Andy Worthington

Control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh to be allowed to leave the UK

Andy Worthington — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:07:24 +0000

Earlier today, I published two articles about the suffering of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh and his family — “Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws,” and “Would you be able to cope?: Letters by the children of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh” — as the Palestinian-born British resident, who has been imprisoned without charge or trial, or held under a control order (a form of house arrest) as a “terror suspect” for seven and a half years, on the basis of secret evidence, which has not been disclosed to him, sought permission in the High Court to leave the country, and to end his horrendous limbo in the UK, where he has suffered from severe mental health problems that have led to repeated attempts to commit suicide, and recently watched, impotently, as his wife gave up the long struggle and left the UK to live with relatives in Jordan, taking the children with her, even though both she and the children are British citizens.

I’m glad to report that Mr. Abu Rideh was successful in his application today, and that Amnesty International, which supported his case, has just announced that the Home Office has agreed to issue him with a travel document. As Amnesty explained, “Subject to the Home Office formally granting him the document, for which he has now applied, Mr. Abu Rideh will now be able to leave the UK and seek entry to another country.”

Amnesty’s press release continued: “Amnesty continues to call for Mahmoud Abu Rideh to be issued with a UN travel document, to which he should be entitled as a refugee. However in the interests of being able to leave the UK swiftly and attempt to be reunited with his family, Mr. Abu Rideh has agreed to apply for an inferior document that will allow him to leave the UK and enter another country.”

Counter-terrorism campaigner Sara Macneice added, “It is very welcome news that Mahmoud Abu Rideh will now be able to leave the UK and seek entry to a safe country, and will no longer be subjected to the repressive measures of his control order, which have driven him to utter desperation. I have spoken to Mr. Abu Rideh and this decision has given him real hope that he may now be reunited with his wife and children, and be able to rebuild his life.”

She also said, “Amnesty is supporting Mahmoud Abu Rideh’s application for a UN travel document, to which he should be entitled as a refugee. However he seems willing to apply for an inferior document in order to leave the UK as soon as possible. The Home Office should issue this document to him promptly, rather than subjecting him to yet more delays. This is a minor victory for one man, but the pernicious system of control orders, which has driven him and his family out of the UK, remains in place. Amnesty continues to call for an end to the control order regime and its replacement with measures which respect people’s basic human rights.”

To this I can only add that I wholeheartedly agree, and hope that, after a crucially important ruling by the Law Lords just three weeks ago — in which the Lords unanimously delivered a resounding repudiation of the government’s use of secret evidence to impose control orders on alleged terror suspects — the government finally decides to abandon policies which are so alien to the laws on which the UK prides itself. For nearly 800 years, since King John signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede, Britain has been the country that not only enshrined habeas corpus — the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned, and to be deprived of one’s liberty only after a trial with a judge and jury — but that also exported it to the rest of the world.

Mahmoud Abu Rideh secured an important personal victory today, but everyone who believes that no one should be imprisoned or otherwise deprived of their liberty on the basis of secret evidence – and, essentially, on the whim of government ministers who have turned the clock back to 1214 — must continue to insist that the control order regime is brought to an end, and that the use of secret evidence has no place in a country that claims to uphold civilized values.

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.

“Would you be able to cope?”: Letters by the children of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh

Andy Worthington — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:23:26 +0000

In an article earlier today, “Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws,” I told the story of Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a Palestinian-born British resident with a British wife and six British children, who had a hearing at the High Court in London today to consider his request for internationally valid travel documents which would allow him to leave the country. As I explained in the article, “On the basis of secret evidence, which has not been disclosed to him, Mr. Abu Rideh has been imprisoned without charge or trial, or held under a control order (a form of house arrest) as a ‘terror suspect’ for seven and a half years, and, as a result, suffers from severe mental health problems that have led to repeated attempts to commit suicide.”

In May, as I also explained, his wife, Dina al-Jnidi — unable to cope any longer with the living hell of the family’s existence in the UK — left the UK to live with relatives in Jordan, taking the children with her. Dina al-Jnidi’s account of the effects of imprisonment without charge or trial and control orders on the mental health of those subjected to the government’s uniquely cruel post-9/11 detention policies was reproduced in the previous article, and below I reproduce four letters written by five of Mahmoud Abu Rideh’s six children, which should convince all but those with hearts made of stone that the government’s anti-terror policies have been nothing but a grave and profoundly disturbing travesty of justice.

Five of Mahmoud Abu Rideh’s children.

Ala’a’s story

My name is Ala’a Mahmoud Abu Rideh and I am 15 years old.

Before you read my story I would like to tell you that people think the UK is one of the most countries that has human freedom but after my story and what has happened to my Dad I know that the UK is not a freedom country. I want whoever reads my story to promise me that he will help me by freeing my Dad.

Our life was one of the worst lives in the world because we really had to live in a life without freedom when you have certain times to get out of your house and certain times to come back to your house and the police telling us what to do and what not to do. What kind of life is that? And who would want to live this type of life? Who would like to live in a life where my Dad has 250 conditions that he is not allowed to do. I wouldn’t think anyone would say yes.

Our story started off like this. It was the second day of Eid when they came and arrested my Dad. We were all sleeping. It was a bout 5 am, then we heard a big crash, then all we see is lots of police coming inside our bedroom, then all I see is my mother crying and telling us to get up and wear some clothes because we are going to leave the house. We all got ready than after we got ready we went downstairs and we saw policemen in our house sitting and smoking. They took us to a hotel to search the house.

We didn’t even know where our Dad was, all we could do is just wait and wait and wait till one of the police came and took us back home at the night time.

When we got to the house it was very messy and very untidy. We kept waiting for our Dad. After nearly a month we had a phone call saying that we could go and see our Dad. When we went there we had to wait for a long time then when we got there we couldn’t even realize that he was my Dad. He was sitting on a wheelchair and was very skinny. He looked very ill. I felt very sorry for him but we were only allowed to talk to him with a glass between us and talking using a phone between us and there was an interpreter in the visit but after a few visits we were allowed to visit our Dad but in a place where it had lots of people but it was very uncomfortable.

The story stayed the same for three years until then one day all we see is police officers coming to our house putting lots of electronic equipment that we didn’t know what they were for, and then at midnight the police officers and my Dad came. We didn’t even know that he was going to come so we were not ready but we tried our best to rush every thing and get ready quickly. Then when my Dad came it was to me like a wish that came true. I felt really happy and felt that one of my wishes have come true. He told us really sad story about what has happened with him in prison, how they tortured him very badly, then after a few days I realized that my Dad was on something called control order.

At the beginning I didn’t understand what was control order then I knew that he has voice variation [recognition?] three times a day and he had to put a tag around his leg. Then after a few months my Dad got arrested again for delaying to say his phone call so they arrested him for two to three months. Then after he came back out he had more strict rules and as the days moved by police came to search our house many times. Then my dad got very ill and very tired of his life. Imagine if you had to live with a life where no one is allowed to visit you or no electronic things, for example iPod, internet, memory stick, MP3 and many other things. So after all of that he got really tired and had to go to the hospital for a few months and when we went to visit him he was very pale and very tired. My young brother was not allowed to visit him because he is very small so we have to find someone to sit with him during the visit.

One time the police came to search our house they were impolite with us, they were swearing at us and say bad things. After a few weeks they came again to arrest my Dad for the things that they found in our house like memory stick. We need it for our school work because we are not allowed to have internet. Then at 11 pm he phoned us to get his clothes for him to the police station so me and my Mum went and left my other brothers and sisters alone at home.

One time when they searched the house for all the day one girl in my school saw them and tell all the girls in my school that my Dad has been arrested and they caused many trouble to us.

And after all this pressure and hard time we have decided to leave the UK and go to Jordan so we all went on the 25th of May 2009 and left my Dad alone in the UK because he does not have a passport and has control order.

Haneen’s story

My name is Haneen and I am 13 years old. My life started off miserably, I have never thought of living this life. I cannot cope no longer, it was so hard where everyone was against us. I could not cope so we decided to leave UK and come to stay in Jordan. I thought I might have a peaceful life but no I was wrong! It was so hard to live without my Dad, he was not allowed to come here. Would you be able to cope? Listen to my story then decide if you will be able to live my life.

My life started off like that, when I was four years old and only four it was Eid, in the early morning, at about early morning we heard a bang — a big bang! — that woke up the whole house, even my youngest brother Imad woke and started crying in tears and he was only four or five months. It was so scary, they took my Dad to some prison and took us to hotel to search our house.

I thought that I would never see him again. But after three years and a half he came back but these three years were so hard he went to prison and when we went to visit him in prison it took us about two hours to get there and dogs used to smell us and I used to hate dogs.

The day they released my Dad they stayed for many hours fixing my Dad’s electronic devices. He has something called a control order, we never heard of this and we don’t understand what it is about. This control order had over 200 rules, some of them like no one was allowed to visit us over 16, we are not allowed to have mobile phone, laptop or internet and many other things. He was allowed to leave the house at 7 am and had to come back at 7 pm. Every week the police comes at any time.

He has to do a call at midnight. We are always worried about him missing his phone call because if he missed it the police would come and in the evening when we gear or see a police car we think they are coming to our house. Now eight years passed and my Dad is still under control order. Every year they renew it and they come to search the house from time to time.

My only wish to whoever is reading this letter is to help my Dad. I wish for my Dad every good thing in this world and please help him. I really want him to come and live with us in Jordan and for the whole family to live a nice life together. Now after you have heard my story, would you be able to cope with my life, yes or no? Please be honest and I’m certain that you would not be able to cope and now this is the end of my awful life story. Think of me and my Dad and please try to help us. Thanks.

Esraa’s story

I am Esraa Abu Rideh. I am 12 years old. I have been through a distressing life. Our life has no meaning. Our life full of worries, frights and sudden. It was hard for me to live. Yes I spent eight years of my life like that.

It all started one day when I was awake by a deafening knock at about 5 am. The date was 19-12-2001. It was odd. Who would knock at the door at that time? Then I know it was the police. From that day our live turned from peace to confrontation. They took my dad to prison and took us to the hotel. When we returned the whole house was messy. At that time I was about five. I still never know where my Dad was.

From that day our life turned dull and no point of living. After he went to prison his health got worse and then they transfer him to Broad moor hospital. We had to travel for two hours each month to visit our Dad. I was always travel sick but I never cared as long as I see my Dad. They had to search us each time we go. Then we had to pass a dog each time.

Then in 2005 he was released. But the next day they came giving him a piece of paper saying all the things not allowed. They were over 200 things. He completely changed after three years in prison. He became more rough and angry. I just want to ask the Home Office a question: what did you do to make him became more angry? You changed all our life. Why is that? Just tell me his blame for arresting him. You made him not care about life or about us. He does not like noise. He can’t sleep all the night because of you. Everyone from the Home Office is responsible from boss to employees. I have to set an alarm to wake my Dad. Imagine you having to wake up about 3 am each time. Wouldn’t you get tired?

From that time the police came more often to our house. Sometimes my Dad late in his phone call and five minutes later whole bunches of the police come knocking. These days were horrible as a memory. During that period my Dad was taken to hospital about 2-3 times. He was always frightened from the police to harm us. Day after day went no joking with each other or laughter.

School was terrible. Ooh, it was a nightmare. Especially secondary school. No memory stick, mobile phones, internet, digital camera, fax, MP3, iPods, Playstation and all the electronic stuff. I had to do my homework in the library and if the library was not opened I don’t do it and then get a detention. Teachers thought I was lazy but the truth was hidden under my clothes.

Police officers were impolite, especially Victoria the boss. She kept swearing.

Although we are British and all this happened we decide to leave UK and live in Jordan leaving my Dad behind.

My wish is to give my Dad his passport so we can live as one family.

Khalid and Imad’s story: “MY terrible LIFE!!!!!”

My name is Khalid, I am 11 years old, and I am Imad, I am 9 years old. We are Mahmoud Abu Rideh’s children. I would like to start my story with me saying that these eight years were awful. My Dad had to be in jail and then forced to have a control order in our house. He had around 200 conditions that he cannot have like using internet, having mobiles, Nintendo Wii game, iPod, memory stick, MP3, digital camera, Playstation, nobody allowed to visit us and much much more. We are sad because that was all for no reason. He was allowed to go out from 7 am to 7 pm which was only 12 hours.

It started at early morning when we were awaken by a deafening knock. There were policemen took my Dad to prison and we went to a hotel for a day. It was the second day of Eid, it was the worst Eid I have ever had, it was miserable to have an Eid without a Dad, feeling like an orphan, especially in a time when you need someone to celebrate with. We had no family, no one to celebrate with, we were waiting for our Dad but he didn’t come back. The days moved by but we didn’t know anything about our Dad, then one day we had a phone call saying we could visit our dad but we could only speak with him with a glass window in the middle and a translator sitting with us.

After a few years, after school my Mum said that my Dad might be released but with a control order. Then the door knocked, the police came and put electronic telephone for my Dad to speak with monitoring people three times a day. They stayed for a long time then they went, the boss Victoria treats us with no respect and say shocking words and treat the house as if it was their house. Once I decided to spend my money that I have been saving for months on a phone so I bought it and after a month they took it and my Nintendo and all my games.

My Dad told me how they treated him in jail and how they tortured him. I would wish if I see my Dad and live with him and all my family to live together in any Arabic country and I hope it comes true. How would you feel if you were treated like that? I hope I see my Dad.

Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws

Andy Worthington — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:27:23 +0000

Today, Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a Palestinian-born British resident with a British wife and six British children, has a hearing at the High Court in London to consider his request for internationally valid travel documents which would allow him to leave the country. On the basis of secret evidence, which has not been disclosed to him, Mr. Abu Rideh has been imprisoned without charge or trial, or held under a control order (a form of house arrest) as a “terror suspect” for seven and a half years, and, as a result, suffers from severe mental health problems that have led to repeated attempts to commit suicide.

In May, his wife — unable to cope any longer with the living hell of the family’s existence in the UK — left the UK to live with relatives in Jordan, taking the children with her, and, in spite of a recent ruling by the Law Lords — in which the Lords unanimously delivered a resounding repudiation of the government’s use of secret evidence to impose control orders on alleged terror suspects — the government has yet to demonstrate that it has taken on board the significance of the ruling, and will take the necessary steps to either charge or release those it has been holding in such an extraordinary bubble of lawlessness for the last seven and a half years, including those, like Mr. Abu Rideh, whose torment has led to what human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce has described as a state of “florid psychosis.”

The following is a letter sent to the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Justice Secretary Jack Straw and to the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, by the Muslim Prisoner Support Group and Peace and Justice in East London, asking the government to bring to an end the unconscionable legal limbo in which Mr. Abu Rideh is held, and it is followed by a heart-breaking account, by Mr. Abu Rideh’s wife, of the effect of arbitrary imprisonment and control orders on her life and health, and on that of her husband and their children. In an article to follow, I will reproduce a series of letters from Mr. Abu Rideh’s children.

A letter on behalf of Mahmoud Abu Rideh

Please give your urgent attention to the case of Mahmoud Abu Rideh, who has been subject to a control order for more than four years.

Mr. Abu Rideh was detained without charge between December 2001 and March 2005 under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, on suspicion of being involved in terrorism-related activity. The grounds for that suspicion were kept secret from him and from his lawyers. The House of Lords in December 2004 decided the law was a breach of the Human Rights Act. The European Court of Human Rights in 2009 confirmed that decision, but went further in Mahmoud Abu Rideh’s individual case and said that he had never been told even the bare minimum that he needed to know to contest the UK Government’s case for detaining him for three and a half years.

The strict obligations imposed by the control order, together with the lasting effects of the time he spent interned in the UK, have had a severe effect on his physical and mental health as well as the lives of his British family. Mr. Abu Rideh has repeatedly self-harmed and is now a severe suicide risk as a result.

On May 25th 2009, his family left the United Kingdom in despair for Jordan, to live with his wife’s parents. They were prevented from taking many of their belongings with them since many of the children’s possessions had been seized by police as claimed breaches of their father’s control order. His children were unable while here ever properly to do their home work since they were allowed no access to the internet. As a result they did not sit their exams or complete the academic year, effectively depriving them of one year of their education. Mr. Abu Rideh was denied the opportunity of bidding his family farewell at the airport. He now despairs at the thought of never seeing his family again, since he cannot leave the country and his family were told that they have no right to return to the UK, despite the fact that they are British nationals.

Mr. Abu Rideh was previously given assurances by the former Home Secretary David Blunkett and former Prime Minister Tony Blair that he would be allowed to leave the UK. He is now requesting that these promises be fulfilled and that he be allowed to leave the UK to any country that will accept him. He has appealed to the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, and the British media with no response.

He stated in an interview aired on Press TV on May 28th:

I am already dead. My soul, my life, my heart — every part of me is dead. I am just like a machine walking, with no other feeling. I have nothing left — I cannot even sleep at night; I have nightmares of what they have done to me, to my wife, my children, my time in prison, the searches … this is enough, I’ve lost my senses, I’ve been driven insane, I can no longer take it. What is the point of living? I’ve lost everything, I’ve lost my wife, I might as well kill myself, that is better for me. I swear by God I have written to Gordon Brown saying that you have two weeks, if I am not helped in this period I will kill myself, whether that’s by throwing myself in front of a train, or slitting my wrists, or throwing myself from a high building, or taking an overdose, whatever it takes. Nobody has lived the life I have or what I’ve had to endure.

Please use your influence to persuade the government’s prosecutors to relax, or even revoke, the Control Order so that Mr. Abu Rideh can, at the very least, leave the UK.

***

If you have any doubts about the effects of imprisonment without charge or trial and control orders on the mental health of those subjected to the government’s uniquely cruel post-9/11 detention policies, then please read the following article, “Life with a control order: a wife’s story,” written by Mahmoud Abu Rideh’s wife, Dina al-Jnidi, and published today in the Independent.

As well as exposing the full horrors of Mr. Abu Rideh’s treatment and its effect on all concerned –- and also exposing the petty and arbitrary nature of the Home Office’s intrusions into the family’s life, and restrictions on prison visits — it also contains a uniquely damning condemnation of the effects of the British government’s wretched anti-terror policy, when Dina al-Jnidi writes, “My husband and I escaped torture at the hand of the Israelis to find worse torture in the UK. I now find myself in another country — Jordan — where I have sought asylum from the torture that Britain has placed me and my family under.”

Life with a control order: a wife’s story

Mahmoud Abu Rideh has spent four years behind bars and another four years on a control order. A father of six, he is in a wheelchair and has never seen the evidence against him. Today he goes to the High Court, backed by Amnesty International, in a plea to leave Britain. Here Dina al-Jnidi, his wife, describes the family’s descent into a nightmare.

It is still fresh in my mind the day the police came to arrest my husband — it was 19 December 2001. They broke down the door and forced their way into our home while I was still in my night dress. They were pointing their guns in my face and in the children’s faces. There were about 30 armed officers. They forced my husband to the floor and handcuffed him, pressing down on his back and neck with their knees as he screamed in pain. They yelled: “Shut up you f***ing terrorist!” I implored the police to stop because my husband suffers from back pain. All this was in view of my children who were terrified; they were crying, shaking, many had wet themselves.

The police took my husband away — to where, I do not know. They took me and my children to a hostel; they wanted to search our home.

After two days we were allowed to return home. The local newspaper had taken pictures of our house. The headlines read something like: “Terrorist raid”. After this article I had my face veil forcibly removed three times. We also had rubbish thrown at our front door.

Forty days passed and I still did not know where my husband was. I called the police, immigration — no one told me where he was.

Eventually I swapped my home because our neighbours had resorted to spitting at me. Prior to the arrest of my husband and the raid on our home, we had never had any trouble with our neighbours. The police have caused this problem which led to our victimisation.

I finally found out my husband was in Belmarsh prison and I went to visit him there. I discovered he was on a hunger strike. The visit was a closed visit, which means that neither I nor my children could touch him. The children were unable to hug or hold their father. Even shaking his hand was not allowed. On many occasions after travelling long distances in difficult circumstances we were sent away without being allowed to see him. My husband does not speak English well, but he was not allowed to speak Arabic (eventually this was allowed for one visit out of four).

My husband used to call and often he would be crying due to the torture and the discrimination he was facing. My children, too, would cry. The effect of all this torture, discrimination, and detention without charge or trial drove my husband insane, angry and psychologically mad. Never before was he like this, he was a normal person — a normal husband and a normal father. Due to his mental state he was transferred to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, a place for dangerous high-risk people.

While at Broadmoor, he was frequently attacked by staff, nurses and other prisoners. I could not visit him there. I tried, but whenever I went I was told he was in isolation, in solitary confinement.

Broadmoor was far from our home, it was difficult travelling with five children only to be sent home.

It was around this time that my husband began to self-harm. He drank detergents, he used pens to dig deep into his arms.

He was finally released in 2005. We were given only two hours’ notice before his return. We were pleased to have him back home, but did not know the full extent of the conditions that would be placed on him. I did not know what a control order was. He had to wear an electronic tag around his ankle. He had to report in several times a day (including the middle of the night) using special equipment that had been placed in our home. We were not allowed to have a digital camera in the home, nor other basic items such as USB sticks, memory cards or MP3 players. Our children were not allowed to use the internet or have a computer. We were not allowed visitors unless they had been cleared by the Home Office after a rigorous vetting procedure. Many would not even call for fear of being harassed by the police or worse.

My husband was a wreck, a shattered man. He could not sleep, he would sweat and shake, he would have nightmares and flashbacks. It was almost impossible to deal with him. He was ill and had complex psychological needs — I am not a trained nurse and he required specialist help. One week later he attempted suicide by taking an overdose of his depression and anti-psychotic medications. I found him on the floor unconscious, in a pool of vomit foam coming from his mouth. He was taken to the hospital and remained unconscious for three days.

My life is ruined. I cannot sleep. I cry so much. It is having an effect on my children. I blame Tony Blair, the House of Lords, the Queen, the politicians, Parliament. They all have a have a hand in this. I am British. So are my children. Why, then, is it acceptable for us to be treated in this manner? The police came many times to search my house, violating the sanctity that is a home. What do they expect to find among my clothes and my children’s clothes? They confiscated money, a Nintendo Wii, a Playstation, a PSP. The Nintendo Wii was a gift from my husband’s solicitor to our children. Despite numerous requests, none of these items have been returned to us. Why? Are my children not allowed the things everyone else’s children are?

Even irrelevant documents have been confiscated — birth certificates, school reports, a car log book and MOT certificates. Of what significance or benefit are these?

I was at breaking point. I could take no more. I was pregnant with my sixth child. During my pregnancy the Home Office made things difficult — I could not get help as people required clearance before being allowed to visit me. How could I care for a sick husband and five children while pregnant?

I want to know how the majority of Christians in Britain prepare and share joy at the christening of their newborn children. Am I exempt from sharing my happiness with friends and family? Should I too not be allowed to show off my precious gift to others? Am I subhuman? I want to ask the politicians, the Queen — would this not affect you?

I tried to remain hopeful many times. But there is no hope. My husband has been charged with no crime, he has not been interviewed or interrogated. He has been presumed guilty because he is Muslim — for what other reason could it be?

Please explain to me and my family — why have we had to endure this treatment? Pets are treated better than we have been. Is this the humanity you profess, is this the justice you want to spread?

Judge Ousley ordered and ruled that the Home Office should release the secret evidence that is held against my husband. But the Home Office appealed this decision and it has been a long time and nothing has been heard or seen.

On or around 19 February this year, the European Courts of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights declared that the secret evidence being used against my husband be released to him and his solicitors. They said the control order should be lifted and that my husband should receive compensation for his unfair treatment. What is the point of these courts if Britain makes a mockery of them and refuses to submit to their judgment?

There is no justice. We have lost all hope of justice.

My family, especially our children, are scared of the police. The have suffered at the hands of the police. Their education has suffered. They have not been able to complete homework, they are at a disadvantage compared to other children as they are not allowed to access the internet. I have three girls in secondary school and three boys in primary school. I was attending college to study childcare. We all require a computer.

My husband was re-arrested for alleged breaches of his control order on at least four different occasions. Once he was arrested for having the Nintendo Wii which was the gift to our children. Once it was for having “mobile phones” in the home — they were actually toys purchased from the pound shop.

We, as a family, are dead. We are sick of the police and the Government’s torture of our family that has gone on for eight years. Our family has been held hostage in Britain. My husband and I escaped torture at the hand of the Israelis to find worse torture in the UK. I now find myself in another country — Jordan — where I have sought asylum from the torture that Britain has placed me and my family under.

Psychiatrists from the Home Office advised me to divorce my husband, saying it would be better for me and my children. Scotland Yard on many occasions also told me this. What kind of twisted advice is this? Would this really be better for me and my children? Or are they looking for more reasons to drive my husband to suicide?

I have too many things to get off my chest. My heart is filled with anger. I am crying as I write this — it is all too much for me to remember. I have left my home to be in Jordan. My husband was not even allowed to accompany us to the airport. He is forbidden under the restrictions of his control order. Is it really likely that he can escape; he has no passport, no travel documents — where would he go?

As we left our home I knew, and he knew, that it was probably the last time we would see each other, the last time he would see, hold, hug and kiss his children. I had to watch my children crying at the thought of never seeing their father again. But I have no choice, I have been forced to leave.

Perhaps now I can try to repair the damage to my children; the emotional scars they will bear for how long I do not know. I can finally try to rid myself of the effects of the “Terrorist Act”, the police, the searches and the torture I have had to witness my husband go through.

I still fear for my husband who is alone. He has made four suicide attempts — each time he has been serious. But Allah has not willed that he be successful.

The British public and Government complain about the effects of immigration and asylum seekers in the UK, about people coming to the country and claiming benefits. Why then do you force my husband to remain here? He has not been charged or convicted of a crime, yet you treat him this way.

I would like to tell the British Government and the rest of the world, I would like to tell anyone who has a heart, anyone who has an ounce of humanity — please allow my husband to leave the United Kingdom.

Please provide him with the necessary documents to go to any country, where there may be at least some hope of seeing him again — before I lose him for good and our children lose their father.

African Embassy Bombing Suspect To Face Trial In September 2010

Andy Worthington — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:45:52 +0000

OK, so nearly 12 years after he was indicted for his alleged part in the African embassy bombings in August 1998, over six years since he was seized after a gunfight in Gujrat, Pakistan in July 2004, and four years after his transfer to Guantánamo — after two years in secret CIA prisons, where, he says, he was “a victim of the cruel ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’” — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian and one of 14 supposedly “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006, will face a trial in a federal court in New York. On Thursday, Federal Court Judge Lewis Kaplan set a date of September 13, 2010 for his trial to begin.

A courtroom sketch of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, by Christine Cornell, at his arraignment in New York on June 9, 2009.

This is ironic for three reasons: firstly, because it means that Ghailani — the first Guantánamo prisoner to make it to the US mainland — will persistently expose the lies of the cowardly, scaremongering politicians who recently whipped up a frenzy about bringing prisoners to the mainland when he fails to escape from prison over the next 14 months; secondly, because it should demonstrate to the Obama administration that federal courts work, whereas Ghailani’s proposed trial by Military Commission at Guantánamo (in the Dick Cheney-inspired system that Obama has hinted he wants to revive) came to nothing and would almost certainly have lacked legitimacy had it gone ahead; and thirdly, because it demonstrates that the five years from the date of his capture to his first appearance in a New York courtroom in June — when he pleaded not guilty to the 286 charges against him — was a complete waste of time (if that isn’t too light-hearted a description of the Bush administration’s chronically cruel and obtuse program of “extraordinary rendition” and torture), and the Justice Department is clearly fortunate that, notwithstanding Ghailani’s claims of torture in secret CIA prisons, his case appears to be relatively straightforward to prosecute.

As I explained in an article in May, when the forthcoming trial was first announced, Ghailani was charged, inter alia, with “assist[ing] in the purchase of the Nissan truck as well as the oxygen and acetylene tanks that were used in the bombing of the US Embassy in Tanzania,” and is “further alleged to have participated in loading boxes of TNT, cylinder tanks, batteries, detonators, fertilizer and sand bags into the back of the truck in the weeks immediately before the bombing.” He is also charged with forging documents in Afghanistan, and working as a cook and a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.

What makes his case so apparently clear-cut is that he has not refuted being an accessory to the Tanzanian bombing, and, in fact, admitted during his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007 that he “bought the TNT used in the bombing, purchased a cell phone used by another person involved in the attack and was present when a third person bought a truck used in the attack.” Moreover, he apologized for his involvement, saying that he did not know that the supplies would be used to attack the embassy, and stated, “I would like to apologize to the United States government for what I did before … It was without my knowledge [of] what they were doing, but I helped them … And I’m sorry for what happened to those families who lost, who lost their friends and their beloved ones.”

On Wednesday, however, his lawyers caused a stir in court by asking the government to preserve the “black sites” where Ghailani was held by the CIA. As Reuters explained, the lawyers “said they needed access to the secret detention sites, whose locations abroad have not been publicly identified, to gather evidence and inspect whether any statements the Tanzanian made under interrogation were reliable.”

As AFP described it, one of his lawyers, Peter Quijano, said, “The inspection of the CIA ‘Black Sites’ where the defendant was detained, subjected to interrogation techniques, interrogated and made statements is necessary,” because “it appears undeniable that the defendant was subjected to harsh conditions and harsh interrogation techniques while detained in CIA ‘Black Sites’” and “it is believed that the defendant was interrogated and made statements after being subjected to a ‘harsh regime employing a combination of physical and psychological ill-treatment with an aim of obtaining compliance and extracting information.’”

According to the Associated Press, Ghailani’s legal team added that it would be “another two months before they obtain security clearance necessary to visit the sites, and they fear they will be dismantled by then because the CIA on April 9 indicated it will ‘decommission’ the interrogation locations.” In response, one of the prosecutors, David Raskin, told Judge Kaplan that the government “would preserve the locations for now.” Kaplan said that he was pleased by the news, and added, bizarrely, “Then I don’t have to look at the classified information, no matter how titillating it may be.”

The most important comments, however, were made by David Raskin, firstly when he said that that the government was not planning to use any statements made by Ghailani in the secret prisons, and, secondly, when he explained that the evidence used in the case against Ghailani would “not be very different” from that used when four of his alleged co-conspirators were put through the federal court system in 2001, and, after being convicted in May 2001, were sentenced to life without parole in October 2001, just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

On that occasion, of course, there was no need for lawyers to propose visits to torture prisons, because the men in question had, sensibly, undergone interrogations in the United States, at the hands of skilled agents, that did not involve the use of secret prisons, that did not involve the use of torture, and that did not involve the current administration using the relatively clean case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani to test whether the federal court system can deliver justice — and be seen to deliver justice — in the cases of other prisoners who also lost years of their lives in an illegal and counter-productive pursuit of “actionable intelligence.”

Like most of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” policies, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani’s five years as a “high-value detainee” were part of a project that was conceived in haste and arrogance, with no thought of what would eventually happen to these dehumanized “ghost prisoners” — America’s Disappeared — when, as was inevitable, they were one day brought back into the real world.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Four more charged, including Binyam Mohamed (June 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (five trials dropped, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), Guilt by Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009).

Release Of The “Holy Grail” Of Torture Reports Delayed Again

Andy Worthington — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:51:46 +0000

Today was supposed to be the day that the Justice Department — after two delays — released an unclassified version of the CIA Inspector General’s 2004 Report into the interrogations of “high-value detainees” in the “War on Terror,” which Democrat Congressional staffers described as the “holy grail,” according to Greg Sargent of the Plum Line, writing in May, “because it is expected to detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works.”

Sargent was following up on an article in the Washington Post, “Hill Panel Reviewing CIA Tactics,” which described how Senate Intelligence Committee investigators were interviewing those involved in the interrogations, “examining hundreds of CIA e-mails and reviewing a classified 2005 study by the agency’s lawyers of dozens of interrogation videotapes” (which were later destroyed), and also examining the CIA Inspector General’s Report.

The Post explained that “government officials familiar with the CIA’s early interrogations” said that the “top secret” CIA report, “based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents,” contained “the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses,” and added that the officials indicated that, although the report remained “closely held,” White House officials had told political allies that they intended to “declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month’s release of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos.” These four memos, issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2005, and released in April, provided a companion piece to the notorious “torture memo” of August 2002 (leaked in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal), and, notoriously, involved lawyers in one of the DoJ’s most prestigious departments — charged with interpreting the law as it applies to the Executive branch — seeking to rewrite the rules on torture so that it could be used in the CIA’s “high-value detainee” program.

According to the Post, officials familiar with the contents of the report said that it “concluded that some of the techniques appeared to violate the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the United States in 1994.” The Post also added that, according to excerpts included in the OLC memos, the report “concluded that interrogators initially used harsh techniques against some detainees who were not withholding information.”

This was a fair précis of the “excerpts” from the report that were included as footnotes in the three memos from May 2005, written by the OLC’s Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Steven G. Bradbury, but as I explained in an article at the time, when analyzed in the context of the memos, the “excerpts” were even more alarming.

To establish the context, the footnotes followed Bradbury’s lame attempts to explain why it was “necessary to use the waterboard ‘at least 83 times during August 2002,’” on Abu Zubaydah, and “183 times during March 2003” on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This apparently involved an appraisal that “other … methods are unlikely to elicit this information within the perceived time limit for preventing [an] attack” (in other words, the fictional ticking time-bomb scenario), but I was obliged to conclude that these “mind-boggling figures” seemed to reveal “not that each horrific round of near-drowning and panic, repeated over and over again, defused a single ticking time-bomb, but, instead, that it became a macabre compulsion on the part of the torturers, which led only to the countless false alarms reported by CIA and FBI officials who spoke to David Rose for Vanity Fair last December.”

What amazed me, however, was that, while filling his memos with largely implausible justifications for the use of torture, Bradbury cited from the Inspector General’s Report, even though it was so clearly critical of the manner in which interrogations had been conducted. These are the key passages from my article at the time:

One sign that this was indeed the case [in other words, that the CIA overreacted] comes in a disturbing footnote, in which Bradbury noted, “This is not to say that the interrogation program has worked perfectly. According to the IG Report, the CIA, at least initially, could not always distinguish detainees who had information but were successfully resisting interrogation from those who did not actually have the information … on at least one occasion, this may have resulted in what might be deemed in retrospect to have been the unnecessary use of enhanced techniques. On that occasion, although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within CIA Headquarters still believed he was withholding information [passage redacted]. At the direction of CIA headquarters, interrogators therefore used the waterboard one more time on Zubaydah [passage redacted].”

Furthermore, as another revealing footnote makes clear, the IG Report also noted that, “in some cases the waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated,” and also that it was “used in a different manner” than the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in SERE training [the torture techniques taught in US military schools to enable US personnel to resist interrogation, which were reverse engineered for use in the “War on Terror”]. As the report explained, “The difference was in the manner in which the detainees’ breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject’s airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency interrogator … applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose. One of the psychiatrist / interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is ‘for real’ and is more poignant and convincing.”

In addition, the IG Report noted that the OMS, the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, contended that “the experience of the SERE psychologist / interrogators on the waterboard was probably misrepresented at the time, as the SERE waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant.” Chillingly, the report continued, “Consequently, according to OMS, there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe.”

I’m not surprised that the release of the report — delayed for a week from June 19, at the CIA’s request, and again from June 26 to July 1 — has been delayed again, as it clearly contains information that is vital to those of who believe that President Obama cannot “restore America’s moral stature in the world” (as he pledged in November) without holding to account those who authorized the use of torture by US personnel. However, every delay only increases the fear that, on arrival, the report will be barely less comprehensively redacted than the laughably censored version that was released to the ACLU in May 2008 (PDF).

In order to keep the debate about torture alive, I therefore recommend a visit to the ACLU’s Accountability for Torture project, which has been running for the last few weeks, and which states, “We can’t sweep the abuses of the last eight years under the rug. Accountability for torture is a legal, political, and moral imperative.” I also recommend a number of articles from the last few days, as part of what blogger and psychologist Jeff Kaye has described as “a mini-blog storm on behalf of the ACLU’s Accountability Project,” looking at how the Bush administration’s torture program was not just reserved for the waterboarding of three “high-value detainees” in the custody of the CIA, but was a poisonous virus that also infected the US military, and that led to over a hundred deaths in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

First up is Glenn Greenwald’s article for his blog at Salon, “The suppressed fact: Deaths by US torture,” in which he states, “Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions — that we “Look to the Future, not the Past” — are literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder.” Then there are articles by Marcy Wheeler, bmaz and Jeff Kaye at Firedoglake, by Digby, and by drational and mcjoan at Daily Kos, and there’s also my article, “When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan,” which draws largely on passages in my book The Guantánamo Files, but also on testimony by former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, and researcher John Sifton, and which, I believe, exposes three murders at the US prison at Bagram airbase that have never been investigated.

POSTSCRIPT July 2: At the Washington Independent, Spencer Ackerman reports on the exchange of letters between the Justice Department and the ACLU, based on the DoJ’s assertion that it now needs until August 31 to complete the declassification.

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.

When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan

Andy Worthington — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:30:21 +0000

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days about the long-awaited (and twice-delayed) release of the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report, which, as Glenn Greenwald explained on Tuesday, “aggressively question[s] both the efficacy and legality” of the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics in the “War on Terror.” As Greenwald also explained,

In anticipation of the release of that report, there is an important effort underway — as part of the ACLU Accountability Project — to correct a critically important deficiency in the public debate over torture and accountability. So often, the premise of media discussions of torture is that “torture” is something that was confined to a single tactic (waterboarding) and used only on three “high-value” detainees accused of being high-level al-Qaeda operatives. The reality is completely different.

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the US resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in US custody — at least [see “Command’s Responsibility,” a Human Rights First report from 2006, PDF]. While some of those deaths were the result of “rogue” interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that’s one reason we’ve always considered those tactics to be “torture” when used by others — because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people. Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions — that we “Look to the Future, not the Past” — are thus literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder.

In the run-up to the anticipated publication of the report, as part of what blogger and psychologist Jeff Kaye described as “a mini-blog storm on behalf of the ACLU’s Accountability Project,” several bloggers — including drational at Daily Kos, and Empty Wheel, bmaz and Jeff at Firedoglake, wrote articles examining aspects of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies — and, in particular, the question of murders in US custody.

On Friday, I also wrote an article about torture for the ACLU’s Accountability Project, explaining how the hunger strikers at Guantánamo are part of the same torture machine — and, moreover, one that, unnervingly, is still operating today — but as a contribution to the specific topic of demonstrating to the US public, and the wider world, that torture techniques implemented by the Bush administration led to murders in US custody, I’m presenting below some relevant sections from my book The Guantánamo Files, from testimony provided by former prisoner Omar Deghayes, and from a recent report by investigator John Sifton, relating to ten murders in US prisons in Afghanistan, three of which, to the best of my knowledge, have never been investigated at all.

Following the outline proposed by Glenn Greenwald above, some of these murders may have involved a few “rogue” actions, but in general it’s clear that they followed methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House — or variations introduced in a context where limits on abusive behavior had been reduced or eliminated, ostensibly to facilitate interrogation.

The prelude to two notorious murders — and, very possibly, three others — in the US prison at Bagram airbase began in the summer of 2002, when 14 soldiers from the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg arrived at the prison, led by Lt. Carolyn Wood, and were soon joined by six Arabic-speaking reservists from the Utah National Guard. Lt. Wood took over interrogations from a team led by an interrogator who later wrote a book about his experiences, The Interrogators, using the pseudonym Chris Mackey. This is how I described what happened next in The Guantánamo Files:

Murders in Bagram (from Chapter 14 of The Guantánamo Files)

Typically, the new recruits were unprepared for what awaited them. Some were counter-intelligence specialists with no background in interrogation, and only two had interrogated real prisoners before. They were also given few guidelines about how to behave. Speaking to the army’s criminal investigation unit in 2004, one of the reservists said that President Bush’s announcement, in February 2002, that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda and that Taliban fighters did not have rights as prisoners of war, led the interrogators to believe that they “could deviate slightly from the rules.” “There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for terrorists,” he added, explaining that senior intelligence officers told them that the prisoners “were to be considered terrorists until proved otherwise.”

Given carte blanche to treat the prisoners as they saw fit, and under persistent pressure to come up with intelligence, Wood’s team adopted stress positions as a standard procedure, and pushed the policy of sleep deprivation further than Mackey had. Whereas “monstering” [a policy introduced by Mackey, which involved interrogation sessions that lasted as long as the interrogator could stay awake] had never exceeded 24 hours, one former interrogator said that they “decided on 32 to 36 hours as the optimal time to keep prisoners awake and eliminated the practice of staying up themselves.”

It also became standard policy that new prisoners were hooded, shackled and kept in isolation for the first 24 hours of their imprisonment, and sometimes for the first three days. Writing about the army’s report [and the murders at Bagram, in an impressive article for the New York Times in May 2005], the journalist Tim Golden noted that prisoners who were considered important or uncooperative were handcuffed and chained to the ceilings and doors of their cells, sometimes for several days. Although the Red Cross complained, the army report noted that senior officers toured the facility and saw it in operation, but never prohibited its use.

In addition, Bagram became a place of even greater random brutality. Golden described how violence was sometimes used to extract information, or as punishment for rule-breaking, but that on other occasions “the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.” In statements to army investigators, soldiers mentioned a prisoner who was “forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went,” and another who was “made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.”

[…]

As Carolyn Wood and her team settled in at Bagram, they were joined, in late August, by a new military police unit — mostly reservists — who had received very little training, and who brought with them a new technique, the common peroneal strike, described by Tim Golden as “a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee,” which soon became widely applied. In the army report cited [above], the MPs claimed they were never told that it was not an accepted army technique, and most said they never heard one of their trainers in the US — a former police officer — telling a soldier “he would never use such strikes because they would ‘tear up’ a prisoner’s legs.”

In early December, the unfettered violence finally spilled over into homicide. The first victim was Mullah Habibullah, who was apparently the brother of a Taliban commander from Uruzgan. Stout and well-presented, he was described as “very confident” by the major in charge of the MPs. After kneeing a soldier in the groin during his anal probe [which all prisoners received on arrival], three guards took him to an isolation cell and shackled his wrists to the wire ceiling, and on the following two days, when he was still “uncooperative,” he was given several peroneal strikes by one of the soldiers, whose lawyer later noted that his client was “acting consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the Bagram facility.”

By the fourth day, he was coughing and complaining of chest pains, and his interrogator allowed him to sit on the floor because he was unable to bend his knees to sit down. Despite this, the violence increased the next day, when two MPs gave him nine peroneal strikes while he was handcuffed to the ceiling in one of the isolation cells. When three soldiers came to his cell later in the day and pulled off his hood, he was already dead. A medic told the military investigators, “It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared.”

The second victim was a taxi driver named Dilawar, who was brought in the day after the death of Mullah Habibullah. According to his elder brother, he was “a shy man, a very simple man,” who lived a quiet life with his wife, his young daughter and the rest of his family. On the day of his capture, he picked up three passengers and was passing Camp Salerno, a US base, when he was stopped at a checkpoint by soldiers serving under Jan Baz Khan, the nephew of Pacha Khan Zadran, who were looking for the men who had launched a rocket attack on the base earlier that day. Finding a broken walkie-talkie on one of the passengers and an electric stabilizer for a generator in the boot of the car, they delivered the four men to the Americans at Bagram as suspects.

They were among the last men to be implicated by Jan Baz Khan, and Dilawar’s passengers — Parkhudin, a 25-year old farmer, Abdul Rahim, a 27-year old baker, and Zakkim Shah, a 19-year old farmer — were certainly the last three to be sent to Guantánamo on Khan’s advice, because the Americans finally realized that their supposed ally was actually using them for his own ends, and imprisoned him in Bagram in February 2004. [Note: The baleful influence of Pacha Khan Zadran and Jan Baz Khan is mentioned elsewhere in The Guantánamo Files, as several other men ended up in Guantánamo based on false allegations provided by them].

All this, however, came too late for Dilawar. After the first night, when the four men were handcuffed to a fence, to prevent them sleeping, their interrogations began. Although Dilawar was only a small, frail man, he was regarded as non-compliant, when he apparently spat in the face of a soldier, who gave him a couple of peroneal strikes, which made him cry out, “Allah!” The soldier explained, “Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny. It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out ‘Allah.’ It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes.”

Over the next two days, Dilawar was subjected to brutal interrogations, in which few words were actually spoken. Unable to assume a stress position in the first session, because his legs were so damaged, he was repeatedly thrown against the wall, and, according to the interpreter, a violent female interrogator stamped on his bare foot with her boot, and kicked him in the groin. The following day, after being chained to the ceiling once more, he was unable to kneel and kept falling asleep. After asking for a drink and being sprayed with water until he gagged, he was returned to his cell and chained up once more, and by the following morning he was dead.

How long it would have taken the US military to investigate the murders, if left to their own devices, is unknown. Instead, they issued a press release, announcing that a prisoner had died of a heart attack, and then refused to release any further information. Investigating further, the journalist Carlotta Gall (in another impressive story for the New York Times in March 2003) traced Dilawar’s family and was shown his death certificate, on which an army pathologist stated unequivocally that, although he had coronary artery disease, his heart failed because of “blunt force injuries to the lower extremities.” The extent of his injuries was later summed up by two coroners: one said that his legs had “basically been pulpified,” and the other said, “I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.”

Gall’s article provoked an investigation into the murders, which, in 2005 and 2006, led to various minor punishments and reprimands for the soldiers involved, although at no point, as with the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, was anyone encouraged to look higher up the chain of command to explain why it was that such murderous treatment had become “standard operating procedure.”

Others who were aware of the murders were other prisoners who had been in Bagram at the time. Dilawar’s passengers, who were released from Guantánamo in March 2004, explained that his family asked them to describe what had happened, but “they could not bring themselves to recount the details,” and Parkhudin said, “I told them he had a bed. I said the Americans were very nice because he had a heart problem.”

[Former British prisoner] Moazzam Begg also reported that he witnessed a death at the end of 2002, but what is even more disturbing is that Begg, Richard Belmar and Jamal Kiyemba [two other former British prisoners] reported another death in July that has never been investigated. All three said that a young Afghan was killed after he tried to escape. Belmar said, “He was fine when they brought him in. They had immobilized him, and the next thing they were carrying him out on a stretcher,” and Kiyemba, who was clearly not talking about either Habibullah or Dilawar, because he was transferred to Guantánamo in October 2002, explained that the murder was used as part of the pressure that was exerted on him to make a false confession: “The only way out, I was told, was to confess. I heard and saw other torture — banging, screaming, cries, barking dogs and a dead guy who had tried to escape. One of the MPs said, ‘Who’s next?’ So I confessed to be left alone.”

The most complete story of this unacknowledged murder was told by Moazzam Begg, who spent ten months at Bagram, where, in addition to the usual abuse, he was threatened with being sent to Egypt for torture, enticed to become a CIA agent, and, at a particularly low point, convinced that a woman who was screaming in a cell next to him was his wife. He reported [in his book, Enemy Combatant] that a guard he knew from Kandahar told him about the murder, admitting that he “started hitting the detainee so hard that he felt he had fractured something,” and that another guard used “Thai-style elbow- and knee-techniques.” He added, “I didn’t know whether they knew that had killed him,” and pointed out that another guard confirmed the murder, but later tried to deny it, saying, “Oh no, he didn’t really die, the reason they covered his face was just to scare people.”

Two more murders in Bagram (from testimony by Omar Deghayes)

In addition, Omar Deghayes, a British resident who was also held at Bagram in this period (and who was released from Guantánamo in December 2007), explained, in a statement made public in August 2007, that he had witnessed two other murders in Bagram. Deghayes said that he “witnessed a prisoner shot dead after he had gone to the aid of an inmate who was being beaten and kicked by the guards” (“The American,” he explained, “said he tried to take the gun”), and that he was also nearby when another prisoner was beaten to death: “One by the name of Abdaulmalik, Moroccan and Italian, was beaten until I heard no sound of him after the screaming. There was afterwards panic in prison and the guards running about in fear saying to each other the Arab has died. I have not seen this young man again.”

As I explained in an article at the time, these two murders were clearly not the same as that reported by Moazzam Begg, Richard Belmar and Jamal Kiyemba, and it appears, therefore, that there may have been five murders at Bagram in 2002.

A murder in the “Salt Pit” (from Chapter 16 of The Guantánamo Files)

The existence of the “Salt Pit,” [a secret CIA prison] housed in an abandoned brick factory north of the capital, remained a closely guarded secret until 2005, when two stories emerged to blow its cover. The first of these was a previously unreported murder, which was exposed by Dana Priest in the Washington Post in March 2005. Priest reported that in November 2002, a recently-promoted CIA officer, who had been put in charge of the facility, in the absence of any senior personnel who were willing to take the job, “ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets.” Following their orders, the guards then dragged him around the floor before putting him in his cell, where he died of hypothermia during the night.

According to a senior US official, he then “disappeared from the face of the earth”: he was hastily buried in an unmarked grave, his family was never notified of his death, and the CIA officer in charge of the prison was promoted. The US authorities, meanwhile, showed no willingness to investigate the case further. “He was probably associated with people who were associated with al-Qaeda,” one official said, even though nothing was known about him at the time of his death, apart from the fact that he was captured in Pakistan with some other Afghans.

More murders in US custody (from Chapter 17 of The Guantánamo Files)

The murders at Bagram and the “Salt Pit” in 2002 heralded an increasingly barbarous US regime in Afghanistan. Although Hamid Karzai was sworn in as [interim] President after a loya jirga (grand council) in Kabul in June 2002, which was attended by 2,000 delegates from across Afghanistan, the US military — and, in particular, the Special Forces soldiers operating out of several forward operating bases around the country — behaved like a rogue army.

In March 2003, journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark traveled to Gardez to meet Dr. Rafiullah Bidar, the regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, recently established — with funding from the US Congress – “to investigate abuses committed by local warlords and to ensure that women’s and children’s rights were protected.” Ironically, Bidar told the reporters [for another impressive article, this one in the Guardian] that what his job actually entailed was registering complaints against the US military. “Many thousands of people have been rounded up and detained by them,” he said. “Those who have been freed say that they were held alongside foreign detainees who’ve been brought to this country to be processed. No one is charged. No one is identified. No international monitors are allowed into the US jails. People who have been arrested say they’ve been brutalized — the tactics used are beyond belief.”

Speaking anonymously, a government minister also complained, “Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability.”

Throughout 2003, at least three more prisoners were murdered by Americans in three different forward operating bases that were part of this arbitrary, indiscriminate and unaccountable prison system. In Gardez, in March 2003, Jamal Naseer, an 18-year old Afghan army recruit, was captured with seven other Afghan soldiers. After being treated “like animals” for 17 days, according to some of the other men, who said that they were hung upside down and struck repeatedly with sticks, rubber hoses and cables, immersed in cold water, made to lie in the snow, and subjected to electric shocks, Naseer’s body, covered in bruises, was turned over to the local police with no documentation of his death and no autopsy results.

Three months later, in Asadabad, 28-year old Abdul Wali, who handed himself in voluntarily in connection with a rocket attack in which he was not involved, was beaten to death by David Passaro, a civilian contractor working with the CIA, who assaulted him “using his hands and feet, and a large flashlight” over a two-day period, and in November, at a base in Gereshk, another Afghan, Abdul Wahid, died from “multiple blunt force injuries” (autopsy report, PDF), 48 hours after he was handed over by Afghan forces.

As with the murders in 2002, the authorities were unwilling to pursue investigations. An inquest into Naseer’s death did not begin until September 2004, after the story surfaced in the media, and in January 2007 the only outcome was that two soldiers received an “administrative remand” for failing to report the murder. In Abdul Wahid’s case, the authorities absolved themselves of blame by claiming that his injuries were sustained in Afghan custody, and in Abdul Wali’s case, David Passaro was charged with assault [not murder] in June 2004, and was sentenced to eight years in prison in February 2007. This was little comfort to Wali’s family, however, and Said Akbar, the governor of Kunar province, noted that his murder became a tool for terrorist recruiting and “created a huge setback for Afghanistan’s national reconciliation efforts.”

A tenth murder, reported by John Sifton

Two months ago, in an article for the Daily Beast, human rights researcher John Sifton provided information about a tenth prisoner murdered in US custody in Afghanistan, Mohammad Sayari, an Afghan who died in August 2002. As Sifton explained, “I first learned about the Sayari case in 2005, reading through a Department of Defense document obtained via a Freedom of Information Act case by the American Civil Liberties Union. The document contained a short description of the incident: A captain and three sergeants ‘murdered Mr. [Sayari] after detaining him for following their movements in Afghanistan.’ The section of the document detailing the result of the investigation was redacted.”

Last year, in conjunction with various human rights groups, Sifton sought an explanation for Sayari’s death from the US military. “The Army,” he wrote, “revealed that commanders had declined to prosecute any of the four men implicated in the case, although one of the four soldiers received an ‘administrative reprimand.’” This was in spite of the fact that, in 2006, additional documents obtained by the ACLU had “disclosed that the Army investigation had found probable cause to recommend charges of murder and conspiracy against the four Special Forces soldiers. According the investigation, the four soldiers had captured the detainee, a civilian non-combatant, and shot him, presumably after interrogating him.” Sifton added that military investigators “also recommended dereliction-of-duty charges against three of the men and a charge of obstruction of justice against the highest-ranking, a captain, who admitted to destroying evidence of the crime, but that, “[i]nexplicably, without a court martial, the case was closed,” and all that happened was that the captain “received a letter of reprimand for ‘destroying evidence.’”

Conclusion

In conclusion, I can only hope that the stories above contribute to correcting what Glenn Greenwald described as “a critically important deficiency in the public debate over torture and accountability” — and bear in mind that I was dealing only with ten murders in Afghanistan, and not the 90-plus murders in US custody in Iraq. If we are indeed to “Look to the Future, not the Past,” and to “regain America’s moral stature in the world,” as President Obama hopes, this can only be achieved by addressing the crimes of the past, moving beyond the “few bad apples” scenario used by the Bush administration to deflect attention from its own culpability, and demanding accountability from the senior officials responsible for turning America into a nation that openly practiced torture.

As retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey explained to MSNBC in April, on the day that President Obama visited CIA headquarters in April to praise the agency for upholding US values and ideals, “We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA.”

Explaining its call for accountability, the ACLU declares on its “Accountability for Torture” homepage, “We will press Congress to appoint a select committee that can investigate the roots of the torture program and recommend legislative changes to ensure that the abuses of the last eight years are not repeated. And we will advocate for the appointment of an independent prosecutor to examine issues of criminal responsibility. We can’t sweep the abuses of the last eight years under the rug. Accountability for torture is a legal, political, and moral imperative.”

It is indeed. And without it, the message that President Obama sends to the world is not that he has “regain[ed] America’s moral stature in the world,” but that senior officials can torture with impunity, so long as they leave office after committing their crimes.

Guantánamo: Charge Or Release Prisoners, Say No To Indefinite Detention

Andy Worthington — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:08:58 +0000

So what’s happening now? According to a joint Washington Post / ProPublica article on Friday, “The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close Guantánamo, has drafted an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely,” according to “three senior government officials.”

The administration moved swiftly to refute the story, with the Justice Department maintaining that it would not comment on specific plans until after July 21, when the administration’s inter-departmental Guantánamo Task Force is scheduled to complete its review of all the Guantánamo cases, and an unnamed official telling AFP that “no such draft order existed, though internal deliberations were taking place on how to deal with those inmates who could not be released or tried in civilian courts.” The Post accordingly revised its story online, stating that administration officials were only “crafting language for an executive order.”

However, it is certainly true that the administration is struggling to deal effectively with the closure of Guantánamo, having recently suffered a defeat in Congress, when politicians of both parties supported a passage in a $106 bn. War Funding Bill, which “prohibits the use of any funds … to release or to transfer … any individual detained at Guantánamo Bay into the continental United States,” and also authorized legislation that “requires the President to report periodically to Congress on the status of Guantánamo Bay detainees and plans for their transfer.”

As a result, an executive order would indeed enable President Obama to “reassert presidential authority” over issues relating to the closure of Guantánamo, although whether indefinite detention is part of the plan is still unclear. Since last month, when the President first made public the options being looked at regarding the closure of Guantánamo (during an important national security speech), it has been clear that all options were being kept on the table.

Is the administration testing the waters?

It also appears that the administration is willing to test out responses to various proposals through strategic media leaks, as happened three weeks ago, when the New York Times published an article about a proposal, in draft legislation to be submitted to Congress, which was apparently designed to pave the way for the prisoners accused of involvement with the 9/11 attacks to plead guilty in a trial by Military Commission (the “terror trials” introduced by former Vice President Dick Cheney in November 2001), and to be executed — thereby fulfilling their stated aim of becoming martyrs — without the government having to go through a full trial process. This latest story may, therefore, represent a similar testing of the waters.

Last month, President Obama spelled out the options being discussed: release or transfer, trials in federal courts, trials in a revamped version of the Military Commissions, and indefinite detention. At the time, civil liberties groups, lawyers and numerous commentators — myself included — responded with undisguised hostility towards the last two options.

As I explained in an article following Obama’s speech and the simultaneous announcement that one of Guantánamo’s “high-value detainees,” Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, an alleged associate of the African embassy bombers, would be tried in a federal court in New York, “setting up a two-tier system — of federal courts on the one hand, and Military Commissions on the other — appears to be nothing but a recipe for disaster.” I was even more worried about the prospect of indefinite detention, writing that I “would urge anyone who believes in the fundamental right of human beings, in countries that purport to wear the cloak of civilization with pride, to live as free men and women unless arrested, charged, tried and convicted of a crime, to resist the notion that a form of ‘preventive detention’ is anything other than the most fundamental betrayal of our core values.”

As a result of opposition to Military Commissions and preventive detention, it was somewhat surprising that the Washington Post / ProPublica article also claimed that unspecified civil liberties groups had “encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,” and added that civil liberties groups “generally oppose long-term detention, arguing that detainees should either be prosecuted or released.” To the best of my knowledge, civil libertarians always oppose long-term detention without charge or trial, and no group has hinted that it would support plans for preventive detention, whether through an executive order or through legislation in Congress.

However, while this passage seems to me to provide another indication that the entire article was viewed by the “three senior government officials” behind it as another attempt to test responses to ongoing discussions within the administration, the article was more useful in its discussion of the government’s current analysis of the 229 prisoners who are still held.

The figures don’t add up

After noting that, during congressional testimony last week, Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that 50 prisoners have been approved for release, and, with some hesitation, responded affirmatively to a suggestion that no more than 25 percent of those still held (in other words, around 60 prisoners) would be put forward for trials, the authors added that one of the officials who spoke to them noted that the administration was “still hoping that as many as 70 Yemeni citizens will be moved, in stages, into a rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia.”

Excluding the one prisoner already sentenced (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who received a life sentence in a one-sided trial by Military Commission on the eve of the Presidential election), that leaves 48 prisoners facing indefinite detention, rather less than the figure quoted in the article by “several” Justice Department officials, who apparently “said they have found themselves agreeing with conclusions reached years earlier by the Bush administration: As many as 90 detainees cannot be charged or released.”

Reading between the lines, therefore (and excluding, for a moment, the laughable suggestion that the Bush administration had any basis for reaching objective “conclusions” about the Guantánamo prisoners it had rounded up so randomly), what this means is that 48 prisoners face indefinite detention, plus 42 Yemenis if plans to put them through the Saudi rehabilitation program do not work out — and the lack of logic involved in that suggestion is, I hope, abundantly clear.

I also have my doubts about the figure of 60 or so prisoners to be put forward for trials (as intelligence estimates over the years — mentioned most recently by Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff — have indicated that no more than two to three dozen of the prisoners had any meaningful connection to terrorism), but I was at least reassured that two Justice Department officials involved in a review of possible prosecutions told the Washington Post / ProPublica that the administration “is strongly considering criminal charges in federal court for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three other detainees accused of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

This contradicts the earlier leak, mentioned above, indicating that they would face a fast-track trial by Military Commission, and, I hope, for two particular reasons, that it is true: firstly, because any trial by Military Commission — however tweaked by Obama — would lack legitimacy in the eyes of many at home and abroad, after the Commissions’ manifest failures throughout the Bush years; and secondly, because, if any genuine evidence exists whatsoever to prove that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-accused were actually involving in planning and facilitating the 9/11 attacks, then no jury in the US will fail to convict them, despite their government-sanctioned torture at the hands of the CIA.

The strange case of Walid bin Attash

Even so, all is not well, as the Washington Post / ProPublica article also indicated. According to “one senior official,” one of the men who could be subjected to preventive detention is Walid bin Attash, one of the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Bin Attash (also known as Khallad, or Tawfiq bin Attash), who is also accused of involvement in the African embassy bombings in 1998, and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, was seized in April 2003 and was held in secret CIA prisons for nearly three and a half years before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006.

In the leaked report on the “high-value detainees” that was compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, based on interviews with the men after their transfer to Guantánamo (and the subject of a major New York Review of Books article by Mark Danner in April), bin Attash, who lost a leg in Afghanistan many years before his capture, described some of the ways in which he was treated in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan:

On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks. I was put in a cell measuring approximately [3 1/2 by 6 1/2 feet]. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural …

After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists. I shouted for help but at first nobody came. Finally, after about one hour a guard came and my artificial leg was given back to me and I was again placed in the standing position with my hands above my head. After that the interrogators sometimes deliberately removed my artificial leg in order to add extra stress to the position …

Noticeably, however, when bin Attash was brought before a tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, he produced what appeared to be an unprompted confession, when he said that he was the link between Osama bin Laden and the Nairobi cell during the African embassy bombings in 1998, and also admitted that he had played a major part in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, explaining that he “put together the plan for the operation for a year and a half,” and that he bought the explosives and the boat, and recruited the bombers.

Despite this, it was noticeable that the senior official did not even mention bin Attash’s own confession, and focused instead on what was described as the Justice Department’s conclusion that “none of the three witnesses against him can be brought to testify in court. One witness, who was jailed in Yemen, escaped several years ago. A second witness remains incarcerated, but the government of Yemen will not allow him to testify [and] Administration officials believe that testimony from the only witness in US custody, Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, may be inadmissible because he was subjected to harsh interrogation while in CIA custody.”

It is difficult to know quite what conclusion to draw from this. Certainly, there is a problem with the case against al-Nashiri — one of three prisoners subjected to waterboarding, according to Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA — although the problem is less to do with the manner in which he was treated in CIA custody, and more to do with the fact that, in his tribunal in Guantánamo, he denied every allegation against him.

He stated that he made up stories tying him to the bombing of the USS Cole and confessed to involvement in several other plots — including plans to bomb American ships in the Gulf, a plan to hijack a plane and crash it into a ship, and claims that Osama bin Laden had a nuclear bomb — in order to get his captors to stop torturing him. “From the time I was arrested five years ago,” he said, “they have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way, and another time they tortured me in a different way. I just said those things to make the people happy. They were very happy when I told them those things.”

Considering that, in the 9/11 Commission Report (PDF), bin Attash was specifically mentioned in connection with investigations by the CIA, the FBI and Yemeni intelligence following the bombing of the USS Cole, and information provided during his interrogations in CIA custody was quoted from extensively, it strikes me as remarkable that no reliable evidence apparently exists that can be used to prosecute him in a US federal court. Is this because no evidence really exists, or is it because of reticence in providing information on the part of the intelligence agencies? If the former, then I fail to see how a case can be made for continuing to hold him; if the latter, then the administration should find a way to put him on trial.

As was explained in a press release that accompanied the transfer of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani to the US mainland, the Justice Department has “a long history of … successfully prosecuting terror suspects through the criminal justice system,” and, to prove it, the DoJ attached a list of successful prosecutions over the last 16 years. Surely the case of Walid bin Attash should be no different.

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

UK protestors mark 13th anniversary of Libyan prison massacre

Andy Worthington — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:07:19 +0000

Befriending dictators, as the UK and US have been doing with Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi since British Prime Minister Tony Blair made an official visit to Libya in March 2004, brings with it its own set of unprincipled compromises. In Libya’s case, the resultant hypocrisy has been starkly delineated. Although reviled as a sponsor of international terrorism for decades, Gaddafi was instantly transformed into an ally in the “War on Terror,” when Blair stated that he “had been struck by how Colonel Gaddafi wanted to make ‘common cause with us against al-Qaeda, extremists and terrorism.’”

The British Prime Minister conveniently ignored the fact that, while he was meeting Gaddafi, it was revealed (as the BBC put it) that “Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell had signed a deal worth up to £550m for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast,” and also failed to mention that, as a result of this new relationship, the UK’s main involvement with Libya on issues related to terrorism would apparently focus not on al-Qaeda, but on exiles opposed to Gaddafi’s regime, as the British government moved to deport a handful of Libyan dissidents back to their homeland on the basis of secret evidence that was not disclosed to them.

The government was subsequently thwarted by two courts: SIAC, the Special Immigrations Appeal Court, which deals with cases related to terrorism, deportation and the use of secret evidence, and the Court of Appeal. In October 2008, the Court of Appeal upheld an earlier ruling by SIAC (in October 2007), in which the secret terror court ruled that two suspects — alleged to be members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a group dedicated to removing Gaddafi from power — would be at risk of torture and a “complete” denial of a fair trial if returned to Libya. The Court of Appeal affirmed SIAC’s ruling that Gaddafi could not be relied upon to abide by a “memorandum of understanding” signed with the UK in 2005 and supposed to guarantee that returned prisoners would be treated humanely, and also affirmed the court’s conclusion that torture is “extensively used against political opponents among whom Islamist extremists and LIFG members are the most hated by the Libyan Government, the Security Organisations and above all by Colonel Gaddafi.” SIAC also noted that the incommunicado detention of political opponents without trial, often for many years, “is a disfiguring feature of Libyan justice and punishment.”

Although the British government did not appeal the ruling and abandoned plans to deport Libyan terror suspects, the Home Office has continued to hold the men under control orders, a form of house arrest that, as the Law Lords ruled recently, breaches Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial.

As a result of this cynical manoeuvring on the part of the British government, official criticism of Libya has come to an end. In the latest Foreign and Commonwealth Office profile of Libya, no mention is made of human rights issues (unlike other countries — see, for example, Morocco), and in its latest report on human rights (PDF), the FCO did not include Libya in its study of 20 “Major countries of concern,” and also failed to include Algeria, Jordan and Tunisia, with whom it has also signed “memoranda of understanding,” or, in Algeria’s case, an even less binding “exchange of letters.” This is in spite of the fact that, as Human Rights Watch noted in October 2008, “All the governments in question have well documented records of torture and ill-treatment, particularly of persons suspected of involvement in terrorism or radical Islamism.”

On Monday the extent of the British government’s hypocrisy regarding human rights was highlighted in the starkest manner possible as Libyan exiles and human rights campaigners marked the 13th anniversary of a prison massacre in Libya which involved the cold-blooded murder of at least 1,200 prisoners, and which, had it occurred elsewhere, would surely be held up as a particularly vile example of state-sanctioned mass murder.

Protestors outside the Libyan embassy in London on the 13th anniversary of the Abu Salim prison massacre, June 29, 2009.

The Abu Salim prison massacre, June 29, 1996

In an account of the massacre published in 2007, an eye-witness to the events began by explaining that the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli (also known as Abu Saleem), where the massacre took place (and where the CIA’s most notorious “ghost prisoner,” Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, recently died in mysterious circumstances), had been overcrowded for eight years before the massacre took place, after “Islamic groups became more politically active and faced a brutal, large-scale crackdown from the various Security apparatuses.” The witness explained that, in 1996, the prison held between 1,600 and 1,700 prisoners, even though there were just 112 cells, and that, in addition to the overcrowding, prisoners were forced to endure “unsanitary conditions, scarcity of food, lack of any medical attention, and inhumane treatment by the guards.”

Conditions at the prison apparently grew worse after a number of prison breaks in 1995 and early 1996. As the witness explained,

All visitations were cancelled, and all prisoners’ belongings, including clothes, were confiscated. Prisoners were allowed to have nothing more than their prison uniforms, mats to sleep on and two blankets … Penalties increased, prisoners were beaten every time they walked out to get their meals, quality of food, when available, deteriorated even further, garbage was not removed, and prisoners were forced to live with backed-up and overflowing sewers. The difference between life and death became very blurry. Many attempts were made to meet with the warden to discuss these conditions to no avail. At that point some of the prisoners decided to try a different method; they decided to protest.

According to the eye-witness, and to Hussein al-Shafa’i, another eye-witness interviewed by Human Rights Watch in 2004 and 2006, the events leading up to the massacre began sometime between 4.30 and 4.40 pm on June 28, when prisoners in one cell overpowered a guard — “push[ing] him from behind [so that] he fell hard on his face, hitting the concrete floor” — and immediately set about liberating other prisoners. Within a short amount of time, according to al-Shafa’i, who was held in Abu Salim from 1988 to 2000, and who was working in the prison’s kitchen at the time, hundreds of prisoners from three of the prison’s eight cell blocks had been set free, but as they emerged into the prison’s courtyard, guards on the roof began shooting. According to both witnesses, 17 prisoners were either wounded or killed as a result.

Within half an hour, as al-Shafa’i described it, senior security officials and “a contingent of security personnel” arrived at the prison. Negotiations then took place, and, according to al-Shafa’i, “who said he observed and overheard the negotiations from the kitchen, the prisoners asked … for clean clothes, outside recreation, better medical care, family visits, and the right to have their cases heard before a court, because many of the prisoners were in prison without trial.” One of the officials, Abdullah Sanussi, who is married to the sister of Gaddafi’s wife, “said he would address the physical conditions, but the prisoners had to return to their cells” and release two hostages they had taken. One was released, but the other, mentioned above, had died from his injuries.

As al-Shafa’i described it, security personnel then “took the bodies of those killed and sent the wounded for medical care.” He added that “[a]bout 120 other sick prisoners boarded three buses, ostensibly to go to the hospital,” although “he saw the buses take the prisoners to the back of the prison.” The other eye-witness had a slightly different explanation. He said that

Those who were accused of belonging to opposition groups were ordered to get off the buses. All others were taken outside the prison section to a different part of the compound. They were lined up and shot, execution-style, by young conscripts whose choices were shoot, or stand with them to be shot. This was later reported by an officer, who defied orders that night and was able to escape.

Around 5 o’clock the following morning, according to al-Shafa’i, “security forces moved some of the prisoners between the civilian and military sections of the prison,” and by 9 am “they had forced hundreds of prisoners from blocks 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 into different courtyards. They moved the low-security prisoners in block 2 to the military section and kept the prisoners in blocks 7 and 8, with individual cells, inside.”

Again, the other eye-witness had a slightly different explanation. He said that the prisoners in cell block 2, “and all other prisoners accused of opposition activities were taken out of their cells and into the courtyard,” and that “[t]he same happened to cell blocks 1, 3, 4, 5, 6,” and added that the prisoners in blocks 7 and 8 — who numbered approximately 60 prisoners — were not removed because their “cell locks could not be broken.”

Both eye-witnesses, however, agreed on what happened next. In al-Shafa’i’s words, “At 11:00 a grenade was thrown into one of the courtyards. I did not see who threw it but I am sure it was a grenade. I heard an explosion and right after a constant shooting started from heavy weapons and Kalashnikovs from the top of the roofs. The shooting continued from 11:00 until 1:35.” He added that it was a “special unit” of six men that conducted the massacre, and that, at 2 pm, the forces used pistols to “finish off those who were not dead.”

Al-Shafa’i also said that the security forces killed “around 1,200 people,” explaining, as Human Rights Watch put it, that he “calculated this figure by counting the number of meals he prepared prior to and after the incident.”

He added that, the following day, “security forces removed the bodies with wheelbarrows” and “threw the bodies into trenches — 2 to 3 meters deep, one meter wide and about 100 meters long — that had been dug for a new wall.” He also said, “I was asked by the prison guards to wash the watches that were taken from the bodies of the dead prisoners and were covered in blood.”

The other witness largely corroborated this explanation. He put the number of the dead at 1,170, and also explained that looting of the corpses had taken place. “Most of the guards rushed to strip the dead bodies of their watches, rings, glasses, and search their pockets,” he wrote. “They took everything they could find. They also confiscated all the clothes, blankets, radios, which belonged to the dead, and divided them among themselves. The warden’s share was all the fans, space heaters, and other electronic devices. He then sold these items to his guards, who in turn sold them to prisoners brought in after 1996.”

However, the witness disputed Hussein al-Shafa’i’s claim that the bodies had been buried in the prison. “The bodies could easily be discovered within the compound,” he wrote, adding, “The regime is too smart to implicate itself.” According to his version of events, two refrigerated trucks — one belonging to the Meat Transportation Company, the other to the Marine Fisheries Company — took corpses away on two successive days, and on the third, when, “because of the sun and the heat, the stench of the corpses became unbearable,” a large container was brought instead, “and they used a forklift to load the remaining corpses into the container.” He added, “This continued through Tuesday, but the stench persisted despite the disinfectants and chemicals they used inside and outside the prison. Residents of the Abu Salim district know and remember this well.”

No justice: the aftermath of the massacre

Crucially, for the first five years after the massacre, the regime dealt with its aftermath by denying that it took place. It was not until 2001, as Human Rights Watch described it, that the authorities “began to inform some families with a relative in Abu Salim that their family member had died, although they did not provide the body or details on the cause of death.” Libyan Human Rights Solidarity, a Libyan group based in Switzerland, stated in 2006 that the authorities had notified 112 families that a relative held in Abu Salim had died, and, in addition, 238 families said that they had lost contact with a relative who was held in the prison.

People holding up photos of their missing relatives at a protest to mark the 12th anniversary of the Abu Salim prison massacre, on June 17, 2008, in Benghazi.

It was not until April 2004 — just after Tony Blair’s bridge-building mission to Tripoli — that Colonel Gaddafi “publicly acknowledged that killings had taken place in Abu Salim, and said that prisoners’ families have the right to know what took place,” but despite this, the Libyan government has continued to deny that “any crimes took place,” according to Human Rights Watch. In May 2005, the organization explained that the head of the Internal Security Agency told them that “prisoners had captured some guards during a meal and taken weapons from the prison cache,” and that “[p]risoners and guards died as security personnel tried to restore order.” Adding that the government had opened an investigation on the order of the Secretary of Justice, he claimed, “When the committee concludes its work, because it has already started, we’ll give a detailed report answering all questions.”

Three years later, no detailed report has been forthcoming, and last year, when Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, claimed that a “genuine” investigation was underway, and that “those found guilty will be punished,” observers responded by wondering what kind of political machinations the announcement was meant to disguise.

On this shameful anniversary, the British government’s relationship with Libya stands in marked contrast to that of the United Nations. In October 2007, the UN Human Rights Committee “found Libya responsible for torture and other serious human rights violations” in the case of Edriss El-Hassy, who was arbitrarily arrested in 1995. The Committee based its decision on the fact that El-Hassy “was detained in prolonged incommunicado detention” and was “tortured and then disappeared,” and because, “[a]lthough it is probable that he was summarily executed in the notorious prison massacre … the Libyan authorities have refused to acknowledge this fact.”

For the majority of those whose relatives disappeared, the similarities with El-Hassy’s case are striking, and, in addition, even those who have received some sort of notification from the government about the deaths of their relatives are appalled that they have been provided with so little information, and that the bodies have not been returned to them.

A typical example is the family of Ibrahim al-Awani, who was seized from his family’s home in July 1995 and was never heard from again. Three years ago, on the tenth anniversary of the massacre, his brother, Farag al-Awani, who lives in Switzerland, said that in 2002 members of the Internal Security Agency “told the family that Ibrahim had died in a Tripoli hospital due to sickness.” A death certificate stated that he had died on July 3, 2001, but no cause of death was provided, and, “[d]espite repeated requests, the authorities never returned the body, as required under Libyan law.” As Human Rights Watch explained, “It is unclear if Ibrahim al-Awani died in the June 1996 incident or at another time.” Farag al-Awani’s response to this ongoing mystery was simple — and reflects the concerns of everyone who lost a relative in the massacre on June 29, 1996. “We just want to know what happened and to have the body back,” he said.

People holding up photos of their missing relatives at a protest to mark the 12th anniversary of the Abu Salim prison massacre, on June 17, 2008, in Benghazi.

Note: The photos of people holding up photos of their missing relatives are from the website Libya-alyoum. The other photos were provided by one of the protestors outside the Libyan embassy in London on June 29, 2009.

Mohammed El-Gharani, Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, speaks to al-Jazeera

Andy Worthington — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:09:42 +0000

Speaking for the first time since his release from Guantánamo after seven years’ imprisonment without charge or trial, following a successful habeas corpus appeal in January, Mohammed El-Gharani, now a free man in Chad, told Mohamed Vall of al-Jazeera, in an exclusive interview, how he felt about being imprisoned from the age of 14 to the age of 21. “Seven of the most beautiful years of youth were lost in prison,” he said. “I couldn’t learn or work. Seven years were just lost — for nothing.” Recounting the torture he experienced, which I reported last April in my article, “Guantánamo’s forgotten child: the sad story of Mohammed El-Gharani,” Mohammed also revealed, for the first time, that the interrogators in Guantánamo tried to force him to spy on his fellow prisoners.

The interview, via YouTube, is available below:

Andy Worthington: Four radio interviews on Guantánamo and torture

Andy Worthington — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:54:56 +0000

This was a busy week for interviews. On Tuesday, after trekking down to Westminster to record an interview for Democracy Now! I returned to the leafy retreat of my home in south London to talk to Peter B. Collins for a show that doesn’t appear to be online, and then stayed up horribly late — the interview began at 2.15 in the morning, London time! — with Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog, who was the guest presenter for the week on the Mike Malloy Show on LA’s KTLK AM 1150 radio station.

The show is available here (it starts about 13 minutes into “Hour 1”), and, in between copious ad breaks, Brad and I (who have emailed many times, but have never spoken before) ran through Guantánamo’s history, discussed the Obama administration’s unfortunate wavering over Guantánamo’s future (despite Obama’s bold promise to close the prison within a year) and the possible prosecution of “high-value detainees,” and talked about the most significant recent stories, including my exclusive article about the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, and recent events relating to Guantánamo: the release of nine prisoners, and the habeas corpus review of the Syrian prisoner Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, which — to those paying attention — has done enormous damage to the Obama administration’s credibility, for the simple reason that al-Ginco was tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy and imprisoned by the Taliban for nearly two years before he was “liberated” by US forces and sent to Guantánamo. At the end of the show, while keeping Ed Asner waiting, I answered some questions from callers about the many ways in which prisoners came to be at Guantánamo who had no connection with terrorism — or often any form of militancy whatsoever — and about whom the government knew nothing.

On Thursday I had two more interviews. The first was with Linda Olson-Osterlund for her new show, “A Deeper Look,” on KBOO FM in Portland, Oregon. Linda has interviewed me many times before, and it was a pleasure to talk again. The show is available here, and, as Linda described it in her notes for the show, she asked, “What progress is being made since Obama has become President?” and we duly discussed the failures of US politicians (of both parties) to put notions of justice before political maneuvering, the recent releases of prisoners including the transfer of four Chinese Uighurs to Bermuda (and the failures of Obama to overturn the Bush administration’s lawlessness by tackling, head-on, the egregious failures of the “War on Terror” detention policies, and bringing the Uighurs to the US mainland to demonstrate, first-hand, that they are not terrorists at all), the release of three Saudis and Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, and the torture and suspicious death of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. This included, of course, a discussion of al-Libi’s notorious claim, produced under torture in Egypt, that there was a working relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which was, in turn, used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and led to further discussion of the role that information obtained through torture — or through other forms of coercion, or bribery — constitutes the majority of the government’s so-called evidence against prisoners in Guantánamo. We also, I’m glad to say, discussed Britain’s “War on Terror,” and my home country’s version of indefinite detention without charge or trial, which have echoed the Bush administration’s policies, and which I discussed most recently here, and also the UK’s involvement in the use of torture abroad.

Thursday’s second interview was with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio. On our ninth outing (available here), under the snappy heading on Antiwar.com, “Al-Libi Tells No More Tales, Because He’s Dead, says Andy Worthington,” Scott and I did indeed discuss Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, and, as Scott also put it, “Guantánamo habeas corpus cases that reveal most ‘evidence’ is from confessions by other prisoners made under duress, Bagram’s function as a SCOTUS-free zone and Dick Cheney’s supposed 9/11 transformation into, well, Dick Cheney.” The first (as also discussed with Linda) is a key topic of mine — and crucial to undermining former Vice President Dick Cheney’s persistent claims that the remaining prisoners are the “hardcore,” the second concerns the Obama administration’s refusal to accept a recent court ruling that foreign prisoners held at Bagram for up to seven years have habeas corpus rights, and the last concerns my belief that the entire “War on Terror” was fueled, in particular, by the psychotic paranoia of former Vice President Dick Cheney.