.co.uk, and he is also on the steering committee of the newly launched campaigning website, “Close Guantánamo.”

Polly Nash is a senior lecturer at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London, and the co-director of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.”

About the film

“‘Outside the Law’ is a powerful film that has helped ensure that Guantánamo and the men unlawfully held there have not been forgotten.”
Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

“[T]his is a strong movie examining the imprisonment and subsequent torture of those falsely accused of anti-American conspiracy.”
Joe Burnham, Time Out

As featured on Democracy Now!, ABC News and Truthout. Buy the DVD here (£10 + £2 postage in the UK, and worldwide) or here if in the US ($10 post free).

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a documentary film, directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, telling the story of Guantánamo (and including sections on extraordinary rendition and secret prisons) with a particular focus on how the Bush administration turned its back on domestic and international laws, how prisoners were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan without adequate screening (and often for bounty payments), and why some of these men may have been in Afghanistan or Pakistan for reasons unconnected with militancy or terrorism (as missionaries or humanitarian aid workers, for example).

The film is based around interviews with former prisoners (Moazzam Begg and, in his first major interview, Omar Deghayes, who was released in December 2007), lawyers for the prisoners (Clive Stafford Smith in the UK and Tom Wilner in the US), and journalist and author Andy Worthington, and also includes appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Shakeel Begg, a London-based Imam, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Focusing on the stories of three particular prisoners – Shaker Aamer (who is still held, despite being cleared for release), Binyam Mohamed (who was released in February 2009) and Omar Deghayes — “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” provides a powerful rebuke to those who believe that Guantánamo holds “the worst of the worst” and that the Bush administration was justified in responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by holding men neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects with habeas corpus rights, but as “illegal enemy combatants” with no rights whatsoever.

For further information, interviews, or to inquire about broadcasting, distributing or showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” please contact Andy Worthington or Polly Nash.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This was not because of anything he had done, but because, as a critic of the regime, he had left the country in 2001, and had been in Pakistan, undertaking humanitarian work in a refugee camp when he was caught in a US bombing raid (which, with subsequent medical neglect on the part of the US authorities, led to him losing a leg). As a result, following his departure from Egypt, he had been given a three-year sentence in absentia by the Egyptian State Security Court for his alleged part in a supposed plot that was known as al-Wa’ad.

This, as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm explained, was “the first major terrorism case in Egypt” after the 9/11 attacks, in which the defendants — 94 in total — were charged with “attempting to overthrow former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime and infiltrate Palestinian territory.” However, the case “was widely condemned as an attempt by Mubarak to suppress his Islamist opponents,” and this was an interpretation that carried considerable weight, as “[m]ore than half of the suspects were subsequently released.”

In the Miami Herald on Sunday, Hannah Allam, reporting from Cairo, explained that, after six months of pressure from his lawyers, at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, Adel’s case will be heard on December 27, in an appeal for a new trial that will be held in a military court. Katie Taylor of Reprieve’s Life After Guantánamo project, said, “Egypt has an opportunity to, in a sense, wipe the slate clean when it comes to the human rights violations of the Mubarak years.”

Adel’s case is set to establish a precedent for how Egypt deals with former opponents of Mubarak’s regime who have been returning to the country since February, and it remains to be seen how the response of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) will reflect developments in Tunisia and Libya, if at all. In Tunisia, as Hannah Allam explained, “one of the first decrees of the interim Tunisian government was amnesty for political prisoners, including former or current detainees from Guantánamo,” and in Libya, former opponents of Gaddafi, and members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who opposed him from exile in Afghanistan and elsewhere, took up positions in the rebellion that finally toppled Moammar Gaddafi.

As I explained in articles here, here and here, in Tunisia, the circumstances were so favorable that a companion of el-Gazzar’s from Slovakia returned home safely, another was freed after imprisonment and a trial in Italy, and another, as Hannah Allam described it, “was freed from a Tunisian jail where the old regime had kept him since his release from US custody in 2007.” The interim government then “pledged to send a delegation to the US to negotiate for the release of the remaining Tunisians held in Guantanamo,” as Katie Taylor explained, and as I reported here, which was a development that “received considerable support among political parties and civil society in Tunisia.”

As Allam also explained:

Few analysts expect similar tolerance from Egypt’s ruling military council, which for years hyped the threat of Islamist extremism to Western allies as justification for Mubarak’s repressive police state. Since taking power in February, the council has outraged human rights advocates by subjecting about 12,000 Egyptians to military trials — more than in Mubarak’s entire time in office.

On the ground in Egypt, Adel el-Gazzar’s family “warned him that the old regime’s vast security and intelligence apparatus remained intact,” as the Herald‘s article put it, and worried that, “If that’s how revolutionary Egypt treats its civilians … then a bearded Islamist fresh out of Guantánamo stood little chance for smooth repatriation.”

His wife, Umm Abdul Rahman, who had brought up “three teenage sons, and an 11-year-old daughter who was an infant when Gazzar was detained,” said, “They paid no consideration to his age or his health. If he was cleared and released by America, then why try him again and imprison him for three more years? They were supposed to have cleared him as soon as he got back.”

Instead, as I explained in June, he was arrested on arrival at Cairo airport, and, as Allam put it, “was allowed a few moments with his wife and four children, their first meeting in a decade, and then disappeared into Egypt’s prisons” — and, specifically, the notorious Tora Prison, where Mubarak’s two sons and some of the former dictator’s senior associates “are awaiting trial on corruption and other charges.” Mohammed Zarae, an Egyptian lawyer who is representing Adel in his appeal, explained that he is not being “abused or violated,” and has been allowed family visits, although “they’ve been curtailed because Egypt is on high alert for parliamentary elections.” In a report for Al-Jazeera, however, Katie Taylor noted that, despite this, “a prisoner was allegedly tortured to death three weeks ago” in the Tora prison.

Reporting on the case that led to his in absentia conviction, the Herald noted that the Egyptian authorities opened the al-Wa’ad case immediately after the 9/11 attacks, and that many of those rounded up and sentenced after cursory trials, and that some of the defendants, including Adel and his brother Ashraf, were not even in the country at the time. Ashraf el-Gazzar said that interrogators told the prisoners, “Sorry, it’s just bad timing for you guys. You’re Mubarak’s gift to the Americans.”

Egyptian political analysts told the Herald that “Mubarak’s government fabricated or greatly exaggerated the threat posed by the defendants to prove to Washington that it was a reliable ally in the fight against terrorism,” and it was noted that, under Mubarak, most of the convictions were overturned, while other defendants “served three-year sentences and are now free.”

Adel, however, is “believed to be the last of the Waad Cell suspects still in custody,” and a military court will have to decide “whether he should be freed, kept in prison or granted a new trial based on what his attorneys say is a conviction based on evidence obtained through torture.” A memorandum of appeal submitted by his lawyers states:

The evidence against the defendant is based on the statements of other defendants, which they subsequently recanted. The court ruled that statements had been the result of physical and moral coercion by state security agents. The coercive methods of the security services became clear in the scandal following the revolution when it was revealed that physical torture had led to false confessions.

The only government official who spoke to the Miami Herald was Maj. Mukhtar el-Mullah, a member of the ruling military council, who said that “he hadn’t heard of el-Gazzar by name and had no information about the case.”

Ashraf el-Gazzar said that his brother had left the prison just once, when “he was granted a day pass to visit his ailing mother at the family home in Cairo.” He added that the authorities “flooded their block with security forces and put snipers on the roof of the house,” which, his family said, “was absurd for a man with only one leg,” and “was designed to shame them among neighbors.”

Ashraf also said that the authorities “sent along a video crew,” but “the family refused to allow recording for fear the government would use it as propaganda.” Adel’s family added that the ruling will be “the only barometer they need to decide whether human rights are a priority in the post-Mubarak Egypt,” and, in conclusion, speaking of the authorities’ plan to video Adel’s visit, Ashraf said, “They wanted to pretend that they cared about prisoners’ rights. I told one officer to his face, ‘You’re an extension of Guantánamo. What the Americans do there, you do here.’”

In her concluding thoughts, Katie Taylor of Reprieve stated, “If the military prosecutor does not acquit Adel, it will be yet one further indication that, unlike Tunisia, Egypt has not broken with its illegal detention policies. Just last week, SCAF officials went on state television to urge Egyptians to stop comparing SCAF’s rule to the Mubarak regime. Clearly, the solution is for them to stop acting like the Mubarak regime.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This was not because of anything he had done, but because, as a critic of the regime, he had left the country in 2001, and had been in Pakistan, undertaking humanitarian work in a refugee camp when he was caught in a US bombing raid (which, with subsequent medical neglect on the part of the US authorities, led to him losing a leg). As a result, following his departure from Egypt, he had been given a three-year sentence in absentia by the Egyptian State Security Court for his alleged part in a supposed plot that was known as al-Wa’ad.

This, as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm explained, was “the first major terrorism case in Egypt” after the 9/11 attacks, in which the defendants — 94 in total — were charged with “attempting to overthrow former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime and infiltrate Palestinian territory.” However, the case “was widely condemned as an attempt by Mubarak to suppress his Islamist opponents,” and this was an interpretation that carried considerable weight, as “[m]ore than half of the suspects were subsequently released.”

From America, Adel al-Gazzar’s attorney, Ahmed Ghappour, “call[ed] for the charges to be dropped.” By phone from New York, he told Al-Masry Al-Youm, “I think primarily they should be dismissed on humanitarian grounds because of what he suffered.” That was an assessment of al-Gazzar’s time in US custody, but reflecting on the Egyptian side of his story, and the trumped-up charges that led to his in absentia sentence, he added, “Such cases were often used as a tool by the Mubarak regime to silence dissent.”

Al-Gazzar’s story, in his own words, can be found in an extraordinary interview conducted in Slovakia last year by former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, but to recap briefly, as Ahmed Ghappour explained in a press release yesterday:

Mr. al-Gazzar was handed over to the US while recovering in a Pakistani hospital from injuries sustained while volunteering with the International Committee of the Red Crescent on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. He was hit by a US air strike while helping refugees displaced by the onset of war.

In the midst of his recovery, he was transferred to a US prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was subject to severe beatings, exposure to freezing temperatures, sleep deprivation for days on end, and suspension by the wrists. He received no medical attention during his time in Kandahar, and as a result, his leg was infected with gangrene so severe that it had to be amputated.

Ahmed Ghappour stated, “Mr. al-Gazzar has literally lost life and limb as a result of his unlawful detention by the United States. The last thing he deserves is to return to prison for a sham prosecution that was initiated by the abusive Mubarak regime.”

Nevertheless, he told Al-Masry Al-Youm of his concerns that al-Gazzar would be convicted and imprisoned after another sham trial, even after the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s hated regime. “The Egyptians have a track record of abuse and one that we’ve seen continued in the post-Mubarak era,” Ghappour said, reflecting on the mixed record of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took over the government after Mubarak’s resignation in February — on the one hand, the announcement of the trial, in August, of former President Mubarak, his two sons Gamal and Alaa and businessman Hussein Salem, who will face charges of “intentional murder, attempted murder of demonstrators, abuse of power to intentionally waste public funds and unlawfully profiting from public funds for them and for others,” but, on the other, the sentencing of at least 7,000 civilians in military courts since Hosni Mubarak was ousted, a much higher number than before the dictator’s fall.

“I think there is a bigger picture here, to be honest,” Ghappour added. “The question is: how will the transitional regime receive him, considering that the prosecution was based on a political crime of dissent? Does Mubarak’s departure mark a game change for the post-9/11 cases? Will he be treated differently because he was in Guantánamo Bay?”

That question has not yet been answered. As Al-Masry Al-Youm reported, “Following his arrest, the officers allowed [al-Gazzar's] wife and four children to meet with him and check up on him at the airport after his lengthy absence from the country. The authorities then proceeded to begin the legal paperwork needed to send Gazzar to the prosecution so they could determine their position regarding his case.”

Abdul Ghappour also explained that he had spoken with al-Gazzar on Sunday, as he was preparing for his flight. “He seemed really hopeful to come back home,” he said, adding, “Mr. al-Gazzar, you’d call him a true patriot. He loves Egypt and he has been dying to go back home for 10 years to be reunited with his countrymen and his family.” As his London-based lawyers at Reprieve also explained:

He had not seen his family, including his wife and four children, for a decade. Efforts by his family to visit him in Slovakia were thwarted. And, recently, his mother suffered a cerebral haemorrhage which has left her paralysed and requiring full time care.

It is to be hoped that Adel al-Gazzar will be released soon, as he has already suffered more than enough. Held at Guantánamo for nine years despite being cleared for release back in 2004, he then found himself imprisoned again — in a detention center in Slovakia, described by local media as “a police detention facility for illegal migrants.” He and two other men released in Slovakia were held there while the government failed to sort out their status in the country, obliging al-Gazzar to embark on a hunger strike to raise awareness of their plight and secure them proper housing and residential status, but as another of his lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, explained:

This is the third time Adel has been punished for completely unsubstantiated allegations. [His] persecution … makes a mockery of everything the revolution stands for. Where is the new dawn? Justice and the rule of law must return to Egypt. We hope the Egyptian military will put an end to Adel’s decade-long ordeal.

This is my hope too, as it would be deeply disturbing if, after all he has gone through, and everything that was done to avoid him being tortured in Egypt, he were to end up abused by the successors to Mubarak’s reign of terror.

Dark ironies nevertheless pepper this case. At the time of his release from Guantánamo, for example, when the US government complied with his request not to be repatriated to Egypt, as he feared torture at the hands of the Mubarak regime, everyone who supported his release — relieved that he had been freed after a six-year wait — politely refused to point out how grimly ironic it was that al-Gazzar — and another cleared Egyptian, Sharif al-Mishad, who was released in Albania in February 2010 — couldn’t be repatriated because of fears that they would be tortured by the same torturers who had been some of the Bush administration’s closest friends when it came to torturing other prisoners seized in the “War on Terror.”

Two of those unfortunate prisoners were Mamdouh Habib, the Australian citizen rendered by the CIA from Pakistan, whose torture was personally directed by Mubarak’s spy chief Omar Suleiman, and Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, a Pakistani religious scholar rendered to torture from Indonesia, where he had been sorting out his late father’s affairs, on nothing more than the vaguest of hunches that he was involved in some way with terrorism (which he wasn’t).

There were others, detailed in an account I compiled for the United Nations in 2010, and undoubtedly others whose stories have not yet surfaced, but the most celebrated prisoner sent by the US to be tortured in Egypt was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan, who, after being picked up crossing into Pakistan form Afghanistan in December 2001, was sent to Egypt, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that two al-Qaeda operatives had been meeting with Saddam Hussein to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. Although he recanted his false confession, it was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. As for al-Libi, after his usefulness was finally exhausted, he was rendered back to Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi disposed of him in May 2009, telling the world that he had committed suicide in a prison cell.

On Tuesday, the next step took place in Adel al-Gazzar’s case, as reported in the Egyptian media. Via Mohamed Za’er, the director of the Egypt-based Human Rights Association for the Assistance of Prisoners, Daily News Egypt explained that, on Tuesday, military prosecutors had referred him to “an appeals prison not usually used for political prisoners.”

Daily News Egypt also reported that the verdict against al-Gazzar was “contested … before the military court” on Tuesday, noting also that the court “is expected to look into the case within 60 days.” Mohamed Za’er explained, “If approved, al-Gazzar will be granted a re-trial, though it is no longer a crime to be a member in an Islamist group following the January 25 Revolution. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood now has an official political party after being banned for years.”

That ought to be a good sign, but in Egypt, still caught between the end of Mubarak’s rule and a hoped-for transition to free and fair elections, nothing is certain.

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, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), 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.

In November 2008, the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas published a report, “Guantánamo’s Children: Military and Diplomatic Testimonies,” presenting evidence that 12 juveniles had been held, and this was then officially acknowledged by the Pentagon.

The next week, however, I produced another report, “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo,” providing evidence that at least 22 juvenile prisoners had been held, and drawing on the Pentagon’s own documents, or on additional statements made by the Pentagon, to confirm my claims.

Two and a half years later, I stand by that report, and am only prepared to concede that up to three of the prisoners I identified as juveniles may have been 18 at the time of their capture. In the meantime, I have identified three more juvenile prisoners, and possibly three others, bringing the total back to 22, and possibly as many as 28.

My new research coincides with a new report by the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, “Guantánamo’s Children: The WikiLeaked Testimonies,” drawing on the recent release, by WikiLeaks, of classified military documents shedding new light on the prisoners, identifying 15 juveniles, and suggesting that six others, born in 1984 or 1985, and arriving at Guantánamo in 2002 or 2003, may have been under 18, depending on when exactly they were born (which is unknown, as it is in the cases of numerous Guantánamo prisoners).

However, crucially, the UC Davis report chose to make its assessments based on the prisoners’ dates of arrival in Guantánamo, which was often up to six months after their capture, whereas I have focused on their capture date, thereby demonstrating that at least 22 of the 28 prisoners identified in my research were indeed under 18 at the time of their capture.

Of course, to be strictly correct, this analysis should go further, dealing not with the dates of capture, but with the dates when the prisoners’ alleged crimes took place. However, I simply do not have the time at present to go through every file, and, while such research would undoubtedly yield more juvenile prisoners, I am content for now to have reinforced the claims that I made in November 2008, and to have made a case for there having been at least 22, and as many as 28 juveniles held in Guantánamo.

Just three of these former child prisoners are still held, but the US position has always been a disgrace. Notoriously, in May 2003, when the story first broke that juvenile prisoners were being held at Guantánamo, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a press conference, “This constant refrain of ‘the juveniles,’ as though there’s a hundred children in there — these are not children,” while Gen. Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said:

I would say, despite their age, these are very, very dangerous people. They are people that have been vetted mainly in Afghanistan and gone through a thorough process to determine what their involvement was. Some have killed. Some have stated they’re going to kill again. So they may be juveniles, but they’re not on a little-league team anywhere, they’re on a major league team, and it’s a terrorist team. And they’re in Guantánamo for a very good reason — for our safety, for your safety.

Moreover, in May 2006, when the Independent reported on “The Children of Guantánamo Bay,” a senior Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said that the DoD “rejected arguments that normal criminal law was relevant to the Guantánamo detainees,” as the Independent put it. In Gordon’s own words, “There is no international standard concerning the age of an individual who engages in combat operations … Age is not a determining factor in detention [of those] engaged in armed conflict against our forces or in support to those fighting against us.”

This was nonsense, because, under the terms of Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which the US ratified on December 23, 2002, signatory nations are required to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict,” and not to punish them by imprisoning them alongside adult prisoners in an experimental prison devoted to coercive interrogation and — at its worst — torture.

Despite its obligations, however, only three of the juveniles held at Guantánamo were ever treated differently to the adults — three Afghan boys, Asadullah, Naqibullah and Mohammed Ismail, who were held in a separate camp until their release in January 2004. For the rest, however, there was, or has been no “physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration” whatsoever, and, instead, they have been subjected to torture and abuse, as described by many of these prisoners, “extraordinary rendition” to a torture prison in Jordan in the case of one of the juveniles, Hassan bin Attash, and, in the case of Omar Khadr, a war crimes trial, based on charges invented by Congress. In order to secure an eight-year sentence, Khadr was obliged to agree to a disgraceful plea bargain in which he claimed responsibility for his actions aged 15, during the firefight that led to his capture (and the death of a US soldier), when he was not, in fact, responsible for his actions. He was also obliged to admit that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent” who was not allowed, under any circumstances, to be engaged with US forces in combat.

It remains disgraceful that so many juveniles were held at Guantánamo — and that three former child prisoners are still held — but it is just as disgusting that, under President Obama, one of these former child prisoners was obliged to accept that, in modern-day America, lawmakers and the executive branch, without a murmur of dissent from the judiciary, have arranged for opponents of the US military in wartime to be criminalized, their actions regarded incorrectly as war crimes, and their very existence declared illegal. This is effectively no different than it was under President Bush, when the twisted ideologues who surrounded the President, under the aegis of his dark assistant Dick Cheney, created the concept of “illegal enemy combatants,” people without any rights whatsoever, who could be held forever and tortured with impunity.

The 22 juveniles held at Guantánamo

(i) The three still held

1. Ali Yahya al-Raimi (ISN 167, Yemen) Born 1984, seized December 2001 (aged 16/17). As WikiLeaks revealed, he was approved for transfer from Guantánamo in October 2004, but is still held over six and half years later. As I explained in my article, “Abandoned in Guantánamo: WikiLeaks Reveals the Yemenis Cleared for Release for Up to Seven Years,” the WikiLeaks files reveal 19 Yemeni prisoners approved for transfer between 2004 and 2007 who, disgracefully, are still held.

2. Omar Khadr (ISN 766, Canada) Born 19 September 1986, seized 19 July 2002 (aged 15). After well-chronicled abuse in Bagram and Guantánamo, Khadr, seized after a firefight in Afghanistan, accepted a plea deal in his trial by Military Commission last October, to secure an eight-year sentence, agreeing that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” who was not allowed, under any circumstances, to engage in combat with US forces. The US (under Bush and Obama) and the Canadian government have all behaved appallingly towards him.

3. Hassan bin Attash (ISN 1456, Saudi Arabia) Born 1985, seized 11 September 2002 (aged 16/17). Despite his age at the time of his capture, he was rendered on his capture to a torture prison on Jordan. He was seized with the “high-value detainee” Ramzi bin al-Shibh and is the younger brother of the “high-value detainee” Walid bin Attash (both allegedly involved in the 9/11 attacks), but there is, of course, no excuse for subjecting juveniles to torture because of their family ties.

(ii) The Afghans

4. Faris Muslim al-Ansari (ISN 253, Afghanistan/Yemen) Born 1984, seized December 2001 (aged 16/17), released December 2007. Seized crossing the Pakistani border, he explained that his family had left Yemen when he was a child, and had moved to Afghanistan, where his father had fought the Russians. He was assessed as being “a probable member of the Taliban.”

5. Shams Ullah (ISN 783, Afghanistan) Born 1986, arrived in Guantánamo October 2002 (aged 16/17), released October 2006. Described by his uncle, Bostan Karim (who is still held), as having “a mental problem,” he was shot after US forces raided the compound where he lived, suspecting that it contained insurgents.

6. Mohamed Jawad (ISN 900, Afghanistan) Born 1985, seized December 2002 (aged 16/17, although his family said he was 12 at the time of his detention), released August 2009. Put forward for a trial by Military Commission in October 2007, for allegedly throwing a grenade at US forces in a Kabul marketplace, his Commission trial essentially collapsed when his judge ruled that his confessions had been extracted through torture, and his prosecutor resigned, and he then won his habeas corpus petition in July 2009.

7. Abdul Samad (ISN 911, Afghanistan) Born 1986, seized December 2002 (aged 15/16), released September 2004. One of three (or possibly four) juveniles seized in a raid on a compound owned and run by a warlord named Samoud, who was not captured in the raid (see below for the other two confirmed juveniles). All were treated brutally in a US base in Gardez and at Bagram, where, according to another released prisoner, Habib Rahman, they were abused until they admitted attacking US forces.

8. Asadullah (ISN 912, Afghanistan) Born 1988, seized December 2002 (aged 13/14), released January 2004. See above.

9. Naqibullah (ISN 913, Afghanistan) Born 1988, seized December 2002 (aged 13/14), released January 2004. See above.

10. Abdul Qudus (ISN 929, Afghanistan) Born 1988, seized late 2002 (aged 13/14), released April 2005. He said that he was sold to US forces by opportunistic Afghan soldiers, along with Mohammed Ismail (see below), although he was assessed as having been radicalised by local imams.

11. Mohammed Ismail (ISN 930, Afghanistan) Born 1988, seized in late 2002 (aged 13/14), released January 2004. See above.

(iii) The Pakistanis

12. Khalil Rahman Hafez (ISN 301, Pakistan) Born 20 January 1984, seized December 2001 (aged 17), released September 2004. Like many Pakistanis, he had been recruited for jihad against the Northern Alliance and the US in his home country.

13. Mohammed Omar (ISN 540, Pakistan) Born 1986, seized December 2001 (aged 14/15), released September 2004. Despite traveling to Afghanistan with a friend for military training, it appears that he spent most of his time waiting around, before being captured by Afghans.

14. Saji Ur Rahman (ISN 545, Pakistan) Born 1984, seized December 2001 (aged 16/17, although Rahman himself said he was 15 when captured), released July 2003. He said that he traveled to Afghanistan with two friends to visit shrines in October 2001, but was then captured by Afghans. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no indication that the US authorities didn’t believe his story.

(iv) The Saudis

15. Abdulrazzaq al-Sharekh (ISN 67, Saudi Arabia) Born 18 January 1984, seized November 2001 (aged 17), released September 2007. He was assessed as an al-Qaeda member just a month before his release, although he may, like the majority of those accused of involvement with al-Qaeda because of their attendance at a training camp, have been nothing more than a soldier, recruited to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance.

16. Yasser Talal al-Zahrani (ISN 93, Saudi Arabia) Born 22 September 1984, seized November 2001 (aged 17), died in Guantánamo June 2006. A survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan, he died under mysterious circumstances on the night of 9 June 2006, with two other prisoners, as Scott Horton reported last year for Harper’s Magazine (and see my report and updates here, here and here).

17. Yousef al-Shehri ISN 114, Saudi Arabia) Born 8 September 1985, seized November 2001 (aged 16), released November 2007. Seized in northern Afghanistan like his cousin Yousef (see below), he was held in hideously overcrowded conditions in Sheberghan prison, belonging to the US-allied warlord General Dostum, and probably survived a massacre in container trucks, known as the “convoy of death,” before being transferred to US custody.

18. Abdulsalam al-Shehri (ISN 132, Saudi Arabia) Born 14 December 1984, seized November 2001 (aged 17), released June 2006. Like Yasser al-Zahrani, he was a survivor of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, and, with his cousin, was then held in Sheberghan before ending up in US custody.

19. Ibrahim al-Umar (ISN 585, Saudi Arabia) Born 1985, seized 28 February 2002 (aged 16/17), released May 2003. A student at a religious school in Pakistan, he was encouraged to leave the country after the US-led invasion, but was seized at a checkpoint, held by Pakistan’s notorious ISI (Inter Services Intelligence directorate), and then handed over to US forces.

(v) The others

20. Mohammed El-Gharani (ISN 269, Chad) Born 1986, seized October 2001 (aged 14/15), released June 2009. Seized in a raid on mosque in Karachi, he was treated brutally at Guantánamo, but was finally freed after winning his habeas corpus petition in January 2009.

21. Haji Mohammed Ayub ISN 279, China) Born 15 April 1984, seized December 2001 (aged 17), released May 2006 in Albania. One of 22 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province), who were detained by mistake, as they never had any affiliation with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and were solely opposed to the Chinese government. For further information, see this McClatchy Newspapers interview from 2008.

22. Rasul Kudayev (ISN 82, Russia) Born 23 January 1984, seized November 2001 (aged 17), released February 2004. A former wrestling champion from the Russian territory of Kabardino-Balkaria, north of Georgia, who also survived the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, he was rearrested in October 2005, after gunmen attacked government buildings in his hometown, and was tortured in police custody, despite protesting his innocence. The latest report, in 2008, indicated that he was still imprisoned.

The six additional prisoners who may have been under 18 at the time of their capture

23. Qari Esmhatulla (ISN 591, Afghanistan) Born 1984, seized 10 March 2002 (aged 17, or possibly 18), released October 2006. After telling a story in which he claimed to have been set up by Afghan soldiers while returning from a shrine, he was assessed as being “a low-level Taliban recruit.”

24. Hezbullah (ISN 666, Afghanistan) Born 1984, seized April 2002 (aged 17, or possibly 18), released November 2003. A Pakistani by birth who was listed as an Afghan “because that was where he had been living since 1990 and [he] considered that his home,” he was seized with his cousin after he had helped US forces locate and remove suspect items from the home of a suspected insurgent leader.

25. Peta Mohammed (ISN 908, Afghanistan) Born 1985, seized December 2002 (aged 16/17), released March 2004. Do note, however, that, in the documents released by WikiLeaks, his date of birth was recorded as 1984, which, if correct, would mean that he was almost certainly 18 at the time of his capture. If he was under 18, he was one of four juveniles seized in a raid on the compound owned and run by a warlord named Samoud (see Abdul Samad, ISN 911, above).

26. Mahbub Rahman (ISN 1052, Afghanistan) Born 1985, seized 1 June 2003 (aged 17, or possibly 18), released August 2008. He was assessed in April 2008 as  being “a member of an Anti-Coalition Militia (ACM) cell” located in Khost province, having been captured after a firefight with coalition forces, and as a “high risk” prisoner, who was “likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies.” Nevertheless, he was transferred back to Afghanistan just four months later.

27. Sultan Ahmad (ISN 842, Pakistan) Born 1 November 1984, probably seized before November 2002 (aged 17), released September 2004. Regarded as deceptive, he said that he was seized after traveling through Afghanistan to try to reach Turkey. The authorities in Guantánamo suspected that he was “an extremist recruit” in his assessment in November 2003, although he was released 10 months later.

28. Shakrukh Hamiduva (ISN 22, Uzbekistan) Born on 13 December 1983, probably seized in November 2001 (aged 17), released September 2009 in Ireland. He stated that he left Uzbekistan because of religious persecution, lived in a refugee camp in Tajikistan for 18 months, and was then taken to Afghanistan with other refugees, where he eventually worked as a taxi driver, which is what he was doing when he was seized. The US authorities, in contrast, regarded him as a Taliban-affiliated fighter with the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan/Uzbekistan.

In addition, there is a remote possibility that four others were under 18 at the time of their capture. The first is Mohammed Ishaq (ISN 20), a Pakistani. Born in 1983, he and a friend traveled to Afghanistan at the start of November 2001 to find his friend’s brother, who had gone to Afghanistan to fight against the Northern Alliance. Sometime in November 2001, he was seized by Northern Alliance forces in Kunduz, but he would only have been 17 at the time of his capture if he was born in late November or December 1983. Similarly, three Saudis — Ali Mohammed Nasir Mohammed (ISN 172), Tariq al-Harbi (ISN 265) and Abdul Khaliq al-Baidhani (ISN 553) — were also born in 1983 and were probably seized in mid-December 2001, meaning that they would only have been under 18 at the time of their capture of they were born in the second half of December 1983.

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, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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

Since May 2007, I have been writing articles on a regular basis dealing exclusively with the horrors of Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s torture program, explaining how few of the prisoners held at Guantánamo had any involvement with terrorism, how many innocent men and boys were seized by mistake or sold to US forces for bounty payments by the military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, and how the “War on Terror” initiated by the Bush administration was an abomination.

This was because Bush’s “war” — essentially maintained by the Obama administration — involved confusing terrorists with soldiers, and attempting to do away with the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture, as well as other traditions more specifically associated with the United States — the Constitution and the separation of powers, for example, sidelined by an executive branch that sought unfettered executive power.

In addition, Bush’s “war” led directly to the situation exposed most clearly in the recently released documents: the persistent attempts by interrogators to ramp up the significance of the innocents, the nobodies and the insignificant Taliban foot soldiers in their possession through the only source available to them — the prisoners themselves.

Whether in Guantánamo or in secret CIA prisons, the prisoners — through repeated exposure to what were described as “family albums” of photos — were prevailed upon to provide statements or confessions about other prisoners. If the prisoners did not willingly provide information, either because they knew nothing, or were unwilling to do so, they were persuaded through the use of torture or other forms of coercion, or through bribery — the promise of better living conditions, or of otherwise restricted “comfort items.”

The results are plain to see in the number of allegations, masquerading as evidence, which are attributed to “high-value detainees” like Abu Zubaydah, for whom the torture program under Bush was specifically developed (leading to his torture by waterboarding on 83 occasions in August 2002), and other notorious informants who, in exchange for preferential treatment, told lies about their fellow prisoners.

Although these false confessions were relied upon by the US military (and, on many occasions, by the Justice Department and by the President’s own Guantánamo Review Task Force), they have been exposed, on an infrequent basis, in the mainstream media, and, more often, by judges in the District Court in Washington D.C., who have repeatedly refused to accept their statements as evidence in the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions.

Until now, however, they were never gathered together in one place for discerning readers to be able to piece together the extent to which Guantánamo is — and was — a house of cards built on torture, bribery and lies. However, while it is reassuring that the prevalence of these statements by tortured prisoners and other unreliable witnesses has been recognized in the US media in the last week (see the McClatchy article, “Eight Guantánamo detainees testified against 255“), the coverage by other media outlets has not necessarily been as rigorous as those who have been studying Guantánamo for many years were hoping for.

The academic and blogger Chris Floyd, for example, had harsh but just words for the New York Times in his article, “Normalizing Evil,” which dealt with the distortions apparent in the Times‘ articles, “Classified Files Offer New Insights Into Detainees” and “Judging Detainees’ Risk, Often With Flawed Evidence.” Floyd might also have mentioned, “As Acts of War or Despair, Suicides Rattle a Prison,” which examined the three deaths at the prison in June 2006 without mentioning US soldiers’ claims, aired in Harper’s Magazine last year, indicating that the official suicide story was a cover-up.

Elsewhere, the Times‘ coverage provided the basis for a bizarre article in The New Republic by Jeffrey Rosen, who tried to use the Times to score points against WikiLeaks, declaring:

Unlike the Times’s story, which was accompanied by seven carefully selected detainee assessments, WikiLeaks’s decision to publish all 779 of the raw assessments is a reckless act that can only harm the detainees themselves — making it harder for the Obama administration to release those it would like to free. As has long been known, the detainee assessments are a messy grab-bag of unsubstantiated fictions, hearsay about individual detainees, and tentative assessments of their genuine danger. The United States is in the middle of delicate negotiations with a variety of countries to accept some of the detainees for repatriation, and, now, every time a particular case comes up, the foreign governments the US are asking to accept the detainees will find it politically harder to do so because of charges in the reports that may or may not be true.

Apart from the description of the supposed intelligence as “a messy grab-bag of unsubstantiated fictions, hearsay about individual detainees, and tentative assessments of their genuine danger,” this was nonsense, not only because the Times had published more than seven profiles in its “Guantánamo Docket” database (“about 20,” as stated in an article, “Answers to Readers’ Questions” on April 25), but also because of the entirely unjustified claim that publishing the files would damage the US government’s “delicate negotiations” with other countries.

Back in September 2009, when the Swiss government was considering taking a handful of prisoners from Guantánamo, I briefed a Swiss journalist on the background to the Guantánamo stories, noting, in a description that is not out of place a year and a half later, “how prisoners had ended up in Guantánamo without anyone really knowing who they were — because the majority were handed over by the Americans’ Afghan or Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments for ‘al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects’ were widespread, and also because, once they ended up in US custody, they were never adequately screened to ascertain whether or not they were combatants,” and also “how much of the supposed ‘evidence’ against the prisoners was extracted from other prisoners, or from the prisoners themselves, under dubious circumstances (involving, on the one hand, coercion or torture, and, on the other, bribery; in other words, ‘confessions’ in exchange for better living conditions).”

What I did not explain at the time, because it appeared to be spectacularly sensitive information, which could jeopardize the release of prisoners in the future, was that, when Swiss officials traveled to Guantánamo to see the files of the prisoners whose settlement they were being encouraged to pursue by the US State Department, they were not shown responsible assessments of the prisoners’ status, but were, instead, shown documents which alleged that the men they had been asked to take were “low risk,” “medium risk” and “high risk.”

At the time, I was appalled that the Obama administration was allowing such exaggerated and irresponsible assessments to be shown to the representatives of countries who were being asked to help the United States by taking in prisoners who could not be repatriated because they faced the risk of torture. I was also appalled to discover that the “low risk” prisoner was a Uighur, a Muslim from China’s Xinjiang province, whose habeas corpus petition had been granted by a US judge in October 2008 after the Bush administration had dropped all pretense that he and 16 of his compatriots were “enemy combatants,” and who was, therefore, not “low risk” but absolutely no risk at all.

Finally, however, with the release of these documents by WikiLeaks, I understand that these are the documents that were shown to prospective host countries. I also understand that the risk assessments almost all betray the kind of exaggeration that plagued the Uighurs’ files, with innocent men and unwilling Taliban conscripts joining the Uighurs as “low risk” prisoners, and similar exaggerations infecting many of the other assessments, resulting in other innocent men and Taliban foot soldiers being labeled as “medium risk” or even as “high risk” prisoners — like the former child prisoner Mohammed El-Gharani, for example, who was just 14 years old when seized in a raid on a mosque in Pakistan.

El-Gharani was labeled as a “high risk” prisoner, but Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush, ordered his release in January 2009, when he realized that some of the informants mentioned above were responsible for the supposed evidence against him, which, amongst other outlandish fantasies, contained a claim that, at the age of 11, when El-Gharani had been with his parents in Saudi Arabia, he had been part of an al-Qaeda cell in London.

This story was discussed in an article in the New York Times last week, which was worthy of Jeffrey Rosen’s appreciation, but he spectacularly missed the point by trying to blame WikiLeaks for damaging the prisoners’ chances of release. As I hope to have demonstrated, WikiLeaks’ release of all the files will actually help to shine a light on injustices that would otherwise remain hidden — and on perversities like the one I discussed above.

These revelations may, in the end, not bring about the closure of Guantánamo, although they should, but if that is the case it will be because of the actions of the administration, Congress, the judiciary and the mainstream media, and not because of WikiLeaks.

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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

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

In addition — and perhaps most crucially — Moazzam and I were looking forward to having the opportunity to discuss the existence, in the early years of the “War on Terror,” of a secret CIA torture prison at Stare Kiejkuty, near Szymany, where a number of “high-value detainees,” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, were held, as part of a network of secret prisons that also included facilities in Thailand, Romania, Lithuania and Morocco.

This aspect of the tour is of particular relevance right now because one of the men held in Stare Kiejkuty was Abu Zubaydah, a man who, it turned out, was not a significant terrorist at all, but was, instead, the mentally damaged gatekeeper for a training camp in Afghanistan that was closed down by the Taliban in 2000 because its leader, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, refused to allow it to be taken over by Osama bin Laden. Just two weeks ago, Abu Zubaydah was granted “victim” status by the Polish Prosecutor in an ongoing investigation into the complicity of the Polish government — under former Prime Minister Leszek Miller and former President Aleksander Kwasniewski — in the establishment of the secret prison. This followed the granting of “victim” status to another “high-value detainee,” Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — allegedly the mastermind of the atack on the USS Cole in 2000 — last October.

Moazzam and I were met at the airport in Kraków by Anna Minkiewicz, a friend and supporter who, heroically and almost single-handedly, organized the tour and translated and sub-titled the film, which, in Polish, is “Poza Prawem: Echa z Guantánamo,” although she could not have done so without some heroic assistance on the subtitles, from Polly, here in the UK, and without the dedicated support in Poland of Przemysław Wielgosz, the chief editor of the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, who supplied all the contacts for the tour’s local media partners — a great group of people who not only made us welcome everywhere we went, but also arranged most of the publicity. Despite communicating by email for many years (since Anna first contacted me out of the blue with the kind of detailed and engaging email that is all too rare), we had never met, and I was looking forward to spending a week together, and also to spending a few days with Moazzam, who was only able to stay for the first two screenings in Warszawa and Łódź.

After settling in for the evening, in wonderful high-ceilinged rooms in a well-preserved building overlooking the Main Market Square (one of the largest in Europe), Anna took us, past some excellent architecture (including St. Mary’s Basilica and the Sukiennice — or Cloth Hall), to a charming little restaurant, where we happily spent a few hours in a free-wheeling discussion that touched on Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Africa, amongst other topics.

Day One: Kraków and Warszawa (Warsaw)

In the morning, we made our way across the square to a bar overlooking the Cloth Hall, for a live interview with TVN, one of the major independent TV channels in Poland, for the morning news, which was an excellent opportunity for Moazzam and I to publicize the tour, to explain why we were in Poland, and how the Polish people can help to close Guantánamo by offering new homes to cleared prisoners. I had been interviewed in London in December by another TVN reporter, Michal Sznajder, for a programme about the British government’s financial settlement with former Guantánamo prisoners (which has not yet been broadcast), so I was aware that TVN employs some fine journalists interested in covering important topics. The presenter, Marcin Sawicki, was well prepared, having watched the film the night before, and the interview is available here (in Polish), although in retrospect it was disappointing that, in the six minutes alloted to us, we didn’t have the opportunity to raise the topic of the secret CIA prison.

After the interview, while I returned to my room to catch up on emails, Moazzam and Anna visited the Jewish Quarter, where the echoes of the Holocaust obviously left a deep impression on Moazzam (who attended a Jewish school as a child), as it was something he referred to repeatedly during the rest of his visit — and in fact, as Moazzam and I both attempted to understand modern, post-Communist Poland, on our first ever visit, and the circumstances in which a government desperate for approval from the US agreed to host a secret torture prison on Polish soil, we were constantly prompted to draw analogies with the torture and brutality of the Nazis and the Soviet Union, which provide — or ought to provide — powerful resonances for the Polish people, and unassailable reasons why new atrocities should not have been allowed to happen in their country.

After a late breakfast, we then made our way to the station to catch a train to Warsaw. In Poland’s railway stations, the ghosts of the Soviet era were more tangible than they were in the streets of Kraków in particular, which was an almost miraculous survivor of the devastation of Poland by the Nazis, and is now a major tourist attraction, but the trains, although old and slow for the most part, were a delight, with the kind of six- or eight-person compartments that have now vanished from Britain, but which have a particular charm and intimacy not replicated in modern, open-plan carriages.

Our first stop in Warsaw was Kino Muranów, where we were met by the tall and enthusiastic figure of Bartek Kurzyca of the Globale political collective, which has connections in Berlin and Montevideo, and which was the media partner for our events in Warsaw.

The first of these was a press conference with Bartlomiej Jankowski, the lawyer for Abu Zubaydah, a smart and serious man who greeted us warmly, and added depth and resonance to our introduction to the Polish media. It was a great pleasure to meet him, and the press conference was a success, with Moazzam and I interviewed afterwards by Wojciech Cegielski of Polskie Radio and Adam Krzykowski of the State broadcaster TVP. At 6 pm, TVP broadcast a report on the press conference in its news programme “Panorama,” which was useful and important.

Moazzam and Anna and I actually watched the “Panorama” report in the office of Mikołaj Pietrzak, the lawyer for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, where we had a meeting (after dropping our bags off at our hotel) that also included Irmina Pacho of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, which played a crucial role last summer in obtaining the flight logs for the flights in and out of Stare Kiejkuty between December 2002 and September 2003, and I wrote about the flight logs last August, in an article entitled New Evidence About Prisoners Held in Secret CIA Prisons in Poland and Romania and followed up with Will Poland’s Former Leaders Face War Crimes Charges for Hosting Secret CIA Prison? This was when I first made contact with Adam Bodnar of the Helsinki Foundation — a contact that led me, on this trip, to make contact with Bartlomiej Jankowski, Mikołaj Pietrzak and Irmina Pacho.

The meeting with the lawyers was particularly useful, reassuring them that their cause has not been forgotten, that it is being watched with intense interest by lawyers, activists and other decent-minded people in countries around the world (including the US and the UK) and that, despite large-scale indifference in Poland, it was also possible to stir up interest through the film and the tour, and to establish important contacts across the country, and the building blocks for a network of interested parties who can move forward with their shared interests. The meeting was also extremely useful for providing Moazzam and I with strategies for the future, and I was delighted to receive English language translations of various important documents — as well as new and relevant information — that I’ll be writing about in another article in the very near future.

From Mikołaj Pietrzak’s office, we returned to Kino Muranów, where it was enormously satisfying to discover that the cinema was packed, and that at least 200 people had turned up to watch the film’s first public outing in Poland. After we had sneaked off, during the screening, for some food — which turned out to be a surreal meal in a Vietnamese vegan restaurant where we had to order our food based solely on rather lurid photos — we returned for the Q&A session, and were joined by  Draginja Nadażdin, the director of Amnesty International Poland (which provided some support for the tour), and had our first taste of the dedication with which Polish audiences pursue opportunities to ask questions.

Day Two: Warszawa (Warsaw) and Łódź

On Wednesday morning, after breakfast and a quick tour of the centre of Warsaw, painstakingly reconstructed after its complete destruction by the Nazis, we took a taxi to the outskirts of town, to a studio where Moazzam and I were interviewed for a documentary about the secret prison that is being made by Roman Kurkiewicz, a veteran of the Solidarity movement (Solidarnosc), and also a journalist, author and professor, and the kind of principled revolutionary pro-democracy figure that I admired while watching the rise of Solidarity from afar 30 years ago. The documentary promises to be excellent, and I made sure that Roman knew that I would be delighted to tour it and make it available in the UK and the US if he makes an English version.

From the studio, we rushed to the station to catch the train to Łódź, where we were met by Marek Jedliński of of Krytyka Polityczna, and, at the cinema, his wife and the two translators for the evening. With some time to spare, we had an opportunity to chat, to enjoy some home-cooked food on sale in the basement of the cinema (which is also a cinema museum, with some wonderful old projectors filling the corners of various rooms), and also to be photographed (see the photos here and here) prior to an interview, during the screening (when we again retired downstairs), with Moazzam and I, which was conducted by a reporter from the Polish news agency Polska Agencja Prasawa, and which formed the basis of an article (available here in Polish) in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

For the second night, the cinema was packed out, with around 100 people, and the screening was followed by another lively Q&A session (audio here, in Polish and English), in which Moazzam, Anna and I were also joined by Wojciech Makowski of Amnesty International Poland. With translators (not available in Warsaw), it was, I think, a more satisfying Q&A session, with all the major topics covered, and a true abhorence of torture vividly expressed in various quarters of the crowd.

Afterwards, when I had let Wojciech Makowski know that I was happy for Amnesty to use my list of the remaining prisoners to encourage Amnesty members to write to the prisoners in Guantánamo (and also see here), the organizers took us to Ganesh, an excellent Indian restaurant, where we chatted away merrily and devoured butter chicken, garlic naan, and, in my case, some rather fine mutton with spinach, before retiring to our hotel. With two days completed, it was obvious that the tour was proving to be a great success.

Day Three: Poznań

After a late night in our hotel, in a block with an evident Soviet history, where Moazzam and I, who were sharing a room, stayed up talking about the tour, about Shaker Aamer, about anti-terror legislation in the UK, and about the plight of the Yemenis in Guantánamo (and I then retired to the bathroom to write Guantánamo: A Tale of Two Tunisians, letting Moazzam sleep), I awoke to find that Moazzam had already left for the station, to catch a train to Warsaw and a flight home. After breakfast, Anna and I returned to the station for the next stage of our journey, to Poznań, where we met up again with Draginja Nadażdin, the director of Amnesty International Poland, for a screening in another arthouse cinema, Kino Rialto.

The publicity in Poznań had been very last-minute, so there was not a huge audience, but the 30 or so people who did attend were refreshingly committed, and, after Anna, Draginja and I had grabbed some food in the only nearby place that wasn’t McDonald’s (a little pasta place), we had an excellent Q&A session, honing our messages about dispelling the lies about Guantánamo, and pushing for the resettlement of cleared prisoners and greater visibility for the topic of the torture prison.

Day Four: Wrocław

On Friday morning, after filling up on coffee and breakfast at our well-appointed hotel — where, the day before, I had thought the recent smoking ban in Poland didn’t apply, because the owner was so brazenly smoking in his own dining room — Anna and I took the train to Wrocław (formerly known as Breslau, and handed over from German to Polish control after the Second World War), where we were met by Aneta Jerska of Falanster, a collective of young activists with a lovely bookshop, and fine food and coffee, where we got to relax for an hour or so after dropping our bags off at the no-frills, Soviet-era Hotel Polonia, complete with sullen staff.

From Falanster, we made our way to Kino Warszawa, a delightfully unreconstructed old cinema (in a country with its fair share of unreconstructed old cinemas) inside a splendid old building, where I was introduced to my translator for the evening, and also to Józef Pinior, our very special guest. A former member of the Solidarity movement, he was an MEP from 2004 to 2009, and, crucially, was first a member, and then the Vice-Chair of the Subcommittee of Human Rights, where he worked with other MEPs, including the UK’s Sarah Ludford, on a crucial investigation into renditions in Europe in the “War on Terror,” which was published in January 2007, and entitled, “Report on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transportation and illegal detention of prisoners” (PDF, and see the resolution here).

As a result of his investigations, Józef Pinior came across information in Poland establishing that the Polish government not only sanctioned the establishment of a secret CIA prison in Poland, but was actively involved in it (as will be discussed in more detail in a forthcoming article). Despite this, he found himself ridiculed in Poland by those he sought to expose, although his presence on Friday — and the rare opportunity to discuss the secret prison in a public forum — drew the most spirited audience of the tour, anxious to debate ways to take the story forward, and, from feedback I received afterwards, grateful that Anna and I had brought the film to Wrocław, that I was bringing news of interest in the story of the prison from outside Poland, and that Józef Pinior had an opportunity to explain what he knew to a sympathetic audience, and was able to assert that the Prosecutor’s granting of “victim” status to Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri establishes, beyond any doubt, that both men were held in the secret prison at Stare Kiejkuty.

After the screening and the Q&A session, a group of us — including Józef Pinior, Anna, Aneta and I — found a wonderful Armenian restaurant around the corner from the cinema, with great food (my beef and spinach was excellent), where we discussed the secret prison, Pinior’s investigations, and the state of politics in Poland, enabling to understand more about how he could have been so thoroughly sidelined by politicians and the media.

We also proceeded more generally to discuss the dangers of unchecked global capitalism , especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the failure of governments to legislate against the banking sector, or to hold anyone accountable, and the need for new political responses. As throughout my visit, I was happy to point out that savage ideological cuts in the UK have provoked significant resistance by students and scholchildren, but also to concede that it does not yet constitute a new political movement, and broad coalitions (as with Solidarity) and further spurs to erode complacency and apathy will be needed before there is any real hope of a paradigm shift in the problems of the West.

Day Five: Kraków

For the last screening of the tour, Anna and I took a four and a half hour train ride back to Kraków, arriving with time to drop our cases off at Anna’s apartment, and to make our way to Kino Agrafka, another lovely arthouse cinema in a rambling old building, where another lively audience, of about 50 people, had forsworn the more recreational attractions of a Saturday night for an evening of arbitrary detention and torture. I was, by now, clinging to consciousness somewhat, but a Polish speciality for dinner — tasty meat and vegetable stew served inside a hollowed-out loaf of bread — and a few coffees brought me back to life a little for the final Q&A session of the tour, and afterwards Anna and I retired to a bar with one of the audience members.

Unwinding after an intense but rewarding week was a precursor to my final day in Kraków, which involved sleeping, eating, shopping and chatting before my flight back on Monday morning. It was not the easiest week I have ever had, as I received the sad news on Thursday evening that my father had passed away suddenly, which was difficult to deal with so far from home, but it was a very worthwhile trip, and I am deeply grateful to Anna for organizing it and funding it, and also for being there for me when I received the news about my father’s death.

In combatting the injustices of the “War on Terror,” and calling for accountability for America’s torturers (and their allies), those of us working in the US and the UK over the last nine years have realized that it is a long road, and not one for those seeking instant results. I hope that my presence, and that of Moazzam, helped to raise awareness of this amongst Poland’s anti-torture activists, as well as reassuring them that they are not alone, and I hope also that, with Anna, we helped to keep the story of the secret prison — and of cleared prisoners in Guantánamo who need new homes — alive in the media.

From my point of view, the trip was worth it alone for the audiences who saw the film and engaged in the Q&A sessions, for the media interest, and for the contacts I established with activists, lawyers and journalists, but I’m also pleased that it was more than just the sum of its parts — that Anna was such an engaging host, and that there are so many lovely people in Poland.

Note: In Poznań and Kraków, university lecturers who attended the screenings asked for (and received) copies of the film, to arrange screenings in their universities and to use in lecture topics for their students. I would like to encourage more people to do this, and also hope that there will be interest in making the sub-titled version of the film available on DVD. Please contact me (or Anna Minkiewicz if  writing in Polish) if this is of interest.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

Last week, it was announced that, from February 1 to 5, 2011, Moazzam Begg, former Guantánamo prisoner and director of the NGO Cageprisoners, and Andy Worthington, investigative journalist and author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, will be visiting Poland for a tour of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” which Worthington co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash. The Polish version of the film, with subtitles, is entitled, “Poza Prawem: Echa z Guantánamo.”

The details of the tour (and of the film) are available here, and this update is to provide information about the press conference in Warsaw on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the key themes of the tour, which, as well as providing important information about Guantánamo (regarding the innocent men held there, and how few prisoners are alleged to have had any connection to terrorist actvities), is also intended to raise awareness of the 31 men who have been cleared for release, but cannot be repatriated because they face a credible risk of torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries.

Crucially, the tour is also intended to create a space for discussions about the secret CIA prison that existed at Stare Kiejkuty, near Szymany, and the ongoing investigation into the complicity of senior Polish officials in establishing this prison, where numerous “high-value detainees” were held and tortured in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

Moazzam Begg and Andy Worthington will be joined for the press conference on Tuesday by Bartlomiej Jankowski, the lawyer for Abu Zubaydah, one of the “high-value detainees” held in the secret CIA prison at Stare Kiejkuty, who was granted “victim” status by the Polish Prosecutor just 10 days ago as part of an ongoing investigation into the prison.

The organizers also hope that Mikołaj Pietrzak, the lawyer for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another “high-value detainee” who was granted “victim” status in October last year, and Irmina Pacho of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, which played a major role last summer in exposing flight records demonstrating the movement of prisoners to and from the prison, will also be available to discuss this crucial matter of international significance. The “victim” status granted to al-Nashiri is of particular interest as it was announced last week that the Obama administration is planning to proceed with his trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo.

For further information, or to arrange interviews, please contact Andy Worthington. The contact in Poland is Anna Minkiewicz, the organizer of the tour.

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

Described as “a powerful film that has helped ensure that Guantánamo and the men unlawfully held there have not been forgotten” by Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International UK, and as “a strong movie examining the imprisonment and subsequent torture of those falsely accused of anti-American conspiracy” by Time Out, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” tells the story of Guantánamo  (including sections on extraordinary rendition and secret prisons) with a particular focus on how the Bush administration turned its back on domestic and international laws, how prisoners were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan without adequate screening (and often for bounty payments), and why some of these men may have been in Afghanistan or Pakistan for reasons unconnected with militancy or terrorism (as missionaries or humanitarian aid workers, for example).

The film is based around interviews with former prisoners (Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes), lawyers for the prisoners (Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, and Tom Wilner, who was Counsel of Record to the Guantánamo prisoners in their cases before the US Supreme Court), and journalist and author Andy Worthington, and also includes appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Shakeel Begg, a London-based Imam, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Focusing on the stories of three particular prisoners — Shaker Aamer (who is still held) and released prisoners Binyam Mohamed and Omar Deghayes — “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” provides a powerful rebuke to those who believe that Guantánamo holds “the worst of the worst” and that the Bush administration was justified in responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by holding men neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects with habeas corpus rights, but as “illegal enemy combatants” with no rights whatsoever.

The tour, organized by Anna Minkiewicz, a supporter of Andy Worthington’s work and that of Cageprisoners, is backed by Le Monde Diplomatique in Poland, with additional support from Amnesty International Poland, and is intended to raise awareness of the truth about Guantánamo — that very few of the men held are alleged to have had any connection to terrorist actvities, and that the prison’s very existence is an affront to established laws and treaties, and to common notions of fairness and decency.

The organizers also intend the tour to provide the impetus for parliamentarians to recognize that there are, currently, up to 31 men in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release, but who cannot be repatriated because they face a credible risk of torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries, and to press for Poland to join 15 other countries — including Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland — in offering new homes to some of these men.

We also anticipate that the tour will provide an opportunity for timely discussions about the Polish government’s complicity in the establishment of a secret CIA prison in Poland, following the announcement on January 20 that the “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah has been granted “victim” status by the Polish Prosecutor in connection with an ongoing investigation into the prison, at Stare Kiejkuty, near Szymany. This follows the granting of “victim” status to another “high-value detainee,” Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, in October last year.

Also showing will be two short animated films by Afghan filmmaker Said Mohsen Hossaini.

Information about the tour is available below.

For further information, or to arrange interviews, please contact Andy Worthington. The contacts in Poland are Anna Minkiewicz, Przemyslaw Wielgosz, the chief editor of the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique and, at Amnesty International, press officer Aleksandra Minkiewicz.

Please note that other speakers are still to be confirmed, and please also note that Moazzam Begg will only be in Poland on February 1 and 2.

Tuesday February 1, 15:00 hrs: Press conference to discuss Guantánamo and the secret CIA prison in Poland with Moazzam Begg, Andy Worthington and Bartlomiej Jankowski.
Kino Muranów, ul. Gen. Andersa 1 (Plac Bankowy, metro “Ratusz”), 00-147, Warszawa.
Subject to final confirmation, Moazzam Begg and Andy Worthington will be joined for the press conference on Tuesday by Bartlomiej Jankowski, the lawyer for Abu Zubaydah. The organizers also hope that Mikołaj Pietrzak, the lawyer for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and Irmina Pacho of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, which played a major role last summer in exposing flight records demonstrating the movement of prisoners to and from the prison, will also be available to discuss this crucial matter of international significance.

Tuesday February 1, 20:00 hrs: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” in association with the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique and Amnesty International Poland.
Followed by Q&A with Moazzam Begg, Andy Worthington, Bartlomiej Jankowski, the lawyer for Abu Zubaydah, and Draginja Nadażdin, director, Amnesty International Poland.
Kino Muranów, ul. Gen. Andersa 1 (Plac Bankowy, metro “Ratusz”), 00-147, Warszawa.
See the website here or email.
Media partner: międzynarodowy kolektyw Globale (Berlin-Montevideo-Warszawa). Please contact Bartek Kurzyca on (48) 515 603 907 or by email.

Wednesday February 2, 18:00 hrs: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Moazzam Begg, Andy Worthington and Wojciech Makowski, Amnesty International Poland.
Kino studyjne „Kinematograf”, Pl. Zwycięstwa 1, Łódź.
Phone: (48) 42 674 0957 (contacts are Anna Michalska or Jakub Sas) or see the website here, and see here for a map.
Media partner: The local branch of Krytyka Polityczna. Please contact: Marek Jedliński.

Thursday February 3, 20:00 hrs: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.”
Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington and Draginja Nadażdin, director, Amnesty International Poland.
Kino Rialto, ul. Dąbrowskiego 38, Poznań.
Phone: (48) 61 847 5399 or email Piotr Zakens (also on 600 254 502). Also see the website here.

Friday February 4, 18:00 hrs: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington and ex-MEP Józef Pinior.
Kino Warszawa, ul. Piłsudskiego 64, Wrocław.
Please note that Józef Pinior was a member of the EU commission which investigated EU involvement in rendition and secret prisons.
Phone: (48) 071 342 1246.
Media partner: Kolektyw Falanster. Contact: Aneta Jerska. Also with support from the Odra Film Institution and Amnesty International Wrocław.

Saturday February 5, evening, 20:00 hrs: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.”
Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington and Anna Minkiewicz.
Kino Agrafka, ul. Krowoderska 8, Kraków.
See the website here. or phone (48) 12 430 0179 or mobile: 57 123 233.
Media partner: Fundacja Cyrk Edison. Contact: Robert Skrzydlewski.

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

For the most part, the suffering of the Tunisians at Guantánamo has been deeply depressing. Many, if not most were horribly abused, and when the Bush administration finally decided to clear the majority of them for release (largely in 2006), their nightmare was far from over. The men feared being repatriated, because they had all left Tunisia many years before, and were aware that all that awaited them at home was further abuse and imprisonment, followed by show trials based on information extracted through the torture of others in Tunisia, which had led to them receiving prison sentences in absentia.

The two Tunisians repatriated from Guantánamo in 2007

Nevertheless, the Bush administration, in furtherance of America’s close ties with Ben Ali, and long support for his oppressive regime, stealthily repatriated two Tunisians in June 2007 — 38-year old Lotfi Lagha and 51-year old Abdullah bin Omar — on the basis of “diplomatic assurances,” agreed between the US and Tunisia, which purported to guarantee that the two men would be treated humanely on their return.

Little was known of Lotfi Lagha, as he did not have legal representation in Guantánamo, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights three years before his release. As I explained in an article at the time, “all that exists in the public domain to mark his 2,000-day imprisonment are three pages of notes” from a military review board in 2005.

From this short document — full of unsubstantiated allegations about connections with terrorists — it was clear that Lagha, who was seized on the Afghan-Pakistani border in December 2001, had served in the Tunisian army as a young man, and had then fled to Italy, where he seems to have settled for many years. In early 2001 he traveled to Afghanistan, settling with other Tunisians in Jalalabad, and associating, at some point, with members of the missionary organization Jamaat-al-Tablighi. According to his own account, he never trained in a camp in Afghanistan, never took up arms against the Americans or anybody else, and thought “al-Qaeda’s belief system strange and that they are not good.”

Only later did it emerge that he had had all his fingers, except for his thumbs, amputated in US custody at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, an act of supposed medical necessity that he maintained was unnecessary.

Bin Omar, as I explained in an article at the time, had worked as a mechanic for the Tunisian railways, but had left the country for Saudi Arabia in 1989, because of religious persecution. Soon after, he moved to Pakistan with his wife and children, where he was living when he was convicted, in absentia, by a Tunisian court for belonging to the Islamist political party Ennahdha, and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Human Rights Watch reported that the “primary evidence” against him in this trial (in 1995) “appears to have been the statement that one of his 19 co-defendants made to the police in 1993, in which he claimed that [he] had taken a leadership position in an organization known as the Tunisian Islamist Front while in Pakistan.” Based on his experience of similar cases, his lawyer, Samir Ben Amor, explained that he thought it “likely that this incriminating statement was the product of torture and abuse.”

Captured in Pakistan in April 2002, during a frenzied few months when all manner of innocent Arabs were rounded up, bin Omar said in Guantánamo that he was sold to the Americans by the Pakistanis for $5,000. In his five-year detention, he was only allowed to meet a lawyer for the first — and only — time on May 1, 2007, when Zachary Katznelson of Reprieve met him, and explained that 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.” Katznelson added, “When Reprieve later learned of Mr. Bin Omar’s Tunisian conviction in absentia — a conviction Mr. Bin Omar likely does not know about — Reprieve repeatedly requested additional visits with our client. The United States government failed to respond to any of those requests” — and, in fact, stealthily repatriated him before Reprieve could protest about it as Reprieve’s director, Cive Stafford Smith, explained in the New Statesman in July 2007.

Summing up bin Omar’s predicament, Katznelson also declared, after bin Omar’s repatriation, that he “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. Now the world’s focus must shift to Tunisia. Tunisia is faced with a simple choice: will they do the right thing and show the world that they support human rights, or will they revert to their dark past? We are all watching.”

Abuse, show trials and prison sentences for the men returned from Guantánamo

The world may have been watching — or those part of the world that still cared about human rights in the “War on Terror” — but the Tunisian president didn’t care. In September 2007, when Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch tried to visit the men, who were being held in prison, she was prevented from doing so, but met local activists, lawyers, government officials and family members — some of whom had been allowed to meet them — who explained to her that they had been “telling visitors that things are so bad they would rather be back at Guantánamo Bay.”

Bin Omar had, on his return to Tunisia, apparently been slapped, subjected to sleep deprivation and told that his wife and daughters would be raped. Daskal added that the threats to his family “were more than he could take: he told his lawyer that he signed the paper that officials thrust at him, even though his eyes had deteriorated so badly and his glasses were so old that he had no idea what it said.”

He was then taken briefly before the military court that had sentenced him in absentia, and, for the next six weeks, was “held in solitary confinement in a windowless, unventilated cell that he called his ‘tomb,’” and was allowed no contact with any other prisoners.

Following these reports, Jennifer Daskal was not reassured when she asked Robert F. Godec, the US ambassador to Tunisia, to explain what the Bush administration was doing “to track the two men’s cases,” and was told that “he had ‘specific and credible’ assurances from the Tunisian government that they would not be abused,” adding, “we follow up on these assurances.” As she explained, she was concerned that he “would not say whether the treatment of [bin Omar] and Lagha had lived up to Tunisia’s pledges; nor would he say whether any US official had met with the two since their return home,” and she concluded, correctly, “This is disturbing: all we have are promises from a notoriously abusive regime, yet US officials will not even say whether they are following up on those assurances by talking to the detainees themselves.”

In October 2007, Lotfi Lagha, who had not spoken about his treatment, but had, presumably, been dealt with in a similar manner, as his lawyer reported that he had been held in solitary confinement for six weeks after his return, was sentenced to three years in prison. As I explained at the time:

[His trial] bore all the hallmarks of a show trial. Allegations that he received military training in Afghanistan and fought with the Taliban regime were dropped, and he was, instead, convicted of “associating with a criminal group with the aim of harming or causing damage in Tunisia,” even though, as the Associated Press reported, the Tunisian authorities “did not name the group that Lagha was said to participate in or specify what its planned violence was,” and even though Lagha himself insisted during the trial, “I haven’t been involved in any terrorist activity. I went to Afghanistan for work.” Speaking after the verdict was announced, his lawyer, Samir Ben Amor, said he was “disappointed” with the verdict, and stated that he would lodge an appeal, adding, “We thought he would get justice in his own country after what he endured at Guantánamo.”

In November 2007, as I explained at the time, Abdullah bin Omar received a seven-year sentrence, after being convicted of “belonging in times of peace to a terrorist organization operating in a foreign country,” and of preparing for attacks intended to “change the state through violence,” replacing the government with a “fundamentalist regime.” Zachary Katznelson, who was present at the trial, told me, “There was not a shred of evidence actually offered against him. No witnesses, no documents, nothing. Merely a statement from the intelligence services saying he was guilty. Accusation presented as fact.” He added that this was “all too familiar in the context of Guantánamo,” but that it was “horrible to see the consequences pronounced before my eyes.”

For Lotfi Lagha (who was supposed to have been released last October) and Abdullah bin Omar (three years into his seven-year sentence), the collapse of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s regime ought to be good news. I cannot confirm whether Abdullah bin Omar was a member of Ennahdha, as alleged, but there are grounds for describing both bin Omar and Lotfi Lagha as political prisoners, and, as the Guardian reported on Tuesday, “Tunisia’s new government appears on the brink of releasing political prisoners, including all members of the Islamist Ennahdha movement.” As the Guardian also explained:

Najib Chebbi, an opposition party leader who has joined the new government, claimed that all prisoners had been released, [although] Samir Dilou, a lawyer and Ennahdha leader, said: “We’ve spoken to the families. It is not confirmed. They are not free yet.” But the government could discuss a general amnesty as early as tomorrow.

Supporting the idea of Ennahdha’s involvement in Tunisia’s political future, Chebbi told the BBC Hard Talk programme: “To have democracy, we must integrate any people who want to respect the law and play the game of democracy. Moderate political Islam is a component of the Arab and Islamist landscape.”

A general amnesty would open the way for Ennahdha’s exiled leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, to come home. He has said he would wait for a general amnesty before returning to Tunisia from London.

The Tunisans still in Guantánamo, or freed in other countries

The uprising in Tunisia may also be good news for other Tunisians still held in Guantánamo, and those released in other countries.

Still in Guantanamo are five men — Lotfi bin Ali, Ridah al-Yazidi, Adel Hakeemy, Hisham Sliti and Abdul Ourgy, all cleared for release by the Bush administration — although it is possible that only bin Ali stands to benefit from the collapse of Tunisia’s dictatorship. Back in October 2007, before Lotfi Lagha and Abdullah bin Omar were sentenced, but after reports of their abuse had surfaced, a District Court judge in Washington D.C., Judge Gladys Kessler, destroyed the Bush administration’s reliance on “diplomatic assurances” with Tunisia, ruling that he “cannot be sent to Tunisia because he could suffer ‘irreparable harm’ that the US courts would be powerless to reverse.”

Despite this ruling, no new home has been found for bin Ali in the last three years and four months, although now, presumably, there is no obstacle to his release, which should be demanded immediately.

As for the others, the Obama administration ought to be reviewing their cases, and thinking long and hard about whether it wants to continue holding them. I can see no reason why Ridah al-Yazidi should not also be released immediately, but officials may have concluded that he is one of 48 men who should be held indefinitely without charge or trial, because they are regarded as too dangerous to release, even though the interagency Task Force that made these recommendations conceded that the supposed evidence used to make these appraisals would not stand up in any court.

For Adel Hakeemy, the problem is that the Belgian govermment has apparently expressed an interest in extraditing him in connection with terrorist allegations in Belgium, as it has with Hisham Sliti, who, in addition, lost his habeas corpus petition in December 2008.

As for Abdul Ourgy, the problem is that the Italian goverment has apparently expressed similar wishes, following the successful extradition of two other Tunisians from Guantánamo — Adel Ben Mabrouk bin Hamida Boughanmi and Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri — in December 2009. They, presumably, are unlikely to be returning to Tunisia any time soon, even though they have not been put on trial since their dubious extradition, unless, that is, the Italians suddenly decide that the collapse of Ben Ali’s regime is an excuse for them to repatriate all its unwanted Tunisians — something that may, indeed, happen not only in Italy, but across the EU.

To conclude on a brighter note, three other men who may benefit are those released in other countries since the collapse of the Bush administration’s “diplomatic assurances” — Rafiq al-Hami, who was released in Slovakia last January with two other men (from Egypt and Azerbaijan), Saleh Sassi, who was released in Albania in February last year (with an Egyptian and a Libyan), and Hedi Hammamy, who was released in Georgia last March (with two Libyans). All are apparently doing well in their new homes (although the men in Slovakia had to embark on a hunger strike in June to improve their living conditions), but they will no doubt be delighted to return home — if home is finally a country that has rid itself of tyranny.

In some cases this may be because their political opposition to Ben Ali’s regime is on the brink of being recognized as legitimate, and not condemned under the convenient rubric of terrorism, and in other cases it is because Ben Ali’s flight — and the continuing mobilization of what the Middle East expert Juan Cole recently described as “a populist revolution spearheaded by labor movements, by internet activists [and] by rural workers” — may finally promise an end to the ruinous poverty, and the plundering of Tunisia’s economy, that typefied Ben Ali’s reign, and that drove so many Tunisians abroad — to Europe, and, in some cases, to Afghanistan and Pakistan — in search of work and freedom.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

A former professional footballer, Ahmed Belbacha fled Algeria for the UK in 1999 after receiving death threats from the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA), which, as Reprieve explained in its submission to the High Court (PDF), “targeted individuals who had served in Algeria’s military (and might again be called up), as well as employees of state-owned enterprises. Mr. Belbacha, who had completed a mandatory term of national service and worked for Sonatrach, the state-owned oil company, fitted both categories.”

Reprieve added that Belbacha “sought for a period to evade the GIA from within Algeria,” but that, “when the threats continued to escalate … he left the country for good,” subsequently settling in the UK, and living for nearly two years in Boscombe in Bournemouth, where, as has been previously reported, and as the Guardian explained, he “worked and studied English,” and, during one Labour Party conference, “was responsible for cleaning the hotel room of the then deputy prime minister, John Prescott,” who left him a tip and a thank-you note.

In the summer of 2001, Belbacha traveled from the UK to Pakistan and then on to Afghanistan,” which he would not have done had he had any militant aims, as his asylum claim was still pending in the UK. After the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, he returned to Pakistan, where he was seized. He was then held in a Pakistani prison (where he was abused), before being transferred to US custody, staying in the US prison at Kandahar from December 2001 until approximately February 9, 2002, when he was flown to Guantánamo, where he has been held ever since.

In the court submission, Belbacha’s lawyer, Cori Crider, stated that her client “seeks disclosure from the Secretaries of State tending to show that certain statements he is said to have made during detention were obtained by torture and mistreatment.” She added, “This information is necessary for two purposes: first, to make representations to US executive officials (and in the US courts) against his transfer to Algeria, and second, to have his coerced statements suppressed in the litigation of his substantive habeas claim.”

The torture of Ahmed Belbacha

Crider proceeded to explain how Belbacha was subjected to torture and abuse in US custody in Kandahar and Guantánamo, and how British agents, who interrogated him in both locations, helped to provide information that formed the basis of the false confessions that resulted from the more brutal sessions at the hands of US interrogators:

Mr. Belbacha has on several occasions told me that, during his detention at Kandahar and Guantánamo, he suffered serious mistreatment and was tortured. He alleges that the mistreatment included, among other things, beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and abuse, sensory deprivation, exposure to temperature extremes, dietary manipulation and the use of stress positions. [...]

Mr. Belbacha alleges that he was questioned by UK interrogators at Kandahar and Guantánamo during the period of his mistreatment. The interrogators knew of Mr. Belbacha’s employment history in the UK and questioned him about his connection with certain mosques in the UK. [...]

During his interrogations, Mr. Belbacha informs me that he made false statements and confessions as a result of his torture and mistreatment during custody and, in particular, due to his fear that his abuse would otherwise continue. He is unable to specify the precise details of the statements and confessions, as he has been questioned hundreds of times over the past nine years and because the memories are in many instances too painful, but much of his questioning by British officials related to his alleged association with the Finsbury Park mosque in the United Kingdom and how individuals at the mosque had allegedly assisted him in travelling to Afghanistan. Mr. Belbacha’s false confessions obtained under torture are the sole source of a number of allegations made against him.

None of this is surprising, of course, as the array of techniques to which Belbacha was subjected were common, in various permutations, in both Kandahar and Guantánamo, and because it has been established, in court proceedings in the case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, that the British security services provided information to their US counterparts while he was being held and tortured in Morocco. However, the chain of events is of particular interest in Belbacha’s case, as it suggests that the US interrogators stepped in after their British counterparts had obtained information from him directly, and indicates a very clear example of complicity in torture.

Reprieve’s aim, however, is not primarily to expose this aspect of the British security services’ activities, but, as stated in the lawsuit, to secure information in the possession of the British government to help prevent Belbacha’s forcible repatriation, and also to provide important evidence as part of his ongoing habeas corpus petition in the District Court in Washington D.C., where, since the Supreme Court gave the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas rights in June 2008, 57 cases have been decided, two-thirds of which have been won by the prisoners.

Resisting involuntary repatriation and seeking a new home for Ahmed Belbacha

This information is of great significance because of the particular circumstances in which Belbacha finds himself. Although Reprieve was notified on February 22, 2007 that Belbacha had been cleared for release from Guantánamo after an Administrative Review Board hearing the year before, he was desperate not to return to Algeria, because, as Cori Crider explained, “he fears that he would be mistreated by the Algerian state, having spent nearly a decade in US custody stamped as a would-be terrorist (and having vocally objected to returning to Algeria for many of those years)” and he “also fears retaliation from the contemporary descendant of the GIA — al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) — as he has been an equally vocal critic of the GIA’s attacks on civilians.”

On the former point, Belbacha’s fears appeared to be confirmed last November, when he was “convicted in absentia in Algeria of unspecified charges and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment.” Reprieve has been unable to establish the grounds for his conviction, and, as Cori Crider noted in her submission, “The sentence is particularly troubling because no other Algerian in Guantánamo was thus singled out. It appears likely that the sentence reflects a decision by the Algerians to retaliate against Mr. Belbacha, the earliest and most vociferous opponent of repatriation to Algeria from Guantánamo. I am not aware of any diplomatic or political assurances (credible or otherwise) that have been given by the government of Algeria in relation to Mr. Belbacha’s treatment on his return.”

As a result of Belbacha’s credible fears, Reprieve has spent nearly four years trying to secure resettlement for him in a third country. The British government has persistently refused to help, an application for asylum in the US was turned down in 2007, and although the town of Amherst, Massachusetts passed a resolution last year offering him a new home, this cannot happen because of legislation passed by Congress preventing the transfer of any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland except to face a trial (and even that last proviso is currently in doubt).

The closest Belbacha came to resettlement in a third country appears to have been in January this year, when representatives from Reprieve, Cageprisoners and the Center for Constitutional Rights traveled around Europe attempting to secure new homes for cleared prisoners who faced the risk — or the probability — of torture in their home countries. Crider noted that “The most advanced of those efforts, which targeted the government of Luxembourg, was apparently blocked by the US State Department,” and explained, in a footnote:

I know this because our efforts with the government of Luxembourg culminated in a meeting, on January 14, 2010, which was attended by myself for Reprieve, Moazzam Begg [for Cageprisoners], the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, and a member of staff at a partner group, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The discussion centred on two individuals — Mr. Belbacha and one of CCR’s clients — and during the meeting, Reprieve, with Mr. Begg’s support, proposed Mr. Belbacha as an appropriate candidate for resettlement in Luxembourg. We later learned from a contact in the Luxembourg Foreign Ministry that, as a result of this meeting, Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn had inquired of our client by name of the US authorities. The contact related that the US State Department officials had brushed off this approach, stating that Mr Belbacha “could go back to Algeria.”

This experience led Crider to conclude, as she explained, that “further efforts in this vein will be futile without additional exculpatory information or information that indicates that [Belbacha] will be at risk on return to Algeria. Without this information, the US government is unlikely to be willing to press [his] case for resettlement out of Algeria.”

Problems in the US courts

In seeking to prevent Belbacha’s involuntary return to Algeria, Reprieve has, after initial success, run up against renewed opposition from officials of the Obama administration and various US courts, which affects not only Belbacha but dozens of other prisoners as well. In July 2007, Reprieve asked the District Court in Washington D.C. to prevent Belbacha’s involuntary repatriation, and secured an injunction preventing his removal on June 13, 2008. This, however, only stood until the D.C. Circuit Court became involved, ruling in September 2009, in a case known as Kiyemba II, involving the Uighurs in Guantánamo (Muslims from China who won their habeas petition in October 2008, but feared torture in China) that questions relating to the transfer of prisoners — even when the risk of torture was involved — were solely for the executive branch of government to decide.

The court, out of nowhere, drew on Munaf v. Geren, a case from 2008 in which “two American citizens held in the custody of the United States military in Iraq petitioned for writs of habeas corpus, seeking to enjoin the Government from transferring them to Iraqi custody for criminal prosecution in the Iraqi courts.” In Munaf, the court ruled that “it could not enjoin the Government from transferring the petitioners to Iraqi custody,” because “that concern is to be addressed by the political branches, not the judiciary.”

As a result of the Kiyemba II ruling, which the Supreme Court refused to reconsider in March this year, Belbacha’s injunction was vacated by a District Court judge (in February), and attempts to have it reconsidered were refused. The last straw for Belbacha came in July, when, after protracted court dealings (mostly conducted in secret), the Supreme Court refused to prevent the administration from repatriating any of the six Algerians in Guantánamo at the time, leading to the immediate repatriation of one of these men, Abdul Aziz Naji, who promptly disappeared for a few days, before resurfacing with the threat of a dubious terrorism trial hanging over him.

As Crider noted in her submission, “because there is no injunction in place, the US government may forcibly repatriate Mr. Belbacha at any time.” She also noted that public criticism of the decision to transfer Naji against his will appeared to have paused further transfers, but stressed that the current situation — in which all the government needs to do is assert that it is “government policy not to transfer prisoners to torture” for all judicial inquries to come to an end — is deeply unsatisfactory, and, as a result, Ahmed Belbacha is now seeking to win his habeas corpus petition in the District Court in Washington D.C., and needs the documents in the possession of the British government as an essential part of his defense.

Explaining the importance of his habeas petition, Crider noted, that although “under current Court of Appeals precedent, the judge has no power to order the production of the prisoner in the courtroom; no power to order that the prisoner be released into the United States (or, it would appear, anywhere else); and no power to order the US not to send a petitioner, prevailing or otherwise, anywhere,” and that “The scope of the habeas remedy left to the US judiciary, in other words, is remarkably slim … there remains a category of prisoners that the US has never forced back to a country unwillingly: habeas winners.”

The importance of the British information about Ahmed Belbacha

After running through the poor history of disclosure in the US courts, where “government lawyers litigating the habeas cases have repeatedly claimed that they do not have access to the full set of relevant documents that might be implicated in a habeas action, and that to be required to search all of every relevant agency’s files (the DOD, the CIA, and so forth) for relevant material would be ‘unduly burdensome,’” and where, in the case of Binyam Mohamed, who was demonstrably sent to Morocco to be tortured, “Morocco never once appeared as a detention site on any document … in three separate orders from the district judge in [his] habeas action to the government to disclose all exculpatory information”, Crider’s submission ended with an appeal to the High Court to order disclosure of documents that might help prevent her client’s involuntary repatriation, and I believe this entire passage is worth quoting in its entirety:

A key category of information that is, in my experience, never disclosed is exculpatory information identifiably sourced from a foreign government. So, for example, even had the UK authorities generated reports of their interviews with the Claimants in Afghanistan and in Guantánamo and shared those reports with the US — something UK agents might well do — the US government has not disclosed and would not disclose such foreign-sourced material out of respect for the “control principle” [of not disclosing foreign intelligence sources] that was litigated at length in the English Binyam Mohamed litigation.

It is also, of course, likely that the UK produced internal reports about the situation in Afghanistan or Guantánamo that were never transferred to the US. Those reports, self-evidently, would be unavailable in any habeas disclosure process.

I am aware only of two instances in which exculpatory material originating with a foreign intelligence agency has been disclosed to a petitioner’s lawyer in a Guantánamo case: the case of Binyam Mohamed, and the case of Shaker Aamer. In both cases, the only reason such material was disclosed was as a result of Norwich Pharmacal litigation in England. I am cleared counsel of record in both cases, and have reviewed those disclosures at the Secure Facility in the US [where Guantánamo lawyers must travel to view all classified information]. In both instances, the UK disclosures were, by some margin, the most useful, illuminating, and exculpatory material that I saw in the habeas process.

For these reasons, the information sought is a vital part of having my client’s coerced statements suppressed in their habeas proceedings. I also believe it an essential component of persuading Obama administration officials not to transfer my client to Algeria against his will.

While I cannot know the scope of the information used by the Obama administration to determine whether and under what circumstances to transfer my clients, I do know that my own capacity to make effective representations to them has thus far been very limited. The reasons for this are simple: I have as yet had no information I could use to prove to the administration that my clients’ allegations of coercion, particularly during their early years in US military detention, were true. This, combined with the challenges of producing detailed statements on abuse (or, indeed, on the circumstances of capture) from prisoners who have been in Guantánamo for nearly nine years, has limited me to making fairly general statements: statements to the effect that I believe the clients were abused in custody, that the clients were never implicated in any terrorist act and never joined al-Qaida or the Taliban, and that the clients would pose no threat to anyone upon their release to a safe third country.

It is my view that the representations I could make if I had meaningful exculpatory information about Mr. Belbacha, and about how he was treated in US custody, would be qualitatively different. This, in turn, I believe would make the Obama administration more open to the prospect of resettling him, rather than simply forcing him back to abuse, an unfair trial and/or lengthy imprisonment in Algeria.

The Obama administration has stated, on more than one occasion, that it considers a prisoner’s individualized claim of fear of torture when it decides whether to repatriate a prisoner. In theory, of course, the question of the abuse a prisoner faces in Algeria and his fitness to be released elsewhere are distinct; in practice, however, I believe the lines blur. Proving to the Obama administration that Mr. Belbacha was tortured; that he gave false statements under torture; that, therefore, that allegations lodged against him are unreliable, particularly the most severe ones, is, I believe, an essential part of persuading the government that it would be unjust and inappropriate to return Mr. Belbacha to Algeria.

I wish Reprieve every success in this approach. The Norwich Pharmacal litigation mentioned above, which, in simple lay terms, involves appraisals of how parties (in these cases, the UK government) can become involved in “wrongdoing,” whether intentionally or not, for which a remedy may be sought, was invaluable in the case of Binyam Mohamed, and eventually led to his release. It has not yet had the same end result in Shaker Aamer’s case, although it led, last December, to the release of important documents in the possession of the British government, and it is clear, in the grounds for a judicial review submitted by Cori Crider (PDF), that it should also apply in Ahmed Belbacha’s case. As she explained:

Mr. Belbacha alleges that the Defendants have become involved in the wrongdoing of the US authorities in the following ways. UK officials:

(1) interviewed Mr. Belbacha in circumstances where it was standard practice for detainees to be mistreated prior to interviews to secure their cooperation, thereby facilitating further mistreatment;

(2) interviewed Mr. Belbacha in circumstances where this is likely to have prolonged his detention, in particular at Kandahar;

(3) failed to protest at the mistreatment, torture and/or unlawful detention of Mr. Belbacha, despite no doubt being aware of the circumstances of his detention;

(4) failed to take any or any sufficient steps to secure better treatment for Mr. Belbacha; and

(5) failed to take any or any sufficient steps to secure the release from detention of Mr. Belbacha.

If justice has not entirely vanished, it will lead, as intended, to Ahmed Belbacha winning his habeas petition, and the Obama administration accepting that it will no longer try to forcibly repatriate him, and will, instead, seek a third country prepared to take him.

And if there is any justice left over, that third country will be the UK, where he lived in a peaceful and law-abiding manner for nearly two years, and where there are many people wiling and able to help with his resettlement.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.