The appeal, by lawyers for MI5 — but with the explicit backing of the government — sought to overturn a ruling in the Court of Appeal last May, when judges ruled that the intelligence services could not suppress allegations, in a civil claim for damages submitted by six former Guantanamo prisoners, that the British government and its agents had been complicit in their ill-treatment. The six are Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga, and they argued, as the Guardian put it, that “MI5 and MI6 aided and abetted their unlawful imprisonment and extraordinary rendition.”

The ruling last May precipitated a huge crisis in the government, as the first of hundreds of thousands of classified documents emerged from the court, revealing the extent to which Tony Blair and Jack Straw were up to their necks in wrongdoing, preventing consular access to a British citizen in Zambia, in Tony Blair’s case, and in Straw’s, approving the rendition of British citizens to Guantanamo the day before the prison opened in January 2002. I covered this story in detail in my article, UK Sought Rendition of British Nationals to Guantánamo; Tony Blair Directly Involved.

As a result, ministers scrambled over each other in their rush to shut down further damaging leaks from the court by arranging for the former prisoners to accept compensation claims in exchange for dropping the civil claim for damages, persuading them that they would not be able to afford to proceed with their case if they did not accept the offer.

The settlement was announced in November, but the government immediately responded not with a dignified silence, which would have been appropriate as they wheedled their way out of the court-ordered release of evidence of complicity in torture at the highest levels of government, but with a provocative announcement by justice secretary Kenneth Clarke, who chose the very moment that the payments were announced to also announce that, in future, the work of Britain’s security services would be “permanently hidden from court hearings,” as the Guardian explained.

Kenneth Clarke told MPs that a government green paper, supposedly to be published this summer, would “contain specific proposals designed to prevent the courts from releasing the kind of information that has emerged from recent Guantánamo cases in the English courts.” A Whitehall official told the Guardian, “It will absolutely eliminate [the possibility of] the process happening again.”

The Guardian also explained that ministers had been “convinced by MI5 and MI6 that disclosing information held by the security and intelligence agencies — and notably information provided by foreign agencies such as the CIA –compromises Britain’s national security,” and that, as a result, they were planning to use a secret evidence and the system of speoial advocates, used in domestic terrorism cases, which has alarmed believers in open justice for many years.

To introduce secret evidence into the courts for cases involving domestic terror suspects, the government set up a ludicrous situation whereby special advocates are appointed to represent defendants in closed sessions in which secret evidence is discussed, but they are unable then to discuss anything that they see or hear with their clients, tying their hands and conjuring up the spirit of Franz Kafka, as I have discussed at length in previous articles — see, for example, Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Calling Time On The Use Of Secret Evidence In The UK, Control Orders: Solicitors’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010 and Control Orders: Special Advocates’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010.

In the cases of British nationals and foreign nationals held on control orders (a form of house arrest) on the basis of secret evidence, the Law Lords — the precursors to the Supreme Court — ruled in June 2009 that the system of secret evidence and special advocates infringed the men’s right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, so it was alarming that the government wanted to expand this system as a blanket ban on any future discussion of wrongdoing on the part of the security services.

The appeal that was decided by the Supreme Court on Wednesday was essentially testing the waters for the new proposals regarding secret evidence and the security services, and, a a result, the government’s plans are thoroughly discredited. See here for the judgment (120 pages, PDF), and see here for a brief summary issued by the Court.

Delivering the judgment, Lord Dyson said, “There are certain features of a common law trial which are fundamental to our system of justice, both criminal and civil. First, subject to certain established and limited exceptions, trials should conducted and judgments given in public. The importance of the open justice principle emphasised many times. The open justice principle is not a mere procedural rule. It is a fundamental common law principle.”

“Secondly,” Lord Dyson stated, “trials are conducted on the principle of natural justice,” and he warned that allowing a “closed procedure” in “an ill-defined way” could “be the thin end of the wedge,” adding, “This would be a big step for the law to take in view of the fundamental principles at stake. In my view this is a matter for parliament and not the courts.”

Lord Hope also had some powerful advice for the government, and a stirring defense of the law. “There comes a point,” he said, “where the line must be drawn between procedural choices which are regulatory only and procedural choices that affect the very substance of the notion of a fair trial. Choices that cut across absolutely fundamental principles — such as the right to be confronted by one’s accusers and the right to know the reasons for the outcome — are entirely different. The court has for centuries held the line as the guardian of these fundamental principles.”

He added, “Any weakening in the face of advances in the methods and use of secret intelligence in a case such as this would be bound to lead to attempts to widen the scope for an exception to be made to the principle of open justice.”

As the Guardian explained, Lord Brown warned that cases involving closed procedures “would mean that claims concerning allegations of complicity, torture and the like by UK intelligence services abroad would be heard in proceedings from which the claimants were excluded, with secret defences they could not see, secret evidence they could not challenge, and secret judgments withheld from them and from the public for all time.”

Lord Kerr added that, under the proposals put forward by the security services, “all the material goes before the judge and a claim that all of it involves national security or some other vital public interest will be very tempting to make.”

However, although the decision is “a significant victory for open justice,” as the Guardian explained, the nine judges “pointed out that parliament could change the law to permit such ‘closed material procedures’ in future.”

That should not be necessary, as, in the Supreme Court’s judgment, all nine judges “rejected the security service’s main submission that a court has a common law power to order a closed material procedure as an alternative to the more conventional public interest immunity (PII) certificate,” as the Guardian put it. They argued that such a power “would contravene fundamental and long-established principles of open and natural justice.”

If there is any valid area for discussion, it is with the “mission creep” of a secondary proposal by the security services –  that “a court has a common law power to order a closed material procedure as an add-on to a conventional PII in certain exceptional cases.” When pushed on fundamental problems with their cavalier attitude to the law as it relates to the perceived threat of terrorism, governments have tended to resort to introducing their dangerous innovations in “exceptional cases,”and as a result it is worth keeping a close eye on how the government responds to this particular point.

Nevertheless, this is, in general, a judgment to be savoured, and confirmation, yet again, that British judges are capable of maintaining their independence, despite intense political pressure, when it comes to dealing with issues involving terrorism and “national security.” In response to the judgment, Eric Metcalfe, of the all-party law reform group JUSTICE, which was involved in the case, said, “The ruling has confirmed that secret evidence has no place in the common law. It is a clear setback for the government’s plans to extend the use of secret evidence and secret hearings in our courts. Although it is open to parliament to legislate further, today’s ruling sets a high hurdle for any MP seeking to cut across centuries of common law tradition.”

Let us hope that Eric Metcalfe is correct, and, if not, that those of us who have had enough secrecy and complicity in torture in the last ten years, can say to Parliament that enough is enough, and that we do not want the expansion of the secrecy state, and do not want politicians and the intelligence services to have new opportunities to hide their wrongdoing under the feeble guise of “national security.”

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

How the financial settlement arose

Seven former prisoners first sued the British government and the security services last year, seeking damages for their role in unlawful acts and conspiracy, through their involvement in, or their failure to stop, their detention and ill-treatment in US custody (or US supervision in other countries), and, in some cases, their “extraordinary rendition” to secret prisons. These men were Moazzam Begg, Binyam Mohamed, Omar Deghayes, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna, Martin Mubanga and Richard Belmar.

When the government’s preferred route out of this tricky situation — seeking and securing judicial approval for MI5, MI6 and the police to be able to withhold evidence from defendants and their lawyers on the basis of national security — was overturned by the Court of Appeal in May this year, it was obvious that their only escape route would be to negotiate an out of court settlement with the seven men. In their ruling, the judges in the Court of Appeal — including Lord Neuberger, the Master of ther Rolls — said they were obliged to “take a stand” against secrecy that would undermine the “most fundamental principles of common law,” and Lord Neuberger pointed out that “a litigant’s right to know the case against him and to know the reasons why he has lost or won is fundamental to the notion of a fair trial.”

The government moved swiftly. On July 6, David Cameron announced that there would be a judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture, telling the House of Commons that he had asked Sir Peter Gibson, a former appeal court judge who monitors the activities of the intelligence agencies, to “look at whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees held by other countries that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11.” Cameron noted that, although there was no evidence that any British officer was “directly engaged in torture,” there were “questions over the degree to which British officers were working with foreign security services who were treating detainees in ways they should not have done.”

Crucially, David Cameron also made it clear that the inquiry could not begin “until civil claims have been resolved through mediation or settled with compensation,” as the Guardian explained, and until Metropolitan Police investigations into the activities of MI5 and MI6 agents concluded. These concern Binyam Mohamed (returned to the UK in February 2009), who was subjected to two years of torture (with British knowledge) in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2004, and Shaker Aamer, married with a British wife and four British children, who is still held in Guantánamo, despite being cleared for release in 2007. Originally from Saudi Arabia, Shaker had traveled to Afghanistan in June 2001 with former prisoner Moazzam Begg and their families to establish a girls’ school and some well-digging projects, but was seized by bounty hunters after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and subsequently sold to US forces.

The need for the government to seek an out of court settlement grew even more pressing just a week after the announcement of the inquiry, when ministers were unable to prevent the first release of documents as a result of the ongoing court case. Less than a thousand in number, out of 500,000 documents being reviewed by lawyers and intelligence personnel, these documents neverthless contained startling new discoveries: that foreign secretary Jack Straw had been content for British prisoners to be taken to Guantánamo in January 2002, when the prison opened, and was only concerned that British agents would have time to interrogate them in Afghanistan before the Americans rendered them to its lawless enclave in Cuba; and that Prime Minister Tony Blair had interfered to prevent the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from granting consular access to Martin Mubanga, a British citizen seized in Zambia, who, as a result, was also sent to Guantánamo.

In the wake of this release of documents, the government stepped up its planning for the judicial inquiry, actively engaging in negotiations with former prisoners and their lawyers, which, after four months of detailed discussions, led to the settlements announced on Monday.

Why the financial settlement is an acknowledgment of guilt

However, although the Prime Minister’s spokesman told reporters on Tuesday morning, “We are not admitting culpability,” and proceeded to follow the government line that “We were in a situation where we were facing years of litigation, the cost of which would have been tens of millions of pounds,” and that “We had to draw a line under the past and let [the security services] get on with the job that they have to do,” even a cursory glance at what has taken place over the last four months reveals that Downing Street — and Kenneth Clarke, who repeated the message in the House of Commons — are not being entirely honest.

When the story broke on Monday night, the only ex-prisoners mentioned were the seven men involved in the damages claim, but by Tuesday it was clear that settlements had been made with 16 men in total — all of the British citizens and residents returned between 2004 and 2009, and Shaker Aamer, despite the fact that he is still held in Guantánamo.

If, as the government claims, the aim of the settlements is to bring to an end the court case that was proving so costly and so dangerous to the security services (and former government ministers), then there would be no need to include all these other men, who are not actually engaged in litigation.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this, and neither reflects well on the government. The first is that the settlements are indeed an acknowledgement of guilt, and the second is that the government is trying to make sure that there are no loose ends — or loose cannons — around for when the inquiry begins its work. This suggests that the government is hoping to ensure that the inquiry will be able to guarantee that enough damaging material as possible is safely removed from public scrutiny, so that its real business — going through the motions, leading to the odd slapped wrist — will not be able to be challenged.

Personally, I doubt that such a plan will be successful, as so much information relating to British complicity in torture is already in the public domain, and any attempt at a whitewash will be met with fierce resistance. Moreover, although the ex-prisoners have accepted a settlement to drop their civil claim against the government, they have not, as Kenneth Clarke admitted in Parliament, “withdrawn their allegations,” and it remains possible, therefore, that one day those who facilitated or turned a blind eye to their torture and abuse might still face prosecution.

As it is, all the former prisoners have made it clear in the last few days that they intend to make their allegations, with evidence, directly to Gibson when the inquiry begins, and Moazzam Begg has explained that Cageprisoners will be submitting its findings from its report, “Fabricating Terrorism II,” which highlights the cases of 29 individuals who allege the complicity of MI5 and/or MI6 in their abuse, including one pre-9/11 case directly linked to Moazzam Begg.

Why the government has, to date, failed Shaker Aamer — and how the former prisoners made him central to their concerns

Just as significant as the government’s little-perceived acknowedgment of guilt is the unresolved question of what will happen to Shaker Aamer.

It is extraordinary enough to realize that he is being offered a settlement while he is still held in Guantánamo, but it is even more astonishing that, until the negotiations began, the government was unaware that all the former prisoners would tell ministers that they were unwilling to enter negotiations without confirmation that any deal would also include Shaker’s return to the UK.

The government apparently failed to understand that the bonds between Guantánamo prisoners run particularly deep, after their shared experiences, and that they all have great feelings of responsibility towards those left behind in Guantánamo — and especially towards Shaker, an intelligent, articulate and charismatic man, who, since his capture almost nine years ago, has fought tenaciously for the prisoners’ rights.

Ministers were duly taken aback when, one after another, the former prisoners explained that their intention had never been to seek financial compensation. They were, they said, motivated by a quest for justice, a desire to make sure that nothing that happened to them would be allowed to happen again, and an unassailable conviction that the entire process was useless while Shaker Aamer remained in Guantánamo.

Rather disturbingly, ministers also, apparently, failed to realize how little civil servants had done for the last few years to secure Shaker Aamer’s return from Guantánamo, and in one meeting there was a shocked silence from minsters, lawyers and the former prisoners when they admitted that they had not made a welfare visit to Shaker for five years.

They also, it seems, failed to realize how absurd it was to offer Shaker a settlement while he is still held in Guantánamo, and it also transpired that ministers had not been fully briefed about the fact that no inquiry can possibly proceed without him. This is not only because Shaker is the subject of one of the Metropolitan Police investigations, but also because the reason that investigation arose in the first place is because a court accepted, last December, his allegations that British agents had been present in a cell in the US prison at Kandahar in December 2001 when he was subjected to horrible abuse.

Although the British government, under Gordon Brown, asked for Shaker to be returned to the UK with four other British residents in August 2007, there has been no progress since that time, even though the other four men were safely returned in 2007 and 2009.

What Shaker Aamer knows

When prompted, the US goverment has claimed that it still has “security concerns” about Shaker, although these could obviously be dealt with by the British government if the political will existed to secure his return. Very possibly, this has been an excuse — mutually beneficial to both the US and UK governments — to put off having to deal with both the embarrassment, and with detailed revelations about the treatment of prisoners, which might be more damaging to both governments, when Shaker is eventually released.

The reason for this is that, in his fierce advocacy of rights for the prisoners held in the “War on Terror,” Shaker may know more than any other prisoner about the dark workings of Guantánamo and other prisons in Afghanistan. Soon after his capture he initiated a hunger strike to demand that prisoners be treated humanely, and in Guantánamo he not only supported and advised countless fellow prisoners, and liaised endlessly with the authorities, but also played a pivotal role in briefly bringing to an end a prison-wide hunger strike in the summer of 2005. On that occasion, he and five other influential prisoners were allowed to form a short-lived Prisoners’ Council, in an attempt to persuade the authorities to run the prison according to the Geneva Conventions, but when the authorities suddenly changed their minds and the council was disbanded, Shaker was thrown into solitary confinement, where he stayed for at least two years, on a hunger strike.

Moreover, it was during this period that three prisoners died, on June 9, 2006, and Shaker later told his lawyers that, on that same night, he had been tortured to within an inch of his life. His account added great weight to an article published in January this year, which, drawing on eye-witness accounts by soldiers who were stationed in Guantánamo on that particular night, demolished the authorities’ claim that the three men who died committed suicide, and indicated instead that they had been killed — either deliberately, or as part of a torture session in a secret facility outside Guantánamo that went too far.

Why Shaker Aamer must return to the UK now

According to the Guardian, Shaker “is expected to be allowed to return to the UK soon,” and I can only hope that this is true. As Moazzam Begg explained on Tuesday, “Shaker Aamer must now become a priority for this current government. The compensation paid to the former Guantánamo detainees is a welcome departure from the policies of the previous administration but in order to truly resolve the errors that have been made, Shaker Aamer must be returned back home to his family. We will do everything in our power to help this government achieve their goal of helping his return.”

In the last two days, the pressure for Shaker’s return has increased markedly. Although the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, said on Wednesday that the Crown Prosecution Service had advised the Metropolitan Police that, in their ongoing investigation into Binyam Mohamed’s case, there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the MI5 officer at the heart of the investgation (known as Witness B), “for any criminal offence arising from the interview of Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan on 17 May 2002,” Starmer added, “We are unable to release further information at this stage because the wider investigation into other potential criminal conduct arising from allegations made by Mr. Mohamed in interviews with the police is still ongoing.” Significantly, Starmer did not mention the ongoing investigation into the conduct of security service officials in Shaker Aamer’s case, but it is apparent that this particular investigation cannot conclude without Shaker Aamer being present to answer questions.

As a result of this investigation, and also, it should be noted, as a direct consequence of the settlement discussions, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, raised the question of Shaker Aamer’s return to the UK with Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, on Wednesday, marking the most high-profile mention of Shaker Aamer by a British government official since August 2007, when Gordon Brown asked for the return of the five remaining British residents.

This was a welcome development, and a clear reflection on the successful pressure exerted on the British government by the former prisoners, but Shaker’s return is not yet a done deal, and in the meantime anyone interested in securing Shaker Aamer’s return should besiege all available parties — David Cameron, William Hague, their local MPs and the US goverment — with demands for his return, pointing out that the Metropolitan Police’s investigation cannot conclude without him, and nor, indeed, can the goverment’s judicial inquiry begin.

Note: As part of Amnesty International’s new campaign for Shaker Aamer, readers can send a postcard to Daniel Fried, Obama’s Special Envoy on Guantánamo, who will hopefully receive many thousands of postcards demanding Shaker’s return (although, to be honest, I would cut the recommended text about the possibility of charging him promptly and giving him a fair trial), and can also write to MPs in the UK, who can be contacted easily and directly via the campaign page here. Also see this page for information about future screenings of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the documentary film, co-directed by Polly Nash and myself, which features the story of Shaker Aamer — on November 22 in Oxford, on December 10 in Roehampton, on December 11 in Battersea, and on December 15 in Sheffield — and if you’re in London, or able to pay a visit, please also note that the screening on Saturday December 11, at the Battersea Arts Centre, is part of an event entitled, “A Day for Shaker Aamer,” organized by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign in his home borough of Wandsworth. The day begins at 12 noon, with a demonstration at Ponton Road, Nine Elms, London SW8, the site of the new US embassy. At 12.30 those gathered will march to Battersea Arts Centre for a public meeting, beginning at 2 pm, with speakers including Ken Livingstone, Moazzam Begg, Victoria Brittain, Jeremy Corbyn, Lindsey German, Kate Hudson, Gareth Peirce and Yvonne Ridley, and the film will be shown at 4.30 pm, followed by a Q&A with myself and Omar Deghayes.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Public Record, The World Can’t Wait and Uruknet.

The amounts to be paid will not be disclosed, but it has already been suggested that one payout will be more than a million pounds – related, no doubt, to the most horrific of all the cases: that of Binyam Mohamed, seized in Pakistan in April 2002, who was subjected to torture for two years in Pakistan, in Morocco and in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul. In February this year, the Court of Appeal ordered the government to release documents — whose disclosure had been resisted for 18 months by foreign secretary David Miliband — demonstrating that British agents knew that their US counterparts were subjecting Mohamed to torture in Pakistan,  and, with the Metropolitan Police also investigating MI5′s role in Mohamed’s torture, and the existence of other information that has never been disclosed in court, it is understandable, frankly, that the government would seek to prevent any more dangerous disclosures in Mohamed’s case.

The announcement of the payments will no doubt cause a tsunami of outrage from the right-wing press, who will not be placated by the government’s argument that the continuation of the court case already initiated by these men, which has involved the government hiring at least 80 lawyers to examine half a million documents, would cost many times this amount (possibly as much as 50 million pounds). These critics will also, presumably, not even be swayed by the government’s national securtity argument: that. as the Guardian explained, “it is in the national interest that the cases are not brought to court so as to protect the security services methods from scrutiny.”

It is certainly true that even the limited disclosure of documents in summer, as a result of the court case, was troubling for the establishment. There was, for example, an FCO document from January 10, 2002, the day before Guantánamo opened, entitled, “Afghanistan UK Detainees,” which described the government’s “preferred options” in dealing with British prisoners. “Transfer of United Kingdom nationals held to a United States base in Guantánamo is the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objectives, to ensure they are securely held,” the document explained, adding that the “only alternative” was to either hold these men in British custody in Afghanistan, or to return them to the UK.

However, the most shocking revelations in the documents had more to do with former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had personally intervened to prevent Martin Mubanga, a British citizen seized in Zambia, from having consular access, and foreign secretary Jack Straw, who, in mid-January 2002, sent a telegram to several British diplomatic missions around the world in which he “signaled his agreement” with the Guantánamo policy, “but made clear that he did not wish to see the British nationals moved from Afghanistan before they could be interrogated.” In the telegram, he wrote:

A specialist team is currently in Afghanistan seeking to interview any detainees with a UK connection to obtain information on their terrorist activities and connections. We therefore hope that all those detainees they wish to interview will remain in Afghanistan and will not be among the first groups to be transferred to Guantánamo. A week’s delay should suffice. UK nationals should be transferred as soon as possible thereafter.

Nevertheless, the fear that the security services’ activities would be opened up to unparalleled scrutiny — when added to the fear of futher disclosures about government ministers and civil servants — ought to silence the critics, as these revelations are not merely embarrassing, but also suggest involvement with war crimes, for which those found to be complicit could face prosecution. For those wishing to avoid such an outcome, the most sensible approach is the one favoured by David Cameron — proceeding with the judicial inquiry into British complicity in the torture of prisoners abroad, which he announced in July, and whose intention, clearly, is to slap a few wrists, hide any damning evidence, and declare that a line can now be drawn under the whole affair.

As I know many of the released prisoners, and have witnessed the pain — and sometimes the horrors — that still haunt them, and that may never leave them, I cannot argue with their right to be compensated, having never received a penny either from the US government or from the British government, despite the involvement of both countries in their detention without charge or trial, their rendition, and their torture and abuse.

However, what particularly concerns me, in the run-up to the government’s official announcement, is what has been decided about Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was being ignored until some of the former prisoners — or perhaps all of them — suggested that they were not prepared to enter negotiations until his return from Guantánamo was guaranteed.

Although he was was cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2007, Shaker, who has a British wife and four British children, is still held, with both the British and the American governments blaming the other for his continued detention. The Americans claim to have “security issues,” which, if grounded in any reality at all (and this is itself doubtful), could easily be addressed by the British government, and the Americans occasionally point out, off the record, that the British could have him back easily if they were prepared to make enough of a fuss.

The shameful abandonment of Shaker Aamer is presumably because, as an intelligent, articulate and charismatic man who has been the foremost advocate of the rights of the prisoners in Guantánamo, he knows more than is comfortable about the dark workings of the prison (including the deaths of three prisoners in June 2006). However, holding onto Shaker has never been more than unjustly delaying the inevitable, and, in addition, his claims that he was abused in US custody in Afghanistan while British agents were present (which was the subject of a UK court case last year, leading to the launch of an investigation by the Metropolitan Police) means that it is unthinkable that any kind of inquiry can take place without him.

Most of all, however, the former prisoners look out for one another, and are bonded by their experience in a way that no one who has not been in Guantánamo can quite understand. Everyone who leaves the prison tells those left behind that he will do what he can for them, and while the fate of most of the remaining 174 prisoners is outside anyone’s control — even President Obama’s, either for sinister reasons, or because his critics, and supporters of Guantánamo in the US, are disturbingly infuential — the fate of Shaker Aamer is not, and I hope that today’s announcement will swiftly be followed by the arrival of a plane from Guantánamo bringing Shaker Aamer home.

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

Cross-posted on Common Dreams and The Public Record.

The identity of the second — Mahmoud Salim al-Ali, a Syrian — was then revealed by Der Spiegel, which stated that he had arrived in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in central-western Germany. In fact, the identities of both men should not have come as a surprise, as Der Spiegel devoted a major article to their stories back in July, after the German government had confirmed that it would take two prisoners from Guantánamo.

The release is good news not only for Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali, but also for the many campaigners and commentators — myself included — who have been trying to keep Guantánamo on the mainstream media’s radar. Although President Obama briefly discussed Guantánamo on September 9, in his first press conference since May, apologizing for failing to meet his self-imposed deadline of January 2010 for the prison’s closure, progress towards belatedly fulfilling his promise has been horribly slow this year. Although the President’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force recommended that over half of the remaining prisoners should be released, just 21 of the 111 prisoners cleared for release at the start of the year have been freed in the last nine months, and 90 cleared men still remain.

Dozens of these men — like Mahmoud al-Ali — cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture in their home countries, and must wait for third countries to rehouse them (a difficult task, given that the Obama administration, Congress and the judiciary have all made sure that the United States will not take any of them), and one, like Ayman al-Shurafa, is a stateless Palestinian. However, 58 others are Yemenis, who could be sent home tomorrow were it not for an indefensible moratorium on releasing any Yemenis that was issued by President Obama in January, following hysterical overreaction to the news that the failed Christmas day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen.

Clearly, the President has no chance of fulfilling his promise to close Guantánamo until this moratorium is lifted, and those who wish to see the prison closed must do more to challenge this cynical knee-jerk ban which effectively tars all Yemenis as terrorist sympathizers. For now, however, the German government must be congratulated for offering new homes to Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali, and for bringing their long and unjust imprisonment to an end.

Ayman al-Shurafa, a stateless Palestinian

Ayman al-Shurafa, who is now 34 years old, was cleared for release by a military review board in 2007, but remained at Guantánamo because of the particular problems facing the handful of Palestinians held in the prison, who are — or were — literally stateless. In al-Shurafa’s case, although his family is from Gaza, his parents settled in Saudi Arabia with their four children when he was a young child. He spent most of his life in Saudi Arabia, where his family still lives, but because he does not have a Saudi passport, the Saudi government refused to press the US authorities for his repatriation. Instead, he holds documents issued by the Jordanian government (as part of his family’s long search for refuge), which are suitable only for travel purposes, and until Germany agreed to accept him, he was, therefore, literally a man without a home.

Around ten years ago, al-Shurafa traveled to Gaza to enroll in a Palestinian university to finish a business degree that he had started in Saudi Arabia. However, after the intifada broke out, he feared for his life and decided that he had to leave. He returned to Saudi Arabia, but, as with all Saudi residents, discovered that his educational opportunities were more limited than those available to Saudi citizens. It was then that, like many other young men, he found himself taking poor advice from a Saudi sheikh who stated that he needed to be “prepared” to defend Muslims from those oppressing them — a religious duty known as e’dad, which is conceptually distinct from jihad or any participation in combat.

As a result, he traveled to Afghanistan in summer 2001, but, like many young men recruited by religious figures, he was unaware that the Taliban’s enemies were other Muslims. Throughout his detention, he maintained that, although he was in Afghanistan, he never took up arms against the Northern Alliance — or against the United States after the US-led invasion of October 2001. In meetings at Guantánamo with his lawyers, he explained that “he hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was getting himself into; he knew nothing about the Taliban’s long inter-Muslim struggle with the Northern Alliance, and had no knowledge whatsoever of al-Qaeda.”

In 2007, a military review board agreed with this assessment, but although al-Shurafa was cleared for release, and was compliant throughout his detention, he still ended up held in isolation in a cell in Camp 6 for 22 to 23 hours a day. Throughout his life, he has suffered from vitiligo, a painful skin complaint, and his permanent isolation from sunlight made his skin condition flare up horribly, causing maddening discomfort, as well as permanent skin damage. According to his lawyers, although he was well regarded by both the guards and by his fellow prisoners, leading prayers in his cell block, he was deeply concerned that he would never see his elderly mother again, and also showed signs of depression, asking the authorities for medication to “let the days go by without feeling anything.”

Mahmoud Salim al-Ali, a Syrian seized by an Afghan warlord

As Der Spiegel explained in July, Mahmoud Salim al-Ali, who is 36 years old, had been living in Kuwait before he made an ill-fated trip to Afghanistan in October 2001. His last job had been in a fruit and vegetable market, but he also had “experience working in the service sector and in industry, as a salesperson in the Sultan Shopping Center and with the Al-Fahad Aluminum & Glass Works.”

However, in late September 2001, he traveled to Afghanistan, via Syria and Iran, apparently because, as the US authorities alleged at Guantánamo, he “had a desire to join the jihad after viewing videos depicting the situation in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya.” Nevertheless, as Der Spiegel also explained:

[H]e never received any military training or saw any combat. After a few days in Kabul, al-Ali contracted a serious case of diarrhea, for which he was treated in a hospital. He then spent the night in the house of a doctor. By the next day, as he was fleeing from the Northern Alliance, which was fighting the Taliban, his big adventure was over. Al-Ali and his companions were captured by an Afghan warlord and robbed. The bandits took his money, his wedding ring and his watch, and he was later turned over to the Americans.

New life in Germany

For both these men, life in Germany promises to present them with an excellent opportunity to rebuild their lives. As Der Spiegel explained in July, Mahmoud al-Ali “has a wife and a 10-year-old daughter living in Syria who apparently want to come to Germany to live with him, to which the state politicians dealing with the case have no objections,” and Ayman al-Shurafa, whose immediate physical and psychological needs appear to be more acute, is already receiving attention in a medical clinic, where, as Der Spiegel reported on Thursday, “he will be given an extensive check-up over the next few days.” Hamburg government officials stated that “the goal was to help reintegrate the former prisoner into society, with the hope that he will ultimately become self-sufficient.”

Accepting these two men has not been without problems for the German authorities. There was fierce opposition from conservative ministers, for example, and, in response, plans for the state of Brandenburg to take a third prisoner, Mohammed Tahamuttan, the last Palestinian in Guantánamo, were quietly dropped. In July, Rainer Speer, the state’s interior minister, told Der Spiegel, “We were up to the task,” and the newspaper also noted that “the Interior Ministry task force charged with the issue had apparently concluded that accepting all three candidates was fundamentally justifiable.” However, Der Spiegel speculated that the rejection of Tahamuttan was “probably intended primarily to send a political message at home in Germany, where de Maizière felt that he had to show the many members of his party who had opposed reaching an agreement with the United States on Guantánamo that he was not blindly obeying the Americans.”

Noticeably, the government in Berlin also refused to proceed with the resettlement of Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali without written guarantees from the Obama administration. As Der Spiegel noted, Germany was “probably the only ally to have done so.” According to a joint declaration signed by the two countries, “The United States will not release any inmates if this could jeopardize the security of the United States or our friends and allies.” Der Spiegel added that “the Germans also have it in writing that the US government would not permit any individuals deemed a threat to the national security of the United States to ‘enter the country,’” explaining that what this means is that the men being released and sent to Germany “are not dangerous and could even enter the United States as tourists.”

As Der Spiegel also explained, this was “a delayed victory for Wolfgang Schäuble who, as interior minister in Berlin’s former grand coalition government, refused to accept Guantánamo inmates because, as he noted, they would not even be given a tourist visa for the United States.”

Will other countries now help?

While this will send shockwaves though the more paranoid parts of the US establishment (and should, if there is any justice, lead to calls to revoke the various bans on bringing cleared prisoners to live in the US), the impact of Germany’s acceptance of two prisoners should be most marked in Europe, where hopes for rehousing other cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated are most sharply focused.

Although ten other countries in Europe (Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland) have taken in 23 prisoners over the last 16 months, who had no prior connection to their new homes (and 15 others have been settled in Bermuda, Cape Verde, Georgia, Latvia and Palau), other countries have failed to be swayed by the entreaties of Daniel Fried, President Obama’s Special Envoy to Guantánamo.

Ambassador Fried’s thankless task has been to persuade other countries to overlook US hypocrisy regarding the resettlement of prisoners, and to help President Obama close Guantánamo by taking in men like Ayman al-Shurafa and Mahmoud al-Ali. However, despite his success to date, certain prominent countries in western Europe — Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK — have so far refused to help, even though, in some cases, persuasive arguments can be made that they should be involved as part of a tacit acknowledgment of their involvement in the crimes committed in the “War on Terror.”

In Norway’s case, this arose because of the involvement of AkerKvaerner, the country’s largest commercial company, which, as filmmaker and journalist Erling Borgen has noted, “had 700 people working on the Guantánamo base,” providing logistical support that included “fueling the rendition flights.” In Sweden’s case, the complicity centers on the government’s involvement, in December 2001, in the CIA-directed kidnap and rendition to torture in Egypt of two Egyptian asylum seekers, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed Alzery. In Britain’s case, the true scale of the complicity of the Bush administration’s closest ally has not yet been revealed, but enough has been exposed to indicate that providing new homes for a handful of cleared Guantánamo prisoners who cannot be repatriated is the least that the government should do.

The British government’s complicity includes former foreign secretary Jack Straw’s recently-revealed support for Guantánamo and former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s interference in plans to provide consular access to a British citizen seized in Zambia (Martin Mubanga). It also includes involvement in the kidnap and rendition of two British residents in the Gambia (Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna), its knowledge of the torture by US agents in Pakistan of British resident Binyam Mohamed, who was later sent to be tortured in Morocco (also with British knowledge), and the repeated visits made by British agents to British nationals and residents while they were held in Pakistan, and in US custody in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, even though it was apparent that the conditions in which they were being held did not meet internationally recognized standards of humane treatment.

Although Prime Minister David Cameron has announced an inquiry into British complicity in torture abroad, one way in which the government could atone for its deep involvement in the “War on Terror” would be to step back from the outrageous position taken by the previous government — that, in securing the return of nine British nationals and five British residents, the UK had “done its bit,” as foreign secretary David Miliband claimed in January 2009 — and accept that this was, in fact, nothing more than what was required.

The new coalition government already faces questions about why it cannot secure the return of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was cleared for release in 2007 but is still held, and is also under pressure to explain why it will not accept Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who lived and worked in the UK between 1999 and 2001, who was also cleared for release in 2007, but is terrified of returning to Algeria. Perhaps it might now be worth asking if the British government will take up where Germany left off, and also offer a new home to Mohammed Tahamuttan, the Palestinian who is still waiting for someone to free him from Guantánamo.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Two Freed Prisoners in Germany.” Cross-posted on The Public Record, Cageprisoners and New Left Project.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 64 prisoners released from February 2009 to July 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland, 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania, 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); July 2010 — 1 Algerian, 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain.

These reveal, shockingly, how the Labour government was happy for British nationals and residents seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan to be rendered to Guantánamo by the Bush administration, and how, in one case — that of Martin Mubanga, seized in Zambia — Tony Blair’s office intervened to prevent attempts by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to have him returned to the UK, leading to his imprisonment in Guantánamo for two years and nine months.

In paving the way for its announced inquiry into British complicity in torture, the coalition government attempted, without success, to persuade the High Court that, as the Guardian put it, “proceedings should be delayed while attempts at mediation are made” before the inquiry begins. Critics had already expressed their fears that the calls for “mediation” were a smokescreen for compensation deals that would attempt to buy the former prisoners’ silence, so that the inquiry could proceed in secret without too many embarrassments.

Instead, however, the government’s intervention has precipitously kick-started the inquiry in a very public manner, after Tim Otty QC, counsel for five of the men, said that proceedings “should be allowed to continue because the documents that the government is beginning to disclose shed new light upon the role that the UK authorities played in the men’s mistreatment,” and the judge, Mr. Justice Silber, agreed.

One of the most shocking documents disclosed in the High Court proceedings was issued by the FCO on January 10, 2002, the day before Guantánamo opened. Entitled, “Afghanistan UK Detainees,” it described the government’s “preferred options” in dealing with British prisoners. “Transfer of United Kingdom nationals held to a United States base in Guantánamo is the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objectives, to ensure they are securely held,” the document explained, adding that the “only alternative” was to either hold these men in British custody in Afghanistan, or to return them to the UK.

In another shocking revelation, it was revealed that, in the case of Martin Mubanga, released documents “raise a number of troubling questions as to the role of the former Prime Minister’s office in frustrating the release of one of the claimants,” as Tim Otty described it, adding, “In the period of March and April 2002, the Prime Minister’s office apparently countermanded a desire on the part of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to intervene on behalf on Mr. Mubanga.”

Mubanga, a joint British-Zambian national, had traveled from Pakistan to Zambia, where his sister lived, in February 2002, but had then been seized by the Zambian security services, and according to the documents released in court, the Prime Minister’s Office had intervened to ensure that he was not brought back to the UK. As a result, the FCO was put in a difficult position: if officials sought consular access, thereby acknowledging British responsibility for him, he would have been released to the UK authorities, directly contradicting the Prime Minister’s orders, which, as Reprieve noted yesterday, involved the Prime Minister “order[ing] the FCO to violate its international law obligations under the Vienna Convention, which requires the UK to provide consular assistance to British nationals around the world.”

At the time, an FCO document complained about “the schizophrenic way in which policy on this whole case was handled in London,” which had led to the British High Commission in Lusaka being placed “in an impossible position,” and in an email dated August 22, 2002, an FCO official, recognizing that “we broke our policy” because of direct interference from Tony Blair’s office, stated, “we are going to be open to charges of concealed extradition.”

According to Mubanga, after the British finished with him — apparently having tried and failed to recruit him as a spy — the US agent who had been dealing with him told him, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, as I think you’re a decent guy, but in ten or 15 minutes we’re going to the airport and they’re taking you to Guantánamo Bay.”

In court, Tim Otty highlighted Tony Blair’s complicity in torture by pointing out that, by the spring of 2002, it was abundantly clear that there was a considerable risk that terror suspects in US control would be subjected to rendition and torture. “Despite that,” he told the court, “someone at Number 10 saw fit to counter what the Foreign Office wished to do.”

As the Guardian also explained yesterday, this was “not the only time the Prime Minister’s Office intervened to thwart attempts by Foreign Office officials to obtain a degree of protection for British citizens.” Minutes prepared for the Home Office Terrorism and Protection Unit after a meeting in April 2002 state that the US authorities “had been informed that the British government might begin making public requests for legal access to British men held at Guantánamo.” According to the minutes, “FCO had wanted to do this (and wanted to be seen to be doing it) but had been overruled by No. 10.”

The released documents also highlight the leading role played by Jack Straw, then the foreign secretary, in shaping the policies that led to the interrogations of British prisoners in US custody in Afghanistan, prior to their transfer to Guantánamo. As the Guardian explained, in mid-January 2002, Straw sent a telegram to several British diplomatic missions around the world in which he “signaled his agreement” with the Guantánamo policy, “but made clear that he did not wish to see the British nationals moved from Afghanistan before they could be interrogated.” In the telegram, he wrote:

A specialist team is currently in Afghanistan seeking to interview any detainees with a UK connection to obtain information on their terrorist activities and connections. We therefore hope that all those detainees they wish to interview will remain in Afghanistan and will not be among the first groups to be transferred to Guantánamo. A week’s delay should suffice. UK nationals should be transferred as soon as possible thereafter.

One of these “detainees” was Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held in Guantánamo, and as a court heard in December last year, leading to the launch of a Metropolitan Police investigation, Mr. Aamer has claimed that British agents were present in the room, in the US prison at Kandahar airbase in Afghanistan, when he was subjected to abusive treatment by Americans.

Other interrogations revealed in the documents include those involving Omar Deghayes, seized from a house in Lahore in May 2002, who was treated disdainfully by the British agents who visited him, and an unidentified prisoner held in Kabul, under the heading, “Warriors 14/1,” about whom the agents involved noted only, “Interview conditions: cold beaten up.”

Extraordinarily, these documents are only the tip of a very murky iceberg, and it is unclear at present how many more will be publicly revealed. As has been previously reported, the government has identified up to 500,000 documents that may be relevant to the former prisoners’ claim for damages, and, according to the Guardian, “says it has deployed 60 lawyers to scrutinize them, a process that it suggests could take until the end of the decade.” In this first batch, “just 900 papers have been disclosed, and these have included batches of press cuttings and copies of government reports that were published several years ago,” but as they also include these damning insights into the activities of Tony Blair, Jack Straw and the agents who interrogated British prisoners in appalling conditions, it is surely inconceivable that the government will now be able to conduct a secret inquiry into British complicity in torture, and must, instead, order a full and open inquiry.

This could take place under the Inquiries Act of 2005, like the Baha Mousa inquiry (into the murder, in British custody, of a hotel clerk in Iraq), which, as Reprieve noted when David Cameron announced the torture inquiry two weeks ago, was held under the Act and has been “a model of an inquiry functioning efficiently, including the hearing of secret evidence,” and has also allowed for document classification review proceedings that “are sophisticated and rightly allow the judge to balance the need for national security against the need for transparency.”

The time for silence, and the time for secrecy are over. To clear the air, and to draw a line under this most lamentable period in our recent history, we need an inquiry presided over by someone who is able to “balance the need for national security against the need for transparency.” For too long now — and with baleful results — the need for national security has been allowed to override everything else, inflicting grave damage on our claims to be a civilized country, and leading to devastating effects for those caught up in a “War on Terror” with few checks and balances.

Note: To see the released documents in full, please visit the website of Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity whose lawyers represent dozens of current and former Guantánamo prisoners. The documents have also been made available by the Guardian. Please also note that, as well as Martin Mubanga and Omar Deghayes, the former prisoners involved in the civil claim are Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna and Richard Belmar.

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

As published on the Huffington Post, Antiwar.com and CounterPunch. Cross-posted on Cageprisoners, The Public Record, Eurasia Review, Uruknet, Op-Ed News, Indymedia, The Smirking Chimp, Aletho News and Star Talk FM.

I do, however, urge everyone to read the whole report, because the introduction and conclusions are important, as are the sections establishing the legal approach to secret detention and its historical context, the section detailing current practices in 25 other countries worldwide, and the annexes, which contain government responses to a questionnaire about secret detention, and a number of case studies.

Given the length of this section of the report (pp. 43-89), I’m publishing it in three parts. The first, published here, provided an introduction, and dealt with “The ‘high-value detainee’ programme and CIA secret detention facilities,” the second, published below, looks at “CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones,” and the third looks at “Proxy detention sites,” “Complicity in the practice of secret detention” and “Secret detention and the Obama administration.”

Please note that I have inserted hyperlinks where possible. However, the original report contains footnotes, and not all of these provide links to websites. In most cases, I have added the information contained in the footnotes in square brackets, but for full details, please see the original.

Excerpts from the UN “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” February 2010

Prepared by Martin Scheinin, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Shaheen Ali, the vice-chair of the Working Group on arbitrary detention, and Jeremy Sarkin, the chair of the Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances.

B. CIA detention facilities or facilities operated jointly with United States military in battlefield zones

131. Although it is still not possible to identify all 28 of the CIA’s acknowledged high-value detainees, the figures quoted in a memo of the Office of Legal Counsel of 30 May 2005 written by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury [PDF] indicate that the other 66 prisoners in the CIA programme were regarded as less significant. Some of them were subsequently handed over to the United States military and transferred to Guantanamo, while others were rendered to the custody of their home countries or other countries. In very few cases were they released.

1. Afghanistan

132. Outside of the specific “high-value detainee” programme, most detainees were held in a variety of prisons in Afghanistan. Three of these are well-known: a secret prison at Bagram airbase, reportedly identified as “the Hangar” [See also the interview with Murat Kurnaz (annex II, case 14)], and two secret prisons near Kabul, known as the “dark prison” and the “salt pit”. During an interview held with the experts, Bisher al-Rawi indicated that, in the dark prison, there were no lights, heating or decoration. His cell was about 5 x 9 feet with a solid steel door and a hatch towards the bottom of it. He only had a bucket to use as a toilet, an old piece of carpet and a rusty steel bar across the width of the cell to hang people from. All the guards wore hoods with small eye holes, and they never spoke. Very loud music was played continuously. He also indicated that he had been subjected to sleep deprivation for up to three days and received threats. Binyam Mohamed provided a similar account to the experts [see annex II, case 18], as did the lawyer of Khaled El-Masri [annex II, case 9] and Suleiman Abdallah [annex II, case 2]. The experts heard allegations about three lesser-known prisons, including one in the Panjshir valley, north of Kabul, and two others identified as Rissat and Rissat 2, but it was not yet possible to verify these allegations. Of the prisoners identified as having been held in secret CIA custody (in addition to the above-mentioned high-value detainees), seven were eventually released and four escaped from Bagram in July 2005, namely Abu Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan; Omar al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti, captured in Bogor, Indonesia, in 2002; Muhammad Jafar Jamal al-Kahtani, a Saudi, reportedly [re-]captured in Khost province, Afghanistan, in November 2006; and Abdullah Hashimi, a Syrian, also known as Abu Abdullah al-Shami. Five prisoners were reportedly returned to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in 2006: Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi [see para. 146 below]; Hassan Raba’i and Khaled al-Sharif, both captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2003, who had “spent time in a CIA prison in Afghanistan”; Abdallah al-Sadeq, seized in a covert CIA operation in Thailand in the spring of 2004; and Abu Munder al-Saadi, both held briefly before being rendered to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. In May 2009, Human Rights Watch reported that its representatives briefly met Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi on a visit to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, although he refused to be interviewed. Human Rights Watch interviewed four other men, who claimed that, “before they were sent to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, United States forces had tortured them in detention centers in Afghanistan, and supervised their torture in Pakistan and Thailand”. One of the four was Hassan Raba’i, also known as Mohamed Ahmad Mohamed al-Shoroeiya, who stated that, in mid-2003, in a place he believed was Bagram prison in Afghanistan, “the interpreters who directed the questions to us did it with beatings and insults. They used cold water, ice water. They put us in a tub with cold water. We were forced [to go] for months without clothes. They brought a doctor at the beginning. He put my leg in a plaster. One of the methods of interrogation was to take the plaster off and stand on my leg”.

133. The released detainees are:

• Laid Saidi, an Algerian seized in the United Republic of Tanzania on 10 May 2003, was handed over to Malawians in plain clothes who were accompanied by two middle-aged Caucasian men wearing jeans and T-shirts. Shortly after the expulsion, a lawyer representing Mr. Saidi’s wife filed an affidavit with a Tanzanian court, saying that immigration documents showed that Mr. Saidi had been deported through the border between Kasumulu, United Republic of Tanzania, and Malawi. He was held for a week in a detention facility in the mountains of Malawi, then rendered to Afghanistan, where he was held in the “dark prison”, the “salt pit” and another unidentified prison. About a year after he was seized, he was flown to Tunisia, where he was detained for another 75 days, before being returned to Algeria, where he was released.

• Three Yemenis — Salah Nasser Salim Ali Darwish, seized in Indonesia in October 2003, Mohammed al-Asad and Mohammed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah — were held in a number of CIA detention facilities until their return to Yemen in May 2005, where they continued to be held, apparently at the request of the United States authorities. Mr. Bashmilah was detained by Jordanian intelligence agents in October 2003, when he was in Jordan to assist his mother who was having an operation. From 21 to 26 October 2003, Mr. Bashmilah was detained without charge and subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including prolonged beatings and being threatened with electric shocks and the rape of his mother and wife [see Declaration of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in support of plaintiffs’ opposition to the motion of the United States to dismiss or, in the alternative, for summary judgment, civil action No. 5:07-cv-02798 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division]. A communication was sent by the special rapporteurs on torture and on human rights while countering terrorism to the Governments of the United States, Indonesia, Yemen and Jordan on the cases of Bashmilah and Salim Ali, who were both detained and tortured in Jordan [E/CN.4/2006/6/Add.1, paras. 93, 126, 525 and 550]. Only the latter country responded, declaring that no record showing that the two men had been arrested for the violations of either the penal, disciplinary or administrative codes, and that they did not have documented files indicating that they posed a security concern, eliminating the possibility of their arrest for what may be described as terrorism [A/HRC/4/33/Add.1, para. 123]. The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention adopted its opinion No. 47/2005 (Yemen) on the case on 30 November 2005, declaring their detention to be arbitrary as being devoid of any legal basis. In its reply to the allegations, the Government of Yemen confirmed that Mr. Bashmilah and Mr. Salim Ali had been handed over to Yemen by the United States. According to the Government, they had been held in a security police facility because of their alleged involvement in terrorist activities related to Al-Qaida. The Government added that the competent authorities were still dealing with the case pending receipt of the persons’ files from the United States authorities in order to transfer them to the Prosecutor [A/HRC/4/40/Add.1, para. 15].

• Khaled El-Masri, a German seized on the border of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on 31 December 2003, was held in a hotel room by agents of that State for 23 days, then rendered by the CIA to the “salt pit”. He was released in Albania on 29 May 2004 [Also see Interview with the lawyer of Khaled El-Masri (annex II, case 9)].

• Khaled al-Maqtari, a Yemeni seized in Iraq in January 2004, was initially held in Abu Ghraib, then transferred to a secret CIA detention facility in Afghanistan. In April 2004, he was moved to a second secret detention facility, possibly in Eastern Europe, where he remained in complete isolation for 28 months, until he was returned to Yemen and released in May 2007.

• Marwan Jabour, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, was seized in Lahore, Pakistan, on 9 May 2004, and held in a CIA detention facility in Afghanistan for 25 months. He was then transferred to Jordan, where he was held for six weeks, and to Israel, where he was held for another six weeks, before being freed in Gaza.

[Also mentioned:] Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish national residing in Germany, interviewed by the experts for the present study, was arrested in Pakistan in November or December 2001 and initially held by Pakistani police officers and officers of the United States. He was then transferred into the custody of the United States at that country’s airbase in Kandahar, Afghanistan, before being taken to the naval base at Guantanamo Bay on 1 February 2002. He was held secretly until May 2002, and released on 24 August 2006.

134. A total of 23 detainees who ended up in Guantanamo were also held in CIA detention facilities in Afghanistan. They include:

(a) Six men seized in the Islamic Republic of Iran in late 2001:

• Wassam al-Ourdoni, a Jordanian, who was released from Guantanamo in April 2004. In 2006, he told Reprieve that he had been seized by the Iranian authorities while returning from a religious visit to Pakistan with his wife and newborn child in December 2001, then handed over to the Afghan authorities, who handed him on to the CIA. He said that the Americans “asked me about my relationship with Al-Qaida. I told them I had nothing to do with Al-Qaida. They then put me in jail under circumstances that I can only recall with dread. I lived under unimaginable conditions that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.” He said that he was first placed in an underground prison for 77 days: “this room was so dark that we couldn’t distinguish nights and days. There was no window, and we didn’t see the sun once during the whole time.” He said that he was then moved to “prison number three”, where the food was so bad that his weight dropped substantially. He was then held in Bagram for 40 days before being flown to Guantanamo [Clive Stafford Smith, “Abandoned to their fate in Guantánamo”, Index on Censorship, 2006].

• Aminullah Tukhi, an Afghan who was transferred to Afghan custody from Guantanamo in December 2007. He alleged that he had fled from Herat to the Islamic Republic of Iran to escape the Taliban, and was working as a taxi driver when the Iranians began rounding up illegal immigrants towards the end of 2001 [PDF, pp. 71-7].

• Hussein Almerfedi, a Yemeni, still at Guantanamo. He alleged that he was “kidnapped” in the Islamic Republic of Iran and held for a total of 14 months in three prisons in Afghanistan, “two under Afghani control and one under US control [Bagram]” [PDF, pp. 31-40].

• Tawfiq al-Bihani, a Yemeni, still at Guantanamo. Allegedly, after deciding to flee Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks, he was “arrested by Iranian Police in Zahedan, Iran for entering the country without a visa” and held “in various prisons in Iran and Afghanistan, for approximately one year in total [PDF, pp. 66-9].

• Rafiq Alhami, a Tunisian still held at Guantanamo, who alleged that “I was in an Afghan prison but the interrogation was done by Americans. I was there for about a one-year period, transferring from one place to another. I was tortured for about three months in a prison called the Prison of Darkness or the Dark Prison” [PDF, pp. 147-61]. And further: “Back in Afghanistan I would be tortured. I was threatened. I was left out all night in the cold. It was different here. I spent two months with no water, no shoes, in darkness and in the cold. There was darkness and loud music for two months. I was not allowed to pray. I was not allowed to fast during Ramadan. These things are documented. You have them” [PDF, pp. 20-22].

• Walid al-Qadasi, a Yemeni who was rendered to the “dark prison” and held in other prisons in Afghanistan, together with four other men whose whereabouts are unknown [In addition, Aminullah Tukhi explained that 10 prisoners in total -- six Arabs, two Afghans, an Uzbek and a Tajik -- had been delivered to the Americans. Although six of these men are accounted for above, it is not known what happened to the other four: an Arab, an Afghan, the Uzbek and the Tajik]. An allegation letter was sent in November 2005 by the Special Rapporteur on torture in relation to Walid Muhammad Shahir Muhammad al-Qadasi, a Yemeni citizen, indicating that the following allegations had been received: He was arrested in Iran in late 2001. He was held there for about three months before being handed over to the authorities in Afghanistan who in turn handed him over to the custody of the US. He was held in a prison in Kabul. During US custody, officials cut his clothes with scissors, left him naked and took photos of him before giving him Afghan clothes to wear. They then handcuffed his hands behind his back, blindfolded him and started interrogating him. The apparently Egyptian interrogator, accusing him of belonging to Al-Qaida, threatened him with death. He was put in an underground cell measuring approximately two metres by three metres with very small windows. He shared the cell with ten inmates. They had to sleep in shifts due to lack of space and received food only once a day. He spent three months there without ever leaving the cell. After three months, Walid al-Qadasi was transferred to Bagram, where he was interrogated for one month. His head was shaved, he was blindfolded, made to wear ear muffs and a mouth mask, handcuffed, shackled, loaded on to a plane and flown out to Guantanamo, where he was held in solitary confinement for one more month. In April 2004, after having been detained for two years, he was transferred to Sana’a prison in Yemen. In its response, the Government of the United States reiterated its earlier announcements that no Government agency was allowed to engage in torture and that its actions complied with the non-refoulement principle. Opinion No. 47/2005 of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention also concerns Mr. al-Qadasi [See E/CN.4/2006/6/Add.1, paras. 1 and 527, and the response from the Government of the United States (A/HRC/10/44/Add.4, para. 252). See also the report of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 47/2005 (A/HRC/4/40/Add.1)].

(b) Two men seized in Georgia in early 2002 and sold to United States forces:

• Soufian al-Huwari, an Algerian, transferred to Algerian custody from Guantanamo in November 2008; and Zakaria al-Baidany, also known as Omar al-Rammah, a Yemeni, still held at Guantanamo. According to Mr. al-Huwari, both were rendered to the “dark prison”, and were also held in other detention facilities in Afghanistan: “The Americans didn’t capture me. The Mafia captured me. They sold me to the Americans”. He added: “When I was captured, a car came around and people inside were talking Russian and Georgian. I also heard a little Chechnyan. We were delivered to another group who spoke perfect Russian. They sold us to the dogs. The Americans came two days later with a briefcase full of money. They took us to a forest, then a private plane to Kabul, Afghanistan” [PDF, pp. 15-23].

(c) Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi national and British resident, was seized in the Gambia in November 2002, and rendered to the “dark prison” at the beginning of December 2002. He was kept shackled in complete isolation and darkness for two weeks. On or around 22 December 2002, he was transferred to Bagram, and then to Guantanamo on 7 February 2003. He was finally released on 30 March 2007. At Bagram, he was reportedly threatened and subjected to ill-treatment and sleep deprivation for up to three days at a time [Interview with Bisher al-Rawi (annex II, case 4)].

(d) Jamil El-Banna, a Jordanian national and British resident, was also seized in the Gambia in November 2002 and rendered to the “dark prison”, then to Guantanamo. He was released from Guantanamo in December 2007.

(e) Six other detainees were flown to Guantanamo on 20 September 2004 after having spent one to three years in custody:

• Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani and Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani, Pakistani brothers seized in Karachi, who were held in the “salt pit” [Both Laid Saidi and Khaled El-Masri spoke about getting to know the Rabbani brothers in the “salt pit”];

• Abdulsalam al-Hela, a Yemeni colonel and businessman who was seized in Egypt;

• Adil al-Jazeeri, an Algerian seized in Pakistan [PDF, pp. 315-34];

• Sanad al-Kazimi, a Yemeni seized in the United Arab Emirates [PDF. Also on the flight that took these men to Guantanamo were Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, Hassan bin Attash and Binyam Mohamed. See also paras 151 and 159 below];

• Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman seized in Thailand, who was held in isolation in Bagram for a year.

Mr. al-Kazimi was apprehended in Dubai in January 2003 and held at an undisclosed location in or near Dubai for two months. He was then transferred to a different place about two hours away. He was kept naked for 22 days, at times shackled, and subjected to extreme climatic conditions and simulated drowning. After six months, he was transferred to United States custody, allegedly pursuant to the CIA rendition programme. He was taken to Kabul and held in the “dark prison” for nine months, where he suffered severe physical and psychological torture by unidentified persons. He was then transferred to Bagram airbase, where he was held for a further four months in United States custody. Again, he was allegedly subjected to severe physical and psychological torture by what he believed were the same unidentified persons he had encountered in the “dark prison” [See the report of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 3/2009 (United States of America) (A/HRC/13/30/Add.1)].

135. Four other detainees, held in Bagram, are known because lawyers established contact with their families and filed habeas corpus petitions on their behalf:

• Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian who was seized in Karachi in May 2002.

• Amin Mohammad al-Bakri, a Yemeni who was seized in Bangkok on 28 December 2002 by agents of the intelligence services of the United States or of Thailand. Throughout 2003, his whereabouts were unknown. The Thai authorities confirmed to Mr. al-Bakri’s relatives that he had entered Thai territory, but denied knowing his whereabouts. In January 2004, Mr. al-Bakri’s relatives received a letter from him through ICRC, informing them that he was being kept in detention at the Bagram airbase. It was reported that Mr. al-Bakri was detained owing to his commercial connections with Mr. Khalifa, a cousin of Osama bin Laden later assassinated in Madagascar [Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion No. 11/2007 (Afghanistan/ United States of America) (A/HRC/7/4/Add.1)].

• Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni seized in 2004, who was sent to Abu Ghraib before Bagram.

• Haji Wazir, an Afghan seized in the United Arab Emirates in late 2002 [PDF].

136. The whereabouts of 12 others are unknown, and the others remain to be identified. It is probable that some of these men have been returned to their home countries, and that others are still held in Bagram. The experts received allegations that the following men were also held: Issa al-Tanzani (Tanzanian), also identified as Soulayman al-Tanzani, captured in Mogadishu; Abu Naseem (Libyan), captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, in early 2003; Abou Hudeifa (Tunisian), captured in Peshawar, Pakistan, at the end of 2002; and Salah Din al-Bakistani, captured in Baghdad. Marwan Jabour also mentioned eight other prisoners. One was Yassir al-Jazeeri (Algerian), seized in Lahore, March 2003 (whom he met), and he heard about seven others: Ayoub al-Libi (Libyan), seized in Peshawar in January 2004; Mohammed (Afghan, born Saudi), seized in Peshawar in May 2004; Abdul Basit (Saudi or Yemeni), seized before June 2004; Adnan (nationality unknown), seized before June 2004; an unidentified Somali (possibly Shoeab as-Somali or Rethwan as-Somali); another unidentified Somali; and Marwan al-Adeni (Yemeni), seized in or around May 2003.

2. Iraq

137. Although the Government of the United States stated that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees seized during the occupation, an unknown number of persons were deliberately held “off the books” and denied ICRC access. In Abu Ghraib, for example, the abuse scandal that erupted following the publication of photographs in April 2004 involved military personnel who were not only holding supposedly significant detainees delivered by the United States military, but others delivered by the CIA or United States Special Forces units. The existence of “ghost detainees”, who were clearly held incommunicado in secret detention, was later exposed in two United States investigations.

138. In August 2004, a report into detainee detentions in Iraq (chaired by former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger) noted that “other Government agencies” had brought a number of “ghost detainees” to detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib, “without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention”, and that, on one occasion, a “handful” of these detainees had been “moved around the facility to hide them from a visiting ICRC team” [PDF].

139. In another report issued in August 2004, Lieutenant General Anthony R. Jones and Major General George R. Fay noted that eight prisoners in Abu Ghraib had been denied access to ICRC delegates by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Commander of the Coalition Joint Task Force in Iraq: “Detainee-14 was detained in a totally darkened cell measuring about 2 metres long and less than a metre across, devoid of any window, latrine or water tap, or bedding. On the door the delegates noticed the inscription ‘the Gollum’, and a picture of the said character from the film trilogy ‘The Lord of the Rings’” [PDF].

140. Although the Schlesinger report noted the use of other facilities for “ghost detainees”, the locations of these other prisons, and the numbers of detainees held, have not yet been thoroughly investigated. In June 2004, the then United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that a suspected leader of Ansar al-Aslam had been held for more than seven months without ICRC being notified of his detention; he also stated: “He was not at Abu Ghraib. He is not there now. He has never been there to my knowledge” [also see this New York Times report]. According to another report, the prisoner was known as “Triple X” and his secret detention was authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who issued a classified order in November 2003 “directing military guards to hide [him] from Red Cross inspectors and keep his name off official rosters”. In addition, some locations may well be those in which prisoners died in United States custody. In 2006, Human Rights First published a report identifying 98 deaths in United States custody in Iraq, describing five deaths in CIA custody, including Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in Abu Ghraib, and others at locations including Forward Operating Base Tiger, in Anbar province, a forward operating base near Al-Asad, a base outside Mosul, a temporary holding camp near Nasiriyah and a forward operating base in Tikrit [PDF].

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 January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

For a sequence of articles 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), 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), 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), Two Algerian Torture Victims Are Freed from Guantánamo (January 2010), UN Secret Detention Report Asks, “Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?” (January 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive.

Beyond the easy targets — the hated ID card scheme, for example — the new government has reacted well to two early tests of its promise to tackle Labour’s record on terrorism. This was a significant target for the Liberal Democrats (who actively opposed the use of secret evidence and control orders, and called for an inquiry into British complicity in torture at their conference last autumn), and this latter topic was also a personal obsession of William Hague’s, even if the party as a whole — with a few other notable exceptions (David Davis and Andrew Tyrie, for example, and Baroness Neville-Jones in the Lords) — supported Labour’s domestic anti-terror agenda rather enthusiastically.

The first test: not overreacting to a difficult decision regarding the deportation of two terror suspects

On Tuesday, the government passed its first test, responding with admirable restraint to the thorny problem of a judge refusing to allow the deportation of two Pakistani terror suspects, because they face the risk of torture in Pakistan.

On the campaign trail, David Cameron had made repealing the Human Rights Act one of his major manifesto pledges (and replacing it with a BNP-sounding British Bill of Rights), but when every misguided xenophobe with access to a newspaper column (or a comments page) began wailing about repealing the HRA immediately, the government refused to be drawn.

Home Secretary Theresa May promised a commission to investigate the HRA, while Nick Clegg warned that the Act was “an absolute constitutional cornerstone” and a “fundamental guarantor of rights to the British citizen,” adding, bluntly, “Any government would tamper with it at its peril.” Crucially, however, the government did not threaten to appeal the decision, seemed content to keep the men in question under surveillance, and no doubt quietly accepted that bashing the HRA as an election tool was not the same as having to deal with the real issues.

These, to be clear, are that the legally binding European Convention on Human Rights (PDF) and the UN Convention Against Torture are the documents that prohibit any involvement whatsoever with torture (including sending foreign nationals back to countries where they face the risk of torture) and the HRA (which largely attempted, with some success, to keep ECHR issues in-house rather than having cases perpetually being referred to Strasbourg) is not to blame.

As a result, although we can no doubt expect the government to attempt to follow Labour’s dubious policy of establishing “memoranda of understanding” with human rights-abusing regimes (which purport to guarantee the humane treatment of those returned, even though that is scarcely credible), we will also, hopefully, see real movement (as signalled on Sunday) regarding putting terror suspects on trial, by allowing the use of intercept evidence in regular courts.

This is what numerous legal experts have been advising for years (PDF), and it is clearly time that we joined the rest of the world in finding a way to do this while protecting intelligence agents and sources, rather than continuing to rely on the use of secret evidence, on special advocates who represent the accused in closed sessions, but are unable to tell their clients anything that they have heard, and on the whims of judges in a special terror court.

The second test: a judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture

On Thursday, the government passed its second test, when William Hague, evidently preempting attempts by FCO and intelligence officials to cajole him into silence, announced that he was ordering a judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture and rendition since September 11, 2001. As the Guardian explained, his remarks “appear to have caught the Foreign Office by surprise, as no details were yet available on how the inquiry will be conducted, its terms of reference or when it will start work.” In a follow-up article, also in the Guardian, Ian Cobain laid out what might be hoped for from the inquiry. “It is expected to expose not only details of the activities of the security and intelligence officials alleged to have colluded in torture since 9/11,” he wrote, “but also the identities of the senior figures in government who authorised those activities.”

As was revealed last June, any detailed inquiry will be required to follow a chain to the very top of government, because, as the Guardian explained at the time, Tony Blair “was aware of the existence of a secret interrogation policy which effectively led to British citizens, and others, being ­tortured during counter-terrorism investigations.”

The Guardian added that Britain’s post-9/11 policy “offered ­guidance to MI5 and MI6 officers ­questioning detainees in Afghanistan whom they knew were being mistreated by the US military,” providing intelligence agents with written instructions that they could not “be seen to condone” torture and must not “engage in any activity yourself that involves inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners,” although “they were also told they were not under any obligation to intervene to prevent detainees from being mistreated.” As stated in the policy, “Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this.”

The Guardian proceeded to explain that the policy, which was “set out in written instructions sent to MI5 and MI6 officers in January 2002,” also informed them that they “might consider complaining to US officials about the mistreatment of detainees ‘if circumstances allow,’” and noted that Tony Blair had “indicated his awareness of the existence of the policy” in 2004, shortly after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.

The exact form the inquiry will take has not yet been established. William Hague stated only, “We will be setting out in the not-too-distant future what we are going to do about allegations that have been made into complicity in torture. We will make a full announcement that we are working on now. We want a judge-led inquiry.” It is, for example, not known how much of the evidence will be presented publicly. The Daily Mail suggested that “Much of the evidence will be taken behind closed doors and it is is not clear whether a full report will be published — though a summary is expected to be made public.”

However, even with these limitations, an inquiry that focuses, as anticipated, on cases including that of Binyam Mohamed would be extraordinary, given the extent to which the Labour government tried to hide its knowledge of the British resident’s torture in Pakistan, as well as the persistent denials by senior officials, and by the heads of MI5 and MI6, that any collusion in torture took place.

Set against this are the grave concerns and criticism expressed by two High Court judges, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones, who chastised the government for complicity in “wrongdoing” after a judicial review in August 2008, and then spent 18 months arguing that the public had the right to know what was contained in 42 documents sent to the British by their counterparts in US intelligence, and the criticism levelled at MI5 in February this year by Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, in a Court of Appeal hearing that finally led to the release of a summary of those documents. On that occasion, Lord Neuberger accused MI5 of having “deliberately misled parliament.”

There is much more to Binyam Mohamed’s case alone, of course, especially regarding the extent to which the government knew about his imprisonment for 18 months in Morocco — and, as has been alleged, sent both a spy and an informer to talk to him — as well as British complicity in the rendition and torture of other men who ended up in Guantanamo,  including Shaker Aamer, the British resident who is still held, and Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna, who were seized by the CIA in the Gambia on a business trip, after an exchange of intelligence between the US and the UK.

There are also many other cases, primarily in Pakistan, but also in other countries, including Bangladesh, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, that have surfaced over the last few years, in which the torture of British citizens appears to have been very deliberately sub-contracted to foreign torturers. Ian Cobain exposed many of these stories for the first time, I have also discussed them (see, for example, here), and they have also been examined by Human Rights Watch and by Cageprisoners, in a report, “Fabricating Terrorism II” (PDF) that was published in April 2009.

Another champion of accountability, David Davis MP, played a major role in exposing British complicity in torture, when, last July, he used the protection of parliamentary privilege to tell the House of Commons how, in 2006, the government and the security services allowed Rangzieb Ahmed, a British citizen, to travel to Pakistan, where they “suggested” to the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Pakistan’s most notorious intelligence agency, that he should be arrested. As he explained, Pakistani intelligence would have been “aware that ‘suggesting’ arrest was equivalent to ‘suggesting’ torture.” Ahmed was later returned to the UK to face a trial, at which evidence of his torture — including having three of his fingernails ripped out — was concealed, and Davis was not only appalled by this particular cover-up, but also told the House, bluntly, “I cannot imagine a more obvious case of the outsourcing of torture.”

For now, those of us who have been calling for an inquiry can only hope that its revelations will not be drowned in the secrecy that was such a hallmark of the Labour government, and that, as Philippe Sands urged yesterday, it will be “deep and broad and as open as possible.” After eight years of largely hidden complicity in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” and the recent and compelling evidence of Britain’s own policy of outsourcing torture, we need answers, and we need them to be both frank and clear.

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

Cross-posted on The Public Record, Eurasia Review and Uruknet.

The former prisoners are suing MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the Attorney General on the basis that agents of the intelligence services were involved in unlawful acts and conspiracy, and that, essentially, they were involved in, or failed to stop, their detention and ill-treatment (and in some cases, their “extraordinary rendition” to secret prisons). However, in November, Mr. Justice Silber ruled that the government should be able to withhold evidence from defendants and their lawyers on the basis of national security.

In reversing this ruling, the judges in the Court of Appeal — Lord Neuberger, Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Lord Justice Sullivan — said they were obliged to “take a stand” against secrecy that would undermine the “most fundamental principles of common law.”

In what the BBC described as “a strongly-worded ruling,” pointing out that “no damages hearing could be heard in secret because the courts had not been empowered by Parliament to withhold evidence from the claimants,” Lord Neuberger stated:

In our view, the principle that a litigant should be able to see and hear all the evidence which is seen and heard by a court determining his case is so fundamental, so embedded in the common law, that, in the absence of parliamentary authority, no judge should override it. At least so far as the common law is concerned, we would accept the submission that this principle represents an irreducible minimum requirement of an ordinary civil trial. Unlike principles such as open justice, or the right to disclosure of relevant documents, a litigant’s right to know the case against him and to know the reasons why he has lost or won is fundamental to the notion of a fair trial.

As the BBC also explained, the ruling was “the second major blow by the Court of Appeal against the government’s attempts to keep secret material out of open courts.” Back in February, the Court overturned 18 months of obstruction, on the part of foreign secretary David Miliband, aimed at preventing the release of documents supplied to the UK by the US intelligence services, which revealed how Binyam Mohamed had been tortured while in US custody in Pakistan in 2002, before his rendition to torture in Morocco and the CIA’s “Dark Prison” near Kabul, and his eventual transfer to Guantánamo. On that occasion, Lord Neuberger was deeply critical of the role played by the intelligence services, noting — in a passage in his ruling that the government tried to suppress — that MI5 did not respect human rights, had not renounced participation in “coercive interrogation” techniques, deliberately misled MPs and peers on the intelligence and security committee, which is supposed to be able to scrutinize its activities, and had a “culture of suppression” in its dealings with Miliband and the court.

As the BBC explained, “British courts deal with secret evidence in two different ways. Ministers can sign special orders called Public Interest Immunity certificates, which leads to material being withdrawn entirely from a case so it cannot be used by either party,” as happened for 18 months in Binyam Mohamed’s case. In other cases — “[c]ontrol order hearings and national-security related deportations” — some evidence, “such as MI5 assessments,” is discussed in secret. As the BBC added, “The suspect is not allowed into these hearings — but a special advocate argues on their behalf behind closed doors.”

The problems with this latter system were exposed by the Law Lords last June, when they dealt a major blow to the government’s system of detaining terror suspects — both British and foreign nationals — on control orders (a form of house arrest) on the basis of secret evidence, following a ruling in the European Court of Human Rights. As I explained at the time, the unfair use of secret evidence primarily “centres on an absurd situation whereby, in the Special Immigration Appeals Court (SIAC), which deals with these cases, special advocates are responsible for representing the accused in closed sessions involving the use of secret evidence, but are prevented from revealing anything about those sessions to the men they represent. This impenetrable barrier to transparency also works in the other direction, as suspects cannot brief the advocates effectively when they are kept in the dark regarding the details of the case against them.”

Recognizing this, the Law Lords “unanimously declared that they had had enough of the system as it currently stands. By nine votes to nil, they ruled that imposing control orders breaches Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, because a suspect held under a control order is not given ‘sufficient information about the allegations against him to enable him to give effective instructions to the special advocate assigned to him.’”

Nevertheless, when it came to the damages claim filed by the six former Guantánamo prisoners, the government proposed exactly the same sort of procedure that the Law Lords found to be unlawful when it came to control orders, arguing that closed sessions should be held because of national security concerns, but with the supposed concession that the men would be represented by special advocates.

In their judgment, however, the judges in the Court of Appeal refused to accept this argument, and Lord Neuberger stated:

Quite apart from the fact that the issue is one of principle, it is a melancholy truth that a procedure or approach which is sanctioned by a court expressly on the basis that it is applicable only in exceptional circumstances nonetheless often becomes common practice.

Responding to the ruling, Corinna Ferguson, a lawyer with Liberty, told the BBC, “Yet again, the Court of Appeal has sent the strongest signal to the security establishment that it cannot play fast and loose with the rule of law. Fair and open justice belongs to people not governments.” She added, pointedly, “Whoever governs us from Friday would be wise to bear this in mind.”

(‘’)

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.

The use of secret evidence in cases related to terrorism involves prisoners held on control orders (a form of house arrest), or imprisoned on deportation bail, who are assigned special advocates to speak on their behalf in closed sessions of the Special Immigrations Appeal Court (SIAC), but who are then prohibited from speaking to the special advocates about what took place in these closed sessions. This regime is now under threat, after the Law Lords ruled in June that imposing control orders breaches Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, because a suspect held under a control order is not given “sufficient information about the allegations against him to enable him to give effective instructions to the special advocate assigned to him.”

Yesterday, however, a new front in the assault on open justice opened up when Mr. Justice Silber ruled, in the cases of seven former Guantánamo prisoners who are suing the government for damages, related to claims that agents of the intelligence services were involved in unlawful acts and conspiracy, that, for the first time ever in a civil case, MI5, MI6 and the police will be able to withhold evidence from defendants and their lawyers on the basis of national security.

The seven men in question are Bisher al-Rawi, Moazzam Begg, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Jamil El-Banna, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga, and they anticipated that their challenge would involve wrangling over the use of Public Interest Immunity certificates, designed to prevent the use of evidence in cases where the government asserts that disclosure would reveal intelligence sources or pose a threat to national security. The use of PII certificates has plagued the disclosure of documents in the long-running case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture by the US government, with the complicity of the British intelligence services, but no one anticipated that, in this particular case, a judge would authorize the use of the same system of special advocates used by SIAC.

Mr. Justice Silber acknowledged that the case raised what he called a “stark question of law,” and added that he agreed with the claimants that an appeal “should be expedited.”

It is to be hoped that the Court of Appeals will recognize that Mr. Justice Silber’s ruling must be overturned, but in the meantime Louise Christian, the solicitor for some of the former Guantánamo prisoners, captured the full, horrific implications of the ruling when she explained:

The judge has sanctioned what would be a constitutional outrage, allowing government to rely on secret evidence in the ordinary civil courts. [He has done this] by treating the issue as if it was a purely technical legal matter, not a question of overturning the whole history of the common law and the fundamental principle that both sides must be on an equal footing. By giving the government such an advantage in civil litigation, the court would overthrow the very essence of the rule of law.

She added that she was “confident that the court of appeal will not allow such a massive erosion of the rights of the individual to hold government to account, particularly on the all-important issue of complicity in torture,” and we must all hope that her analysis is correct. As with the case of Binyam Mohamed, it appears that justice is being undermined, with issues of national security being invoked not to protect national security, but to prevent the government and its agents either from embarrassment or, more gravely, from being held accountable for complicity in the systematic torture and abuse at the heart of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

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

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees (August 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009), Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z, Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction? and URGENT APPEAL on British terror laws: Get your MP to support Diane Abbott’s Early Day Motion on the use of secret evidence (all April 2009), and Taking liberties with our justice system and Death in Libya, betrayal in the West (both for the Guardian), Law Lords Condemn UK’s Use of Secret Evidence And Control Orders (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009), Britain’s Torture Troubles: What Tony Blair Knew (June 2009), Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws, Would you be able to cope?: Letters by the children of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh, Control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh to be allowed to leave the UK (all June 2009), Testing control orders and Dismantle the secret state (for the Guardian), UK government issues travel document to control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh after horrific suicide attempt (July 2009), Secret evidence in the case of the North West 10 “terror suspects” (August 2009), Letting go of control orders (for the Guardian, September 2009).

Back in March, Judge Garzón announced that he was planning to investigate the six prime architects of the Bush administration’s torture policies — former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, who played a major role in the preparation of the OLC’s notorious “torture memos”; Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy; William J. Haynes II, the Defense Department’s former general counsel; Jay S. Bybee, Yoo’s superior in the OLC, who signed off on the August 2002 “torture memos”; and David Addington, former Vice President Dick Cheney‘s Chief of Staff.

In April, on the advice of the Spanish Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido, who believes that an American tribunal should judge the case (or dismiss it) before a Spanish court even thinks about becoming involved, prosecutors recommended that Judge Garzón should drop his investigation. As CNN reported, Mr. Conde-Pumpido told reporters that Judge Garzón’s plans threatened to turn the court “into a toy in the hands of people who are trying to do a political action.”

On Saturday, however, Público reported that Judge Garzón had accepted a lawsuit presented by a number of Spanish organizations — the Asociación Pro Dignidad de los Presos y Presas de España (Organization for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners), Asociación Libre de Abogados (Free Lawyers Association), the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de España (Association for Human Rights in Spain) and Izquierda Unida (a left-wing political party) — and three former Guantánamo prisoners (the British residents Jamil El-Banna and Omar Deghayes, and Sami El-Laithi, an Egyptian freed in 2005, who was paralyzed during an incident involving guards at Guantánamo).

The newspaper reported that all these groups and individuals would take part in any trial, which is somewhat ironic, as, although Judge Garzón has been involved in high-profile cases that have delighted human rights advocates — his pursuit of General Pinochet, for example — he has been severely criticized for his heavy-handed approach to terrorism-related cases in Spain (as in the cases of Mohammed Farsi and Farid Hilali, amongst others), and, in fact, aggressively pursued an extradition request for both Jamil El-Banna and Omar Deghayes on their return from Guantánamo to the UK in December 2007, in connection with spurious and long-refuted claims about activities related to terrorism, which he was only persuaded to drop in March 2008.

It is, at present, uncertain whether another attempt to stifle Judge Garzón will derail him from his pursuit of the Bush administration’s lawyers, as he is not known for letting adversaries stand in his way. At the end of June, the Spanish Parliament pointedly passed legislation aimed at “ending the practice of letting its magistrates seek war-crime indictments against officials from any foreign country, including the United States,” on the basis that no Spanish Court should be able to judge officials of foreign countries except when the victims are Spanish or the crimes were committed in Spain.

However, on Sunday, when Público spoke to Philippe Sands, the British lawyer, and author of Torture Team, which provided much of the first-hand evidence for Garzón’s case, Sands explicitly stated that there was “no legal barrier” to prevent Judge Garzón’s prosecution from proceeding. He explained that he believed the recent decision by US Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special investigator to investigate cases of torture by the CIA is related to the Spanish lawsuit and the importance it has acquired because of its instigation by Judge Garzón. Sands told Público, “The recent decision by Eric Holder emphasizes how appropriate the Spanish investigation is. Many commentators believe that this decision has had a significant and direct impact in the United States, reminding people that there is an obligation to investigate torture.”

He added, “Judge Garzón’s actions have acted like a catalyst, and are supported by many people in the United States, including some members of Congress. He has reminded everybody that a blind eye cannot be turned to these actions and that there are people who are not going to let that happen.” He also explained that Eric Holder’s gesture is only a first step, “limited to cases in which interrogators may have exceeded the limits formally approved by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel,” that the architects of the “legal decisions that purported to justify the use of torture are not in immediate danger in the United States,” and that there is, therefore, “no legal barrier to the continuation of the Spanish investigation.”

He concluded by stating that it was “important” that Judge Garzón proceeds with the case in Spain, because, although Eric Holder “has confirmed the importance of the Convention Against Torture, he has taken only a first step that “does not really address the actions of those who were truly responsible for its violation.”

Note: I wish to extend my thanks to Carlos Sardiña Galache for alerting me to the latest developments in this important story, which was not mentioned in the English-speaking press, and for translating crucial passages.

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 on the Huffington Post and AlterNet. Cross-posted on The Public Record and After Downing Street. Also mentioned in the Washington Independent and Raw Story.

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). 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.