Madni, an Islamic scholar, was rendered to Egypt and tortured because, on a trip to Indonesia to sort out his late father’s affairs, he was recorded by Indonesian intelligence with a group of young Indonesian Islamists who were under surveillance, and who, in teir conversation, discussed the shoe bomber Richard Reid, who had been captured the month before. When the information was passed to US intelligence and he was picked up, the prevailing opinion about him based on interviews after his capture — that he was nothing more than a “blowhard,” who “wanted us to believe he was more important than he was,” and that he would be held for a few days, “then booted out of jail,” as a US intelligence official told Ray Bonner of the New York Times in 2005 — was ignored, and someone higher up the chain of comand ordered his rendition to Egypt.

As I explained after Madni’s release, his case “deserves to be more than a mere footnote in the history of the Bush administration’s vile and unprincipled policies of ‘extraordinary rendition’ and torture,” as the suffering inflicted on the 24-year old Islamic scholar — which involved three months of torture in Egypt, followed by eleven months in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and over five years in Guantánamo — was based not on detailed evidence that he was a terrorist, but on a single ill-advised comment picked up by the Indonesian intelligence services (which, Madni has stated since his release, was not even made by him).

Explaining what led to his capture, Madni told a military review board in Guantánamo, “After I went to Indonesia, I got introduced to some people who were not good,” adding, “They were bad people. Maybe I can say they were terrorists. When someone gets introduced to someone, it is not written on their foreheads that they are bad or good.”

I have covered Madni’s story in depth in previous years — in my book The Guantánamo Files, in September 2008, after his release from Guantánamo, in an article entitled, Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo, and in June 2009, in an article entitled, Revealed: Identity Of Guantánamo Torture Victim Rendered Through Diego Garcia, after his lawyers at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve established that he had been rendered to Egypt via the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, a British territory leased to the US, where there have been regular reports that prisoners in the “War on Terror” were held between 2002 and 2006.

The NBC report adds little new to Madni’s story of his capture, rendition, torture in Egypt, and the torture he also suffered in Bagram and Guantánamo, which led to him attempting to commit suicide, but it is a powerful interview with a man still broken by what happened to him, and a salutary reminder for an American audience — whilst hysteria about Guantánamo is still the dominant Republican response to attempts to discuss the prison in a rational manner — that horrendous mistakes were made by the Bush administration, and that President Obama’s decision not to investigate his predecessor’s policies or to consider anyone accountable for their actions has contributed directly to this lamentable state of affairs, allowing those who conceived the kind of dreadful policies that led to the capture and torture of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni — and those who supported them, or who want to shield them from accountability — to continue lying about the success of the program of rendition and torture, and to keep the torturers’ illegal and ill-conceived arrogance alive and well in American discourse, with baleful effects for the very soul of the United States.

The NBC interview is available below, via YouTube, and is followed by a cross-post of the article feartured on NBC News’ website.

‘I wake up screaming’: A Gitmo nightmare
Islamic scholar’s experience sheds light on counterterrorism efforts in wake of 9/11 attacks
By Carol Grisanti and Fakhar ur Rehman, NBC News, January 18. 2011

LAHORE, Pakistan — Saad Iqbal Madni looks decades older than his 33 years when he shuffles into the room, head down and eyes averted.

“There are a lot of times I start to cry. I still feel like I am in Guantánamo,” he says, his voice cracking and hands trembling. “I have memorized the torture. I wake up in the middle of the night screaming.”

It has been two years since the Pakistani Islamic scholar left Guantánamo Bay. After six-and-a-half years of imprisonment as a suspected enemy combatant he was released without being convicted and without an explanation. According to accounts by Madni and others, his experience involved torture, extraordinary rendition across several continents and five years at the U.S. prison in Cuba.

Mohammed Burki, Madni’s physician in Pakistan, describes his patient as a deeply troubled man who is “still far far away from being normal again.”

Madni now suffers from a catalogue of ailments, including migraines, paranoia, depression, panic attacks and temper tantrums, Burki told NBC News.

“Before I could treat any of those, I had to try and get him off the morphine,” says Burki, who treated Madni for two years after his release. “The Americans had made an addict out of him.”

The CIA and the U.S. military did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Madni’s detention and subsequent release. The United States has explicitly denied torturing detainees.

While it is impossible to independently corroborate much of Madni’s story, experts say it stands up to scrutiny.

“His account is so precise and so detailed and there are enough documents to back up everything he says,” says Sultana Noon of Reprieve, a U.K.-based charity that represents prisoners who have been rendered and abused around the world.

Madni was part of wave of men scooped up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. His story sheds further light on international counterterrorism efforts, when suspected terrorists were transported around the globe, held without trial and allegedly tortured at the hands of foreign intelligence agencies.

Some contend these practices continue.

“Anyone who is sporting a beard is a vulnerable target for the intelligence agencies to pick up,” says Pakistani human rights activist Amina Masood. “We are talking about gross violations of human rights in this U.S. war on terror, disappearances, arrests, no courts to hear one’s pleas.”

“We are dealing with human beings here,” she says.

Madni, who was employed to read the Koran during prayer times and religious holidays for the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, says he was picked up by Indonesian authorities during a visit to Jakarta in 2002.

Shoe bomb

Madni says he was told by the officials who detained him that they were acting on CIA instructions after he told an Islamic group that he knew how to make a shoe bomb. Madni denies the charge, saying that nobody ever even questioned him about the alleged comment during his detention.

Even American officials in Jakarta questioned the case against Madni, saying he was a braggart, a “wannabe” and should be let go, according to a New York Times article from Jan. 6, 2009.

Quoting two senior American officials, the newspaper reported there was no evidence that Madni ever met Osama bin Laden or had been to Afghanistan.

“But in the atmosphere of fear and confusion in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, Mr Iqbal (Madni) was secretly moved to Egypt for further interrogation,” the newspaper reported.

Madni says he felt his life was over as soon as Indonesian intelligence officials took him from his prison cage to the airport.

“A person from Egyptian intelligence come, kicked and grabbed me and threw me against the wall,” he says. “That’s when I got a perforated ear drum and started bleeding from my ear, nose and throat.”

Madni identified his captors as Egyptian immediately from their accents. He is fluent in nine languages, including Arabic, which he believes made him suspect.

“They stripped me naked, beat me and kicked me,” Madni told NBC News. “I was shackled from my neck to my feet and taken to a plane. They put me inside a wooden box, on top of the box is a plastic sheet. My legs were up on my chest and I had to stay like that for an 18-hour flight to Diego Garcia. They didn’t allow me to go to the bathroom. They put me in diapers and said, ‘your bathroom is with you’.”

Diego Garcia is a British territory used by the U.S. military.

Madni says he kept track of the passage of time because he recited the Koran by heart. Anyone who reads the Muslim holy book professionally knows exactly how long it takes to recite each verse.

In Egypt, Madni says his captors put him in a room that he describes as “smaller than a grave, so small I could not even lie down.”

Madni says he was kept there for 92 days.

“They gave me electric shocks on my body and my head and kept asking me if I know Osama bin Laden, and have I been to Afghanistan,” he says.

After three months in Egypt, he was handed over to the Americans and flown to Bagram, the U.S. military prison in Afghanistan.

Madni says he passed a polygraph test three times.

“A man from military intelligence introduced himself as Ron,” he told NBC News. “He said, ‘We did a mistake about you but we can’t release you, we have to take you to Guantánamo and from there you will be released.’”

Madni says he was kept in Bagram for one year where he was repeatedly tortured and denied any visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which works to protect victims of armed conflict around the world.

On March 23, 2003, [14 months] after he was picked up in Jakarta, Madni arrived at Guantánamo Bay.

“They put me in frequent flyer status for six months. That means no sleep. The guards came to wake me up every ten minutes. Every two hours they make me walk from camp to camp in shackles from my neck to my feet,” he says. “I was in terrible pain from my ear, which was infected and bleeding. They wrote ‘f*** you’ inside the Koran and flushed pages from it down the toilet.”

Madni breaks down as he recalls what was perhaps his most difficult time.

“They put me in Delta Block in a six-by-four refrigerator with just my underwear for six months. I lost my hearing and when they finally started to give me IV medication, I noticed that the labels had expired dates,” he alleges. “They would keep me for 15 hours in the interrogation room with no bathroom, I had to pee and number two on myself.”

After 192 days in Guantánamo, Madni tried to hang himself with a bed sheet. He later went on a hunger strike for a year and a half.

Madni also claims he was denied medical treatment for his infected eardrum. The guards told him he would be treated only after he confessed to knowing Osama bin Laden, Madni says.

Prison records later revealed that the ear infection had spread dangerously close to his brain, Burki, his doctor says.

House arrest

The International Committee of the Red Cross paid for Madni’s treatment for six months after he was released.

Back home in Pakistan Madni’s ordeal is still not over. He remains under house arrest and needs permission from security officials to leave home and meet with people, even with his own sister.

Madni’s treatment at the hands of Pakistani authorities is not unusual, Reprieve’s Noon says.

“Most Gitmo detainees are kept in jail or under house arrest when they are repatriated because the government doesn’t want to be embarrassed in the media,” she says.

Madni had to get official permission to meet with NBC News.

Reprieve is suing the Pakistani government on behalf of seven Pakistani prisoners who are in detention in Afghanistan’s Bagram. The charity sued the government for illegal rendition and for violating the men’s human and constitutional rights.

The case has been postponed until later this month.

And in November, the British government agreed to pay seven former Guantánamo detainees millions of dollars as part of an out-of-court settlement .

The ex-detainees, Britons or British residents, were claiming damages from the government over allegations that they were mistreated during their detention abroad with the knowledge and in some cases the complicity of British security services.

Madni was released without a conviction after his lawyer Richard Cys of Davis Wright Tremaine took up the case pro bono in the U.S. courts.

“We are pleased that he was released from his imprisonment,” Cys said in a written response to an interview request from NBC News.

Guantánamo Bay prison is still holding 173 detainees, according to Reprieve.

“My family won’t forget”

President Barack Obama, desperate to keep his campaign promise to reduce the prison population and eventually close the facility, has strong-armed allies to take former prisoners in, according to secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

In Pakistan, Asma Jehanghir, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association and a human rights lawyer, promised to fight Madni’s case in the Pakistani courts in order to lift his house arrest.

But Obama closing Guantánamo and the government clearing his name won’t erase the last eight years of Madni’s life.

“What they did to me, me and my family won’t forget for 100 years,” Madni says. “There are a lot of people like me that never did anything and were in Guantánamo Bay.”

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.

The 226-page report, published on Wednesday in an advance unedited version, is the culmination of a year-long Joint Study by the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. It will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in March.

The advance unedited version of the report is available here: UN Secret Detention Report.

In an introduction, the UN experts established that:

a person is kept in secret detention if State authorities acting in their official capacity, or persons acting under the orders thereof, with the authorization, consent, support or acquiescence of the State, or in any other situation where the action or omission of the detaining person is attributable to the State, deprive persons of their liberty; where the person is not permitted any contact with the outside world (“incommunicado detention”); and when the detaining or otherwise competent authority denies, refuses to confirm or deny or actively conceals the fact that the person is deprived of his/her liberty, hidden from the outside world, including, for example, family, independent lawyers or non-governmental organizations, or refuses to provide or actively conceals information about the fate or whereabouts of the detainee.

After running through the historical background to secret detention — both in a legal context, and through numerous examples from the twentieth century — the report focuses primarily on secret detention in the last nine years, providing a detailed account of US policies in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and also running through the practice of secret detention in 25 other countries, including Algeria, China, Egypt, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Libya, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

These sections contain valuable summaries, explaining how, in many cases, terrorism is used as a cover for secret detention policies of a political nature. However, the heart of the report is a detailed analysis of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” policies.

Of particular concern to the authors of the Joint Study — beyond the overall illegality of the entire project conceived and executed by the Bush administration — is the fate of dozens of men held in secret prisons run by the CIA, or transferred by the CIA to prisons in other countries. Based on figures disclosed in one of the Office of Legal Counsel’s notorious “torture memos” (PDF), written in May 2005 by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Bradbury, the CIA had, by May 2005, “taken custody of 94 prisoners [redacted] and ha[d] employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these detainees.”

The 28 men subjected to “enhanced techniques” are clearly the “high-value detainees” — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Abu Zubaydah and twelve others — who were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, but no official account has ever explained what happened to the other 14 “high-value detainees,” or, indeed, to the majority of the other 66 men.

The report also establishes that, at a minimum, many dozens of other prisoners were rendered to prisons in other countries.

In tracking these men, the report traces the development of the US secret detention program, drawing on new research into flight records to demonstrate that rendition flights, carefully disguised in the records, flew to Poland, Romania and Lithuania. The report also touches on the existence of a secret facility within Guantánamo, exposed by Scott Horton for Harper’s Magazine last week, which prompted the experts to note that they were “very concerned about the possibility that three Guantánamo detainees (Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani) might have died during interrogations at this facility, instead of in their own cells, on 9 June 2006.”

Also mentioned are two little-reported facilities in the Balkans — Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and Eagle Base in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina — and a claim that Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean (a British territory leased to the US) was used in 2005-06 to hold Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a joint Syrian-Spanish national.

Accounting for other prisoners, the report focuses on a number of secret prisons in Afghanistan; in particular, the “Dark Prison,” the “Salt Pit,” and a secret facility within Bagram airbase. Of the 94 men mentioned by Stephen Bradbury — minus the 14 transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 — the report establishes that eight were released, that 23 others were transferred to Guantánamo (mostly in 2004), that four escaped from Bagram in July 2005, that four others are still in Bagram (three of whom are awaiting a US appeals court ruling on their successful habeas corpus petition last March), and that five others were returned to Libya in 2006.

These five include Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoner,” who falsely confessed, under torture in Egypt, that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which were subsequently used to justify the invasion of Iraq. After multiple renditions to other countries (which I exposed last June), al-Libi’s return to Libya came to a dark end last May, when he died under mysterious circumstances.

Discussing the other prisoners, whose current whereabouts are unexplained, the experts noted, “It is probable that some of these men have been returned to their home countries, and that others are still held in Bagram.” As I explained in an article last week, following the publication of the first ever list of prisoners held in Bagram (PDF), it appears that a handful of these men may indeed be in Bagram, but not all of them, and it is, therefore, imperative that the publication of this list leads to pressure on the Obama administration to reveal details of all the “disappeared” detainees.

The report also examines the cases of 35 men rendered by the CIA to Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Morocco, between 2001 and 2004. As with the “ghost prisoners” in Afghanistan, many of these men later surfaced in Guantánamo, or were freed, but the whereabouts of others — particularly those in Syria, and, probably, other completely unknown men rendered to Egypt — have never been disclosed, even though some of the prisoners rendered to Syria were flown there as long ago as 2002, and, in at least two cases, were only teenagers at the time.

There are also sections on secret detention in Ethiopia, Djibouti and Uzbekistan, and the experts also criticized other countries for their involvement in the program, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Kenya and the UK. According to Reuters, throughout the report, 66 countries in total are implicated in one way or another in secret detention practices — either independently, or as part of the US-led “War on Terror.”

In concluding their review of US detention policies since 9/11, the experts welcomed President Obama’s commitment to revoke and repudiate many of the Bush administration’s policies, including the closure of all CIA black sites, but requested clarification “as to whether detainees were held in CIA ‘black sites’ in Iraq and Afghanistan or elsewhere when President Obama took office, and, if so, what happened to the detainees who were held at that time.” They were also “concerned that the Executive Order which instructed the CIA ‘to close any detention facilities that it currently operates’ does not extend to the facilities where the CIA detains individuals on ‘a short-term transitory basis,’” and, in the light of suggestions by Scott Horton that the secret facility at Guantánamo may have been run by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), noted that the order “does not seem to extend to detention facilities operated by” JSOC.

These were not their only concerns. Although they welcomed the implementation in August 2009 of a new policy whereby the International Committee of the Red Cross must be notified of all prisoners’ names within two weeks of capture, they noted that “there is no legal justification for this two-week period of secret detention,” because the Geneva Conventions allow only a week, and also because of their fears that some prisoners are being held who were not captured on the battlefield, and who may, as I noted in an article in September, in fact be prisoners who have been rendered to facilities outside of the military’s control (at Bagram in Afghanistan and Camp Nama in Iraq). The experts explained that they had “noted with concern news reports which quoted current government officials saying that ‘the importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has risen under the Obama administration, which barred the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention.’”

The experts’ final concern was with Bagram’s new review system for prisoners. They noted that the decision to replace the existing system, which the judge in the habeas cases last March described as a process that “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo,” was still inadequate. As they explained:

[T]he new review system fails to address the fact that detainees in an active war zone should be held according to the Geneva Conventions, screened close to the time and place of capture if there is any doubt about their status, and not be subjected to reviews at some point after their capture to determine whether they should continue to be held.

They were also “concerned that the system appears to specifically aim to prevent US courts from having access to foreign detainees captured in other countries and rendered to Bagram,” and, despite welcoming the release of the names of 645 prisoners at Bagram (an annotated version is here), urged the US government “to provide information on the citizenship, length of detention and place of capture of all detainees currently held within Bagram Air Base.”

While the report spreads its net wide, the US administration’s response to its findings about the Bush administration’s legacy of “disappeared” prisoners, and its focus on the gray areas of Obama’s current policies, is particularly anticipated. So far, however, there has been silence from US officials, and only the British, moaning about “unsubstantiated and irresponsible” claims, have dared to challenge their well-chronicled complicity in the secret detention policies underpinning the whole of the “War on Terror, which do not appear to have been thoroughly banished, one year after Barack Obama took office.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison , Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA) (all May 2009) and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009), The Logic of the 9/11 Trials, The Madness of the Military Commissions (November 2009), UK Judges Compare Binyam Mohamed’s Torture To That Of Abu Zubaydah (November 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan (July 2009), US Torture Under Scrutiny In British Courts (July 2009), What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed (August 2009), Torture in Bagram and Guantánamo: The Declaration of Ahmed al-Darbi (September 2009), UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents (October 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List (January 2010), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive.

And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), Torture In Guantánamo: The Force-feeding Of Hunger Strikers (June 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Torture And Futility: Is This The End Of The Military Commissions At Guantánamo? (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (Fouad al-Rabiah, September 2009), UK Court Orders Release Of Torture Evidence In The Case Of Shaker Aamer, The Last British Resident In Guantánamo (December 2009), Shaker Aamer: UK Government Drops Opposition To Release Of Torture Evidence (December 2009), Afghan Nobody Faces Trial by Military Commission (January 2010), Murders at Guantánamo: Scott Horton of Harper’s Exposes the Truth about the 2006 “Suicides” (January 2010), Two Algerian Torture Victims Are Freed from Guantánamo (January 2010), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

Specifically, Col. Wilkerson wrote about “the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the US operations there,” and how “several in the US leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.” He also poured scorn on “the ad hoc intelligence philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy,” whose shortcomings were recognized, in May, by a District Court judge, Gladys Kessler, when she granted the habeas corpus petition of a Yemeni prisoner, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed.

I recently approached Col. Wilkerson to ask if he would discuss some of these issues in greater detail, and was delighted when he agreed to be interviewed, as he provided some startling new insights into the conduct of the “War on Terror’; specifically, in this first part, he explained how the State Department had wondered whether the little-reported Dasht-i-Leili container massacre had involved war crimes, how the Bush administration had considered using the Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia (leased from the UK) instead of Guantánamo, and how Col. Wilkerson himself believed that some prisoners had been held on Diego Garcia.

He also spoke about the administration’s obsession with building a “mosaic” of intelligence from the prisoners to understand the workings of al-Qaeda, and how, increasingly, this obsession shifted to a search for connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, to justify the planned invasion of Iraq. What I found particularly interesting at this point in the interview was Col. Wilkerson’s insistence that the administration’s fear of another terrorist attack subsided more rapidly than has been previously acknowledged, as the drive for war in Iraq took over.

Col. Wilkerson also spoke about the long-standing rivalry between the Pentagon and the CIA, and how defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld — albeit with the backing of Dick Cheney — infected the military with the kind of techniques authorized for use by the CIA on “high-value detainees,” and he also mentioned receiving reports from military personnel who refused to disobey the Geneva Conventions when it came to the humane treatment of prisoners, and from others who revealed the disturbing scale of the global detention policies implemented by both the Pentagon and the CIA.

Towards the end of this first half of the interview, he also explained how he believed that President Bush had no idea how dysfunctional his administration was, and reinforced his earlier claim that “no more than a dozen or two” of the prisoners held at Guantánamo had “any intelligence of significance” with a few pointed anecdotes about the administration’s overall failure to seize more than a handful of worthwhile prisoners.

Andy Worthington: I wanted to talk to you about the article you wrote about Guantánamo for the Washington Note in March, which was fascinating because you pointed out so many aspects of how the prison had come into being that had not been reported very well. I know that you received a certain amount of attention for it at the time, but I’m very interested in putting some of those comments that you made out there again, for some people who may have missed them the first time around, and also because I was hoping that maybe you could expand on a few of the themes that you wrote about.

In the first major point that you raised in your article, you talked about the incompetence of the battlefield vetting, and I know, from The Interrogators, a book by a former interrogator in Afghanistan, who wrote under the pseudonym Chris Mackey, that the orders came from Camp Doha in Kuwait, where the prisoner lists were being looked at, that every single Arab who came into US custody had to be sent to Guantánamo, that there was effectively no screening process whatsoever.

And, of course, the Article 5 competent tribunals didn’t take place either. (Held close to the time and place of capture, and designed to separate combatants from those caught up in the fog of war, these tribunals were established in the Geneva Conventions, and were used by the US military in every war from Vietnam onwards — until the US-led invasion of Afghanistan). So I was wondering how you’d heard about the incompetence, if you’d heard this from military people in the field who’d complained that the competent tribunals didn’t take place, whether you’d been getting feedback from Kandahar and Bagram about how there was no screening. I wonder if you could explain a little bit more about that.

Lawrence Wilkerson: My initial source was immediate, and it was from the conversations that took place every morning without fail, sometimes at the weekend but always Monday through Friday, at 8.30, in the Deputy’s Conference Room in the State Department, with the Secretary [Colin Powell] and the Deputy [Richard Armitage] assembled and some 50-odd undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, office directors etc. We went around the table with everyone with a dog in the fight, which was most of the undersecretaries and the assistants getting his or her three or four minutes, and the Secretary would get his five minutes or 30 minutes, depending on what the issues were that day — and of course the Deputy would get his time too. And immediately upon our commencing operations in Afghanistan — and when I say commencing operations, I mean the moment we had the first Special Operating Force team with the Northern Alliance, and we were getting actual reporting back from US as well as CIA with Northern Alliance Forces (so, from US military sources, CIA sources, and initially from others in-country, let’s put it this way, to whom we had access) — what I got immediately was that, with regard to the Northern Alliance taking prisoners, it was absolute chaos.

We got signs that they weren’t taking prisoners; that is to say, they were shooting them. We got signs that when they did take prisoners they would negotiate with them, get them to reconcile themselves, so to speak, and let them go. I mean, it was chaos. Everything you can possibly imagine that could be happening on a battlefield in Afghanistan was happening.

Andy Worthington: So this is presumably after the fall of Kunduz and the fall of the North, when there was the terrible container massacre …

Lawrence Wilkerson: It grew particularly — how shall I say it? The volume [of information] increased remarkably right before, and then during and after the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Andy Worthington: OK. And then most of these people didn’t end up in American hands. To my knowledge, only dozens of the thousands of prisoners who made it alive to General Dostum’s prison in Sheberghan, near Mazar-e-Sharif were taken to Guantánamo …

Lawrence Wilkerson: Right, and of course that was the subject of an intense period of discussion. If my memory serves, it was over several mornings with different questions from the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary of our war crimes envoy, Pierre Prosper — ambassador-at-large Pierre Prosper — and of other people like Beth Jones, who was assistant secretary for Eurasia. The appropriate functional and/or regional assistant secretaries would join in the discussion in the morning when the Secretary would ask questions, and I do remember several discussions about these prisoners who grew fairly visible there for a moment and then just seemed to fade from the scene as Dostum apparently had his people put them in containers. One story was that his people then ventilated the containers with AK47s in an attempt to give the prisoners some air, if you want to put a positive spin on it; if you want to put a negative spin on it, in an attempt to kill them. I mean, there are all kinds of stories associated with that, but that was sort of minor considering the chaos that, it seemed to me, existed on the battlefield of Afghanistan with regard to detainee management.

Then it faded for a bit and we didn’t get a lot until we began to hear that there were going to be some detainees that were going to be siphoned off, and were going to be brought back to either Diego Garcia or Guantánamo Bay, or some other place that would be essentially out of US jurisdiction, and Guantánamo quickly took the most emphasis, because we had dealings with Guantánamo before, during the ’93, ’94 exodus of Haitians, when we had problems with immigration across the Florida Strait, and we needed a place to keep people in this instance, so that we could determine, on a very careful, methodical basis, whether they were economic asylum seekers, whether they were political asylum seekers, or whether they were just people trying to get away from wherever they were, and to do the vetting process, and so forth, and to do it out of the confines of the very precisely delineated American judicial procedures.

So Guantánamo was a place that we knew from past, what I would call altruistic uses of it — to allow the process to work, to keep people in a place where they weren’t harassed, where they were fed and looked after, and had medical attention and so forth — but it became a place where we were trying to detain people from the so-called “War on Terror.”

And the reason for picking that place ultimately — and I still believe we had a few at Diego Garcia, and perhaps a few in other places too, but Guantánamo was the principal place — the motivation for picking it was familiarity, and the fact that we’d been through this before, with this sort of extra-territoriality, this being outside the US court system and so forth, and it had met the test of time, if you will, during those episodes, and so it very quickly became the area of choice, I think, and before we knew it at the State Department we were getting cables saying that people were coming back, detainees were coming back from Afghanistan and coming back to Guantánamo.

We knew that these people probably included people captured in Pakistan, people captured under what was a bounty system, essentially, people captured perhaps in other areas, but we knew that the central flow point was going to be Afghanistan, and we also knew that because we were already getting signals from Foreign Minister Straw, the Foreign Minster in Spain, and different countries, who were alerting us to the fact that they knew that we had some of their citizens in these contingents, and they were making their early pleas to get their citizens repatriated, to get them back, under the guise that, of course, they could do as well determining their guilt or innocence, putting them through their judicial systems and incarcerating them if necessary.

And I remember Jack Straw being particularly adamant about this, because he was one of the first to know, as you might expect, that British citizens were involved, and that went on, almost on a daily basis, to the point where it became exasperating for Powell and to a certain extent for Armitage, who would be there sometimes when Powell was traveling, and we’d ask these questions, with specific detainees in mind, with specific countries in mind, indeed often with specific foreign ministers in mind who had just called the Secretary that morning, and the Secretary or the Deputy would ask Pierre, “What’s the update?” and Pierre would, as happened almost every time, roll his eyes and report essentially the same thing: that the Secretary of Defense would not let them go.

We had made every plea, we had banged on doors, we had sent cables, the Secretary himself had called the National Security Advisor, Dr. Rice, the Secretary himself had brought it up with the President of the United States on one occasion, but the Secretary of Defense would not relent, these people were not going to be released. And that went on, and of course the Uighurs got into it, and we started a program to sort of shop the Uighurs around the world, and that went on and, as far as I remember, was never resolved in a way that the Secretary or Pierre was very happy with, and in fact we wound up placing a few Uighurs in Albania, that was the only country that would take them …

Andy Worthington: And that took place in May 2006.

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yes, that was much later, but to return to Afghanistan, the regular meetings were one of my sources of knowing how chaotic the vetting was, and how chaotic the imprisonment was, and how adamant Rumsfeld was — and I’ve come to find now that Donald would not have been adamant without the Vice President’s cover — about not letting any of these guys go, for any reason whatsoever. I also know that one of the motivations for this was not just his obstreperousness, or his arrogance, which was manifested most of the time, but it was the fact that they wanted all of these people questioned vigorously, and they wanted to put together a pattern, a map, a body of evidence, if you will, from all these people, that they thought was going to tell them more and more about al-Qaeda, and increasingly more and more about the connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad.

I even think that probably, in the summer of 2002, well before Powell gave his presentation at the UN in February 2003, their priority had shifted, as their expectation of another attack went down, and that happened, I think, rather rapidly. I’ve just stumbled on this. I thought before that it had persisted all the way through 2002, but I’m convinced now, from talking to hundreds of people, literally, that that’s not the case, that their fear of another attack subsided rather rapidly after their attention turned to Iraq, and after Tommy Franks, in late November as I recall, was directed to begin planning for Iraq and to take his focus off Afghanistan.

So those discussions that went on — the cables that came in, the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary, all the cognizant people in the Department of State, Pierre, and their discussions every morning, sidebar discussions in the corridors on the seventh floor, indeed, discussions with me in my office, once I became Chief of Staff in August 2002 — that was one source. Another source was military personnel whom I’d known in the past or who people I’d known in the past introduced to me as good sources, who reported to me from, essentially, all over the world, not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but places like Indonesia, places like Djibouti, and so forth, about what was going on with regard to what the Defense Department was calling “kinetic activity”; that is to say, Delta Force and the like, spread all over the world looking for al-Qaeda, and what was happening in the various countries and cities where they were doing this.

Other information came from other places like conventional formations in Afghanistan and Iraq, where I had people I knew in the military who were reporting back to me, usually by email, and also from the other side of the house, if you will, from the diplomats and the people in the embassies and the consulates and so forth in some of these countries, some of whom were much dismayed that they had, as one ambassador put it, 6’ 4” white males with 19-inch biceps walking around in their capital cities, and did anybody really think that they were fooling anyone,  and when was somebody going to tell him why they were in his capital city? You know, these were forces that Rumsfeld and [Douglas] Feith [the undersecretary of defense for policy] spread across the world to go after everything from Abu Sayyaf to Jemaah Islamiyah to al-Qaeda, and our ambassadors knew nothing about it initially, but these people were very visible, and they were discovered, and calls began to come back from cities around the world to the Secretary of State and to others about who were these people and what were they doing.

And they were also detaining people, because I believe that Rumsfeld’s first goal there was — he didn’t trust the CIA, he didn’t trust their interrogation, he didn’t trust what they were doing — so he wanted his own activity, he wanted his own action. That’s one of the reasons that the procedures that the President, for example, had confined to a very select group of “high-value detainees” and to just the CIA as the instrument of interrogation — that’s how that migrated over to the Defense Department, essentially through Rumsfeld’s distrust of the CIA, and, frankly, bureaucratic jealousy, and a grab for power. And so Rumsfeld wanted his people doing the same thing, and Jim Haynes, his lawyer in the Defense Department, was perfectly willing to go over to David Addington, and [John] Yoo and [Jay] Bybee and the rest, and craft his own legal views for justifying what the Defense Department then struck out to do.

But much of the reporting that was coming back to me was coming back not just from this massive chaos in the battlefield areas, which Abu Ghraib, of course, with regard to Iraq, came to characterize most vividly, but also from these other detentions that were going on around the world, because, as I said, Rumsfeld’s first priority was to capture, not to kill. If they got in extremis, they were authorized to kill, as Seymour Hersh has stumbled onto, but their real goal was to capture them and to provide more intelligence for this “mosaic” that Rumsfeld and crew were building up, so that they could understand more about al-Qaeda, and more about terrorism in general, and go after these people.

So that was another source. Still another source was people who were involved in detainee management. These were contractors — CIA and military — who were a little bit uneasy about what they were being asked to do, and by whom they were being asked to do it, and without, in some cases, any paperwork to cover their butts, so to speak, and they were sending cables back, and they were talking to people, and people were talking to me, about the disquiet that was going on amongst people who were either seeing some of these things happen, or in some cases were actually involved in it, in some way, and weren’t happy about what they were doing.

I’ve said before that one of the things that, with regard to the armed forces, has made me proud of a lot of those young guys out there — and young gals out there — was that a lot of these people apparently refused to do this stuff, and their leaders, whether they were captains or lieutenants, or whether they were majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, brigadier generals or whatever, were not eager to order them to, because they knew, from past experience, that when that happens, then you get whistleblowers, you get people who write their Congressmen, and call their Congressmen, and take pictures and so forth, so I was elated to hear that a lot of these young officers — in particular, young NCOs — were refusing to do this stuff, but nonetheless they were talking about what others were doing.

Andy Worthington: And, just to confirm, you’re talking about detention and interrogations in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other places, I mean, was this kind of across the board?

Lawrence Wilkerson: Yes, and it wasn’t just interrogation, as you indicated, it was some of the things that happened when they were detaining prisoners for the initial time on the battlefield, it was some of the other things that happened other than just officially sitting down in a room and being interrogated, the whole detention system and the management thereof.

Andy Worthington: Well, I’m very glad to hear you talk about that, and about the numbers of people refusing to take part in abusive behavior, because I realize that it was such a shock to so many serving military personnel that they were expecting the Geneva Conventions, and that was all stripped away, and suddenly they’re in a chaotic place, where, it seems, anything goes, and presumably, for so many of these people, the only rule seemed to be some kind of sadism, so I’m really pleased that you mentioned how much feedback was coming from people who were appalled by it and who refused to take part in it.

Lawrence Wilkerson: There was one young lieutenant, who happened to be a Pakistani American, who was fluent in Urdu and one of the Afghan languages, and who also spoke enough Arabic to get by in Iraq. He gave me some really electrifying vignettes, about leading his platoon the first year that he was over there, and some of the things that he had to do that made him feel like he was risking his life in order to, as he put it, obey the law.

Andy Worthington: You’ve made it very clear how much professional jealousy encouraged Donald Rumsfeld to drive the “CIA-ization” of the military’s way of treating prisoners, which is horrific really …

Lawrence Wilkerson: It wasn’t a surprise to me, because I spent 31 years in the DoD, and I have to say that the entity we probably disliked the most during the majority of my years was the Central Intelligence Agency. I mean, we would sit out in the Pacific, when I was working out there, and our station chiefs then, we would mock them, you know: big fat dudes, making 120, 130 thousand a year, and all they did was sit there and read the newspapers in their capital cities and report it back to Langley as finished intelligence. I mean, we didn’t have much use for the CIA and that’s generally the way the rank and file in the Pentagon feels — and in the military in general. I remember in the first Gulf War, when Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell were on the phone at Colin Powell’s house — a secure phone; late in the evening for Powell, and early in the morning for Schwarzkopf — and Norm was threatening to come to Washington and shoot the DCI.

So I mean, there’s always been that institutional jealousy, hatred even between the Pentagon and the CIA, so I didn’t have much difficulty understanding that that was a part of what had happened, and you add Rumsfeld’s arrogance and his power play to it, and you’ve got a real, powerfully dysfunctional system there, in terms of — as Powell put it in his debrief to President Bush, January 13, 2005, if I recall, “Mr. President, you have no idea.” Bush had just said, “Well, you’ve lived through Weinberger and Shultz, you know that there’s always infighting,” and Powell’s response was, “Mr. President, you have no idea. This is an order of magnitude worse.” Frankly, I think that was the first time anybody had ever alerted the President to the fact that his wasn’t a normal administration.

Andy Worthington: And that’s important to raise, because so much of what went on focused on Cheney, obviously, and I was going to ask you a little bit about Cheney — and Addington, because I was particularly struck by a passage in Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side. Mayer was writing about when John Bellinger, legal counsel to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, had discovered, from intelligence reports, that a significant number of innocent men were being held at Guantánamo, but when he tried to approach the President about it (via Alberto Gonzales, who was then White House Counsel), they were met by Addington instead, who dismissed Bellinger’s concerns by declaring, “No, there will be no review. The President has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it!” After Bellinger fired back, pointing out that this was “a violation of basic notions of American fairness,” Addington replied, “We are not second-guessing the President’s decision. These are ‘enemy combatants.’ Please use that phrase. They’ve all been through a screening process. There’s nothing to talk about.”

Lawrence Wilkerson: I received one particular assessment from a person for whom I had no reason whatsoever to believe that he would give me an inaccurate portrayal — and one reason was, that was his character, but another reason was that he had no dog in the fight — and his estimate of the number of people — I think it was 741 or 742 that we suddenly had on a piece of paper somewhere — of any significance was as follows. He said, “I’ll tell you right now that 700 of them haven’t done a damn thing except get in the way of somebody capturing them.”

Andy Worthington: Right, and those are the kinds of figures that we’re down to. I mean, back in March, you stated that no more than a couple of dozen had any serious intelligence value …

Lawrence Wilkerson: The other thing — I laughed at this when I first heard it, but now I realize it was probably closer to the truth than anything the administration said — when Bush announced in September 2006, with some degree of trepidation, that he’d transferred these 14 to Guantánamo out of the secret prisons. Now I realize that they made that transfer principally so they could get some hardcore terrorists to Guantánamo.

In the second part of this interview, Col. Wilkerson discusses, amongst other things, Barack Obama’s response to the legacy of the Bush administration, and the madness of Dick Cheney.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on Foreign Policy Journal. Both parts of the interview were cross-posted as a single article on The Public Record.

Reprieve’s director, Clive Stafford Smith, had been planning to unveil the report at a meeting of the Commons Committee on Foreign Affairs two weeks ago, but when the government pulled the plug on the meeting (as I reported here and here), because Stafford Smith also intended to talk about former Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed and the recently disclosed evidence that a British spy had visited him while he was being held by the CIA’s proxy torturers in Morocco, his revelation about the identity of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni was also shelved.

This was a shame, because Madni’s story also deserves to be thoroughly aired in public. Like Mohamed’s, it involves cover-ups on both sides of the Atlantic, as both the US and UK governments continue to try to hide the full extent of their involvement in a global network of secret torture prisons, in which “ghost prisoners” were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” via a secretive fleet of planes run by the CIA.

How the British government provided the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle

Until last year, claims that prisoners in the “War on Terror” had been rendered through Diego Garcia — leased to the US for a military base that has been described as the United States’ “single most important military facility” — had been flatly denied by the British government. However, on February 21, 2008, the British foreign secretary David Miliband finally admitted that two rendition flights carrying US prisoners had stopped on Diego Garcia in January and September 2002. In a statement to Parliament, Miliband said,

Contrary to earlier explicit assurances that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights, recent US investigations have now revealed two occasions, both in 2002, when this had in fact occurred. An error in the earlier US records search meant that these cases did not come to light. In both cases a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia. The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then.

On the same day, General Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, also supplied an apology. “The refuelling, conducted more than five years ago, lasted just a short time,” he wrote, adding, “But it happened. That we found this mistake ourselves, and that we brought it to the attention of the British government, in no way changes or excuses the reality that we were in the wrong. An important part of intelligence work, inherently urgent, complex and uncertain, is to take responsibility for errors and learn from them … Our government had told the British that there had been no rendition flights involving their soil or airspace since 9/11. That information, supplied in good faith, turned out to be wrong.”

At the time, I stated that I thought these concessions reeked of damage limitation, and were designed to curtail further inquiries into the use of Diego Garcia, but Reprieve noticed that an additional comment made by David Miliband in fact raised more questions than answers. “The House will want to know what has become of the two individuals in question,” he said, adding, “There is a limit to what I can say, but I can tell the House the following. The US government has told us that neither man was a British national or a British resident. One is currently in Guantánamo Bay. The other has been released.”

The next piece of the jigsaw puzzle appeared on February 12, 2009, when, in response to a parliamentary question by Andrew Tyrie MP asking about the fate of the prisoner who, in February 2008, was still at Guantánamo, Miliband said, “Both of the individuals rendered through Diego Garcia in 2002 have been returned to their countries of nationality.”

Reprieve then set about working out, from flight logs in its possession, and from the dates when prisoners were released from Guantánamo, the identity of the prisoner who was released between February 2008 and February 2009, and discovered, by a neat process of elimination, that it could only have been Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni.

The story of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni

As I reported after Madni’s release, his case “deserves to be more than a mere footnote in the history of the Bush administration’s vile and unprincipled policies of “extraordinary rendition” and torture,” as the suffering inflicted on the 24-year old Islamic scholar — which involved three months of torture in Egypt, followed by eleven months in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and over five years in Guantánamo — was based not on detailed evidence that he was a terrorist, but on a single ill-advised comment picked up by the Indonesian intelligence services (which, Madni has stated since his release, was not even made by him).

A renowned Islamic scholar, fluent in nine languages and from a wealthy and influential family, Madni maintained throughout his imprisonment that he was betrayed by one of four would-be jihadists whom he met by accident on a trip to Indonesia in November 2001 to sort out family business after his father’s death. “After I went to Indonesia, I got introduced to some people who were not good,” he told his tribunal in Guantánamo, adding, “They were bad people. Maybe I can say they were terrorists. When someone gets introduced to someone, it is not written on their foreheads that they are bad or good.”

In fact, Madni had not been betrayed by one of these men, but had been seized by the CIA after the Indonesian intelligence services, who were monitoring the men he had met — members of the Islamic Defenders Front, an organization that espoused anti-Americanism, but had not been involved in any terrorist attacks — heard him say that bombs could be hidden in shoes, and handed the information on to the CIA.

Although a US intelligence official told Ray Bonner of the New York Times in 2005 that Madni was nothing more than a “blowhard,” who “wanted us to believe he was more important than he was,” and another thought that he would be held for a few days, “then booted out of jail,” more senior officials, in a heightened state of fear following the capture of the inept and mentally troubled British shoe-bomber Richard Reid, demonstrated how casual the Bush administration’s use of “extraordinary rendition” was by rendering him to Egypt, presumably under the mistaken belief that torture would reveal the truth, one way or another.

More recent details of Madni’s rendition and torture

Since Madni’s release, Reprieve has been in touch with him, and he was also featured in a New York Times article in January, which added gruesome details to what was already known of his experiences. Madni explained that he had first suffered physical abuse at the airport in Jakarta, before his rendition flight took off. “One person from Egyptian intelligence, he come and he punch me here, very hard,” Madni said, hitting his chest to make his point, “and he grab me like this and he throw me against the wall.”

On the flight, Madni said, he was “bleeding from his nose, mouth and ears,” and on arrival in Cairo “they make me naked, they torture me.” Locked up in an underground cell like “a grave,” he said that he was held for 92 days, and was interrogated on three occasions soon after his arrival, for 12 to 15 hours at a time. He told the Times that his interrogators were Egyptian, but that “there were other men in the room whose faces were covered and who did not speak, but who passed notes with questions to the Egyptians.” When he refused to concede that he had traveled to Afghanistan and had met Osama bin Laden, he said that the Egyptians tortured him with electric shocks. “I cry and I yell,” he explained, adding, “they gave me brain electric shocks,” and that they also gave him drug-laced drinks “so you don’t know what you are talking about.”

Transferred to Bagram in early April, Madni confirmed that the abuse continued. He explained that a CIA agent told him, “We forgive you; just accept you met Osama bin Laden,” but that despite his refusal to confess, and even though he took several polygraph tests, which showed that he was telling the truth, he was subjected to sleep deprivation for six months, moved from cell to cell every few hours as part of a program that, when it surfaced in Guantánamo, was known euphemistically as the “frequent flier program.”

After his arrival at Guantánamo, on March 23, 2003, Madni was so depressed that, according to Mamdouh Habib, an Australian prisoner, released in January 2005, who had also been rendered for torture in Egypt, “he tried to hang himself twice, and went on three hunger strikes.“ By the time of his release, as the Times described it, “he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.”

Everything about Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni’s treatment at the hands of US forces — and their willing accomplices in Egypt — should be a source of profound shame, and it is no wonder that Madni told the New York Times, “It’s easy for the United States to say no charges were found, but who is responsible for the seven years of my life?” and that his lawyer, Richard L. Cys, said he planned to sue the US government for his client’s unlawful detention, and has filed a lawsuit in the federal courts in the hope of gaining access to his medical records from Guantánamo, which, he hopes, will confirm his account of his torture in Egypt.

The complicity of the UK government

However, Reprieve is also concerned about the complicity of the British government in Madni’s rendition, noting that “the 1976 Exchange of Notes between the UK and US governments in relation to Diego Garcia clearly requires that the UK must be informed of all intended movements of US ships and aircraft on or through” Diego Garcia, and that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has also “stated that the United States would need to ask permission of the UK should it bring any ‘unlawful combatants’ onto the island.”

Reprieve also pointed out that, in response to questions about why it had taken so long for evidence of the two rendition flights through Diego Garcia to come to light, former foreign secretary Margaret Beckett told the BBC, “It was very difficult for the government … to go back and look at what had happened on previous occasions … [T]here was not a clear, simple trace of record keeping. That may, I don’t know, that may have been the case in the United States also.” Asking why this should have been so, Reprieve noted that “more than one independent source has since suggested that there had been logs of flights through Diego Garcia but the logs had been destroyed.”

That said, Reprieve also provided another explanation of why it may have been “difficult” to source the records, which, while tending to validate the British government’s claims about record keeping, demonstrates instead that approval for the activities of US agents must have come from the highest levels of the British government, through a rather devious arrangement whereby the Bush administration sought approval for its actions from cooperating governments, without necessarily providing them with any details of its activities.

A detailed examination of flights conducted by a well-known CIA rendition plane, a Gulfstream V turbojet identified by its tailfin number N379P, has indicated that it “routinely operated under various ‘special status designators’” (STS), including the designation “STS/STATE,” for which, as Reprieve notes, “the operators were claiming an official status for N379P as an aircraft on state duty, only one category below the aircraft that carry Heads of State [STS/HEAD].”

Moreover, Reprieve has also established, after studying four rendition cases, that “the operators of N379P also declared the plane to have the special status ‘ATFMEXEMPT,’” an even more limited STS designator, which “allows deviations from planned routes and other exemptions.” As Reprieve stated, this “effectively allowed N379P to fly wherever it liked, whenever it liked, without having to file new flight plans.”

Crucially, however, this special status is only granted when “specifically authorized by the relevant national authority,” and is taken very seriously by European air traffic controllers, indicating that approval must have come from the highest levels of the governments involved. As Council of Europe Senator Dick Marty has explained, based on his detailed investigations into “extraordinary rendition,” “Both of these ‘special status’ designations … vouch for the prior knowledge and collaborative planning input of the states whose territory or airspace was being traversed, because such exemptions ‘shall only be used with the proper authority.’”

While these investigations indicate that approval for the passage of US rendition flights through other countries’ airspace required high-level consultations with the governments involved, it should be noted that Reprieve also uncovered evidence indicating that the US may, in fact, have been given blanket approval to conduct “operations against terrorism” without having to provide cooperating governments with any specific details of these operations, using a “military travel order,” approved as part of a largely classified NATO agreement signed on October 4, 2001, in which NATO allies “agreed — at the request of the United States — to take eight measures, individually and collectively, to expand the options available in the campaign against terrorism.”

As Reprieve explained, only two of these measures have been made publicly available, but they certainly seem to provide all the approval the United States would have needed to conduct rendition operations while keeping its allies ignorant of the details. One provides “Blanket overflight clearances for the United States’ and other Allies’ aircraft for military flights related to operations against terrorism,” and the other provides “Blanket access to ports and airfields on NATO territory, including for refuelling, for United States and other Allies for operations against terrorism.”

What about the secret prison?

By revealing the identity of one of the prisoners rendered through Diego Garcia — and, perhaps more importantly, through its investigations of the types of government approval required for rendition flights — Reprieve’s report should renew pressure not only on the British government, but on other cooperating governments, to explain what special measures were adopted after the 9/11 attacks to facilitate “extraordinary rendition” and torture, and, I believe, to open up a debate about both their legality and the fact that they are presumably still in effect, should the Obama administration — or any other NATO member — feel that further renditions are required.

What also needs noting, however, is that, behind the revelation of one man’s identity — and the ongoing question of the identity of the other man rendered through Diego Garcia — is an even more thorny question that has more profound implications for both the British and American governments: whether a secret “War on Terror” prison has existed on the island, or on a ship (or ships) moored in its territorial waters.

This question has been raised since July 2002, when TIME, “quoting a source familiar with the operation,” reported that the alleged senior al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah had been transferred to a prison on Diego Garcia from a US naval ship, and has been reinforced in the years since by other reports, in the US and Spanish media, claiming that other “high-value detainees” — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the Bali bombing suspect Hambali and two of his alleged associates, and Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, the only one of the six who was not eventually transferred to Guantánamo — were also held on the island, as I reported in a detailed article last summer.

Both Dick Marty and Manfred Novak, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Terrorism, have stated their belief that prisoners have been held on Diego Garcia. In March 2008, Novak said that he had “received credible evidence from well-placed sources familiar with the situation on the island that detainees were held on Diego Garcia between 2002 and 2003,” and, after consultation with senior CIA officials and other knowledgeable sources, Marty told the Council of Europe, following the publication of a report into “Alleged secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states” in June 2006 (PDF), “We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees. It is true that the UK government has readily accepted ‘assurances’ from US authorities to the contrary, without ever independently or transparently inquiring into the allegations itself, or accounting to the public in a sufficiently thorough manner.”

Moreover, confirmation has also come from two sources within the Bush administration. Last summer, a “senior American official” (now retired), who was “a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings” after the 9/11 attacks, told Adam Zagorin of TIME that “a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being interrogated on the island,” and in two interviews with National Public Radio, Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, who is now professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, let slip that Diego Garcia had been used to hold terror suspects. In May 2004, he blithely declared, “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, “They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

In conclusion, it is ten months since the scandal of Diego Garcia’s secret prison last surfaced, and I can only hope that the ordeal of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni — and the painstaking research undertaken by Reprieve — will once more give this sordid story to the prominence it deserves.

Note: The description of Diego Garcia as the United States’ “single most important military facility” was made by John Pike, who runs the website GlobalSecurity.org, to David Vine, author of the newly-published book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press). For Dick Marty’s second report on “Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states” (published in June 2007) see here.

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 exclusively on Cageprisoners.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prisonдивани (May 2009, and follow the links for further articles about al-Libi). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009) and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

In the 1960s, Diego Garcia, the centerpiece of the Chagos Islands (which are part of the British Overseas Territories) was leased to the United States for use as a strategically important airbase.

The deal had two crucial components: one was a sizeable discount on Polaris, Britain’s nuclear missile programme, and the other was the removal from the islands (to a life of poverty in Mauritius and the Seychelles) of the 2,000 inconvenient British subjects (the “residents”), who traced their ancestry back nearly 200 years to African- and Indian-born labourers from Mauritius, shipped in by French coconut planters in the years before Napoleon’s fall and the transfer of the islands’ sovereignty to the UK.

To be honest, the Chagossians never stood a chance, even though their long legal struggle had secured significant victories. In 2000, when the High Court ruled that the islanders’ expulsion had been illegal, foreign secretary Robin Cook made it clear that he supported their case, but was overruled by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who blocked their return by “orders in council,” an ancient royal prerogative that conveniently bypassed parliament.

In 2006, three judges, declaring that Blair’s actions were illegitimate, upheld the islanders’ right to return, ordering the government to pay their legal costs and attempting to withhold support for an appeal to the House of Lords, and in May 2007 the court of appeal upheld that decision, ruling that the British government’s removal of the men, who, as the Guardian explained, were “tricked out of their homes, encouraged to leave on temporary trips, and not allowed back,” was an “abuse of power.”

Nevertheless, the importance of Diego Garcia to the US government in the years since the 9/11 attacks has ensured that Tony Blair’s relentless support of the Bush administration would trump Robin Cook’s almost forgotten attempts to secure an “ethical” foreign policy for the UK. In the persistent warmongering of the last seven years, Diego Garcia’s strategic importance to the US has been more pronounced than ever.

The first ground troops in the Afghan invasion set off from Diego Garcia, countless bombers have used the base as they have embarked on the missions that have killed so many civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, perhaps most importantly, other planes have arrived bearing precious cargo: allegedly important prisoners in the “War on Terror.” Some, like the Australian David Hicks and Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, were interrogated, in the early days of the “War on Terror,” in the bowels of ships moored off the coast of Diego Garcia, and others, it appears, were held in a secret prison on Diego Garcia itself, as I reported in an article this summer.

Set against such an important component in the “War on Terror,” therefore, it was clear that the demands of the Chagossians were never going to succeed. However, what made the verdict particularly galling, beyond the spinelessness of the Lords, was a statement by the current foreign secretary David Miliband — who has yet to explain in a satisfactory manner if the British government actually knew anything about a secret prison on Diego Garcia — in which he noted “the government’s regret at the way the resettlement of the Chagossians was carried out in the 1960s and 1970s and at the hardship that followed for some of them.”

It was a classic New Labour moment: an apparent gesture of contrition from a government that likes to say sorry for historic crimes, but that refuses to do anything about its own.

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 Liberal Conspiracy.

In the article, I run through the history of revelations relating to a secret prison on Diego Garcia, contrast this with the persistent denials that have been made by both the British and the American governments, and point out that the British position — though very possibly based on what Ministers perceived to be genuine assurances that the US had not been engaged in any kind of illegal activity — is no longer tenable.

The other option, of course, is that the British government has been lying, but whatever the case there must now be a full and open public inquiry.

Andy 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.

A more detailed analysis of the Diego Garcia scandal is available here.

The news will, however, be an embarrassment to the US government, which has persistently denied claims that it operated a secret “War on Terror” prison on Diego Garcia, and will be a source of even more consternation to the British government, which is more closely bound than its law-shredding Transatlantic neighbor to international laws and treaties preventing any kind of involvement whatsoever in kidnapping, “extraordinary rendition” and the practice of torture.

This is not the first time that TIME has exposed the existence of a secret prison on Diego Garcia. In 2003, the magazine broke the story that Hambali, one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, was being held there, and in the years since confirmation has also come from other sources. Twice, in 2004 and 2006, Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, who is now professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, revealed the prison’s existence. In May 2004, he blithely declared on MSNBC’s Deborah Norville Tonight, “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” and in December 2006 he spoke out again, saying, in an NPR interview with Robert Siegel, “They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

The prison’s existence was also confirmed by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who produced a detailed report on “extraordinary rendition” for the Council of Europe in June 2007 (PDF) and by Manfred Novak, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, in March this year. Having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, Marty told the European Parliament, “We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees,” and Manfred Novak explained to the Observer that “he had received credible evidence from well-placed sources familiar with the situation on the island that detainees were held on Diego Garcia between 2002 and 2003.” The penultimate piece of the jigsaw puzzle came in May, when El Pais broke the story that “ghost prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, whose current whereabouts are unknown, was imprisoned on the island in 2005, shortly after his capture in Pakistan — although the English-speaking press failed to notice.

Despite these previous disclosures, today’s article, by Adam Zagorin, is particularly striking because of the high-level nature of the source, and his admission that “the CIA officer surprised attendees by volunteering the information, apparently to demonstrate that the agency was doing its best to obtain valuable intelligence.” In addition, the source noted that “the US may also have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia’s territorial waters, a contention the US has long denied.”

Zagorin also spoke to Richard Clarke (at the time the National Security Council’s Special Advisor to President Bush regarding counter-terrorism), who explained, “In my presence, in the White House, the possibility of using Diego Garcia for detaining high value targets was discussed.” Although Clarke “did not witness a final resolution of the issue,” he added, “Given everything that we know about the administration’s approach to the law on these matters, I find the report that the US did use the island for detention or interrogation entirely credible,” and he also pointed out that using the island for interrogations or detentions without British permission “is a violation of UK law, as well as of the bi-lateral agreement governing the island.”

Zagorin’s source did not name the prisoners, but it seems clear that the period he was referring to (“2002 and possibly 2003”) was when three particular “high-value detainees” — Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh — are reported to have been held on the island, and it seems entirely plausible, therefore, that after these three were transferred to another secret CIA facility in Poland, the prison was used not only to hold Hambali, but also to hold the two other “high-value detainees” captured with him — Mohammed bin Lep (aka Lillie) and Mohd Farik bin Amin (aka Zubair). The addition of Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, who, it seems, may have been held into 2006, not only confirms that a secret prison existed, but that it was possibly in use for four years straight.

These damaging revelations seal Diego Garcia’s reputation as a quagmire of injustice. A British sovereign territory — albeit one that was leased to the United States nearly 40 years ago, when the islanders were shamefully discarded by the British government and exiled to face destitution and death by misery in Mauritius — Diego Garcia has long been a source of shame to opponents of modern colonial activity. Until now, however, the only admission that any activities connected with the “War on Terror” had taken place on the island came in February, when, after years of denials on the part of the British government, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, finally conceded that requests for information from his US counterparts had revealed that, in 2002, two rendition flights had refuelled on the island. “In both cases,” Miliband stated with confidence, “a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia. The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia.”

The British government had been provoked to action by critics within the UK, in particular the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, led by the Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, and the legal action charity Reprieve, which represents 30 prisoners in Guantánamo, but the story appeared to grind to a halt when Michael Hayden, the CIA’s director, stepped forward to deny that Diego Garcia had ever been used as a “War on Terror” prison.

“That is false,” Gen. Hayden said when asked if a secret prison had existed on Diego Garcia, adding, as the New York Times put it, that “neither of the two detainees carried aboard the rendition flights that refuelled at Diego Garcia ‘was ever part of the CIA’s high-value terrorist interrogation program.’” He also explained that one of the detainees “was ultimately transferred to Guantánamo,” while the other “was returned to his home country,” which was identified by State Department officials as Morocco. “These were rendition operations,” he added, “nothing more.”

Four weeks ago, however, the story resurfaced once more, as David Miliband reported the results of his latest request for information from his US counterparts. This concerned a list of rendition flights, which, in the opinion of Reprieve and the All-Party Parliamentary Group, may also have passed through British territory, but the Foreign Secretary was confident that there was no further evidence to be mined, stating, “The United States Government confirmed that, with the exception of two cases related to Diego Garcia in 2002, there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the United Kingdom, our Overseas Territories, or the Crown Dependencies, with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”

Yet again, the assurances of his US colleagues did nothing to assuage the critics. Reprieve noted that the British government “intentionally failed to ask the right questions of the US, and accepted implausible US assurances at face value,” and added, presciently, “This remains a transatlantic cover-up of epic proportions. While the British government seems content to accept whatever nonsense it is fed by its US allies, the sordid truth about Diego Garcia’s central role in the unjust rendition and detention of prisoners in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ cannot be hidden forever.”

Just three days after David Miliband’s last attempt to draw a line under the story, the British Foreign Affairs Select Committee published its latest report on the British Overseas Territories (PDF), and was scathing about Diego Garcia, declaring that “it is deplorable that previous US assurances about rendition flights have turned out to be false. The failure of the United States Administration to tell the truth resulted in the UK Government inadvertently misleading our Select Committee and the House of Commons. We intend to examine further the extent of UK supervision of US activities on Diego Garcia, including all flights and ships serviced from Diego Garcia.”

Today’s revelations, of course, leave the US administration looking like bald-faced liars and the British government looking like myopic dupes. Whether Michael Hayden was also duped is not known, but his strenuous denial, just five months ago, that a secret prison existed, which was manned by his own employees, will do nothing for the credibility of the US administration, which likes to pretend that it does not torture and has nothing to conceal, but is persistently discovered not only being economical with the truth, but also behaving exactly as though it has guilty secrets to hide.

Whether this scandal will awaken much indignation in the American public remains to be seen, but it is hugely damaging to the British government, which is legally responsible for the activities that take place on its territory, however much it likes to hide behind “assurances” from its leaseholders that they have done nothing wrong.

It scarcely seems possible, but Diego Garcia’s dark history has suddenly grown even darker.

The prisoners held on Diego Garcia

Abu Zubaydah (Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn). Saudi, b. 1971. Seized in Faisalabad, Pakistan in a joint operation by Pakistani forces and the FBI on 28 March 2002, he is regarded by the administration as a senior al-Qaeda operative and training camp facilitator, although this has been disputed by former FBI interrogator Dan Coleman, who has described him as a minor logistician with a split personality.

In February 2008, Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, admitted that Abu Zubaydah was one of three prisoners who had been subjected to waterboarding (an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning) in CIA custody. Held initially in Thailand, and later in Poland, he is one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. At his tribunal in 2007, he denied being a member of al-Qaeda, and made a point of mentioning that he had been tortured. He has not yet been put forward for trial by Military Commission.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Kuwaiti/Pakistani, b. 1964 or 1965. The supposed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed (commonly known as KSM) was seized in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on March 1, 2003. Like Abu Zubaydah, he was subjected to waterboarding, and is also presumed to have been held initially in Thailand, and later in Poland. Transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, he confessed to being “responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z” at his tribunal in 2007, but also made a point of mentioning that he had been tortured. He was put forward for trial by Military Commission in February, and will face the death penalty if convicted.

Rumors that KSM was held on Diego Garcia have surfaced sporadically over the years, one example being an article in the Toronto Star on July 2, 2005 (mirrored here), in which Lynda Hurst spoke to John Pike, a US defense analyst. Pike, who told Hurst that he believed that KSM had been held on Diego Garcia, explained, “Diego Garcia is an obvious place for a secret facility. They want somewhere that’s difficult to escape from, difficult to attack, not visible to prying eyes and where a lot of other activity is going on. Diego Garcia is ideal.”

Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Yemeni, b. 1972. A friend of the Hamburg cell that led the 9/11 attacks, bin al-Shibh was seized in a raid in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002. He was reportedly intended as the 20th hijacker, but was unable to obtain a visa to enter the United States, and subsequently worked closely with KSM in planning the attacks. Transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006, he is also presumed to have been held initially in Thailand, and later in Poland, but his presence on Diego Garcia has long been suspected, because analyses of flight records have revealed that a plane flew from Pakistan to Diego Garcia immediately after his capture. He refused to take part in his tribunal in 2007, but was put forward for trial by Military Commission in February, and will face the death penalty if convicted.

Hambali (Riduan Isamuddin). Indonesian, b. 1966. Seized in Ayutthaya, Thailand in a joint operation by Thai forces and the CIA on 11 August 2003, he is regarded as the main link between al-Qaeda and its Indonesian counterpart, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). He is alleged to have been one of the planners of the Bali bombings in October 2002, which killed over 200 people, and was transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. At his tribunal in 2007, he said that he resigned from JI in 2000, and was not involved with al-Qaeda or with any bombings or plots. He has not yet been put forward for trial by Military Commission.

Lillie (Mohammed Nazir bin Lep) and Zubair (Mohd Farik bin Amin). Malaysians, seized with Hambali, little is known of these two men, beyond claims by the administration that they worked closely with Hambali, although they were both discussed in another TIME article, in October 2003, which examined Hambali’s interrogation logs. They were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, but have not yet been put forward for trial by Military Commission.

Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (Abu Musab al-Suri). Syrian/Spanish, b. 1958. Seized in Quetta, Pakistan in October 2005 and handed over to US forces a month later, he is not accused of being involved in direct attacks on US forces, but is wanted in Spain as a witness in connection with the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Regarded as one of the most significant proponents of universal jihad, his writings include a 1600-page book, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which was published on the internet in 2004. A critic of al-Qaeda, he reportedly fell out with Osama bin Laden in 1998, and has stated that the 9/11 attacks were catastrophic for the jihadi cause. Unlike the six prisoners mentioned above, he was not transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, and it is not known, therefore, whether he is being held in a secret CIA prison or if he has been rendered to a third country.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, which includes extensive chapters on rendition and secret prisons. The book is 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 Antiwar.com, Indymedia, CounterPunch and ZNet. An edited version was published on the Huffington Post.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison, Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?, Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”, Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq, In the Guardian: Death in Libya, betrayal by the West (in the Guardian here) (all May 2009), Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA), and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (June 2009). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

Diego Garcia and the surrounding islands — known collectively as the Chagos Islands — were shamefully cleared of their existing population in the late 1960s, to make way for a US airbase on Diego Garcia itself. This was a manifestation of the “special relationship” between the UK and the US, which involved the old empire facilitating its successor’s global reach, in exchange for a significant discount on the UK’s Polaris nuclear missile programme.

Ever since, the exiled Chagossians have been attempting to regain access to their ancestral lands, but with limited success. Although successive British governments have toned down the racist rhetoric used at the time of the islanders’ forced removal — when official documents referred to them as “Tarzans or Men Fridays” — Diego Garcia and the Chagos Islands have remained at the forefront of a colonial mindset that has never quite been extirpated from the Foreign Office’s mentality.

Although the islanders won a stunning victory in the High Court in 2000, which ruled that their expulsion had been illegal, the government fought back in 2003, when Prime Minster Tony Blair invoked an ancient and archaic “royal prerogative” to strike down their claims once more. Although the court of appeal reversed this decision in May 2006, ruling that the islanders’ right to return was “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings,” it was clear that, in the struggle between a group of cruelly disposed islanders on the one hand, and the US military-industrial complex on the other, the Chagossians’ fight was far from over.

Last week, just after a party of Chagossians visited London to hear lawyers for the Foreign Office appealing in the House of Lords against the 2006 verdict and claiming, as the Guardian put it, that “[a]llowing the Chagossian islanders to go back to their Indian Ocean homes would be a ‘precarious and costly’ operation,” and that “the United States had said that it would also present an ‘unacceptable risk’ to its base on Diego Garcia,” David Miliband, the foreign secretary, delivered a short statement relating to the other scandal of Diego Garcia: its use for “extraordinary rendition” flights in the “War on Terror.”

After years of denials by the British government that rendition flights had passed through Diego Garcia, David Miliband admitted in February that he had just been informed by his US counterparts that, upon searching their records, they had discovered that two flights had stopped on Diego Garcia in 2002. “In both cases a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia,” Miliband said. “The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then.”

At the time, I noted that this appeared to be a sly form of damage limitation, as there was compelling evidence that, far from being used on just two occasions as a transit point, the island had actually housed a secret prison. Three examples will suffice for now, although it’s a safe bet that more revelations are forthcoming.

In October 2003, Time magazine ran an exclusive feature by Simon Elegant focusing on the imprisonment of Hambali, a “high-value detainee,” who spent years in various secret CIA prisons — including Diego Garcia — until he was transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. Other evidence came from Council of Europe investigator (and Swiss senator) Dick Marty, who reported in June 2006 that, having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, he had “received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees.’”

The final piece of evidence came from inside the US administration itself, when Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, and currently a professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy, let slip on two occasions that Diego Garcia had housed a secret prison. In May 2004, he blithely declared, “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, “They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

David Miliband’s statement last Thursday did nothing to suggest that the British government had any intention of pushing the matter further with its US allies, even though, as the sovereign power in charge of the islands, the ministers are unable to evade responsibility for what has taken place on Diego Garcia.

Rather feebly, the foreign secretary stated that, after sending a list of possible rendition flights that may have passed through British territory to the US authorities, “The United States Government confirmed that, with the exception of two cases related to Diego Garcia in 2002, there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the United Kingdom, our Overseas Territories, or the Crown Dependencies, with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”

Reprieve, the legal action charity that has spent several years investigating “extraordinary rendition” and secret prisons, responded by pointing out that the British government “intentionally failed to ask the right questions of the US, and accepted implausible US assurances at face value,” noting that the Foreign Office had declined to ask the US government for the names of the prisoners transported via Diego Garcia in 2002, that it had failed to ask if any other rendition flights had passed through Diego Garcia, even if, as the US asserted, no other planes landed there, and had also failed to ask whether any other flights passed through UK territory en route to engaging in “extraordinary rendition,” which would make the UK complicit in the crime.

The British government faced a fresh barrage of criticism just three days later, when the Foreign Affairs Select Committee published its latest report (PDF) on the Overseas Territories. With reference to Diego Garcia, the Committee declared that “it is deplorable that previous US assurances about rendition flights have turned out to be false. The failure of the United States Administration to tell the truth resulted in the UK Government inadvertently misleading our Select Committee and the House of Commons. We intend to examine further the extent of UK supervision of US activities on Diego Garcia, including all flights and ships serviced from Diego Garcia.”

For good measure, the Committee also had harsh words about the government’s treatment of the Chagossians, noting, “We conclude that there is a strong moral case for the UK permitting and supporting a return … for the Chagossians. The FCO (Foreign Office) has argued that such a return would be unsustainable, but we find these arguments less than convincing.”

Under pressure on two fronts over Diego Garcia, it remains to be seen whether the government can once more worm its way out of trouble. Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, is keen not to let this happen. Speaking after the report was published, he chastised the foreign secretary for dismissing his concerns about “extraordinary rendition” when he first raised the issue last October. “The Foreign Secretary persistently gave me the brush-off. He said we could rely on US assurances,” Tyrie said, adding, “My allegations were correct. The Foreign Secretary’s brush-off was not just misplaced, it was a disgrace.”

Reprieve was even more blunt, stating, “This remains a transatlantic cover-up of epic proportions. While the British government seems content to accept whatever nonsense it is fed by its US allies, the sordid truth about Diego Garcia’s central role in the unjust rendition and detention of prisoners in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ cannot be hidden forever.”

Andy is the author of The Guantanamo 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 Indymedia, CounterPunch and ZNet.

They insist, moreover, that his case is an urgent priority, because he is about to be charged before a Military Commission in Guantánamo — the much-criticized system of trials for “terror suspects” that was conceived by the US administration in November 2001 — and they desperately need the exculpatory evidence in the possession of the British government to assist in his defence, and to prove his innocence.

Binyam’s torture

A refugee from Ethiopia, who arrived in the UK in 1994 and was later granted indefinite leave to remain, Binyam Mohamed was working as a cleaner in an Islamic Centre in west London in 2001, and attempting to recover from a drug problem, when he decided to travel to Afghanistan to see what the Taliban regime was like, and, he hoped, to steer clear of drugs because of the Taliban’s reputation as fierce opponents of drug use.

He came to the attention of both the American and British intelligence services in April 2002, when he was seized by the Pakistani authorities as he tried to board a flight to London. Although he had a valid airline ticket, his passport had been stolen, and, rather foolishly, he had borrowed a British friend’s passport instead.

In the heightened tension in Pakistan at the time — just days after Abu Zubaydah, an alleged senior al-Qaeda operative, was captured in Faisalabad — Binyam was immediately regarded with enormous suspicion by the American agents who visited him in the Pakistani prison in which he was held.

Although he later reported to his lawyer — Clive Stafford Smith of the legal action charity Reprieve, which represents 35 prisoners in Guantánamo — that the British checked out his story, and confirmed that he was a “nobody,” the Americans were not convinced, and decided to send him to Morocco, where he could be interrogated by professional torturers who were not bothered about international treaties preventing the use of torture, and who were equally unconcerned about whether evidence of their activities would ever surface.

Speaking of his time in Morocco, where he was held for 18 months, Binyam told Stafford Smith that he was subjected to horrendous torture, which, included, but was not limited to having his penis cut with a razor on a regular basis. In spite of this, the regular beatings and other torture that he did not even want to talk about, Binyam said that his lowest moment of all came when his torturers produced evidence of his life in London, which could only have come from the British intelligence services, and he realized that he had been abandoned and betrayed by his adopted homeland.

After Morocco, Binyam was transferred to Afghanistan, where he endured further torture in the “Dark Prison,” a secret “black site” near Kabul, run by the CIA, which was a grim recreation of a medieval dungeon, but with the addition of non-stop music and noise, blasted into the pitch-dark cells at an ear-piercing volume.

Moved from here to the main US prison at Bagram airbase, where at least two prisoners were murdered by US forces, Binyam was finally put on a plane to Guantánamo in September 2004, two and a half years after his ordeal began.

In Guantánamo, he was put forward for a Military Commission in November 2005, and made one memorable appearance before the military court, when he held up a hand-written placard declaring that the Commissions were in fact “Con-Missions,” but in June 2006 the judge in his case was spared further embarrassment when the entire system was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Revived later that year by a barely sentient Congress, the trials have since struggled to establish their legitimacy, and have yet to proceed beyond arraignment and pre-trial proceedings, with the exception of the case of the Australian David Hicks, who accepted a plea bargain last March in order to return home to serve a desultory nine-month sentence.

In recent months, however, the administration, which boldly states that it intends to try between 60 and 80 of the remaining 273 prisoners, has stepped up the rate at which new prisoners are being charged. In an attempt to save Binyam from a second dose of the Commissions, his lawyers at Reprieve, together with solicitors from Leigh Day & Co., decided that the most constructive and innovative way to secure Binyam’s release was to put pressure on the British government.

The letter to the UK government

Armed with evidence from flight logs, which confirmed that CIA planes had flown from Pakistan to Morocco in July 2002, and from Morocco to Afghanistan in January 2004, as Binyam said they had, and with numerous accounts of British complicity in his interrogations, and knowledge of his rendition to torture, the lawyers submitted a list of requests to David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, at the end of March.

The extensive list of items requested included any evidence relating to UK knowledge of Binyam’s forthcoming rendition while he was held in Pakistan from April to July 2002, including “the identity of the US agents involved, so that they can be traced and interviewed or subpoenaed,” and any evidence relating to Binyam’s claim that representatives of the British intelligence services told him in Pakistan that they knew that he was a “nobody,” which, the lawyers stated, led them to “assume that the UK intelligence services and police have carried out investigations in to Mr. Mohamed’s activities whilst in the UK.” “We believe,” they added, “that such evidence will show that he does not represent a terrorist threat,” and that as such “it forms a necessary part of his defence.”

The lawyers also asked “to interview and take statements from the UK agents who (it is conceded) spoke to Mr. Mohamed whilst he was detained in Pakistan,” and who, Binyam stated, “informed him that he was going to be rendered to an Arab country for torture.” In December 2005, Jack Straw, who was the Foreign Secretary at the time, did indeed admit, in testimony to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, that UK Security Service officers visited Binyam while he was in Pakistani custody, and Binyam’s recollections of that encounter were noted by Clive Stafford Smith during a meeting at Guantánamo:

“They gave me a cup of tea with a lot of sugar in it. I initially only took one. ‘No, you need a lot more. Where you’re going, you need a lot of sugar.’ I didn’t know exactly what he meant by this, but I figured he meant some poor country in Arabia. One of them did tell me I was going to get tortured by the Arabs.”

As Binyam’s lawyers pointed out, “Such evidence will be central to the defence of Mr. Mohamed because any evidence obtained as a result of torture is inadmissible.”

The lawyers also requested “information about Mr. Mohamed’s life in the United Kingdom that could only have come from UK intelligence agencies or other government sources,” which, as Binyam pointed out, caused him particular distress in Morocco, when it was used by his torturers. According to Stafford Smith, this information included “personal details about his life in the UK, such as details of his education, the name of his kick-boxing trainer and his friendships in London, which he had never mentioned during interrogations, and that could only have originated from collusion in the process by the UK security or secret intelligence services.”

In addition, the lawyers requested any evidence about rendition flights that stopped on the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean (which is leased to the United States). After five years of denials, the British government finally admitted in February that two flights had indeed stopped at Diego Garcia, and Binyam’s lawyers requested information about these flights, pointing out that one of the flights had “subsequently stopped in Morocco at the time that Mr. Mohamed was there,” and that it was, therefore, “almost certainly (a) taking another prisoner to Morocco for torture; or (b) taking US personnel there who were involved in Mr. Mohamed’s interrogation process.”

The lawyers also requested any evidence relating to Binyam’s time in the “Dark Prison” in Kabul, where, they noted, “it seems highly probable that the UK government has details of the conditions that prevailed there,” because various British residents — including Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna, who returned to the UK from Guantánamo last year — were also held there, and any evidence relating to Binyam’s time in Bagram, where other British prisoners were also held.

The lawyers’ final request was for access to Binyam’s medical records from Guantánamo. They noted that these were “relevant to the question of torture, and Mr. Mohamed’s current physical and mental condition,” and added that, although the Guantánamo authorities have given the UK government access to Binyam’s records, they have refused to provide them to Stafford Smith. “The UK should provide a copy now,” they wrote, “or provide whatever information or documents they have recording the contents of the medical records.”

The lawsuit

The lawsuit filed on Tuesday by Reprieve and Leigh Day & Co. was triggered when lawyers for the government responded to the letter described above by refusing to hand over any of the evidence requested by Binyam’s lawyers, claiming that “the UK is under no obligation under international law to assist foreign courts and tribunals in assuring that torture evidence is not admitted,” and adding, “it is HM Government’s position that … evidence held by the UK government that US and Moroccan authorities engaged in torture or rendition cannot be obtained” by Binyam’s lawyers.

The government lawyers proceeded to claim that Binyam’s lawyers did not “provide any evidence” to support their assertion that “such alleged information or assistance ‘was subsequently used in the torture of [Mr. Mohamed],’” to which Reprieve and Leigh Day responded by pointing out that Binyam’s allegation that UK sources provided information to his torturers in Morocco was “found credible” by the Intelligence and Security Committee (IRC), a committee established in the UK Intelligence Services Act 1994, and empowered to examine the expenditure, administration and policies of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Binyam’s lawyers pointed out that the government had ignored the conclusion of the IRC’s Rendition Report in 2007, when the committee had explicitly stated, “There is a reasonable probability that intelligence passed to the Americans was used in [Binyam Mohamed]’s subsequent [Moroccan] interrogation.”

They also cited the particular passage from Binyam’s statement to Clive Stafford Smith, in which he spoke about the interrogation in Morocco that contained information that could only have come from the British intelligence services:

“Today I was questioned about my links with Britain. The interrogator told me, ‘We have been working with the British, and we have photos of people given to us by MI5. Do you know these?’ I realized that the British were sending questions to the Moroccans. I was at first surprised that the Brits were siding with the Americans. I sought asylum in Britain rather than America because it’s known as the one country that has laws that it follows. To say that I was disappointed at this moment would be an understatement.”

It remains to be seen, of course, if this novel approach taken by Binyam’s lawyers will bear fruit, but it seems plausible, as it is hardly in the interests of the British government to run the risk of further embarrassing disclosures. The lawsuit may, therefore, put pressure on the politicians to step up their efforts to secure Binyam’s return to Britain — to face charges in the UK, if any can be found that will stick to the “nobody” from west London — rather than to allow him to be tried in a much-criticized system in Guantánamo that threatens to embarrass both the British and the American governments.

Andy 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 Indymedia, ZNet, ukwatch.net and American Torture.

For a sequence of articles relating to Binyam Mohamed, see the following: Binyam Mohamed’s letter from Guantánamo to Gordon Brown (May 2008), Guantánamo trials: critical judge sacked, British torture victim charged (June 2008), Binyam Mohamed: UK court grants judicial review over torture allegations, as US files official charges (June 2008), Binyam Mohamed’s judicial review: judges grill British agent and question fairness of Guantánamo trials (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Guantánamo torture victim Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), In a plea from Guantánamo, Binyam Mohamed talks of “betrayal” by the UK (September 2008), US Justice Department drops “dirty bomb plot” allegation against Binyam Mohamed (October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), The betrayal of British torture victim Binyam Mohamed (February 2009), Hiding Torture And Freeing Binyam Mohamed From Guantánamo (February 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Coming Home From Guantánamo, As Torture Allegations Mount (February 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s statement on his release from Guantánamo (February 2009), Who Is Binyam Mohamed, the British resident released from Guantánamo? (February 2009), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009), Guantánamo, Bagram and the “Dark Prison”: Binyam Mohamed talks to Moazzam Begg (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (includes the Jeppesen lawsuit, May 2009), UK Government Lies Exposed; Spy Visited Binyam Mohamed In Morocco (May 2009), Daily Mail Pulls Story About Binyam Mohamed And British Spy (May 2009), Government Bans Testimony On Binyam Mohamed And The British Spy (May 2009), More twists in the tale of Binyam Mohamed (in the Guardian, May 2009), Did Hillary Clinton Threaten UK Over Binyam Mohamed Torture Disclosure? (May 2009), Outsourcing torture to foreign climes (in the Guardian, May 2009), Binyam Mohamed: Was Muhammad Salih’s Death In Guantánamo Suicide? (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009).

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, is to be commended for his confession on Thursday that US “extraordinary rendition” flights had refuelled twice at an airbase on the British colonial territory of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. Leased to the US in the 1960s, in exchange for cut-price nuclear weapons, the island is effectively under US control, although it remains a British sovereign territory, and the British government maintains a small base on the island, which houses 50 military personnel.

It would be slightly churlish to point out that Mr. Miliband only made his confession because he was shamed into it through the persistent pressure exerted on the government by Reprieve, the London-based legal charity that provides frontline investigation and legal representation to prisoners held without trial in the “War on Terror,” and by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, led by the Tory MP Andrew Tyrie. Last October, Reprieve published a report on the use of Diego Garcia as a secret prison, and the parliamentary group used the Freedom of Information Act to request the minutes of discussions between the British and American governments in Washington last September, which were refused by the British government on the grounds that releasing the information “would prejudice the defence” of territory by “exposing plans to counter possible terrorist attacks.” Just three weeks ago, Mr. Tyrie pledged to appeal against the Foreign Office’s decision, and Mr. Miliband’s confession therefore appears to have been timed to put some distance between the government and its increasingly vocal critics.

There are, however, two simple reasons for not bashing Mr. Miliband too hard: firstly, because any confession, however forced, is better than none at all, and secondly, because it also highlights the evasiveness of other senior government figures — step forward, former PM Tony Blair and former foreign secretary Jack Straw — who maintained between 2005 and 2007 that nothing of the sort had ever happened.

In December 2005, Jack Straw stated, “Careful research by officials has been unable to identify any occasion since 11 September 2001, or earlier in the Bush administration, when we received a request for permission by the United States for a rendition through UK territory or airspace, nor are we otherwise aware of such a case.” Tony Blair followed this up by saying, “I have absolutely no evidence to suggest that anything illegal has been happening here at all.”

In January 2006, Mr. Straw repeated his assertions, stating, “The US would not render a detainee through UK territory or airspace without our permission,” and this was followed in March 2007, when Tony Blair assured the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) that, as the BBC put it, “he was satisfied that the US had at no time since 9/11 rendered an individual through the UK or through our Overseas Territories.”

As a result, the ISC’s Report on Rendition, published on June 28, 2007, stated, “we are satisfied that there is no evidence that US rendition flights have used UK airspace (except the two cases in 1998 referred to earlier in the report) and that there is no evidence of them having landed at UK military airfields,” and Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch Brown asserted in July 2007, “The US authorities have given assurances that no terrorist suspects have passed through Diego Garcia.”

Mr. Miliband, of course, had an explanation for his predecessors’ refusal to engage with the concept that, by facilitating, or even by turning a blind eye to the use of British airspace for “extraordinary rendition” flights transferring “War on Terror” suspects to exotic locations where, on numerous occasions, they were tortured, the British government was itself complicit in torture. He had, he said, only just been informed about it.

“I am very sorry indeed to have to report to the House the need to correct these and other statements on the subject, on the basis of new information passed to officials on 15 February 2008 by the US Government,” Mr. Miliband explained. “Contrary to earlier explicit assurances that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights, recent US investigations have now revealed two occasions, both in 2002, when this had in fact occurred.” He added, “An error in the earlier US records search meant that these cases did not come to light. In both cases a US plane with a single detainee on board refuelled at the US facility in Diego Garcia. The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then.”

This is fine as far as it goes, but as I mentioned in October — the last time that the once tranquil island of Diego Garcia reared its ugly head as a rumoured base for a secret “War on Terror” prison — this story goes far deeper than profuse apologies for overlooking a twice-used pit-stop for terror planes.

To give just two examples from my earlier article, “In June 2006, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who produced a detailed report on ‘extraordinary rendition’ for the Council of Europe … concluded that Diego Garcia had been used as a secret prison. Having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, he told the European Parliament, ‘We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the “processing” of high-value detainees.’”

Even more compelling evidence came from Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, who is now professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy. As I described it in October, McCaffrey “has twice let slip that Diego Garcia has, as the administration’s opponents have struggled to maintain, been used to hold terror suspects. In May 2004, he blithely declared, ‘We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,’ and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, ‘They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.’”

As soon as the news broke, General Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, who recently admitted that the CIA had waterboarded “high-value” terror detainees who ended up at Guantánamo, stepped forward to deny that Diego Garcia had ever been used as a “War on Terror” prison. “That is false,” he said, adding, as the New York Times put it, that “neither of the two detainees carried aboard the rendition flights that refuelled at Diego Garcia ‘was ever part of the CIA’s high-value terrorist interrogation program.’” He also explained that one of the detainees “was ultimately transferred to Guantánamo,” while the other “was returned to his home country,” which was identified by State Department officials as Morocco. With remarkable insouciance, Gen. Hayden added, “These were rendition operations, nothing more.”

With apparent evidence that a secret prison had indeed existed on Diego Garcia shut out of the discussions — and no mention made of the name of the casually rendered Moroccan, or of the proof offered by Stephen Grey, the author of Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Rendition Programme, that on September 11, 2002, the day that 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh (a “high-value” detainee if ever there was one) was seized in Karachi, one of the CIA’s planes landed at Diego Garcia — it is no surprise that, before Mr. Miliband had the opportunity to sit down after his contrite performance, Reprieve immediately issued a press release calling for a public inquiry.

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 Indymedia.