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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An excerpt from A Handful of Walnuts by Ahmed Errachidi

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

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

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, 700,000-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As a result, Cheney knew that, on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that launched the “war on terror” that he is still so concerned to defend, his voice would be echoing in the ears of millions of his countrymen and women, helping to disguise a bitter truth: that, following the 9/11 attacks, Cheney was largely responsible for the abomination that is Guantánamo, and for the torture to which prisoners were subjected from Abu Ghraib to Bagram to Guantánamo and the “black sites” that littered the world.

Alarmingly, while Cheney has been largely successful in claiming that the use of torture was helpful, despite a lack of evidence that this was the case, what strikes me as even more alarming is that many Americans are still unaware of the extent to which the torture for which Cheney was such a cheerleader did not keep them safe from terrorist attacks, but actually provided a lie that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

As a long time believer in unfettered executive power, Cheney’s fingerprints are all over the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks, along with those of his legal counsel, David Addington. The two men had met while defending Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, on the basis that the President should be beyond criticism, and it was Cheney and Addington who were behind a military order issued by George W. Bush on November 13, 2001, which established the President’s right to hold those he regarded as terrorists as a new type of prisoner (who later became the infamous “enemy combatants”), and, if he wished, to prosecute them in trials by military commission, which were designed to secure easy convictions and to use evidence derived through the use of torture.

It was Addington, no doubt after consultation with Cheney, who wrote the memo to President Bush on January 25, 2002, signed by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, which claimed that the Geneva Conventions contained “quaint” provisions, and that the circumstances in which the “war on terror” was being waged rendered “obsolete” the Conventions’ “strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” The memo advised the President to discard the Geneva Conventions for the prisoners at Guantánamo, which had opened two weeks earlier.

The purpose was to allow coercive interrogations, and even the use of torture, and this became official policy on August 1, 2002, when another of Cheney’s colleagues, John Yoo, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to provide the executive branch with impartial legal advice, wrote two memos known as the “torture memos,” which attempted to redefine torture — including the use of waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning — so that it could be used by the CIA.

With the help of another of Cheney’s circle of close colleagues — Jim Haynes, the Pentagon’s General Counsel — the torture techniques chosen were reverse-engineered from those taught in US military schools to help US military personnel resist interrogation if captured by a hostile enemy. Haynes had made the first approach to the organization responsible for the program, known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), and he also played a role in the spread of torture techniques to Guantánamo, as approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in November 2002, which then spread to Iraq, leading to the horrors that were revealed around the world when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004.

Even so, Cheney’s biggest crime, to my mind, remains the way in which, while pretending to use torture to protect the American people from further terrorist attacks, he actually used it to attempt to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This bleak story involves Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran a training camp in Afghanistan — Khalden — that was shut down by the Taliban in 2000 after he refused to allow Osama bin Laden to take it over.  Al-Libi was initially interrogated by the FBI, but they were brushed aside by the CIA, who flew al-Libi to Egypt, where the torturers of Hosni Mubarak’s savage regime secured a patently false confession that Saddam Hussein had met with two al-Qaeda operatives to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Al-Libi recanted the false confession obtained through torture — which apparently included waterboarding — in 2004, although the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded at the time of the confession, in February 2002, that al-Libi had misled his torturers. However, no one told Colin Powell, who used it in the presentation he made to the UN Security Council in February 2003, a month before the invasion. This is alarming enough, but as it is clear that Dick Cheney knew about the DIA’s analysis that al-Libi had lied, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that, while pretending to protect the American people, Cheney was actually responsible for using a lie obtained through torture to justify an illegal war that would lead to the deaths of thousands of US military personnel, and of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Torture is a crime, for which Dick Cheney should pay, on the 10th anniversary of the 9//11 attacks, rather than being feted as some sort of entertainingly opinionated elder statesman. Above all, however, the al-Libi episode reveals the former Vice President not only as a torturer, but also as some sort of a traitor, making his continued ability to walk free, and to continue spreading his self-serving lies, a damning state of affairs for America as a whole, and one that should make decent Americans recoil in shame and horror from what they and their country have become.

Note: For more on the bleak story of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, see Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. For more on the malignant influence of Dick Cheney, see Dick Cheney: invisible tyrant, Dick Cheney: more horrors from the ‘Vice-President for Torture’, The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers and Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low.

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.

The buzz about torture has been created because of the publication of a book entitled, The Interrogator: An Education by Glenn L. Carle, a former CIA operative and Arabic speaker who was sent to an undisclosed country, to a “black site” known as Hotel California, to interrogate a suspected senior al-Qaeda operative.

Carle’s book s important for two reasons: firstly, because it is the first example of a US interrogator’s first-hand account of a “black site,” and secondly, and crucially, because Carle refused to engage in the torture techniques that the Bush administration arranged for lawyers in the Justice Department to authorize, preferring instead to interrogate the prisoner using rapport-buiiding methods and psychological insight, and also because he is openly critical of those methods.

While I can recommend reviews of the book by former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan in the Wall Street Journal, and Laura Miller on Salon.com, as well as Carle’s appearance on Democracy Now!, I’m cross-posting below Carle’s interview with Spencer Ackerman of Wired, which succinctly captures all the key points. Carle describes how the objectives of the techniques he was supposed to use were to “dislocate psychologically” a prisoner, explaining how “noise, temperature, one’s sense of time, sleep, diet, light, darkness, physical freedom — the normal reference points for one’s senses are all distorted. Reality disappears, and so do one’s reference points.” He adds, “It is shockingly easy to disorient someone” but also explains how “that is not the same as making someone more willing to cooperate,” adding, “The opposite is true — as the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual cautions will occur, as I predicted and forewarned and as occurred in my and other officers’ experiences.”

Refusing to use these methods, Carle explains how, instead, he used traditional rapport building techniques and psychological insight: “The methods that worked were the same ones that work in classic intelligence operations: establishing a rapport with the individual, understanding his fears, hopes, interests, quirks. It is a psychological task, very similar to what one should do when establishing any human relationship.”

His conclusions about the techniques favoured by the Bush administration are stark. At first, he explains, he accepted that “psychological dislocation induced cooperation, and would not be lasting or severe, [and] therefore could be acceptable in certain circumstances.” He adds, however, “I came quickly to conclude that this was founded on erroneous conclusions — nonsense, actually — about human psyche and motivation. [It] did not work, was counterproductive and was, simply, wrong in every way. So, I came to oppose it.”

The mention of “erroneous conclusions — nonsense, actually — about human psyche and motivation” reminded me of the apologists for the torture program who did so much to justify the use of torture — James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the former instructors in the SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) taught in US military schools to help US personnel to resist torture if captured, who perversely recommended that their program could be reverse-engineered for real world interrogations in the “War on Terror.” I have discussed their terrible contribution to the Bush administration’s torture program in my articles, Abu Zubaydah and the Case Against Torture Architect James Mitchell, The Torture of Abu Zubaydah: The Complaint Filed Against James Mitchell for Ethical Violations and The Dark Desires of Bruce Jessen, the Architect of Bush’s Torture Program, As Revealed by His Former Friend and Colleague.

However, beyond the role of Mitchell and Jessen, the object of Carle’s disdain are even more significant individuals: essentially, John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, the lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who cynically attempted to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA (and who were excused in a whitewash last year that followed a damning internal investigation), and those at the very top of government: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the lawyers who clustered around Cheney in particular, including David Addington, Alberto Gonzales and William J. Haynes II.

“Some Will Call Me a Torturer”: CIA Man Reveals Secret Jail
By Spencer Ackerman, Wired, July 1, 2011

Admitting that “some will call me a torturer” is a surefire way to cut yourself off from anyone’s sympathy. But Glenn Carle, a former CIA operative, isn’t sure whether he’s the hero or the villain of his own story.

Distilled, that story, told in Carle’s new memoir The Interrogator, is this: In the months after 9/11, the CIA kidnaps a suspected senior member of al-Qaida and takes him to a Mideast country for interrogation. It assigns Carle — like nearly all his colleagues then, an inexperienced interrogator — to pry information out of him. Uneasy with the CIA’s new, relaxed rules for questioning, which allow him to torture, Carle instead tries to build a rapport with the man he calls CAPTUS.

But CAPTUS doesn’t divulge the al-Qaida plans the CIA suspects him of knowing. So the agency sends him to “Hotel California” — an unacknowledged prison, beyond the reach of the Red Cross or international law.

Carle goes with him. Though heavily censored by the CIA, Carle provides the first detailed description of a so-called “black site.” At an isolated “discretely guarded, unremarkable” facility in an undisclosed foreign country (though one where the Soviets once operated), hidden CIA interrogators work endless hours while heavy metal blasts captives’ eardrums and disrupts their sleep schedules.

Afterward, the operatives drive to a fortified compound to munch Oreos and drink somberly to Grand Funk Railroad at the “Jihadi Bar.” Any visitor to Guantanamo Bay’s Irish pub — O’Kellys, home of the fried pickle — will recognize the surreality.

But Carle — codename: REDEMPTOR — comes to believe CAPTUS is innocent.

“We had destroyed the man’s life based on an error,” he writes. But the black site is a bureaucratic hell: CAPTUS’ reluctance to tell CIA what it wants to hear makes the far-off agency headquarters more determined to torture him. Carle’s resistance, shared by some at Hotel California, makes him suspect. He leaves CAPTUS in the black site after 10 intense days, questioning whether his psychological manipulation of CAPTUS made him, ultimately, a torturer himself.

Eight years later, the CIA unceremoniously released CAPTUS. (The agency declined to comment for this story.) Whether that means CAPTUS was innocent or merely no longer useful as a source of information, we may never know. Carle spoke to Danger Room about what it’s like to interrogate a man in a place too dark for the law to find.

Wired.com: Do you consider yourself a torturer? At the end of the book, you wrestle with the question.

Glenn Carle: According to Justice Department lawyer John Yoo’s August 2002 memo on interrogation, the answer is no. As one can see from the entire book, I opposed all these practices and this approach. I was involved in it, although I tried to stop what I considered wrong. I feel I acted honorably throughout my involvement in the CAPTUS operation, and tried to have him treated properly, but much of it was disturbing and wrong.

Wired.com: You’re maybe the only CIA officer to publicly describe a “black site” prison, your Hotel California. What was it like to be inside a place completely off the books from any legal accountability? Did it make you feel like you could act with impunity? How did you restrain yourself?

Glenn Carle: No, I never, never felt like I could or should act with impunity. No one I know felt that way. We all felt we were involved in an extraordinary, sensitive operation that required very careful behavior. What was acceptable was often unclear, despite the formal guidance that eventually was developed.

“How did I restrain myself” implies perhaps that I was inclined to act in unrestrained ways. I never, ever was; nor were, in my experience, my colleagues. From literally the first second I was briefed on the operation, I was acutely aware that I would have to weigh every step I took, and decide what was morally, legally acceptable. There was never the slightest thought that I or anyone could act with impunity. We were acting clandestinely; but never beyond obligations to act correctly and honorably. The dilemma comes in identifying where those lines are, in a situation in which much was murky.

Wired.com: You came to believe that the man you call CAPTUS “was not a jihadist or a member of al-Qaida.” Well, even so, was he still dangerous? Did you ever feel he duped you? You write that he lied to you, after all.

Glenn Carle: CAPTUS himself was not a terrorist, or a dangerous man. He had been involved in activities of legitimate concern to the CIA, because they did touch upon al-Qaida activities. That’s a fact. But he was not a willing member of, believer in, or supporter of, al-Qaida. He was not a terrorist, had committed no crimes, had not intentionally supported jihad or terrorist actions.

Did he dupe me? He evaded and lied on occasion, yes. And I always wrestled with the question of whether he was duping me. In the end, I had to decide, though, and I decided he was, fundamentally, straight with me. Never totally, but fundamentally, yes. This is not a black and white-hat situation. I try to make that as clear as can be in the book. Little was simple — thus, my descriptions of the “gray world” in which knowledge is imperfect, motivations and actions are sometimes contradictory — in which CAPTUS, perhaps, was truthful, innocent, disingenuous, and complicit simultaneously.

Wired.com: Did you ever feel, at Hotel California or before, that interrogating CAPTUS put you in legal jeopardy down the road?

Glenn Carle: I think everyone was concerned with this, at every level, and at every second of one’s involvement in interrogation operations. We all worked very hard to act legally.The challenges are how to reconcile contradictory laws, which are morally repugnant, perhaps, and which leave room for broad interpretation and abuse.

No one consciously broke the law, ever, in my experience or knowledge. But what should one do? How could one follow one’s orders and accomplish one’s mission, when it was flawed, objectionable, and perhaps itself legally, albeit “legally” ordered. That’s the supreme dilemma I wrestled with, and others did, too.

Wired.com: When you first interrogate CAPTUS, you write that you tried to establish a rapport with him — even as you kept him fearful that you controlled his fate. When that didn’t get the intelligence CIA HQ wanted, they shipped the both of you to Hotel California. Did CIA consider the possibility that he wasn’t who they thought he was?

Glenn Carle: I had slow, partial, success during my time of involvement in bringing colleagues and the institution to see him more as I did. But I failed, ultimately. The view that he was a senior al-Qaida member or fellow-traveler remained decisive for a long, long time. The agency or U.S. government didn’t change its views for eight years. Perhaps it never did.

Wired.com: Run me through how CAPTUS was treated at the Hotel.

Glenn Carle: The objectives are to “dislocate psychologically” a detainee. This is done through psychological and physical measures, primarily intended to disrupt Circadian rhythms and an individual’s perceptions. So, noise, temperature, one’s sense of time, sleep, diet, light, darkness, physical freedom — the normal reference points for one’s senses are all distorted. Reality disappears, and so do one’s reference points. It is shockingly easy to disorient someone.

But that is not the same as making someone more willing to cooperate. The opposite is true — as the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual cautions will occur, as I predicted and forewarned and as occurred in my and other officers’ experiences.

Wired.com: In 2003, according to declassified documents, your old boss, George Tenet approved the following “enhanced interrogation techniques” for use on high-value detainees: “the attention grasp, walling, the facial hold, the facial slap (insult slap), the abdominal slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours, the use of diapers for prolonged periods, the use of harmless insects, the water board.” Were any of these used on CAPTUS? Did you take part in any of their use?

Glenn Carle: No. These measures were formally set out, I believe, after my involvement in interrogation. And in any event, from my first second of involvement in the CAPTUS operation I simply would not allow or have anything to do with any physical coercive measure. I would not do it. That point I was certain of instantaneously. I also had literally never heard of waterboarding until the story about it broke in the media.

Wired.com: Did you get any useful intelligence out of CAPTUS? If so, what interrogation techniques “worked”?

Glenn Carle: Oh, yes, CAPTUS definitely provided useful intelligence. The methods that worked were the same ones that work in classic intelligence operations: establishing a rapport with the individual, understanding his fears, hopes, interests, quirks. It is a psychological task, very similar to what one should do when establishing any human relationship.

The plan was to be a perceptive, and sometimes manipulative, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and purposeful individual who understood the man sitting opposite him, and earn his trust.

Wired.com: You came to question whether even the mild psychological disorientation you induced on CAPTUS was too severe an interrogation method. Why? Did you sympathize with CAPTUS too much?

Glenn Carle: There is always a danger for a case officer to “fall in love” with his “target.” That’s the term we use. Any good officer guards against that, and always questions his own perceptions. Always. But I was the one who looked in CAPTUS’ eyes for hours and hours and days and days. It was I who knew the man, literally. I’m confident in my assessment of him.

And yes, I at first accepted my training: that psychological dislocation induced cooperation, and would not be lasting or severe, therefore could be acceptable in certain circumstances. I came quickly to conclude that this was founded on erroneous conclusions — nonsense, actually — about human psyche and motivation. [It] did not work, was counterproductive and was, simply, wrong in every way. So, I came to oppose it.

Wired.com: How did the CIA react to you publishing this book? Huge sections of it are blacked out.

Glenn Carle: The agency redacted about 40 percent of the initial manuscript, deleting entire chapters, almost none of which had anything to do with protecting sources or methods. Much of it was so the agency could protect itself from embarrassment, or from allowing any description of the interrogation program to come out. One would infer, obviously, that large segments of the agency would have preferred to leave CAPTUS’ story in the dark, where it took place.

Wired.com: David Petraeus, the incoming CIA director, suggested to Congress that there might be circumstances where a return to “enhanced interrogation” is appropriate. What would you say to him?

Glenn Carle: That there is almost no conceivable circumstance in which the enhanced interrogation practices are acceptable or work. This belief is a red herring, wrong, and undoes us a bit. We are better than that. Enhanced interrogation does not work, and is wrong. End of story.

Wired.com: The Justice Department decided on June 30 to seek criminal inquiries in two cases of detainee abuses — out of 101. Was that justice, a whitewash or something in between?

Glenn Carle: It wasn’t a whitewash. It’s in general better not to seek retribution, but to seek to inculcate correct values and behavior going forward.

Wired.com: Did you ever learn what happened to CAPTUS’ treatment after you left at Hotel California? Why was he was released? Have you tried to find him? What would you tell him if you saw one another?

Glenn Carle: No. I left the case and knew nothing about him for years. I presume he was released because the institution, at last, accepted what I had argued as strongly as I had been able to do so. He was ultimately let go, I hope, because the institution and U.S. government, at last, came to accept my view of CAPTUS. His release validates — substantiates — everything I argued.

I came to respect CAPTUS. We are from such different worlds, and his and my circumstances — he a detainee and I one of his interrogators — are so radically different that conversation would be awkward if we ever met again. It is natural that he feel resentment. And little was ever clear in the entire operation. That’s the nature of intelligence work. He is not a total innocent, I don’t think. But his rendition was not justified by the facts as I came to learn them, which was at odds with the agency’s assessment of him.

Wired.com: Finally, how many CAPTUSes — people you believe to be innocent men swept up in the CIA “enhanced interrogation” system — are there?

Glenn Carle: I do not know.

Note: For more on secret prisons, see my articles transcribing the sections dealing with US secret detention after 9/11, which were part of a UN report on secret detention that was published last year: UN Secret Detention Report (Part One): The CIA’s “High-Value Detainee” Program and Secret Prisons, UN Secret Detention Report (Part Two): CIA Prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq and UN Secret Detention Report (Part Three): Proxy Detention, Other Countries’ Complicity, and Obama’s Record.

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 I explain in a separate article to be published soon, although the review has led to a decison to rebrand control orders — a form of house arrest, introduced in 2005 and used to hold men without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence — allowing the men in question (currently, eight British nationals) slightly more freedom than previously, the rebranding fails to discuss the fundamental problem with holding men on the basis of secret evidence, and also fails to address what will happen to foreign terror suspects, imprisoned or held on deportation bail in circumstances similar to the control orders, who are also held without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence.

Tonight’s Amnesty event, “Ricin! the inside story of the plot that never was,” follows the recent publication of a book of the same name, written by Lawrence Archer (the foreman of the jury in the ricin trial of 2004) and journalist Fiona Bawdon, exposing how the trial, which lasted seven months, and led to the acquital of four of the five defendants, revealed that there was no plot, and also, crucially, revealed in detail the dangerous incompetence of the security services and the manipulation of a false “terror plot” for political aims.

Where this ties in with the counter-terrorism review is a bleak tale that deserves to be disseminated as widely as possible. As Amnesty’s introduction to the event states, “Weeks later the freed men were threatened with deportation to Algeria, despite the jury’s not guilty verdicts. To date only one man has been granted the right to remain in the UK. Two of the men were re-arrested in 2005 and held under control order conditions, accused of being threats to national security, largely based on rehashed evidence from the ricin trial. With juries in terrorism cases constantly under threat by successive governments, this trial is a compelling example of the continuing need for a jury.”

One of those men — Mustapha Taleb (also known as Detainee Y) — is still held pending deportation, on the basis of secret evidence, despite having already been acquited by a jury, and he recently wrote poignantly about the painful isolation he endures as a detainee on deportation bail, living alone and subjected to curfews and restrictions that, in his case, and those of others held on deportation bail, were not addressed by the counter-terrorism review, which focused only on the alleged — and bitterly disputed — safety of “diplomatic assurances” intended to guarantee the men’s humane treatment on their return to their home countries.

Speaking tonight are Michael Mansfield QC, who successfully represented Mouloud Sihali in the ricin trial, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, Julian Hayes, a solicitor who represented Sidali Feddag in the ricin trial, Lawrence Archer, and Diane Abbott MP, who, in 2009, publicly challenged the use of secret evidence, hosting a parliamentary meeting and raising an Early Day Motion in the Commons. The event will be chaired by journalist Peter Oborne.

Below, I’m cross-posting an article written by Lawrence Archer when his book was published last autumn, which provides the necessary context for concluding that, despite the government’s tinkering with control orders, its adherence to the need for secret evidence and its marginalization of those facing deportation on the basis of secret evidence demonstrate that it remains wedded to a system that is fundamentally unacceptable in a country that prides itself on open justice, and that, as is revealed in the case of Mustapha Taleb, has led to some deeply questionable conclusions.

Ricin! The plot that never was
By Lawrence Archer, Ceasefire, October 2010

I knew what the buff envelope was as soon as I spotted it on the doormat; another jury summons. My heart sank. I’d served on a jury in an assault case only two years previously and it had been a brutal experience. The CCTV evidence of a young man being struck on the back of the head with an axe still stayed with me. But this new summons was to the Old Bailey: now that could be interesting. As it turned out, it was life changing.

I was to become the jury foreman in the first terrorism trial in Britain since 9/11. The case became known as the Ricin Trial, since the prosecution alleged that a group of Algerian men were conspiring to manufacture explosives and toxins, including the deadly poison ricin, for terrorist purposes.

The case came to court in September 2004. Five men stood in the dock, while a further four were scheduled to be tried in a follow-on trial, the Court Service considering, probably correctly, that prosecuting nine defendants at once would have both crammed the courtroom and confused any jury. The defendants were a disparate bunch, mostly associated with each other through the Finsbury Park mosque.

Although it has since become inextricably linked with terrorism by the presence of the notorious preacher Abu Hamza, the mosque had previously served a different and rather more peaceful purpose, providing a focal point for the large Algerian community who lived in the neighbourhood. Men would meet, socialise, eat, swap information on jobs and lodgings and even sleep at the mosque, although the latter was an informal arrangement and frowned upon by the mosque trustees.

The five Algerian defendants, Kamel Bourgass, Mouloud Sihali, David Khalef, Mustapha Taleb and Sidali Feddag, were all charged on two counts: Conspiracy to murder and “Conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”, a 19th century piece of legislation that had been resurrected by the CPS for the trial.

Information had come into the British authorities in early January 2003 that a group of Algerian terrorists was going to strike the UK imminently. The news understandably caused huge consternation at Scotland Yard and within a matter of days Anti-Terror Branch officers carried out a raid on a property in Wood Green, North London. The shabby one-bed flat, provided for the 17 year old Sidali Feddag whilst his asylum claim was being processed, was searched thoroughly for poisons and explosives.

Feddag had met Kamel Bourgass at the Finsbury Park mosque some months earlier and had offered him accommodation in the flat when he realised Bourgass was homeless. However, Feddag had asked Bourgass to leave a matter of weeks before the raid when his brother needed somewhere to stay. Bourgass had duly obliged, but crucially left many of his possessions behind. Among these were some suspicious items: rubber gloves, thermometers, bottles of chemicals, a small quantity of castor oil seeds (the principle ingredient for making ricin), a large sum of cash and, most damning of all, a hand-written set of recipes for manufacturing a variety of toxins and explosives, contained in a locked sports bag. The recipes were later identified as being written by Bourgass and his fingerprints covered the other suspicious finds.

Scientists from the government research laboratories at Porton Down carried out generic testing for the presence of proteins on some of the items found at the scene. One item, a mortar and pestle, showed a very weak positive reaction to this on-site testing, but later, highly specific tests for ricin, carried out at the laboratory, proved the initial analysis to be misleading. According to the chief scientist, in his evidence to the Old Bailey, he had declared the tests negative. As far as he was concerned, there was no ricin at Wood Green.

A series of arrests followed, although the main suspect, Kamel Bourgass, was missing. Mustapha Taleb was picked up almost immediately, after his fingerprint was discovered on a photocopy of the poison recipes. David Khalef had been arrested some months earlier in Norfolk, found in possession of a copy of the recipes. Mouloud Sihali had been picked up at the same time as Khalef. He had connections with one of the chief suspects in the alleged conspiracy, having let him stay in his flat for a number of weeks.

Despite Porton Down knowing within 48 hours of the raid that there were no toxins found at the scene, the police had somehow been notified of the exact opposite. The ensuing media reports were unequivocal; there was a “factory of death” in Wood Green and a quantity of ricin had been discovered. Government spokesmen confirmed the find, announcing in a public statement that “a small amount of the material recovered from the Wood Green premises has tested positive for the presence of ricin … The Department (of Health) is now alerting the health service, including primary care, about these developments.” Prime Minister Tony Blair weighed in later the same day, announcing to a meeting of British ambassadors in London, “The arrests which were made show this danger is present and real and with us now. Its potential is huge. ”

The startling headlines almost certainly scared Kamel Bourgass into fleeing London. Within a few days he was holed up in a Manchester flat belonging to a distant acquaintance. When police arrived at the flat several days later, entirely coincidentally and in order to detain another man unconnected with the ricin plot, Bourgass was recognised and promptly arrested.

What happened next was withheld from the ricin trial jury, to avoid prejudicing the evidence. Bourgass broke free from the officers guarding him, snatched a knife from the kitchen and attempted to escape.

In the ensuing chaos he violently stabbed police officer Stephen Oake to death and badly wounded several others before he was finally restrained.

Shockingly, the myth of the ricin find was soon to have an even greater effect. Despite the fact that Porton Down knew there was no ricin at Wood Green in early January 2003, Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, mentioned its definite discovery several weeks later on February 5th, as part of his presentation to the United Nations Security Council. Arguing the case for the invasion of Iraq, Powell cited the Wood Green “find” as a cause for grave concern and linked it to an “Iraq-linked terrorist network”. British and American forces invaded the country within a matter of weeks.

At the end of the ricin trial, which had lasted seven months, cost an estimated £20 million and caused the jury to deliberate for 17 days, Bourgass was convicted on the lesser, although still serious, charge of Conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. The jury were unable to reach a decision on the Conspiracy to murder charge and were eventually discharged. Bourgass had in fact already been convicted of murder and malicious wounding in a previous Old Bailey trial, kept deliberately secret to avoid any press revelations, and was serving a lengthy jail sentence. The other four defendants, Sihali, Taleb, Khalef and Feddag were found not guilty on all charges.

The second, follow on trial collapsed, as the CPS decided there was little realistic hope of any convictions, as much of the evidence alleged against them was linked to the original defendants. While several of the defendants had entered the UK illegally, they had all served enough time in custody to be released after a few days and were let out on normal immigration bail conditions.

A reporting embargo in place since early 2003 had meant that the press had been unable to publicise the case until the verdicts came in. Now, after the jury had announced its decisions, the media had a field day, declaring Bourgass to be “The Toxic Terrorist” and claiming that he had Al-Qaeda connections. The original intelligence given to the British authorities was revealed to have come from another Algerian man, Mohammed Meguerba, who had been interrogated by the DRS, Algeria’s notoriously brutal secret police, who had a fearsome reputation for using torture during their questioning.

While Bourgass was making all the headlines, the other defendants received scant media coverage. The general opinion seemed to be that they had “got away with it”, despite the jury’s lengthy deliberations and Not Guilty verdicts. Politicians and the police were equally disappointed in the jury decisions: there were even mutterings in some quarters that the jury had “gone rogue”. Home Secretary Charles Clarke announced that he would be keeping “a close eye” on the cleared men, while Met Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair told David Frost on his TV show that the law might have to be amended following the verdicts. “I think we’ll just have to look again, to see if there’s some other legislation around ‘acts preparatory to terrorism’ or something of that nature, that’s what we’ll have to do.”

The jury went back to their day jobs, but the story wasn’t over for the cleared defendants. Within weeks, the government announced its intention to deport them to their native country, despite the fact that Algeria had an appalling record on human rights and the defendants had been tarred with the brush of “terrorist”. When it seemed that there might be legal difficulties with the deportation process, the British government attempted to negotiate Memoranda of Understanding with the more contentious countries, including Libya and Algeria. (Libya signed up. Algeria refused, on the grounds that it didn’t go in for mistreatment of detainees, so there really was no need). A lengthy legal battle ensued to derail the deportations, but far worse was to come for two of the men.

Following the 7th July and failed 21st July 2005 bombings on London Transport targets, and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the British public were understandably jittery, and fear of terrorism was running at fever pitch. New anti-terror legislation was hurriedly put together.

In the early morning of 15th September 2005, coincidentally the same day as Home Secretary Charles Clarke announced plans for 90-day detention of terror suspects, police stormed the properties of Mustapha Taleb and Mouloud Sihali.

Both were detained as “threats to national security”, although neither has ever been charged with any offence or even interviewed by the police. After several months in jail they were both released, subject to strict immigration bail conditions (Control Orders in all but name). Terms of their release included wearing an electronic tag, being curfewed for up to 22 hours a day, limiting their movements to a small geographical area and having their premises searched regularly. Potential visitors had to be vetted and approved by the Home Office.

Sihali eventually had his case heard by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) which rules on foreign deportation matters. In May 2007, SIAC decided that Sihali posed no danger to the British public and lifted his bail conditions, although he remains threatened with deportation to this day and is fighting it through the appeal courts. Mustapha Taleb has not been that fortunate. He was put back in jail for two years, where he was adjudged to be a severe suicide risk by the prison psychiatrist. He currently lives in a provincial town, subjected once again to strict bail conditions and cooped up in a tiny house for 20 hours a day, kept sane by anti-depressant drugs. The British government would like to deport him too, despite the fact that he was granted asylum here in 2000, based on evidence that he had been tortured in Algeria.

David Khalef has been granted leave to remain in the UK and now lives quietly in London. Sidali Feddag is the only one of the cleared defendants with any real sense of achievement after the ricin trial. Impressed by the British jury system, he has gone on to study for a degree in law.

As for me, I was non-political before the case. The ricin trial has changed all that.

Lawrence Archer is a writer and engineer. This is his first book. Fiona Bawdon, who co-wrote the book, is a respected freelance journalist who writes on legal matters.

Ricin! The Inside Story of the Terror Plot that Never Was was released by Pluto Press on 11th October 2010.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in 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 other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009), Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z, Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction? (all April 2009), Taking liberties with our justice system and Death in Libya, betrayal in the West (both for the Guardian), Law Lords Condemn UK’s Use of Secret Evidence And Control Orders (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009), Britain’s Torture Troubles: What Tony Blair Knew (June 2009), Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws, Would you be able to cope?: Letters by the children of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh, Control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh to be allowed to leave the UK (all June 2009), Testing control orders and Dismantle the secret state (for the Guardian), UK government issues travel document to control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh after horrific suicide attempt (July 2009), Secret evidence in the case of the North West 10 “terror suspects” (August 2009), Letting go of control orders (for the Guardian, September 2009), Another Blow To Britain’s Crumbling Control Order Regime (September 2009), UK Judge Approves Use of Secret Evidence in Guantánamo Case (November 2009), Calling Time On The Use Of Secret Evidence In The UK (December 2009), Compensation for control orders is a distraction (for the Guardian, January 2010), Control Orders Take Another Blow: Libyan Cartoonist Freed (Detainee DD) (January 2010), Control Orders: Solicitors’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010 and Control Orders: Special Advocates’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010 (both February 2010), Will Parliament Rid Us of the Cruel and Unjust Control Order Regime? (February 2010), Don’t renew control orders, CAMPACC, JUSTICE and the Joint Committee on Human Rights tell MPs (February 2010), Fahad Hashmi and Terrorist Hysteria in US Courts (April 2010), 98 MPs Who Supported Human Rights While Countering Terrorism (May 2010), UK Terror Ruling Provides Urgent Test for New Government (May 2010), An uncivilized society (in the Guardian), New letter to MPs asking them to oppose the use of secret evidence in UK courts, and to support the return from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer (May 2010), Torture Complicity Under the Spotlight in Europe (Part One): The UK (July 2010), Fighting Ghosts: An Interview with Husein Al-Samamara (July 2010), Ruling sends message on control orders (for the Guardian, July 2010), UK Judges Endorse Double Standards on Terror Deportations (August 2010), In Memoriam: Faraj Hassan Alsaadi (1980-2010) (August 2010), An interview with Faraj Hassan Alsaadi (from 2007) (August 2010), UK Government Faces Major Rebellion on Control Orders (November 2010), Gareth Peirce Discusses Her New Book, “Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice” (November 2010), Are Control Orders About To Be Scrapped? (November 2010), Lord Carlile, Discredited Advocate of Control Orders, Presents Flawed Alternative (December 2010).

His autobiography has been well-received. Foreign Affairs described it as “A counternarrative to much of what has been written about Afghanistan since 1979 … Zaeef offers a particularly interesting discussion of the Taliban’s origins and the group’s effectiveness in working with locals,” and the Sunday Telegraph wrote, “Spies, generals and ambassadors will pounce on this book, poring over its pages for clues to a way out of the Afghan morass.”

This fascinating excerpt from the book, cross-posted below, deals with Zaeef’s detention in Pakistan, on the USS Bataan, and in Bagram and Kandahar.

An Excerpt from “My Life with the Taliban” by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef (Hurst & Co.)

When we arrived in Peshawar I was taken to a lavishly-fitted office. A Pakistani flag stood on the desk, and a picture of Mohammad Ali Jinnah hung at the back of the room. A Pashtun man was sitting behind the desk. He got up, introduced himself and welcomed me. His head was shaved — seemingly his only feature of note — and he was of an average size and weight. He walked over to me and said that he was the head of the bureau. I was in the devil’s workshop, the regional head office of the ISI.

He told me I was a close friend — a guest — and one that they cared about a great deal. I wasn’t really sure what he meant, since it was pretty clear that I was dear to them only because they could get a good sum of money for me when they sold me. Their trade was people; just as with goats, the higher the price for the goat, the happier the owner. In the twenty-first century there aren’t many places left where you can still buy and sell people, but Pakistan remains a hub for this trade. I prayed after dinner with the ISI officer, and then was brought to a holding-cell for detainees. The room was decent, with a gas heater, electricity and a toilet. I was given food and drink — even a copy of the Holy Qur’an for recitation — as well as a notebook and pen. The guard posted at the door was very helpful, and he gave me whatever I requested during the night.

I wasn’t questioned or interviewed while being held in Peshawar. Only one man, who didn’t speak Pashtu and whose Urdu I couldn’t understand came every day to ask the same question over and over again: what is going to happen? My answer was the same each time he asked me. “Almighty God knows, and he will decide my fate. Everything that happens is bound to his will”.

All of the officials who visited me while I was detained in Peshawar treated me with respect. But none of them really spoke to me. They would look at me in silence but their faces spoke clearer than words could, humbled by pity and with tears gathering in their eyes. Finally, after days in my cell, a man came, tears flowing down his cheeks. He fainted as his grief and shame overcame him. He was the last person I saw in that room. I never learnt his name, but soon after — perhaps four hours after he left — I was handed over to the Americans.

It was eleven o’clock at night and I was getting ready to go to bed when the door to my cell suddenly opened. A man (also with a shaved head) entered; he was polite and we exchanged greetings. He asked me whether I was aware of what was going to happen to me. When I said that I knew nothing, he said that I was being transferred, and that it would happen soon. So soon, in fact, that he recommended that I should prepare straight away by taking ablutions and by using the toilet. Without asking for any further details, I got up and took my ablutions.

The USS Bataan

Barely five minutes had passed when other men arrived with handcuffs and a piece of black cloth. They shackled my hands and the cloth was tied around my head covering my eyes. This was the first time in my life that I had been treated in this way. They searched my belongings and took the holy Qur’an, a digital recorder and some money I still had with me. As they led me out of the building, they kicked and pushed me into a car. None of them had said a word so far. We drove for almost an hour before they stopped the car. I could hear the sounds of the rotating blades of a helicopter nearby. I guessed that we were at an airport where I would be handed over to the Americans. Someone grabbed me and pulled an expensive watch that I was wearing from my wrist as the car drove closer to the helicopters. The car stopped again, but this time two people grabbed me on each side and took me out of the car. As they brought me towards the helicopter, one of the guards whispered into my ear. Khuda hafiz. Farewell. But the way he said it, it sounded like I was going on a fantastic journey.

Even before I reached the helicopter, I was suddenly attacked from all sides. People kicked me, shouted at me, and my clothes were cut with knives. They ripped the black cloth from my face and for the first time I could see where I was. Pakistani and American soldiers stood around me. Behind these soldiers, I could see military vehicles in the distance, one of which had a general’s number plate.

The Pakistani soldiers were all staring as the Americans hit me and tore the remaining clothes off from my body. Eventually I was completely naked, and the Pakistani soldiers — the defenders of the Holy Qur’an — shamelessly watched me with smiles on their faces, saluting this disgraceful action of the Americans. They held a handover ceremony with the Americans right in front of my eyes. That moment is written in my memory like a stain on my soul. Even if Pakistan was unable to stand up to the godless Americans I would at least have expected them to insist that treatment like this would never take place under their eyes or on their own sovereign territory. I was still naked when a callous American soldier gripped my arm and dragged me onto the helicopter. They tied my hands and feet, sealed my mouth with duct tape and put a black cloth over my head. That was in turn taped to my neck, and then I was shackled to the floor of the helicopter. All this time I could neither shout nor breathe. When I tried to catch my breath or move a little to one side, I was kicked hard by a soldier. On board the helicopter, I stopped fearing the kicking and beating; I was sure that my soul would soon leave my body behind. I assured myself that I would soon die from the beatings. My wish, however, wasn’t granted.

The soldiers continued to shout at me, hit and kick me throughout the journey, until the helicopter finally landed. By then I had lost track of time. Only Allah knows the time I had spent between cars, helicopters and the place where I now found myself. I was glad when the helicopter landed, and allowed me to hope that the torment had come to an end, but a rough soldier took me and dragged me out of the helicopter. Outside, a number of soldiers beat and kicked me. They behaved like animals for what seemed like hours. Afterwards, the soldiers sat on top of me and proceeded to have a conversation, as if they were merely sitting on a park bench. I abandoned all hope; the ordeal had been long and I was convinced I would die soon. Still I saw the faces of the Pakistani soldiers in my mind. What had we done to deserve such a punishment? How could our Muslim brothers betray us like this?

I lay curled up for two hours on the ground and then they dragged me to another helicopter. It appeared to be more modern than the last one. The guards tied me to a metal chair, and throughout the flight I was not touched. No one told me where I was being taken, and the helicopter landed some twenty minutes later. Again, the soldiers grabbed me and led me away. It seemed like a long way; I was still blind-folded, but I could hear that there were many people in the vicinity. They pulled me up to my feet and an interpreter told me to walk down the staircase in front of me. The stairs led inside and the noise of the people above slowly faded. There must have been six flights of stairs before we stopped and the black bag was pulled from my head. The duct tape was ripped off my face, and my hands were untied.

Four American soldiers stood around me and to my left I could see cells — they looked more like cages — with people inside. The soldiers brought me to a small bathroom, but I couldn’t shower. My limbs and body throbbed with the pain of the beating I had received earlier in the day during the torment of the helicopter flight. I felt paralysed and had little sensation in my arms or legs. I was given a uniform and led into one of the cages. It was small, perhaps two metres long and a metre wide, with a tap and a toilet. The walls were made out of metal bars with no seals. Before they left, the guards told me to go to sleep and locked the door behind me. Alone in the cage, I reflected on the last few days. How did I end up in this cage? Everything was like a dark dream, and when I lay down and tried to get some sleep amid the aching of my bruised body, I realised that I no longer knew whether I was awake or asleep.

The next morning I looked out from my cage and saw a soldier guarding the door. There were three other cages around mine, all covered in rubber. It dawned on me that I was in a big ship, one of the ships used in the war against Afghanistan off the Pakistani coast. I could hear the loud rumble of the ship’s engines throughout the night and morning, and I was sure that this was one of the ships that had launched missiles at Afghanistan.

I barely moved my eyes — not daring to look around — out of fear. My tongue was dry and stuck to the top of my mouth. On the left side I could see a few other prisoners who were together in one cell. A soldier came with some food and another prisoner was brought onto the ship. The men ate their breakfast and stood together. We were not permitted to talk to each other, but could see one another while the food was handed to us. I eventually saw that Mullahs Fazal, Noori, Burhan, Wasseeq Sahib and Rohani were all among the other prisoners, but still we could not talk to each other.

A soldier entered my room and handcuffed me to the bars of the cage. They searched my room and afterwards I was interrogated for the first time; fingerprints were taken and I was photographed from all sides. They wrote up a brief biography before bringing me back to my cage. I found that I had received some basic items in my absence: a blanket, a plastic sheet and a plate of food — rice and a boiled egg. I had not eaten for a long time, and returned the empty plate to the guard who stood in front of my cage. I had just lain down to rest when I heard another soldier coming with handcuffs. Shackled once more, I was brought to the interrogation room. This time I was asked about Sheikh Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar. They asked me where they were, what their current condition was, and then about some key commanders of the Taliban forces — where they were hiding, what had happened to them and what they were planning. 11 September came up only once, and then only in a very brief question. They wanted to know if I had known anything about the attack before it happened. These were the main things I was asked in the dark and small interrogation room on the ship.

The Americans knew — I was sure — that I had little to do with the things that they asked me about. I had not been informed, nor did I have any previous knowledge, of the attacks on the United States or who was responsible for them. But just as these things happened to me, thousands of others were defamed, arrested and killed without a trial or proof that they had been complicit or responsible. On the ship I thought that I would never see my friends and family again. I thought they would never know what had happened to me.

No one should be in such despair, especially a Muslim, but I had to remember the Soviet invasion, and the behaviour of the Russians in Afghanistan. I thought of the destiny of those sixty thousand Afghans who were just devoured by the Soviet monster. They were gone forever; no one returned alive, and no one knew anything about them. For the first time, I could feel what those people must have felt, deep in my bones. I wanted my spirit to join them and to be finished with this anguish. I wanted to escape the cruelties of those vicious animals, those barbarous American invaders.

After five or six days on the ship I was given a grey overall, my hands and feet were tied with plastic restraints and a white bag was put over my head. I was brought onto the deck of the ship along with the other prisoners. We were made to kneel and wait. The restraints cut off blood to our hands and feet. Some of the other prisoners were moaning because of the pain but the soldiers only shouted and told them to shut up. After several hours we were put into a helicopter and we landed three times before we reached our final destination. Each time we landed the soldiers would throw us out of the helicopter. We were forced to lie or kneel on the ground and they kicked and hit us when we complained or even moved.

In the helicopter we were tied to the walls or the floor, most of the time in a position that was neither kneeling nor standing. It was torment, and with each passing minute the agony grew. On our penultimate stop when I was thrown to the ground, one of the soldiers said, “this one, this is the big one”. And while I could not see them, they attacked me from all sides, hitting and kicking me on the ground. Some used their rifles and others just stomped on me with their army boots. My clothes were torn to pieces and soon I was lying naked in the fresh snow. I lost all feeling in my hands and feet from the restraints and the cold. The soldiers were singing and mocking me. The USA is the home of Justice and Peace and she wants Peace and Justice for everyone else on the globe, they said over and over again. It was too cold to breathe and my body was shaking violently, but the soldiers just shouted at me telling me to stop moving. I lay in the snow for a long time before I finally lost consciousness.

Bagram

I woke up in a big room. I could see two guards wearing balaclavas and holding large sticks in their hands in front of me. My body ached all over. When I turned my head I saw two more guards behind me in each corner of the room, both pointing pistols at my head. They were all shouting at me. “Where is Osama? Where is Mullah Omar? What role did you play in the attacks on New York and Washington?” I could not even move my tongue. It had swollen and seemed to be glued to my upper palate. Lying in that room, in pain and being screamed at, I wanted to die. May Allah forgive me for my impatience! They left when they noticed that I could not answer; then other soldiers came and dragged me into a run-down room without a door or a window. They had given me some sort of clothes but still it was too cold and once again I lost consciousness. I woke up in the same room. A female soldier was guarding the entrance and came over to me. She was the first soldier that was nice and behaved decently, asking me how I was and if I needed anything. Still I could not talk. I thought I was in Cuba at first, having lost all sense of time, but when I saw that the walls were covered in names and dates of Taliban I realized that I was still in Afghanistan.

I could hardly move. My shoulder and head seemed broken and the pain rushed through me with each heartbeat. Silently I prayed that Allah would be pleased with me and that he protect other brothers from the ordeal I was going through. When it became dark I called for the female soldier to help me. I asked her if I was allowed to pray. She said that I was. My hands were still tied so that I could hardly perform tayammum. I was still praying when two soldiers entered the room. They let me finish my prayer before they asked me if I felt better, if I was cold or needed anything. All I said was alhamdulillah. I dared not complain, and I knew they could see the bloody bruises on my face, my swollen hands and my shaking body. They asked me about Sheikh Osama and Mullah Mohammad Omar but I had nothing to tell them. My answer did not please them, and I could see the anger in their faces. But even though they threatened me and tried to intimidate me, my answer stayed the same and they left.

I had not eaten for six days because I was not sure if the military food rations they gave me were halal. For nearly one month they kept me in that small run-down room, and all I had for food was a cup of tea and a piece of bread. The soldiers would not let me sleep. For twenty days I lay in the room with my hands and feet tied. I was interrogated every day.

On 24 January 2002, six other prisoners were brought into my room, most of whom were Arabs. They stayed for a few hours before they were taken away again. They returned the next day and I asked them what had happened. They told me that Red Cross representatives had come to to inspect the camp, register prisoners and collect letters for their families. They said that they did not know why they were being hidden away. We talked some more, and food was brought, the first time I had had enough to eat.

Kandahar

In the following days we were moved several times. Each time we would be blindfolded, made to kneel and sit in uncomfortable positions for hours. On 9 February we were transferred out of Bagram and flown down to Kandahar. Once again we were tied up, kicked and beaten, dragged through the mud and made to wait outside in the cold. Many of the prisoners screamed and cried while they were abused. The same happened when we arrived after the brief flight. I was hit with sticks, trampled on and beaten. Five soldiers sat down on me while I lay in the cold mud. They ripped my clothes to shreds with their knives. I thought I would be slaughtered soon. Afterwards they made me stand outside; even though it was extremely cold I felt nothing but pain. They dragged me into a big tent for interrogation. There were male and female soldiers who mocked me, while another took a picture of me naked.

After a medical check up I was blindfolded again and dragged out of the tent. The soldiers rested on the way, sitting on me before bringing me to another big prisoner tent that was fenced off with barbed wire. Every prisoner was given a vest, a pair of socks, a hat and a blanket. I put the clothes on and covered myself with the blanket. It was cold in the tent and other prisoners were brought in one after another. Interrogations went on all day and night. The soldiers would come into the tent and call up a prisoner. The rest of us would be ordered to move to the back of the tent while they handcuffed the prisoner and led him out. The soldiers would abuse prisoners on the way, run their heads into walls — they could not see — and drag them over rough ground.

A delegation of the Red Cross came to the camp to register us and gave each prisoner an ID card. We were all suspicious of the delegates and believed that they were CIA agents. The Red Cross was trying to connect the prisoners with their families, arranging for letters to be exchanged and providing some books. They also arranged showers for us. Each prisoner got a bucket of water and was forced to take his shower naked in front of the other prisoners. We were allowed to shower once a month. No water was provided for ablutions. We received bottled drinking water from Kuwait and sometimes prisoners would use it to wash their hands and face, but as soon as the guards noticed the prisoner would get punished. I was held in Kandahar from 10 February till 1 July 2002. We were repeatedly called for interrogation. The tactics of the Americans changed from time to time; they would alternate between threats and decent treatment or they would try to cut deals with us. I was asked about my life, my biography, my involvement in the Taliban movement and so on. But the discussion always returned to Sheikh Osama and Mullah Mohammad Omar. Often an interrogation that began in a humane and decent way would end up with me being grabbed and roughly dragged out of the room because I did not have any information about the life of Sheikh Osama or the whereabouts of Mullah Mohammad Omar.

There were twenty people in each prison tent. The camp in Kandahar was better than Bagram. We were allowed to sit in groups of three and talk to each other; there were more facilities in general. All in all I believe there were about six hundred prisoners in the Kandahar camp. They conducted night-time searches, rushing into each prison tent and ordering all prisoners to lie face-down on the floor while they searched us and every inch of the tent. They brought in dogs to go through the few belongings we had, and to sniff up and down our bodies. There was no real food; all we were given was army rations, some of which dated back to the Second World War. Many were expired and no one could tell if we were allowed to eat the meat that was in the rations, but we had no choice: we had to eat the food or we would starve. The situation improved in June when we were given rations that were labelled halal. The new rations tasted better, and they weren’t out of date any more. We were also given some Afghan bread and sweets, a real luxury. Helicopters and airplanes landed day and night close by and the constant noise kept us awake. Many of the soldiers would also patrol during the nights, shouting and waking us. Three times each day all the prisoners would be counted. We were all given a number; I was 306. Until the time I was released I was called 306.

When I was taken to Bagram, every day I hoped that it would be my last. I only had to look at my shackled hands and feet, my broken head and shoulders, and then I would look at the inhuman, insulting behaviour of these American soldiers; I had no hope of ever being free again. When I met the six prisoners who were being hidden from the Red Cross in Bagram, I understood that there was something going on … I did not see any representatives of the Red Cross at Bagram because the Americans had also hidden me from them, but when I was transferred from Bagram to Kandahar, I saw the Red Cross on the second day after I arrived. They did not have a Pashtu translator with them, just an Urdu speaker whom they had taken from their Islamabad office. He was not Pakistani himself, but he could speak fluent Urdu. They had Arabic speaking staff as well. For Pashtu they had three people who hardly could speak the language at all: Julian, Patrick, and a German who had spent a lot of time in the Peshawar area. It was the first time that I had been able to tell my family that I was alive. I was given a pencil and paper, and a soldier sat in front of me while I wrote. When I was finished I gave the pencil and the paper back to the soldier. I did not receive any letters from home when I was in Kandahar, and nobody gave me any information about my family, about what had happened to them after I was arrested.

There were lots of Red Cross representatives going back and forth, talking to us through barbed wire. They were asking questions about our health and other problems. They told us that whatever we said would stay safe with them, and that they would not tell the Americans. But we were suspicious. We thought they might be lying; we could not trust them and we were not open with them. We did not tell them what was in our hearts. We could not complain about the situation, because right in front of their eyes the Americans were taking us to interrogation, they were dragging us along the ground, sometimes with two or three soldiers sitting on top of us. The Red Cross delegates saw this, but they did not help.

The detainees told all of the brothers to be careful in what they said. According to them, there were many American spies masquerading as Red Cross delegates, tricking us while pretending to help. But in any case we had nothing useful for the Americans. We had nothing to do with any spying. The only sensitive issue was complaints, and the fact that many of the brothers had given false names and addresses when they were captured. So now they could not give new names and addresses to the Red Cross, so their letters were being sent to the wrong places. It was hard for them to tell the truth to the Red Cross, because they were afraid the information would get back to the Americans. I had the same suspicions when I was in Guantánamo.

We did not understand the level of assistance we were getting from the Red Cross while we were in Kandahar. But I did know three things they were doing: first, they were connecting us to our families with those letters, which was very important. Second, they gave us four Qur’ans per each set of twenty people. Third, they arranged for us to take our first shower in four months, even if it was a communal, naked, and very embarrassing shower. They also gave us clean overalls. According to the Red Cross, all of these things were done at their suggestion.

Our guards changed shifts twice a day and many of the low-ranking soldiers misbehaved, bearing ill-will towards Muslims. Every time they would appear, we had to stand in a row looking at the ground, and if the number of a prisoner was called he had to say ‘welcome’. Any prisoner who disobeyed these orders was punished. Every day all prisoners were lined up outside and made to stand in the sun. There were about twenty tents that held eight hundred prisoners. Not all soldiers were the same, but some would command us to stand there for half-an-hour before they took the attendance register and almost two hours afterwards. No one was allowed to sit down or stand in the shade, no matter what his condition. May Allah punish those soldiers!

The guards inspected the tents inside and outside along the barbed wire every day. One time a soldier found a piece of broken glass outside on the ground. He was one of the meanest soldiers, and upon discovering the piece of glass he gave it to me and asked where it had come from. I tossed it back to him and said that I did not know; we had brought nothing with us. The glass must have been here before, I told him. The soldier kept repeating his question. “Don’t talk. I will fuck you up”, he screamed at me. I was forced to kneel with my hands behind my head for several hours; from time to time he would kick or push me to the ground. There was no point in complaining about the behaviour of the soldiers; it would only make the punishment even worse. I will never forget the treatment I suffered at the hands of these slave rulers.

Kandahar prison camp had several sections. Next to the ordinary prison tents, one of the old hangars — previously a workshop for air planes — was now being used for the prisoners. Most prisoners feared it as a place of extreme punishment. Several times I saw prisoners being transported to the hangar bound with metal chains. In another separate location they deprived prisoners of sleep, holding them for months on end. The camp was guarded by six watchtowers and patrols, on foot and with vehicles, which took place all day and night. There are too many stories from the time when I was a prisoner in Kandahar. One day a new prisoner was brought to the prison tent where I was detained. He was a very old man. Two soldiers harshly dragged him into the tent and dropped him on the floor. He was ordered to stand but neither could he stand nor was he able to understand the men. He seemed to be confused; other prisoners told him to stand up but it was as if he could not distinguish the soldiers from the prisoners.

On the second day when he was called for interrogation and had to lie down to be tied up, he did not understand again. None of the other prisoners were allowed to help him; we were told to move towards the far end of the tent. Soon the soldiers let their passions loose and kicked him to the ground. One of them sat on his back while the others tied his hands together. All the while the old man was shouting. He thought he was going to be slaughtered and screamed, “Infidels! Let me pray before you slaughter me!” We were shouting from the back of the tent that he was just going to be interrogated and that he soon would be back at the tent, but it was as if he was in a trance. I cried and I laughed at the same time. There was so much anger in me as I watched the old man being dragged outside. When he came back I sat down to talk to him.

He said he was from Uruzgan province and that he lived in Char Chino district. He told me he was 105 years old, and eventually he was the first man to be released from the Hell of Guantánamo. In the camp we would pray together in congregation. One morning while I was leading the morning prayer, we had just started performing the first raqqat when a group of soldiers entered our tent and called the number of an Arab brother to take him for interrogation. The brother did not move, but continued with his prayer as is commanded by Allah. He was called a second time. By the third time, the soldiers rushed in, threw me to the ground, pressing my head into the floor, sitting on me while two others grabbed Mr Adil, the Arab brother from Tunis, and dragged him out. There was no respect for Islam.

Every day prisoners were mistreated in the camp. A Pakistani brother who had a bad toothache had only been given Tylenol by the medic in the camp. Eating was painful and difficult for him, and he could not manage to finish his food in the thirty minutes allocated for each meal. When the soldier came to collect his plate, he asked to be given more time because of his teeth. The soldier took him to the entrance and hit him in the mouth while the rest of us watched helplessly. After we saw how they treated the Pakistani brother, we decided to go on hunger strike. Word spread quickly and soon the entire camp had stopped eating. When the camp authorities came to find out what the reason for the strike was, we informed them about the abuses of the soldier and that we would no longer tolerate them. We were promised that incidents like this would be prevented in the future and we stopped the hunger strike. Even though we were subject to harsh conditions, this was the first hunger strike to have taken place under the American invaders’ custody.

The next day Mohammad Nawab, who was very ill and could not stand up, was beaten and kicked. The soldiers had come to inspect the tent and ordered the prisoners to move to the back. Mohammad Nawab had not moved; he had remained in bed. When the soldiers saw him, a group of them started to beat and kick him before they dragged him to the end of the tent and dropped him at our feet. I should mention that not all American soldiers behaved in this way; some were decent and respectful and did not join their comrades in the abuses. Some abuses were worse than others and affected everyone in the camp. One afternoon I woke up to the sound of the men crying. All over the camp you could hear the men weep. I asked Mohammad Nawab what had happened. He said that a soldier had taken the holy Qur’an and had urinated on it and then dumped it into the trash.

We had been given a few copies of the Qur’an by the Red Cross, but now we asked them to take them back. We could not protect them from the soldiers who often used them to punish us. The Red Cross promised that incidents like this would not be repeated, but the abuses carried on. The search dogs would come and sniff the Qur’an and the soldier would toss copies to the ground. This continued throughout my time in Kandahar. It was always the same soldier who acted without any respect towards the Qur’an and Islam. There were many other incidences of abuse and humiliation. Soldiers were conducting training with the prisoners as guinea-pigs: they would practise arrest techniques — all of which were filmed — and prisoners were beaten, told to sit for hours in painful positions. The number of such stories is endless.

All the while the interrogations continued. One night, when I had already been in Kandahar for several months, I was called for interrogation. I was asked if I wanted to go home, told that they had not benefited from my detention and had found no proof that I was involved beyond my dealings as Ambassador. They were planning to release me, they said. They would arrange for money, a phone and anything else I needed. After all this they told me the condition for my release: all I had to do was help them find Sheikh Osama and Mullah Mohammad Omar. Any time I would choose detention over this kind of release. I would not dare to put a price on the life of a fellow Muslim and brother ever!

I interrupted them and asked them what the reason for my detention was. They said that they believed I know about Al Qaeda, the Taliban, their financial branches, and about the attacks on New York and Washington. I had been arrested to investigate all these allegations. Given that they had not found any proof of what they had accused me of, they must see that I was innocent, I said. I had been arrested by the Pakistani government, and should be released without any conditions. For three days they talked about financial aid and a possible deal if I would agree to their terms, but I turned all their offers down. Once again their behaviour changed. They threatened me and my life, again.

The next day a group of soldiers came to our tent throwing a bunch of handcuffs towards a group of prisoners. After they put on the handcuffs, they were tied together and led away. We all wondered what was happening. Some believed that we were being released; others speculated that they might get transferred. But they all were brought back a few hours later. Each and every one was shaved — their beards, hair and eyebrows. Every single hair was gone. This was the worst form of punishment. In Islam it is forbidden to shave one’s beard. It is considered a sin in the Hanafi faith. It is better to be killed than to have one’s beard shaved. I was in the next group that was led away to the barber. I asked the barber not to shave my beard; he replied with a hard slap to my head. I did not open my eyes for several minutes while the pain rushed through me. Later, when a doctor asked me what had happened to my face and I complained about the barber, I received another slap from the doctor, telling me I should not complain about the American invaders.

During one interrogation session, I was asked if I knew Mr Mutawakil [the Taliban foreign minister] and there were several other questions relating to him. Finally I was asked if I wanted to meet him. I doubted that he had been arrested and asked where he was and how I could meet him. A few moments later he entered the room. He had brought me a packet of Pakistani biscuits, but my hands were tied and I was unable to eat them. Nor was I allowed to take them with me. We talked for ten or fifteen minutes and then he left again. In the short meeting I learnt that I would soon be transferred to Cuba. Mr Mutawakil did not say much more about that. He knew that Allah knew best what would happen to me. The next day I was interrogated again. I was told that I would be transferred to Cuba on 1 July.

The interrogator added that those going to Cuba would spend the rest of their lives there and that even their bodies might never find their way back to Afghanistan. This was my last chance, he said; I had to make a decision to go home or to be transferred to Cuba. Once again he stated the conditions for my release. If I were to go home, I would have to work with and help the American intelligence agencies in their search for Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, remaining their slave for the rest of my days. May Allah save us from committing such a sin! Even though I was given a day to think about it, I replied immediately: “I am not more talented or important than any of the brothers detained here. I accept the decision made for me by Almighty Allah. I have not committed any crime, and so will not admit to any crime. It is now up to you to decide what to do with me and where I shall be transferred”. After this interrogation I hoped that the transfer would come soon.

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

On its website, Verso, the publisher of Dispatches from the Dark Side, begins its description of the book with the now-mistaken assertion that “The Obama administration, under some pressure from its antiwar base, has begun to release carefully selected evidence concerning the widespread use of torture in the ‘War on Terror,’” ignoring the distressing fact that, since a series of “torture memos” were released in April 2009, the Obama administration has closed ranks, and is now intent on preventing the disclosure of any information that may implicate senior Bush administration officials, allowing a senior Justice Department official to whitewash a damning report into the authors of the notorious “torture memos,” and misusing an obscure “state secrets” doctrine as a shield to prevent scrutiny of Bush-era policies in the courts. This was most recently demonstrated in a case brought by five men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, including British resident Binyam Mohamed, and was recently extended to include the Obama administration’s own disgraceful — and illegal — plans to assassinate US citizens anywhere in the world.

Nevertheless, Verso is correct to point out that, in her essays, Peirce argues that there needs to be an “accounting of the British government’s activities,” and to continue with the following description of the book:

Exploring the few cases that have come to light, such as those of Guantánamo detainees Shafiq Rasul [one of the Tipton Three, along with Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal] and Binyam Mohamed, Peirce argues that they are evidence of a deeply entrenched culture of impunity toward the new suspect community in the UK — British Muslim nationals and residents. Peirce shows how the British New Labour government has colluded in a whole range of extrajudicial activities — rendition, internment without trial, torture — and has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal its actions: its devices for maintaining secrecy are probably more deep-rooted than those of any other comparable democracy. If the British government continues along this path, it will destroy much of the moral and legal fabric it claims to be protecting.

Cross-posted below, to publicize this important book, is an article from the Guardian, based on interviews with Peirce, with Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four, and with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg.

Gareth Peirce: Why I still fight for human rights
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, October 12, 2010

I don’t have any memories of my childhood now,” says Gerry Conlon, as he rolls a cigarette in the sun-dappled garden of a cafe in Camden Town, north London. “But everything that happened from Saturday 30 November 1974 is absolutely vivid.” That was the day the 20-year-old was arrested in Belfast for his supposed part in the Guildford pub bombings, in which five people died and 65 were injured. It was 15 years before Conlon was finally released from prison — thanks mostly to the human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Conlon became known as one of the Guildford Four, whose convictions, along with those of the Birmingham Six and the Maguire Seven, remain among the most grievous miscarriages of justice in British history. Here’s a typical vignette from Conlon’s 15 years in British jail: “When they put me in a cell in the police station, there was no mattress or anywhere to sit. There was no glass in the windows, so flurries of snow were coming in. I was shivering. To make myself small I rolled into the foetal position. A policeman came into the cell with an alsatian as I was lying on the floor naked. He loosened the lead and the dog leaped at me. Its teeth were not even an inch away from my face. He said, ‘Don’t lie down again or I’ll come back with the dog and take it off the leash.’”

In her new book, Dispatches from the Dark Side: On Torture and the Death of Justice, Peirce argues that these miscarriages catalysed conflict in Northern Ireland. “Central to the anger and despair that fuelled the conflict was the realisation that the British courts would offer neither protection nor justice,” she writes. “This should be always in our minds as we analyse the experiences of our new suspect community.” Certainly, this thought has been in her mind a long time. Moazzam Begg, the one-time terror suspect whom Peirce represented before and during his imprisonment in Guantánamo Bay, says, “She said soon after I met her in 1998: ‘It was the Irish first and I can see now it’s the turn of the Muslims.’”

Peirce, who represented many wrongfully jailed Irish men and women in the 1980s and has spent much of the last decade working for Muslim terror suspects, adds: “Muslim men and women here and across the world are registering the ill-treatment of their community, and recognising the analogies with the experiences of the Irish.”

Conlon says that, after losing his 1977 appeal and learning of the death of his father Giuseppe Conlon (also wrongly convicted for terrorist crimes) in a British jail in 1980, he gave up all faith in British justice and British lawyers. Only in 1987 did a Catholic nun change his mind. Sister Sarah Clarke told him that she had a friend she’d like him to meet. That was Gareth Peirce.

It must have been some meeting in Long Lartin prison. Peirce looked and sounded like a pillar of the British establishment; Conlon did not. She had been educated at one of Britain’s most exclusive schools for girls, Cheltenham Ladies, before studying at Oxford and the London School of Economics. And yet: “Within 20 minutes, I felt this is the person who’s going to get me out of prison,” Conlon now says. “She was so convincing in her belief that the system had the ability to own up to huge errors and mistakes. She spoke in a calm, intelligent way that gave me hope for the first time. She was so believable when she said: ‘My job is to get you out and I’m going to get you out.’”

Peirce found a suppressed police statement from Charles Burke, who had been living in the same Kilburn hostel as Conlon, which gave Conlon an alibi. In 1989, mostly as a result of the overwhelming doubt Peirce’s work cast on his conviction, Conlon was freed.

His ordeal isn’t over. In 2005, he had a month’s worth of state-funded therapy: “Until then, I’d never thought about my father’s death and what happened to his body, but it haunts me now.” The story of the treatment of Giuseppe Conlon’s corpse, when staff at Belfast Airport refused to handle the coffin, is told on the final page of Peirce’s book: “His body was flown back to England three times. A British army officer, after Conlon’s body was flown to Belfast a fourth time, informed the undertaker, ‘It is on that plane but it is not coming off. The problem is the press have been notified and we can’t be seen to be handling the body of an IRA man.’”

Peirce relates this incident not just to show how a lie can pursue an innocent man after his death, but to draw a parallel between the treatment of Giuseppe Conlon and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan jailed for the Lockerbie plane bomb in 1988 in which 243 passengers and 16 crew were killed. Giuseppe, she writes, was wrongly convicted on disputed forensic scientific evidence, as later was al-Megrahi.

Peirce has no doubts that the Libyan, like the Conlons, was fitted up for a crime he did not commit by a British state prioritising its own supposed interests over justice. She writes: “Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi … was not recently returned to his home in Libya because it suited Britain considerably to have him do so. The political furore has been very obviously contrived, since both the British and American governments know perfectly well the history of how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted.”

There is, Peirce argues, “clear and compelling evidence” linking the bombing to a Palestinian splinter group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command, which at the time hired itself out to regimes known to sponsor terrorism, notably Syria and Iran. On this account, Lockerbie was a tit-for-tat response to the US shooting down an Iranian plane and killing 290 passengers, including pilgrims flying to Mecca, in July that year. For two years, the Lockerbie investigation focused on that link. Then something changed, and the Palestinian splinter group was no longer in the frame for Lockerbie.

Peirce argues that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, threatening 10% of US oil supplies, drove the US and Britain to change geopolitical tack. She writes: “A sudden shift of alliances was essential: if Iraq were to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated differently and the Syrian regime needed to be brought on board.” And one way of cosying up to Iran and Syria was to change the Lockerbie investigation’s focus, so that these countries were no longer suspected of harbouring the terrorists or commissioning them. By this stage, the CIA rather than Scottish police led the Lockerbie investigation, and the finger of suspicion moved from the Iranian state’s hired terrorists to Libya. The result? The wrong man wound up in a British jail, Peirce claims.

This is the great theme of her book and, arguably, her professional life too: that justice dies when the law is co-opted for political purposes. “Justice has been subverted many times in this country for political ends that seem hard to credit,” Peirce tells me when we meet at Birnberg Peirce & Partners, the law firm in Camden where she trained and is now a partner.

“She thinks this is a good country and that justice will eventually be done,” Conlon tells me, adding that in the 1960s, before Peirce became a lawyer, she spent time as a journalist in the US. “She followed Martin Luther King around on his campaign and embraced his struggle for human rights for black people. She saw there that the system had the capacity for change and she sees that here too.” But when I put this to Peirce, she is sceptical. “We’re very apathetic politically and morally in this country. We take it on trust that if the government suspects people of terrorism and locks them up, or puts them on control orders without charge, they must be terrorists.”

After 9/11, the Bush administration introduced the Patriot Act, which, Peirce says, legitimised the detention of so-called “enemy combatants” by presidential order, the abolition of habeas corpus, and the subjection of detainees to torture in Afghanistan or Guantánamo, or their outsourcing via rendition flights to countries specialising in what she calls “even more grotesque interrogative practices.”

“In Britain, Blair bulldozed through parliament a new brand of internment claiming that Britain faced a similar emergency,” Peirce says. “This resulted in the arrest on 17 December 2001 of 12 foreign nationals living in Britain who were all sent to Belmarsh prison. These men have been locked up indefinitely without trial, never told the accusations against them, never questioned, never spoken to by the police, the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him. Nothing this bad happened during the Irish conflict.”

But wasn’t Blair right to say that the rules have changed — that Britain has to respond to an unprecedented terrorist threat by any means necessary? “No. What has to be done is that the cases against these men have to be made in public, evidence needs to presented in court, the accused should be questioned by the police, and they must know why they are in jail. None of this has happened in the cases of the men I represent.”

The men she means are the 12 so-called Belmarsh detainees. Peirce fought against their detention for three years until the 2005 House of Lords ruling that holding the men without trial was illegal. Soon after that ruling, these men and others were subjected to control orders involving curfews, tagging, communication bans and restrictions on internet access. Some tags, she says, have voice-recognition systems that don’t work for Arabic accents.

After the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, says Peirce, diplomatic agreements were established so that some detainees could be deported to their countries of origin, although the government knew the use of torture was still routine in several of these states. “Many of the detainees came here precisely because they sought asylum here thinking this is a home of justice,” she says. “That’s proved to be a sick joke.” She cites the case of an Algerian asylum seeker who decided his control order made life so miserable that he would risk torture by returning to his native Algeria. Benaissa Taleb was tortured, and charged on the basis of a false confession obtained from torture. Worse yet, says Peirce, his interrogation in Algeria was based on information supplied from the UK.

Peirce looks what she isn’t — a timid figure. She is in her early 60s, married and with grown-up children, but has a fringe that dangles over her eyes like a gauche schoolgirl’s response to the intolerableness of being looked at. She will not talk about herself, not even to tell me why she decided to be known not by her birth name Jean, but as Gareth. Yet this is the woman who has represented some of the highest-profile human rights cases in recent British legal history. “For over 30 years, she has worked in an area where the most vulnerable are often facing the full might of the state,” says her colleague, Dame Helena Kennedy QC. Among her clients have been the Tipton Three, the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, former spy David Shayler, and Jean Charles de Menezes‘s family. “She specialises in representing pariahs of society,” says Moazzam Begg. “I know because I’m one of them.”

Begg tells me that some of the Arabic-speaking detainees she has represented in the last nine years call her al-Umm. “In Arabic, ‘al-Umm,’ which means mother, can signify the greatest. She’s organised rotas with people in her office for babysitting so men on control orders can go to hospital. Sympathy is the word that comes to mind. She genuinely cares.”

Why does Peirce represent people whom Begg calls pariahs? “It’s because the minority has to be protected from what the majority thinks — otherwise the Benthamite thing, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, prevails. Most think secret trials, torture, rendition flights and all the rest — that these things are the right thing to do. But secrecy kills justice: it has the effect of burying understanding.”

But didn’t some of her clients train at al-Qaeda camps? “Those men were thinking of fighting for the Chechens or for the Taliban before the allies invaded Afghanistan. I’ve represented these men for a very long time, men who are stigmatised as a threat to national security when they’re not. I know that they are intelligent, thoughtful men.”

How long these men will suffer from their treatment by British authorities is depressing to contemplate. Conlon, now 56, says: “It’s 20 years since I got out. In those years I’ve been addicted to drugs and alcohol, I’ve had breakdowns, I’ve tried to kill myself twice. I wake up crying. It’s better sometimes not to go to sleep, because the memories are waiting for me.”

Note: Also see this review by Victoria Brittain on the Institute of Race Relations website.

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

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009), Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z, Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction? (all April 2009), Taking liberties with our justice system and Death in Libya, betrayal in the West (both for the Guardian), Law Lords Condemn UK’s Use of Secret Evidence And Control Orders (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009), Britain’s Torture Troubles: What Tony Blair Knew (June 2009), Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws, Would you be able to cope?: Letters by the children of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh, Control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh to be allowed to leave the UK (all June 2009), Testing control orders and Dismantle the secret state (for the Guardian), UK government issues travel document to control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh after horrific suicide attempt (July 2009), Secret evidence in the case of the North West 10 “terror suspects” (August 2009), Letting go of control orders (for the Guardian, September 2009), Another Blow To Britain’s Crumbling Control Order Regime (September 2009), UK Judge Approves Use of Secret Evidence in Guantánamo Case (November 2009), Calling Time On The Use Of Secret Evidence In The UK (December 2009), Compensation for control orders is a distraction (for the Guardian, January 2010), Control Orders Take Another Blow: Libyan Cartoonist Freed (Detainee DD) (January 2010), Control Orders: Solicitors’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010 and Control Orders: Special Advocates’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010 (both February 2010), Will Parliament Rid Us of the Cruel and Unjust Control Order Regime? (February 2010), Don’t renew control orders, CAMPACC, JUSTICE and the Joint Committee on Human Rights tell MPs (February 2010), Fahad Hashmi and Terrorist Hysteria in US Courts (April 2010), 98 MPs Who Supported Human Rights While Countering Terrorism (May 2010), UK Terror Ruling Provides Urgent Test for New Government (May 2010), An uncivilized society (in the Guardian), New letter to MPs asking them to oppose the use of secret evidence in UK courts, and to support the return from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer (May 2010), Torture Complicity Under the Spotlight in Europe (Part One): The UK (July 2010), Fighting Ghosts: An Interview with Husein Al-Samamara (July 2010), Ruling sends message on control orders (for the Guardian, July 2010), UK Judges Endorse Double Standards on Terror Deportations (August 2010), In Memoriam: Faraj Hassan Alsaadi (1980-2010) (August 2010), An interview with Faraj Hassan Alsaadi (from 2007) (August 2010).

So what are Blair’s revelations about his decision to take Britain into an illegal war, one which, as various American friends have told me, was more crucial to swaying public opinion in America than most Brits realize?

“I can’t regret the decision to go to war,” he writes, although he adds, “I can say that never did I guess the nightmare that unfolded, and that too is part of the responsibility. The truth is we did not anticipate the role of al-Qaeda or Iran. Whether we should have is another matter; and if we had anticipated, what we would have done about it is another matter again.”

This is pretty pathetic, to be honest, as anyone remotely aware of history — rather than in an uninformed notion of the importance of “humanitarian intervention” (the so-called “Blair Doctrine,” first formulated during the Kosovo war in 1999) — would have told Blair that, in post-Saddam Iraq, Iran would obviously benefit, and would also have been able to perceive that a “holy war” in Iraq’s post-Saddam vacuum was exactly what al-Qaeda wanted too. In his denials of these basic facts, Blair resembles the media pundits berated by Glenn Greenwald on Tuesday for claiming that “there was no way they ‘could have known’ what was to happen.” Substitute “Tony Blair” for “American elites” in Greenwald’s passage below:

The predominant attribute of American elites is a refusal to take responsibility for any failures. The favored tactic for accomplishing this evasion is the “nobody-could-have-known” excuse. Each time something awful occurs … one is subjected to an endless stream of excuse-making from those responsible, insisting that there was no way they “could have known” what was to happen.

Like US pundits, and many supposedly intelligent warmongers in the UK, Tony Blair — if he were to be honest — would have to concede that, actually, he didn’t give a damn what critics said, or he, like Greenwald, might have taken note of commentaries providing detailed reasons why the war was an incredibly stupid idea, such as those written by Jim Webb of the Washington Post in September 2002, and delivered by Howard Dean in a speech at Duke University in February 2003.

Paying tribute to fallen soldiers, and to Iraqis who lost their lives, Blair asks, “Do they really suppose I don’t care, don’t feel, don’t regret with every fibre of my being the loss of those who died?” He continues, “The anguish arises from a sense of sadness that goes beyond conventional description or the stab of compassion you feel on hearing tragic news. Tears, though there have been many, do not encompass it. I feel desperately sorry for them, sorry for the lives cut short, sorry for the families whose bereavement is made worse by the controversy over why their loved ones died, sorry for the utterly unfair selection that the loss should be theirs.”

These are fine words, but they are ultimately dismissive of the 100,000, 650,000 or one million-plus Iraqis who have paid with their lives for his war of choice, and his words are, therefore, more indicative of his colossal ego and his passive-aggressive tendencies than they are of any genuine remorse. In addition, after admitting that the intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMD programme “turned out to be incorrect,” Blair still insists that the Iraqi leader only made a “tactical decision” to put the programme “into abeyance, not a strategic decision to abandon it,” leaving readers to wonder how he can square the tears he aleegedly cried with the fact that so many died for a seven-year bloodbath whose rationale was “sexed-up,” but which was apparently worth it because the removal of one man justified so many deaths.

For George W. Bush, Blair retains nothing but praise. He has “genuine integrity and as much political courage as any leader I ever met,” he writes effusively, only reinforcing long-held ideas that the men were far too close on a personal level — and through their shared notions of what “genuine integrity” and “political courage” meant — to allow anyone less exalted to burst their bubble. Alarmingly, he even seems to admire the bellicose madness of Dick Cheney, which he apparently encountered first-hand. Cheney, he writes, “would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates … He thought the world had to be made anew … by force and with urgency.”

On Guantánamo, too, Blair remains supportive of the Bush administration’s decision to hold prisoners outside of established norms, describing “a policy that was both understandable and, done in a different way, justifiable,” although adding that it was handled “almost in the most provocative way possible.” He explains that prisoners seized in Afghanistan “had to be treated unconventionally because they could not be proved guilty in a ‘proper’ court of law but ‘would be a threat if released,’” as the Australian described it.

Not only does this echo the disdain for the Geneva Conventions that was at the heart of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” but it also explains why it took until 2006 for Blair to offer even the mildest criticism of Guantánamo, when he described it as an “anomaly.” It should also be of interest to the inquiry into the role of Britain’s intelligence services in the torture of prisoners abroad since 9/11, announced by the new coalition government in July, especially because, just a week after that announcement, documents released in a UK court as part of a civil claim for damages against the government submitted by six former Guantánamo prisoners revealed Blair’s interference in plans by the Foreign office to provide consular access to one of these men, Martin Mubanga, seized in Zambia, who was then rendered to Guantánamo.

There is more. He “compares the fight against Islamist extremism to the Cold War and says the struggle in Afghanistan and elsewhere must go on for ‘as long as is necessary’ — possibly decades,” as the Christian Science Monitor described it, and there is also the sabre-rattling about Iran that so shamefully dominated his appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry in January, which jars — as absurdly as it should — with his unfounded pride about his role as a supposed mediator in the Middle East. As the Guardian explained, “His appetite for international affairs, he admits, has been sharpened by his role,” and, in a postscript to A Journey, he claims, “Personally I have never felt a greater sense of frustration or indeed a greater urge to leadership.”

There is not a word about other matters, of course — how “regime change” in Iraq was actually agreed between Blair and George W. Bush at the President’s Texas ranch in April 2002, as Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s ambassador to the US, told the Chilcot Inquiry last November — but there is enough about Blair’s defence of the Iraq war, his admiration for George W. Bush, and his defence of the rationale behind Guantánamo, to conclude that, whatever his domestic policies, we are all much better off having him far from office, and unable to drag us into disaster again with his deranged view of foreign policy and his tendency to polarized — and, I think, dangerously deluded — beliefs about good and evil.

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

This is a powerful book, covering every facet of the Bush administration’s lawless “War on Terror,” and is essential reading for anyone who wants an insight into the stories of the men held, from the only people outside the US administration (and the International Committee of the Red Cross) who have been allowed to meet them. It is also invaluable for anyone who wants to understand the legal struggles to secure rights for these men, and to hear, from first-hand experience, the kinds of obstructions that have been raised at every step of the way between the lawyers and their clients.

As I heard when the project was first being planned in 2007, it can be seen as the third part of a trilogy of books dedicated to bringing the prisoners and their stories to life, to counter the dehumanizing and unsubstantiated rhetoric of the Bush administration. This began with Poems from Guantánamo, edited by Marc Falkoff, which brought the prisoners alive through their poetry, and continued with my book The Guantánamo Files, which told the prisoners’ stories through their own accounts, based largely on documents released by the Pentagon, press reports and interviews.

Nor is the book the only outcome of the hard work of Mark Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz. As the publishers also note, “An online archive, hosted by New York University Libraries, will be available at the time of publication and will contain the complete texts as well as other accounts contributed by Guantánamo lawyers. The documents will be freely available on the Internet for research, teaching, and non-commercial uses, and will be preserved indefinitely as a historical collection.”

As an introduction to the book, I’m cross-posting below a lecture delivered last week by Jonathan Hafetz at the Washington University School of Law, which provides an excellent introduction to the book and its themes.

“Guantánamo and the Rule of Law”
By Jonathan Hafetz
Lecture at the Harris Institute, Washington University School of Law
October 20, 2009

Forty years ago, America put the first man on the moon, a feat that remains an enduring symbol of promise and possibility. Today, after more than eight years, America cannot seem to find a solution to the fate of some 200 prisoners languishing at Guantánamo Bay that honors the most basic values of its Constitution. How can a nation capable of accomplishing so much, be incapable of so little?

Following his inauguration in January, President Obama announced that Guantánamo must be closed within a year, and that doing so was required both by America’s values and its security. Four months later, in a speech at the National Archives — the repository of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution — Obama reminded the country that “the existence of Guantánamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.” Now, however, it is increasingly likely that the scheduled closure date will not be met, as high-level administration officials, testing the political waters for the coming let-down, have begun citing a litany of complications — some real, others imagined — for the anticipated delay.

To be sure, closing Guantánamo is not easy, particularly not with Congress intent to raise road blocks in the form of NIMBY-inspired appropriations measures that restrict the transfer of detainees to the United States, even for incarceration in existing maximum security prisons. But, let’s be perfectly clear, it’s not rocket science easier. As one European official recently said in frustration, “America seems to like its Guantánamo. Let them have it.”

Guantánamo represents all that it is wrong — legally, morally, and strategically — with the “war on terror.” It has become an icon of lawless detention, torture, and secrecy. It has also become a chilling example of how long and hard a government will fight to suppress the truth and perpetuate a lie.

What is Guantánamo really about?

Guantánamo is about people like Abdul Matin, who, along with seven other detainees, was imprisoned for years because he wore a cheap Casio digital watch. The reason: those watches, which are sold and worn by millions worldwide, happened to have been used by some terrorists in the past as timers in bomb attacks.

Guantánamo is about people like Afghan citizen Haji Bismullah, who the United States claimed was an “enemy combatant” and locked up for six years even though he had fought alongside the United States to defeat the Taliban and had served as a local official in the transitional government in Afghanistan. Bismullah had repeatedly urged the United States contact his brother to verify his story, but the US refused.

Guantánamo is about prisoners like Mohammed al-Qahtani, the Saudi citizen who became a guinea pig for the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Guantánamo. During a two-month period, al-Qahtani was interrogated for 18-20 hours per day and subjected to painful stress positions, forced nudity, and sleep and sensory deprivation. If al-Qahtani fell asleep, interrogators doused him with water. Military dogs were used to frighten and intimidate him. One interrogator tied a leash around al-Qahtani’s neck and made him perform a series of dog tricks. At one point during his interrogation, al-Qahtani had to be taken to the hospital and revived after his heart rate fell so low he was in danger of dying.

Guantánamo is about the Uighurs, a group of 20 plus Muslims from northwestern China sold by bounty hunters to the US military in Afghanistan and rendered half-way across the world to Guantánamo. The United States long ago realized that the Uighurs were not terrorists and presented no danger to the United States but continued to treat them as “enemy combatants” to placate the Chinese. Now, the US cannot send the Uighurs home because they will be persecuted or killed. So, it keeps them locked up year after year until it can find a country willing to take them in rather assuming responsibility for its mistake and resettling them here.

Guantánamo is about Mohammed Jawad, the Afghan youth whom I represented in his habeas corpus challenge in federal court. Jawad was arrested in Afghanistan in December 2002 for allegedly throwing a grenade that injured two US service members and their interpreter. Jawad, who was probably 14-15 years old at the time, was beaten and threatened by Afghan officials into falsely confessing then handed over to US officials who continued the abuse before rendering him to Guantánamo. There, the horrors continued: Jawad was deliberately isolated, told he would never leave, and subjected to severe sleep deprivation — known as the “frequent flyer program” — where he was moved 110 times in 14 days. Matters became so bad that Jawad, who often cried for his mother, attempted suicide by banging his head against a wall.

Guantánamo, at bottom, is about the more than 750 men from more than forty countries who have been imprisoned there since January 2002 and about the more than 220 who remain. It is a place where hundreds of human beings have each spent more than 2,000 days (and counting) behind bars, thousands of miles from home and family, without the most essential guarantee of our Constitution and legal tradition: a fair trial.

Trials, stripped to their essence, are about truth and justice. In the medieval age, trial was by ordeal — where a prisoner was required to undergo some painful task, like walking across burning coals or being submerged in water — to test his innocence. Centuries later at Guantánamo, the Bush administration came up with a new way of arriving at the truth: “Combatant Status Review Tribunals,” where prisoners seeking to test their detention were denied the right even to a lawyer, to see the evidence against them and summon witnesses in their favor, and to an impartial judge. The stakes could not have been more significant and the process more inferior — less, even, than you receive in my hometown of Brooklyn to challenge a parking ticket. The Bush administration also came up with “military commissions” — now going through their third reiteration (talk about putting lipstick on a pig) — which long allowed evidence gained by torture and other abuse and whose rules can best be described as “make them up as you go along.” The results are no less arbitrary than medieval trial by ordeal. But they are surely worse in that — now, in the twenty-first century and hundreds of years after the Enlightenment and American Revolution — we not only know better, but have the time-tested system of our ordinary criminal courts that we have shunted aside.

Guantánamo is the subject of three landmark Supreme Court decisions: Rasul v. Bush, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Boumediene v. Bush, now a part of law school casebooks and curricula. It is the subject of numerous lower court rulings; of almost daily media coverage; and of hundreds of books and academic articles, with many more to come. All, in one way or another try to come to grips with Guantánamo, to understand its meaning, and to explain its significance.

If Guantánamo can be reduced to a few core propositions, these are surely among them. Guantánamo is about the terrible consequences of creating a prison beyond the law — a place where prisoners have no rights and courts have no role. Guantánamo is also about man’s humanity to man, and the ease with which even the most deeply cherished principles can be abandoned to the siren call of “national security” and “public safety.” The end of protecting the country from further attack is not wrong. But the means taken cannot justify everything done in its name. As Justice Kennedy recently reminded us, “Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles,” chief among them being “freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers.” But Guantánamo is not simply about misdirected pursuit of security. In many instances the ends themselves have not been keeping the nation safe but covering up mistakes, abuses, and illegality to prevent embarrassment and avoid accountability.

That Guantánamo has remained open for so long, that prisoners have been held without charges or trial for so many years, and that this system has been propped up by so many (both inside and outside the government), is itself deeply troubling. Guantánamo’s creation may have been generated by a cabal of President Bush’s officials. But its continued existence cannot be blamed on any single person or group of persons. That Guantánamo remains, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, is a reminder of the banality of injustice.

But caution lest we focus too narrowly on Guantánamo as a place. For Guantánamo is, and always has been, more than just a prison. Its reality lies not in brick and mortar, in steel walls and concertina wire, and its cold, forbidding, and antiseptic environment. Guantánamo is a system, one of indefinite, open-ended, and boundless detention outside the basic guarantees of our Constitution. That is why simply shutting the prison at Guantánamo, important as that is, is not enough. Guantánamo, the system, must be eradicated.

Practically speaking, that means a few things. It means that that the remaining prisoners at Guantánamo should be promptly charged and brought to trial in our federal courts or released. It means that the United States cease the claim that it may detain terrorist suspects — captured anywhere in the world — without charge or trial. It also means the United States must cease creating “new Guantánamos” as it is doing at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility in Afghanistan, where, much like Guantánamo, it is claiming the ability to detain individuals without habeas corpus review. And it must ensure not only that torture is abolished (as President Obama has taken steps to do) but that there be actions taken for past abuses, both in the form of holding those responsible accountable and ensuring the possibility of compensation for victims rather than closing the courthouse doors by classifying torture as a “state secret.”

Who can we rely on? We cannot leave it up to the executive branch, which created Guantánamo to maintain and expand its powers. And not even an executive branch, like the current one, that professes fidelity to constitutional principles, for the desire to push the boundaries of those limits will always be tested, especially in the national security context.

Not Congress, which has disappointed time and again — from twice passing legislation (the Detainee Treatment Act and Military Commissions Act) to strip detainees of any right to meaningful court review by eliminating habeas corp, to its latest efforts to treat Guantánamo as political football rather than the political disgrace that it is.

That is not to say we should give up on the political branches, which contain men and women committed to finding rights-respecting solutions to national security, including many in the military and intelligence establishments. Rather, it is to say that, even when pushed and prodded, we can hope the political branches will do the right thing (and they sometimes will) but we can never count on it.

Ending Guantánamo — not just prison, but the system — will depend ultimately on you, law students, and future members of the legal profession. It will depend on your ability to defend the Constitution, and to insist that American justice is not simply an ideal but a reality. It will depend on whatever capacity you practice, whether the public or private sector.

As lawyers, litigation will always be one of the most important tools in your tool box. Litigation is important for number of reasons but, above all, because of the possibility of challenging illegal government action in court. Thus far, the judiciary has been the one branch that has stood up in the face of Guantánamo, pushing back against government overreaching, intransigence, and secrecy. But achieving results in court is only possible through vigorous advocacy, particularly true in national security context.

For seven years, the Bush administration fought to prevent any Guantánamo detainee from getting a fair hearing: first, by claiming that the detainees had no right to habeas corpus; then, after the Supreme Court rejected that argument in Rasul, by enlisting Congress’s aid through the passage of court-stripping legislation. Finally, in June 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in Boumediene that detainees had a constitutional right to habeas corpus and ordered that they be provided what they had so far been denied — a fair hearing.

Since then hearings have started to go forward, slowly but surely in federal district court in Washington, D.C. The results have exploded forever the lie, perpetuated by Bush administration officials, that all the detainees there represent “the worst of the worst.” The habeas process that is now unfolding in Washington speaks volumes about the capacity of our system for injustice, on the one hand, and the importance of courts and dedicated advocacy to combat it, on the other.

In 30 of 38 decisions so far, judges have ruled that the detentions are illegal –that there is no basis to hold the prisoners as “enemy combatants.” The power of this statistic lies not simply in numerical significance — although that number itself is astounding if one contrasts it to the high success rate of US attorneys in obtaining convictions in criminal prosecutions (especially given the higher burden of proof and more rigorous evidentiary rules in criminal cases). The power lies also in the content of those decisions, and in what the judges are saying about the way in which the US government has imprisoned so many for so long on such scant evidence.

Take Judge Ellen Huvelle in Mohammed Jawad’s case, before ordering Jawad’s release from illegal detention: “[S]even years and your case is riddled with holes,” she said to DOJ lawyers after suppressing the government’s evidence as the product of torture and denying yet another government request for delay. “This case is an outrage.”

Or the comments of Judge Coleen Kollar-Kotelly, in ordering the release of Kuwaiti detainee Fouad Mamoud al-Rabiah after years of seven years of illegal imprisonment: “The Court is unwilling to credit confessions that the Government cannot even defend as believable.” Drilling down on the facts, Kollar-Kotelly found that al-Rabiah’s “confessions” were the result of harsh interrogation techniques, including warnings that al-Rabiah could never return to Kuwait if he did not confess, and that “no one leaves Guantánamo innocent.”

Or the comments of Judge Richard Leon, who years before had said that Guantánamo detainees did not even have the right to come to court, but who has since been bewildered by just how thin the government’s evidence actually is. Writing in a case in which the government had continued to defend the detention of a prisoner, Abdulrahim Abdul Razak Janko [aka al-Ginco], even though Janko had been tortured by al Qaeda and imprisoned by the Taliban for 18 months as a spy, Leon remarked to the government: Your position “defies common sense.”

Yet, at Guantánamo, justice is always an uphill struggle and even when you win you can lose. Many of those 30 who have won their hearings still remain at the prison because they cannot be returned home and the US insists on imprisoning them year after year rather than bringing them to this country until resettlement to a third country can be arranged. Unless the right to habeas corpus includes the right to be released from illegal detention, it becomes a dead letter.

I would like to end though on a positive note, by mentioning one possible silver lining in the black cloud of Guantánamo.

Guantánamo was predicated on the notion that the president could create a category of persons and spaces outside the law: that he could bring individuals to an off-shore island and deny them legal protections simply because those individuals were not American citizens and the territory was not formally part of the United States (even if, like Guantánamo, it was under America’s long-time, total and exclusive jurisdiction and control).

Ultimately, the Supreme Court rejected that argument. Critically, it did not simply reject the argument at Guantánamo but said that fundamental constitutional rights such as habeas corpus could extend anywhere the United States imprisoned someone. “The test for determining the scope of [the Constitution’s Suspension Clause],” Justice Kennedy said in the decision’s most important passage, “must not be subject to manipulation by those whose power it is designed to restrain.”

Intended to limit the Constitution, Guantánamo has triggered its possible reconceptualization and expansion. It had breathed new life into the idea of a transnational Constitution, capable of reaching arbitrary detentions, torture, and other illegal government action regardless of where it occurs. Premised on the idea that non-citizens lack even basic constitutional rights, Guantánamo has reinforced the proposition that habeas corpus — and a meaningful opportunity to challenge one’s imprisonment — is a right of all individuals, not just American citizens, thus bringing the US Constitution closer to the spirit and letter of human rights norms. Designed to exploit international law by selectively invoking the law of war, Guantánamo has underscored its importance as well as the hazards of ignoring America’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions.

Whether America will ultimately learn from its mistakes and make something positive out of the legal, moral, and human catastrophe of Guantánamo remains to be seen. But, one thing is for certain: for this is to happen — for America to fight terrorism while remaining true to its Constitution and its values — it will depend on the work of future lawyers to make the ideals of justice and human rights a reality.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009, details about my film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed with Polly Nash, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

An immigrant from Nicaragua, Mejía, like many immigrants, joined the US army shortly after arriving in the United States in 1994, at the age of 19, and after working in a succession of badly-paid menial jobs with which he attempted to put himself through college. “The army,” he explains, “offered financial stability and college tuition, two benefits that seemed tough to find anywhere else.” He also felt that the military “held out the promise of helping me claim my place in the world.”

After three and a half years of active duty service in the infantry, mostly at Fort Hood in Texas, Mejía decided to return to college. It was only at this point that he was informed that anyone entering the military actually signs up for eight years’ service. After three years of active duty service, the remainder can be served in the regular army, or in the Reserves or the National Guard, but “soldiers are always subject to being called back to active duty until the eight-year contract is fulfilled.”

Mejía signed up with the Florida National Guard, returned to college, and had a daughter, Samantha, who was born in 2000, although the relationship with her mother did not last long. He explains that, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, his feelings about the military had “changed radically.” Although he still regarded the army as family, and was familiar with “the lifestyle, the food, the mentality, the discipline and structure, the language, and even the sense of humor,” he had become disappointed by the manner in which the system “preyed on the vulnerability of people, exploiting their lack of options to get them to sign up, and subsequently tied them into service with the promise of benefits that were just around the corner.”

It was then, just months before his contract expired, that the Florida National Guard was “activated in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Shockingly, as he explains, “Those of us who were due to get out of the military soon had just been extended until the year 2031,” following a “stop-loss order” passed by Congress.

In Kuwait, as he prepared to be deployed to Iraq, Mejía was forced to put aside his misgivings –- that the government had not “made a strong case for military action,” that there was no proven connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and that the war “had more to do with oil and geopolitical power than with defense of the United States” –- and to ignore his wish that he had had the courage to express his “doubts about participating in a war that I believed was unjustified.”

His company –- in which he was a platoon squad leader –- was flown to the ruins of Baghdad’s international airport, and after a brief deployment to al-Assad, an air base near the capital, they ended up in ar-Ramadi, a city in the heart of the Sunni triangle. Six of the book’s 13 chapters deal with what happened over the following months to turn a skeptical soldier into a full-blown opponent of the war.

As a portrait of the realities of combat –- punctuated by the development of Mejía’s inner journey –- this, the heart of the book, provides a grim and powerful indictment of the conflicts (which are supposed to be suppressed at all costs) between the bonding of soldiers at risk of death and their obligation to fulfil orders, and the often ludicrous demands placed upon them by their superiors.

As the narrative unfolds, Mejía vividly brings to life the often conflicting personalities of the soldiers, the futility of their mission –- largely composed of road blocks, security details and foot patrols –- and, in particular, the increasingly dangerous intransigence of their commanders, whose lack of vision –- and desire for glory –- led them to subject their men to avoidable danger, resulting in the deaths of several soldiers. As Mejía notes, “We continued to stay longer than we should in a single place and made it easy for the enemy to predict our movements by following the same routes over and over. It was as if our leadership was trying to get us attacked.”

US Marines on patrol in ar-Ramadi, 2006. Photo: Todd Pitman/AP file.

Largely absent –- to Mejía’s dismay –- are the Iraqis themselves, dismissed as “hajjis” by many of his overtly racist colleagues, and mostly encountered as ciphers at checkpoints and in house raids. Mejía was fascinated by Iraqi culture, but was aware, from his limited meaningful contact with Iraqi civilians, that the joys of liberation had rapidly turned to ashes. “Even those who had been initially happy to see the US military’s arrival and who despised Saddam were now saying it was time for Americans to leave Iraq,” he notes, as the insurgency rises.

What distressed him even more, however, was his complicity in the death and destruction of war. Numerous grim events are described, including the soldier mocking the corpse of a dead Iraqi, shot during one of the book’s many violent confrontations, as his relatives, hooded and bound, were unloaded off a truck, within earshot of this vile humiliation, and the “mistaken killing of civilians,” which, over time, “ceased to arouse much interest or even comment.”

Also included are chilling examples of Mejía’s own actions under pressure. On one occasion, at a road block, in a homicidal trance induced by fear, he was only prevented from shooting dead a wounded, unarmed civilian in a car because a colleague intervened. On another occasion, which comes to haunt him, he struggles to recall whether he shot another man in a car:

“I don’t remember his face. I fired at him but he was probably dead by then. It was an automatic decision –- I did not tell my body to point the rifle at him and squeeze the trigger; it just happened. He was meters away from me, and I shot him, knowing just that he was guilty. Of what? I don’t know, of being shot, perhaps. How come I don’t remember his face? He was so close. I just don’t remember it. No images, none at all? Yes, there is an image, the image of a very brief moment. Flesh. Yes, flesh and blood. It wasn’t a face; it was the flesh and blood of what once was his face. He was dead when I shot at him. He must have been dead, he had to be. He was dead.”

After this fraught journey to self-awareness, Mejía’s transformation into a resolute pacifist occurred when he was granted leave, ostensibly to sort out his status. As a US resident, rather than a citizen, he was supposed to be discharged from the military because his residency was about to come to an end, but the army was dismissive of the rules, and insisted –- while dangling the possibility of citizenship before him –- that he returned to Iraq after his leave was over.

Initially paralyzed by a kind of existential inertia, Mejía missed his flight back to Iraq, and then made his way to New York, where his new life –- as a prominent critic of the war, who would have to face a court-martial for his actions –- crystallized in the offices of Citizen Soldier, an anti-war organization run by Tod Ensign, a lawyer whose roots lay in the resistance to the Vietnam war. “As soon as I spoke with Tod,” Mejía writes, “the door to a new world opened up before my eyes. I went from feeling powerless and alone to realizing that there was a whole network of people and groups, from women’s rights organizations and antiwar veterans to military families and religious groups, who all felt as I did about the war.” Ensign, in turn, introduced Mejía to Louis Font, a West Point graduate who had refused to serve in Vietnam and had “accused US Army generals of war crimes against the people of Vietnam.”

For five months, with the help of Ensign, Font, activists from Military Families Speak Out, and Lewis Randa, a conscientious objector from the Vietnam war who had founded an extraordinary retreat called the Peace Abbey in Massachusetts, Mejía lived an underground life, conducting media interviews anonymously. In these, as he gained ever greater exposure, he explained his decision to resist what he described as a “criminal, illegitimate war for empire.”

In March 2004, at a press conference at the Peace Abbey, Mejía gave a brief speech, declaring that he was a conscientious objector, and that the war in Iraq was “oil-motivated,” and, after explaining that “if you want to support the troops, you cannot support the war,” he handed himself in to the military at a nearby army base, where he was held for two months before his court-martial for desertion.

This, it transpired, was a farce, stacked in favour of the prosecution, in which Mejía was prevented from expounding fully on the reasons for his resistance to the war. Although he was convicted, however, the maximum sentence available to the court was one year in prison. “As I walked out of the courthouse,” he explains, “I was not sad or bitter, nor was I afraid. Instead, I experienced a deep sense of empowerment on that beautiful day.”

This measured account of one soldier’s journey to redemption is required reading not only for committed peace activists, but also for anyone prepared to acknowledge the sometimes considerable tension between a soldier’s requirement to obey orders, and his or her doubts about doing so. Camilo Mejía crossed a line –- a critically important line, I believe, which involved betraying the military to protest against an unjust and illegal war –- but in doing so he stood up unequivocally for justice.

Curiously, however, the elements of the book that have lived on with me the most do not concern the anti-combat narrative that drives it forward. The first –- unconnected with Iraq –- concerns Mejía’s own background, as the son of prominent Sandinista activists in Nicaragua, who resisted the US-backed Contras. This alone illuminated for me an essential conflict within the United States. On the one hand, I was impressed yet again by the country’s openness, accepting refugees from all backgrounds, but on the other hand I was also aware, as was Mejía, of how many are then funnelled into the military as cannon fodder.

The second concerns Mejía’s experiences at al-Assad, the air base he visited before his deployment to ar-Ramadi, where he witnessed the everyday abuse of Iraqi prisoners –- referred to, of course, as “enemy combatants” –- who had, for the most part, been picked up in random raids. In scenes that are shockingly familiar from the research I conducted for my book The Guantánamo Files, in which the Guantánamo detainees described their treatment in US-run prisons in Afghanistan, the Iraqis, hooded, bound, and initially held naked, were subjected to sleep deprivation as a matter of course, were yelled at incessantly (without even the assistance of a translator), and were subjected to mock executions, as guns were held to their heads.

A suspected “enemy combatant” in Iraq, hooded and bound.

Just as familiar, sadly, are the pathetic excuses for “intelligence” that were used to justify the men’s imprisonment. In a passage that could have come straight out of The Interrogator’s War, a book by Chris Mackey, a former US interrogator in Afghanistan, who was critical of the unaccountable actions of the CIA and Special Forces, an interrogator wondered why a particular group of prisoners was being held. “Were there any weapons in their belongings?” he asked. “I don’t know,” came the reply. “The guys who dropped them off didn’t give us anything, no belongings, no paperwork, not even an explanation; they just dumped them and left.”

Another man was detained because he was “caught with a sniper rifle.” “Of course, he claims to be a shepherd, and that he needed the rifle to protect his sheep from thieves,” a soldier told Mejía. “He says he loves America. But, you know, they all got a story, and they all fucking love America.” As Mejía notes, “Later in the deployment we learned that most Iraqis own rifles and pistols, often from the decade-long war with Iran,” adding, with considerable restraint, that it “took awhile before the US military stopped viewing every Iraqi who possessed a weapon as an armed insurgent.” The same process, I can confirm, also took place in Afghanistan, and, for many men, led inexorably to Guantánamo.

Dogs and forced nudity: “setting the conditions” for interrogation in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

With up to 20,000 “enemy combatants” imprisoned in US prisons in Iraq –- and many tens of thousands more who have been subjected to similar treatment –- it’s hard to see an end to an insurgency that is so often blamed on anything other than American injustice and incompetence. As well as describing an important personal odyssey, Camilo Mejía’s account of his journey from war to peace also shines a light on the wider failures in the conduct of the “War on Terror.”

Road From Ar Ramadi, by Camilo Mejía, is published by The New Press.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As published on Nth Position.

For other articles on Iraq, see Iraq’s refugees in Syria: Mike Otterman reports (February 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Refuting Cheney’s Lies: The Stories of Six Prisoners Released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison (May 2009), Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (May 2009), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq (May 2009), Cheney’s Lies Undermined By Iraq Interrogator Matthew Alexander (May 2009).

For articles on Abu Ghraib, see Remember Abu Ghraib? (a review of Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007),  Film Review: Standard Operating Procedure (a review of Errol Morris’ challenging documentary about the scandal) (July 2008), In the Guardian: The 5th anniversary of the Abu Ghraib scandal (April 2009), The Torture Photos We’re Not Supposed To See (May 2009).

Torture Taxi was swiftly followed –- and superceded, in depth and detail –- by Stephen Grey’s authoritative Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Rendition Programme, but its first UK printing provides a reminder of its initial power –- as a well-told political detective story, whose topic was, and still is of enormous importance. It remains a good primer on the horrors of “extraordinary rendition,” unveiling, in particular, the ways in which, because the CIA is a civilian organization and not a part of the US military, its rendition hardware –- the jets used to transport prisoners around the world –- cannot officially be kept secret.

Registered with front companies, these planes, unlike the military’s, leave a paper trail in the records of various aviation bodies, which became the basis for much of the subsequent research into the planes’ itineraries, but only, ironically, after the planes themselves had first been monitored by plane-spotters and military secrecy geeks. The irony, of course, is that in the beginning the plane-spotters had no idea what they were tapping into, and even when they did –- becoming what the Guardian described as the “scourge” of the CIA –- they still cared more about their hobby than about clandestine operations run by the CIA.

It’s the exposition of this part of the story that provides the thrills and spills in Paglen and Thompson’s account, starting with the “air traffic controller with a particular interest in ‘black’ military projects,” who first noted unusual aircraft activity at an airstrip in Nevada in December 2002, and who then emailed other enthusiasts the tail numbers of four suspicious planes. Traced to companies that apparently had connections with the CIA, and involving aircraft that had already been noticed visiting “lots of interesting places,” the plane-spotters had unwittingly stumbled upon the most closely guarded secret in the “War on Terror.”

In tracing the story, Paglen and Thompson effectively sketch the contours of the rendition programme’s evolution from a top secret “finding” statement signed by President Bush on September 17, 2001, authorizing “the creation of a network of secret prisons –- ‘black sites’ –- around the globe,” and empowering the CIA “to kidnap anyone it suspected of having terrorist affiliations,” and also tell a number of individual rendition stories; in particular, those of the British resident Binyam Mohamed, and Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen. Mohamed was rendered to Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months, and also spent time in the “Dark Prison,” a secret CIA-run prison near Kabul, and El-Masri, who was seized because he had the same name as a man suspected of aiding the 9/11 hijackers, was kidnapped in Macedonia, where he had gone for a holiday, and rendered to the Salt Pit, another secret CIA-run prison near Kabul, where he was held for four months until the CIA realized it had made a mistake, and he was dropped off in Albania and told to make his own way home.

In between these accounts, Paglen and Thompson make a number of visits to places connected with “extraordinary rendition,” which, although generally fruitless, convey menacing glimpses of the dark machinations that underpin the programme. In a small town in Massachusetts, Paglen hits a dead end at the offices of one of the CIA’s front companies, but the chapter provides chilling confirmation of the “ghost” individuals assigned to the boards of the various companies involved, people like Colleen A. Bornt and Bryan P. Dyess, who don’t really exist and whose signatures vary wildly from document to document.

In Afghanistan, where Paglen and Thompson travel in search of the CIA’s prisons, their mission is also largely inconclusive, although they find and photograph the Salt Pit, which Afghan soldiers describe to them as “an Afghan military facility,” while conceding that “lots of Americans” are also present. After a tip-off from Afghan journalists, they also find and photograph the gates of an undisclosed secret prison in Kabul itself, which appears to be manned by Special Forces and Gurkhas.

Scratching away at the visible –- and not so visible –- reference points of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme, Torture Taxi will not satisfy those who want exhaustive details of the many hundreds of people who have been rendered since 2001 –- including many other innocent men, who are not mentioned –- but is perfect for those who want a brisk introduction to the front line in America’s disturbing and unprecedented retreat from domestic and international law.

Torture Taxi: On The Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights by Trevor Paglen & A.C. Thompson is published by Icon Books. For more on “extraordinary rendition,” see my newly published book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

As published on Nth Position.