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.

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

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

• To assist the family members of those being held.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As discussed here, here and here, the very thought of extraditing these two men, who had suffered so much in US custody, was incomprehensible, not just because the timing of the request was so mind-bogglingly callous, but also because both men had been cleared by both the US and UK authorities.

Jamil El-Banna outside court in January. Photo © Dylan Martinez/Reuters.

Mr. El-Banna, a Jordanian, was seized with fellow British resident Bisher al-Rawi by US agents in the Gambia, where he had travelled to establish a mobile peanut-processing plant, in November 2002, and his case had caused embarrassment to the British government when it was revealed by his lawyers that British intelligence had been complicit in providing the false intelligence that led to his kidnapping, and Mr. Deghayes, who is married to an Afghan woman, and has a child that he barely knows, was seized in Pakistan and sold to US forces at a time when bounty payments for foreigners were widespread.

Omar Deghayes outside court in January. Photo © Dylan Martinez/Reuters.

Baltasar Garzón, the prominent judge who agreed to shelve the case against the two men, explained that he was doing so because of medical reports filed by the men’s lawyers at their last hearing in February. Two doctors, Jonathan Fluxman and Helen Bamber, had examined the men earlier in the month and had concluded that they were suffering from severe medical conditions caused by torture at the hands of their US captors and the inhumane conditions in which they were kept for five years.

According to the Guardian, the doctors reported that Jamil El-Banna was severely depressed, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that he was also suffering from “diabetes, hyper-tension, back pain and damage to the back of his left knee.” Mr. Deghayes was also diagnosed as suffering from PTSD and depression, and has “fractures in his nasal bone and right index finger.” In addition, he is blind in his right eye, as the result of an attack by guards at Guantánamo. It was also noted that both men presented “a high risk of suicide.”

In his report, Dr. Fluxman concluded that, “given all these factors, I don’t see how Mr. Deghayes would be able to give instructions to his lawyers, listen to evidence and give his own accurate testimony.” In Mr. El-Banna’s case, the doctors concluded that his already fragile mental health could deteriorate severely were he to be separated once more from his wife and children.

Announcing the shelving of the charges, Judge Garzón refused to concede that the initial claims that the men had connections with terrorism were misguided, but acknowledged that they were so damaged by their experiences that their very recovery was “uncertain,” and that as a result they were incapable of defending themselves in any potential trial.

Judge Garzón specifically blamed Mr. El-Banna’s medical condition on the “five years [he spent] in secret prisons in Gambia and Afghanistan and latterly in Guantánamo … in inhumane conditions.” He added that the torture he suffered in these prisons resulted in the “progressive deterioration of his mental condition.” In Omar Deghayes’ case, he noted that he was tortured and badly treated in prisons in Islamabad, Bagram and Guantánamo, and he concluded that the men’s treatment had “caused a serious deterioration in the mental state of the accused,” to such an extent that “it is impossible, even inhuman, to pursue the European arrest warrants.”

Speaking from his home in Brighton, Mr Deghayes said, “It’s good — it’s happy news. I always knew they would realise their mistake and give up the case.” He added that he hoped that the curfews imposed on Mr El-Banna and himself would now be lifted. “I still have problems with immigration as the authorities have taken away my resident status, but this is a relief, of course,” he insisted, and then pointed out that one of his main concerns was not his own status, but that of the 40 to 50 detainees still in Guantánamo who, he said, were in “immediate danger” of deportation to their home countries, where they face the risk of torture.

This, it should be noted, is a fate that Mr. Deghayes was himself threatened with, even though he and his family had fled Libya for Britain in the 1980s, after his father, a lawyer and trade union activist, had been murdered by representatives of Colonel Gaddafi’s regime.

Zachary Katznelson, Senior Counsel for Reprieve, the human rights charity which has represented the men, was also overjoyed to hear the news. “We are thrilled to hear that Judge Garzón has done the right thing and dropped his request for the extradition of Jamil and Omar,” he said. “These men suffered horrors for years at the hands of the United States. They never had a trial of any type, yet they served more than five years in a brutal prison. It is now time to let them rebuild their lives here in the UK — it’s where their families are and it’s where they call home.”

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

As published on Indymedia and CounterPunch.

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportation and extradition, 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), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 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).

Yesterday Omar Deghayes and Jamil El-Banna, two of the three Britons freed from Guantánamo in December, returned to Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London for the third time since their release for an update on the progress — or lack of it — in the Spanish government’s request for their extradition, based on long-discredited allegations that were summarized in previous articles here and here.

As I was unable to attend yesterday’s hearing — and no major media outlet has seen fit to report on it — I spoke to Jackie Chase from Brighton’s Save Omar campaign, who filled me in on the morning’s events.

Speaking to a busy courtroom and an overflowing public gallery, Edward Fitzgerald QC, representing Mr. Deghayes and Mr. El-Banna, submitted medical reports which analyzed in detail his clients’ precarious mental state. Although he made a point of sparing the court the details of their abuse in US custody, which had created their current problems, he explained that the reports revealed that both men were suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

He also pointed out that a particular source of stress and mental anguish for the men derived from the electronic tagging devices that they have been obliged to wear since their return to the UK, which, he said, were causing them anxiety, because they were giving them flashbacks to their ordeal in the US prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, and specifically to their interrogations and the array of brutal techniques that were used on them during the run-up to their interrogations.

Mr. Fitzgerald then asked for the tags to be removed, a request to which the prosecution graciously acquiesced. In their place, Mr. Deghayes and Mr. El-Banna are required to allow police representatives to visit them during the curfew hours that were also imposed on their return to the UK — between 8 pm and 7 am — to check that they are actually at home.

As for the extradition request, the Crown Prosecution Service reported that there had been no response from the Spanish government since the last hearing in January. The judge set a deadline of April 13 for the Spanish to respond to the medical reports, and to issues previously raised by Mr. Fitzgerald and his colleagues; namely, that the Spanish authorities had failed to explain why they had filed the extradition request on the men’s return, when they had not pursued it vigorously during their long imprisonment in US custody; and that they had also failed to explain why they wished to pursue the case when both the British and American governments had concluded that there was no case against either man.

In open discussions between the judge and the various lawyers, the prospect was raised that the Spanish government might drop its extradition request in the near future. If they respond by April 13, however, the formal extradition hearing will take place on May 15.

It is to be hoped that the Spanish will indeed drop their request for the return of two innocent men who are struggling to rebuild their lives. As the case of Farid Hilali revealed last week, the European Arrest Warrant, introduced to facilitate extradition proceedings between EU member states, is proving itself sorely lacking in any mechanism whatsoever to prevent extraditions when the country making the request is acting on “evidence” that fails to stand up to impartial scrutiny. See here, here and here for more on Mr. Hilali’s story.

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

As published on Indymedia.

For the conclusion of the extradition story, see here.

The weakness of the Spanish case –- alleging that both Mr. El-Banna and Mr. Deghayes were members of an al-Qaeda cell in Madrid, which provided recruits for militant training camps in Afghanistan and Indonesia –- was discussed at length in a previous article.

In this hearing, as the men returned to court after three weeks with their families, their lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, QC, launched a withering attack on the Spanish government, telling the court, “The Spanish authorities are deeply implicated in the ordeal of the last five years. They acquiesced to, and facilitated, their interrogation at Guantánamo and indeed participated in that interrogation process. They took no steps or adequate steps to say, ‘we want them for trial in Spain.’ They left them to be interrogated in Guantánamo, and now –- after they have been exonerated by US authorities, after English police have said they don’t wish to bring any charges –- the Spanish authorities are saying, ‘we want to question them on the self-same charges.’” He added that it would be an “obvious oppression” to extradite them now “for the same allegations that have been fully investigated in Guantánamo.”

The judge, Timothy Workman, who had already shown compassion to the men before Christmas, when he granted them bail, and noted that prosecution concerns about doing so were “outweighed by the detailed review carried out in the US,” extended their bail, and ordered them to return for a more lengthy hearing on February 14.

Outside the court, as Mr. El-Banna and Mr. Deghayes mingled with well-wishers, there was a palpable optimism on the part of the lawyers, a feeling, perhaps, that the Spanish can be persuaded to drop their ludicrous claims before they embarrass themselves.

Both Mr. El-Banna and Mr. Deghayes seemed well, although this was clearly a day for a show, and it was impossible to discern the fears and anxieties that must be troubling both men after their long imprisonment in horrendous conditions.

With his hair and beard trimmed since his court appearance in December, when, with his long grey hair, he appeared, perhaps aptly, to be a recently rescued castaway, Mr. El-Banna smiled tentatively, taking his supporters by the hand and thanking them warmly.

Jamil El-Banna. Photo © Dylan Martinez/Reuters.

Mr. Deghayes, too, seemed in good spirits. Engaged and talkative, he was accompanied by a group of supporters from the Save Omar campaign, who had worked assiduously for his release, and had travelled from his home town of Brighton to show their solidarity. His mother, whose distress was apparent in photographs taken before his release, was smiling and glancing over at him, clearly still elated at her beloved son’s return.

Omar Deghayes. Photo © Dylan Martinez/Reuters.

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

As published on Indymedia.

For the rest of the extradition story, see here and here.