Archive for July, 2009

On Wednesday, I reported how Retired Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, the former Judge Advocate General of the US Navy from 1997 to 2000, had delivered compelling testimony to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on “legal issues regarding military commissions and the trial of detainees for violations of the law of war,” explaining why the only valid forum for trials of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay is the US federal court system.

The lucidity and directness of Hutson’s testimony was in marked contrast to the amendments to the existing Military Commission system — and terrifying asides about the use of “preventive detention” — that were proposed by Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department’s General Counsel, and David Kris, the Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s National Security Division, in response to legislation already prepared by the Committee, which, it seems, will be presented to the Senate in the imminent future, even though it still allows (subject to certain restrictions) the use of information — I hesitate to use the word “evidence” — obtained through coercion, and other information that is nothing more than hearsay.

The day after Hutson delivered his testimony, the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties Subcommittee of the House Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing on “Legal Issues Surrounding the Military Commissions System,” in which Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld of the US Reserves, a former prosecutor in the Military Commissions, delivered what should, I believe, be the final word on the unsuitability of Military Commissions as a valid trial system (PDF).

Vandeveld, who served in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan before volunteering for Guantánamo, and who has been decorated on several occasions, sent shockwaves through the Commission system under the Bush administration, when he spectacularly resigned last September, declaring, “I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain ‘procedure’ for affording defense counsel discovery.” He added that the “incomplete or unreliable” discovery process “deprive[s] the accused of basic due process and subject[s] the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct.”

The particular trigger for the dissatisfaction that led him to tell the Committee about  “the mistaken proposals to revise and revive the irretrievably flawed military commissions at Guantánamo Bay,” and that turned him from, as he described it, a “true believer to someone who felt truly deceived,” was the incompetence and obstruction he encountered as he tried to build a case against Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan prisoner accused of throwing a grenade that injured two US soldiers and an Afghan translator in December 2002, and it was this journey to the “dark side” that he reprised for the Committee on Wednesday to such devastating effect.

Lt. Col. Vandeveld explains how he became opposed to the Military Commissions

Telling the Committee that he had not always been “skeptical about the capacity of military commissions to deliver justice,” Vandeveld admitted that, at the beginning of his assignment at Guantánamo, when Jawad “told the court that he was only 16 at the time of his arrest, and that he had been subjected to horrible abuse, I accused him of exaggerating and ridiculed his story as ‘idiotic.’” He added, “I did not believe that he was a juvenile, and I railed against Jawad’s military defense attorney, whom I suspected of being a terrorist sympathizer.”

Vandeveld explained that, initially, the case against Jawad “seemed uncomplicated,” because he had “confessed to his role in the attack on a videotape recorded by US personnel,” and, as a result, the case “seemed likely to produce a quick, clean conviction, and an unmarred early victory for the prosecution, vindicating the concept” of the Commissions.

As he “delved deeper into Jawad’s case file,” however, he “soon discovered a number of disturbing anomalies,” and explained that when he “attempted to bring these anomalies to the attention of my supervisors, they were harshly dismissive of my concerns and actually, on some unspoken level, began to question my loyalty, even though my combat experience exceeded both theirs combined.” He continued:

I began to realize that the problems with Jawad’s case were symptomatic of the military commissions regime as a whole. Indeed, if any case was likely to be free of such anomalies, it should have been that of Mr. Jawad, whose alleged crime was as straightforward as any on the prosecutor’s docket. Instead, gathering the evidence against Mr. Jawad was like looking into Pandora’s Box: I uncovered a confession obtained through torture, two suicide attempts by the accused, abusive interrogations, the withholding of exculpatory evidence from the defense, judicial incompetence, and ugly attempts to cover up the failures of an irretrievably broken system.

Evidence from US Army criminal investigators showed that Jawad had been hooded, slapped repeatedly across the face and then thrown down at least one flight of stairs while in US custody in Afghanistan. Detainee records show that once at Guantánamo, he was subjected to a sleep deprivation regime, known as the “frequent flier program,” during which he was moved to different cells 112 times over a 14-day period — an average of once every two and a half hours — and that he had tried to commit suicide by banging his head repeatedly against a wall. Evidence from a bone scan showed that he was, in fact, a juvenile when he was initially taken into US custody. Field reports, and examinations by US personnel in the hours after Jawad had been apprehended, indicated that he had been recruited by terrorists who drugged him and lied to him, and that he probably hadn’t committed the crime for which he was being charged. In fact, the military had obtained confessions from at least two other individuals for the same crime.

As a result, Vandeveld explained, he “came to realize that Mr. Jawad had probably been telling the truth to the court from the very beginning,” but when his subsequent attempts to secure a plea bargain that would allow Jawad to be repatriated fell on deaf ears, he made the “enormously painful decision to ask to be reassigned from the Commissions.” As he explained, “I simply could not in good conscience continue to work for an ad-hoc, hastily created apparatus — as opposed to the military itself — whose evident resort to expediency and ethical compromise were so contrary to my own and to those the Army has enshrined and preached since I enlisted so many years ago.”

Lt. Col. Vandeveld condemns the Commissions

Lt. Col. Vandeveld’s personal experience of incompetence and obstruction in the case of Mohamed Jawad is shocking for two reasons: firstly, because, although a military judge threw out the only supposed evidence against him in October and November last year, ruling that two confessions obtained on the day of his arrest in Afghan and US custody were the result of torture, and although Vandeveld delivered a more expansive explanation of why there was no case against him in a submission accompanying his habeas corpus petition in January, the Obama administration has not followed his advice about repatriating him, and the Justice Department has refused to drop the case.

Just last week, this inexplicable obstinacy on the part of the DoJ led his civilian lawyers at the ACLU to lodge a petition urging the judge to throw out information extracted during 57 subsequent interrogations, which was aptly described by one of his lawyers, Jonathan Hafetz, as confirmation of the government’s “continued reliance on evidence gained by torture and other abuse,” which “violates centuries of US law and suggests the current administration is not really serious about breaking with the past.”

However, while this is certainly a painful example of the Obama administration’s insistence on pursuing worthless and embarrassing cases that seem only to confirm a dogged determination to defend the colossal errors made by the Bush administration (as I also explained here and here), Lt. Col. Vandeveld’s experience of Jawad’s case enabled him to confirm to the Committee not just that one particular case was tainted by incompetence and obstruction, but how the entire system was irredeemably flawed, and cannot be repaired by changing a few of the rules. As he explained in his statement:

I am here today to offer a single, straightforward message: the military commission system is broken beyond repair. Even good faith efforts at revision, such as legislation recently passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee, leave in place provisions that are illegal and unconstitutional, undermine defendants’ basic fair trial rights, create unacceptable risks of wrongful prosecution, place our men and women in uniform at risk of unfair prosecution by other nations abroad, harm the reputation of the United States, invite time consuming litigation before federal courts, and, most importantly, undermine the fundamental values of justice and liberty upon which this great country was founded.

He added, crucially, “The military commissions cannot be fixed, because their very creation — and the only reason to prefer military commissions over federal criminal courts for the Guantánamo detainees — can now be clearly seen as an artifice, a contrivance, to try to obtain prosecutions based on evidence that would not be admissible in any civilian or military prosecution anywhere in our nation.” This was similar to Admiral Hutson’s observation that “You can’t have a legitimate court unless you are willing to risk an acquittal. If you aren’t willing to accept the possibility that a jury will acquit the accused based on the evidence fairly presented, then it isn’t really a court. It’s a charade.” However, Vandeveld then proceeded to provide three concrete examples of institutional problems, “each of which I witnessed during my time at Guantánamo and which would remain problematic under the present proposal”:

• “the rules of admissibility of evidence, including the relaxation of restrictions on the admissibility of evidence obtained through coercion and hearsay”

• “the gathering and handling of evidence, including legal and institutional restrictions on the disclosure of sensitive or classified evidence to the defense”

• “institutional deficiencies, including the insufficient experience and qualifications of both judges and counsel, and the inadequate provision of resources to the defense”

The problems with coercion and hearsay

After stating that each of these shortcomings “will prove persistent even in the face of the most ardent, well-meaning legislative repackaging,” Vandeveld attacked the Senate Committee’s proposal to “continue to allow into evidence statements obtained through coercion.” The wording of the legislation (see Section 1031) stipulates that “A statement in which the degree of coercion is disputed may be admissible in a trial by military commission … only if the military judge finds that (1) the totality of the circumstances renders the statement reliable and possessing sufficient probative value; (2) the interests of justice would best be served by admission of the statement into evidence; and (3) the interrogation methods used to obtain the statement do not amount to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment prohibited by section 1003 of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

For Vandeveld, however, this remained unacceptable, and he stated, bluntly, “The impetus for this rule is obvious. The sad reality is that virtually every detainee — Mohamed Jawad is a salient example — has been subjected to torture and abuse repeatedly. Many of them are mentally ill as a result, some profoundly so.”

In addition, after noting that the prohibition on the use of coerced statements exists because of “moral repugnance,” and because they are “unreliable,” Vandeveld noted that, although in some cases, including those of the “high-value detainees,” coerced statements “may be corroborated by evidence that would be admissible,” for many other prisoners the decision to proceed with coerced statements is desperately unsound:

Disallowing evidence obtained through coercion would result in the evisceration of many of the cases that might otherwise, on the most tenuous of theories, have been prosecuted. Instead of recognizing this sad reality and resettling or repatriating those prisoners against whom the government has insufficient and tainted evidence, the present legislation, in effect, opts to continue the charade.

For similar reasons, Vandeveld then dismissed the use of information obtained through hearsay, disputing Sen. Carl Levin’s explanation, during the Senate Committee hearing on Tuesday, that the Committee’s revisions ought to be acceptable because they were designed to “eliminate the extraordinary language in the existing law which places the burden on detainees to prove that hearsay evidence introduced against them is not reliable and probative.”

He also took exception to President Obama’s claims that the use of hearsay “would be consistent with international standards, such as those employed in international criminal tribunals,” because, he said, the President’s opinion failed to take into account that judges in those cases are “qualified to consider hearsay and determine its value,” whereas the “lay jurors” in the Commissions — whose role would essentially be the same in any system revised by Obama — are not.

The problems with the gathering and handling of evidence

Moving on to the “gathering and handling of evidence,” Vandeveld noted that the Commissions suffered from “enormous problems,” primarily because, unlike “the investigations and case files assembled by military or civilian police agencies and prosecution offices,” the Commissions had — and will continue to have — “no central repository for case files, no method for cataloguing and storing physical evidence, nor any other system for assembling a potential case into a readily intelligible format that is the sine qua non of a successful prosecution.”

This is damning enough, but, citing his experience with Jawad, Vandeveld also explained why the case files were so chaotic. “The obvious reason behind the shoddy preparation of evidence against Mr. Jawad,” he said, “is that it was not gathered in anticipation of any semblance of a ‘real’ trial.” He added:

With the government setting an extremely low evidentiary bar for continued detention without charge, with the focus on extracting information through coercive interrogations rather than on prosecution, and with the understanding that any trials will forego fundamental due process protections, there is little incentive for investigators to engage in the type of careful, systematic gathering of evidence that one would find in a typical civilian trial.

Allied to this particular problem, which, it is clear, can only be addressed adequately by dropping cases in which “the government has insufficient and tainted evidence,” and putting the rest into federal courts, where this type of systemic evasion will be impossible, are what Vandeveld referred to as “the excessive restrictions on the disclosure of classified or sensitive evidence to defense counsel.”

This, again, is clearly part of the very architecture of the Commissions, designed, in an essentially lawless manner, to prevent any obstacles to prosecution, and as Vandeveld spelled out, in practice the almost obsessive focus on secrecy serves only to discredit the entire process. Unmoved by Sen. Levin’s unsubstantiated claim that the Committee’s revisions will “eliminate the unique procedures and requirements which have hampered the ability of defense teams to obtain information and led to so much litigation,” he described a process in which secrecy (to the detriment of the defense) was absolutely central, and made it clear that he found it inconceivable that the necessary changes were even remotely feasible.

“Over-classification and protective orders can make it almost impossible for defense attorneys to formulate a viable case,” he said, adding that, although there was “no reason” to deny attorneys access to this information, because they “can and should be trusted not to share such information with their clients as the law requires,” the endemic focus on secrecy meant, in reality, that “names of potential defense witnesses are routinely redacted from discovery materials, and protective orders hinder the defense’s ability to ascertain such witnesses’ identities through its own investigation.”

Institutional deficiencies

Beyond the chaos that makes it “nigh impossible for prosecutors to comply with the discovery obligations mandated by their rules of professional conduct,” Vandeveld also identified numerous other “institutional deficiencies” with the Commissions, which as he stated, “undermine the pursuit of justice and have created a kind of ‘circus’ atmosphere at GTMO.” These include the lack of experience of the military judges, even though many of them displayed a “remarkable independence,” and refused to “serve as little more than an ‘amen chorus,’ witlessly endorsing every pronouncement, however thin, false, or ill-conceived,” that was put forward by the prosecution, and the inadequate provision of resources to the defense.

Although he was “pleased to see” that the Senate Committee referred to a call from the Office of the Chief of Defense Counsel at the Commissions for more resources to defense counsel, including bringing to an end the patently biased practice of allowing the prosecution to have “input on defense resources,” he insisted that, for these particular reforms to meet necessary standards, they “cannot be simply recommended, they must be mandatory.”

Lt. Col. Vandeveld’s conclusions

In a neat conclusion, Lt. Col. Vandeveld asked the Committee to consider how they would react to “the kind of role reversal that senior military officers routinely consider”:

Imagine that US soldiers captured on the battlefield were, today, being subjected to the type of trial proceedings that we plan to set up through these military commissions. Imagine that our service members had been tortured or abused, and that the commissions hearing their cases allowed into evidence statements obtained through coercion. Imagine that defense counsel were thoroughly under-resourced and prohibited even from viewing information critical to their cases, and that exculpatory evidence was hidden. Imagine that the evidence against our soldiers was so weak, and had been gathered in such a shoddy and disorganized manner, that the commissions allowed hearsay into evidence — to be analyzed not by professional judges but by lay jurors — just to “make sure” that any and all prosecutions were successful. How would out government react to such trials? I imagine the uproar would be close to deafening.

Vandeveld added that “even the well-intentioned changes made to the military commissions by the Senate Armed Services Committee legislation will create a real risk that, in future, American men and women in uniform will be subject to a farcical trial of this nature,” and, in his final words, emphasized the only just manner in which to proceed:

We do not need Military Commissions. They are broken and beyond repair. We do not need indefinite detention, and we do not need a new system of “national security courts.” Instead, we should try those whose guilt we can prove while observing “the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples” — in other words, using those long-standing rules of due process required by Article III courts and military courts-martial — and resettle or repatriate those whom we cannot. That is the only solution that is consistent with American values and American law.

Sadly, Lt. Col. Vandeveld’s unparalleled dissection and repudiation of key deficiencies at the heart of the Commission system — which, as he correctly observed, are without doubt immune to the kind of cosmetic changes endorsed by the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the Senate Committee — already appears to be a mere footnote of dissent in the revival of the Commissions.

As Lt. Col. Vandeveld explained to me in an email on Thursday, although he cannot fundamentally understand why Obama is determined to go forward with the Commissions, a plausible theory was put forward during the Committee meeting; namely that “the President has too many issues he’s concerned with, and has to rely on his advisers to advise him correctly. Of course, these advisers all come from the National Security Division of the Department of Justice, most of them holdovers from the prior administration, so I suppose their recommendations were and are predictable.”

I received a more withering analysis from someone else who intimately understands the irremediable deficiencies of the Commissions, a former senior official who was involved in the novel trial system for many years, who explained to me that, although he was certain when Barack Obama was elected that we were seeing the final days of both Guantánamo and the Commissions, it was “disappointing, to put it mildly, that despite being promised ‘change we can believe in’ we’re getting more of the same old Bush-Cheney policies when it comes to national security.”

Expanding on Lt. Col. Vandeveld’s concerns about “holdovers” from the Bush administration, the former senior official explained that it was no surprise that Bush-era policies were still being pursued, because Robert Gates is still running the Defense Department, Susan Crawford, a close friend of Dick Cheney and his Chief of Staff, David Addington, is still in place as the Commissions’ Convening Authority, responsible for deciding who should be put forward for trial, Brig. Gen. Thom Hartmann, her discredited legal advisor, continues to orchestrate the Commissions, George Toscas is still serving as the senior Justice Department attorney on matters of national security, and Capt. John Murphy, the new chief prosecutor, has “taken off his Justice Department suit and put on a Navy uniform giving DoJ control over the prosecution.”

In a sentence that sums up the increasing sense of disillusion felt by those who expected Barack Obama to work closely with those who resisted the grossest iniquities of the Bush administration, the senior official also noted that it was disappointing that Justice Department and Defense Department officials who stood up to Bush and Cheney and were ostracized for their integrity continued to be ostracized by Obama.

In conclusion, I can only agree wholeheartedly, and add my own disappointment that those of us who spent long years pointing out the horrors of the Bush administration’s policies, and waiting for the demise of that particular cabal in the expectation that America would once more respect its role as a nation founded on the rule of law, are still obliged to struggle to have our voices heard, even though what is at stake — repairing the damage wrought by the Bush administration, and ensuring that the handful of genuine terror suspects at Guantánamo are tried in a forum that will meet international recognized standards — is of critical importance.

Note: For another important statement refuting the suitability of the Military Commissions for trials of prisoners held at Guantánamo, see the testimony of Denny LeBoeuf, Director of the ACLU’s John Adams Project, who “attended and observed nearly all of the capital pretrial proceedings in the 9/11 conspirators’ cases,” and who provided a detailed analysis of the Commissions’ failings based on her observations and on a forensic dissection of the weaknesses in the Senate Committee’s legislation (PDF).

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

As published on the Huffington Post, Antiwar.com, AlterNet, CounterPunch and ZNet. Cross-posted on The Public Record.

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), 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), 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), 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), 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), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009).

The following is the statement that David Davis MP made to the House of Commons on the evening of July 7, which exposed the extent of British complicity in the torture in Pakistan of British citizen Rangzieb Ahmed. For further information, see the article “Britain’s Secret Torture Policy Exposed.”

Four years ago today, this country suffered a terrible atrocity at the hands of terrorists: 52 people were killed and many more horribly injured. I stood at the dispatch box that day and spoke of the need to face down this barbarism. In the subsequent weeks and months, I was proud of the calm and just way that the ordinary British citizen dealt with this assault and of the comparative absence of people trying to make scapegoats of the ordinary, decent Muslim community. I was proud of the courage, sense of honour, tolerance and justice of our citizens at home.

I am afraid that I cannot be so complimentary about the actions of our government abroad. In the last year, there have been at least 15 cases of British citizens or British residents claiming to be tortured by foreign intelligence agencies with the knowledge, complicity and, in some cases, presence of British intelligence officers. One case — that of Binyam Mohamed — has been referred to the police by the attorney general, which implies that there is at least a prima facie case to answer. The most salient others include Moazzam Begg, Tariq Mahmoud, Salahuddin Amin and Rashid Rauf, all in Pakistan, Jamil Rahman in Bangladesh, Alam Ghafoor in United Arab Emirates, and Azhar Khan and others in Egypt.

For each case, the government have denied complicity, but at the same time fiercely defended the secrecy of their actions, making it impossible to put the full facts in the public domain, despite the clear public interest in doing so. Although the combined circumstantial evidence of complicity in all these cases is overwhelming, it has not so far been possible — because of the government’s improper use of state secrecy to cover up the evidence — to establish absolutely clear sequences of cause and effect.

In the case I am about to describe, we can follow the entire chain of events from original suspicion, through active encouragement of the Pakistani authorities to arrest and through the subsequent collaboration between UK and Pakistani agencies. This is the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, a convicted terrorist, whose treatment I can describe in some detail.

As the House will realise, the account I am about to relay comes from several sources. I cannot properly give my sources, given the vindictive attitude of this government, particularly the Foreign Office, to whistleblowers. Indeed, in this case of Rangzieb Ahmed, the authorities were so paranoid that they threatened to arrest a journalist for reporting facts stated in open court. Nevertheless, although I am prevented from naming my sources, I can say that I am confident of these facts beyond reasonable doubt. I will not, of course, disclose any names, or anything that discloses intelligence agency techniques — other than torture — or other issues that threaten national security.

I should say that the individual whose case I am going to describe is not someone for whom I have any natural sympathy. He is a convicted — indeed, self-confessed — terrorist. So what I am talking about today is just as much about defending our own civilised standards as it is about deploring what was done to this man in the name of defending our country.

In 2005-06, Rangzieb Ahmed was a suspected terrorist who was kept under surveillance for about a year before leaving the country to go first to Dubai and on a subsequent trip to Pakistan. During that time, evidence was collected against him, on the basis of which he was later convicted. Let me repeat that point, as it is very important to my subsequent argument — during that time, evidence was collected, on the basis of which he was subsequently convicted.

Despite the authorities having that evidence, he was — astonishingly — not arrested but instead allowed to leave the country. To understand how odd this decision was, we should remember that this was only a year after the tragedy of 7/7, after which agencies were criticised for allowing terrorist suspects to leave the country to go to Pakistan. Since they knew he was leaving, since they knew where he was going, and since they had more than enough evidence to arrest him, allowing him to leave was clearly deliberate. That the authorities knew his itinerary is demonstrated by the fact that he was kept under surveillance when he was in Dubai. He later went on to Pakistan, where the Pakistani authorities were warned of his arrival by the British government. The British intelligence agencies wrote to their opposite numbers in Pakistan — the members of the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence — suggesting that they arrest him. I use the word “suggest” rather than “request” or “recommend” because of the peculiar language of the ISI’s communication. No doubt the minister can confirm that for himself by asking to see the record.

We also know that the intelligence officer who wrote to the Pakistanis did so in full knowledge of the normal methods used by the ISI against terrorist suspects that it holds. That is unsurprising, as it is common public knowledge in Pakistan. The officer would therefore be aware that “suggesting” arrest was equivalent to “suggesting” torture.

Rangzieb Ahmed was arrested by the ISI on 20 August 2006. Once he was taken into custody in Pakistan by the ISI, the Manchester police and MI5 together created a list of questions to be put to him. MI5 arranged for those questions to be given to the ISI.

Rangzieb Ahmed was viciously tortured by the ISI. He says, among other things, that he was beaten with wooden staves the size of cricket stumps and whipped with a 3ft length of tyre rubber nailed to a wooden handle, and that three fingernails were removed from his left hand. There is a dispute between Ahmed and British intelligence officers about exactly when his fingernails were removed, but an independent pathologist employed by the Crown Prosecution Service confirmed that it happened during the period when he was in Pakistani custody.

Rangzieb was asked questions, under torture, about the UK by ISI officers. He claims that he saw “UK/Pakistan Secret” on the question list used by the ISI. That was presumably the list put together by the Manchester police and MI5. After about 13 days, he was visited by an officer from MI5 and another from MI6. He claims to have told them, during questioning, that he had been tortured. They deny that, but it is significant that they did not return for further interviews. By that stage, MI5 policy was not to return after any interview in which the subject claimed that he had been tortured. The British agents did not return, but Rangzieb was subsequently questioned by Americans.

Is it also an extraordinary, if sinister, coincidence that the Manchester police accessed Rangzieb Ahmed’s medical records within days of the MI5/MI6 interview? Why would they do that if he was in perfect health?

Rangzieb Ahmed was kept in detention by the Pakistani authorities for a total of 13 months — first at the ISI centre, then at Rawalpindi and then at Adiyala jail — before being deported to the United Kingdom in September 2007. He was tried and convicted of terrorist offences in late 2008 — according to the prosecution, entirely on the basis of evidence obtained while he was under surveillance in the UK and Dubai in 2005-06. I cannot imagine a more obvious case of the outsourcing of torture, a more obvious case of “passive rendition.”

Let me recap. Rangzieb Ahmed should have been arrested by the UK in 2006, but he was not. The authorities knew that he intended to travel to Pakistan, so they should have prevented that; instead, they suggested that the ISI arrest him. They knew that he would be tortured, and they arranged to construct a list of questions and supply it to the ISI.

The authorities know full well that this story is an evidential showcase for the policy of complicity in torture, should that evidence ever come out. One way in which the in-camera veil of secrecy might be lifted would be a civil case by Mr. Ahmed against the government for their complicity in torture. Part of that process would involve challenging the in-camera rulings and revealing the details of agency involvement. Just such a case was being considered by Mr. Ahmed, and on 20 April this year he was visited in prison by his solicitor and a specialist legal adviser to discuss it.

Mr. Ahmed tells us that a week later he was visited by an officer from MI5 and a policeman. That is the story told today on the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Guardian. During the course of their visit they said that they would like him to help in the fight against terror with information about extremism. This is perfectly proper.

However, the sinister part of this visit was an alleged request to drop his allegations of torture: if he did that, they could get his sentence cut and possibly give him some money. If this request to drop the torture case is true, it is frankly monstrous. It would at the very least be a criminal misuse of the powers and funds under the government’s Contest strategy, and at worst a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

I would normally be disinclined to believe the word of a convicted terrorist. However, when he initially told his lawyer about it, he did not want to pursue the matter. Also, in common with many other criminals, after the scandal of the taping of the current minister of state, Department for Transport, the Right Honourable member for Tooting [Sadiq Khan], on a prison visit, he believes all these meetings are taped and he says this will back him up.

Given that belief, he is unlikely to have made an allegation that would be so easily proven wrong. I do not believe the conversation was taped, but it would have been videoed and this could be used to check his story. For reasons of policy and natural justice, it is imperative that the Crown Prosecution service investigates this allegation immediately, but that is not my principal concern today.

My questions to the minister are as follows: First, will he undertake to look at the in-camera court records and the records of the police and intelligence agencies so that he can confirm for his own satisfaction that my account of the handling of Rangzieb Ahmed pre-trial is correct? That process should take only a few days. Secondly, will he publish the current guidelines governing the agencies handling the suspected torture so that we can see whether the UK authorities broke those guidelines or whether it was the policy that was at fault? The Prime Minister has undertaken to publish the new guidelines, so if the minister cannot publish the current ones, can he explain why his approach is different to the Prime Minister’s?

Thirdly, I believe, but cannot be certain to an evidential level, that the judge in the court case intimated that disciplinary action should be considered within the intelligence agencies. Was this done? If not, why not?

Finally, can the minister now announce a proper judicial inquiry into the allegations of UK complicity in torture, since it is now clear that there is not just circumstantial evidence but hard evidence in government records for ministers to read, if they had but eyes to see?

Let me conclude by saying that our handling of the subject of torture has, in my view, been completely wrong. The Americans have made a clean breast of their complicity, while explicitly not prosecuting the junior officers who were acting under instruction at a time of enormous duress and perceived threat after 9/11. We have done the opposite. As things stand, we are awaiting a police investigation that will presumably end in the prosecution of the frontline officers involved. At the same time, the government are fighting tooth and nail to use state secrecy to cover up crimes and political embarrassments to protect those who are probably the real villains in the piece — those who approved these policies in the first place.

The battle against terrorism is not just a fight for life; it is a battle of ideas and ideals. It is a battle between good and evil, between civilisation and barbarism. In that fight, we should never allow our standards to drop to those of our enemies. We cannot defend our civilisation by giving up the values of that civilisation. I hope the minister will today help me in ensuring that we find out what has gone wrong so we can return to defending those values once again.

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.

On Tuesday evening, Britain’s secret torture policy was blown wide open when, in the House of Commons, David Davis MP used the protection of parliamentary privilege to tell the House how, in 2006, the British government and the security services allowed Rangzieb Ahmed, a British citizen, to travel to Pakistan, where they “suggested” to the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Pakistan’s most notorious intelligence agency, that he should be arrested.

As Davis explained, “We … know that the intelligence officer who wrote to the Pakistanis did so in full knowledge of the normal methods used by the ISI against terrorist suspects that it holds. That is unsurprising, as it is common public knowledge in Pakistan. The officer would therefore be aware that ‘suggesting’ arrest was equivalent to ‘suggesting’ torture.”

What makes this case particularly shocking, as Davis also explained — and repeated for emphasis — is that all this took place even though Ahmed had been “kept under surveillance” in the UK “for about a year” before departing for Pakistan, and that “during that time, evidence was collected, on the basis of which he was subsequently convicted.”

I’m reproducing David Davis’ statement in full in an accompanying article, because of its enormous significance. As the Guardian explained yesterday, “This is the first time that the information has entered the public domain. Previously it has been suppressed through the process of secret court hearings and, had the Guardian or other media organisations reported it, they would have exposed themselves to the risk of prosecution for contempt of court.”

Davis himself was scathing about the government’s secrecy. After stating that, “In the last year, there have been at least 15 cases of British citizens or British residents claiming to be tortured by foreign intelligence agencies with the knowledge, complicity and, in some cases, presence of British intelligence officers,” he added, “For each case, the government have denied complicity, but at the same time fiercely defended the secrecy of their actions, making it impossible to put the full facts in the public domain, despite the clear public interest in doing so. Although the combined circumstantial evidence of complicity in all these cases is overwhelming, it has not so far been possible — because of the government’s improper use of state secrecy to cover up the evidence — to establish absolutely clear sequences of cause and effect.”

In the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, which he reported in painstaking detail, Davis also noted that “the authorities were so paranoid that they threatened to arrest a journalist for reporting facts stated in open court.”

This is clearly not the end of the story. Davis suggested that “One way in which the in-camera veil of secrecy might be lifted would be a civil case by Mr. Ahmed against the government for their complicity in torture,” in which part of the process “would involve challenging the in-camera rulings and revealing the details of agency involvement.” He explained that “Just such a case was being considered by Mr. Ahmed, and on 20 April this year he was visited in prison by his solicitor and a specialist legal adviser to discuss it.”

However, as Davis also explained, just a week after Rangzieb Ahmed met his lawyer, he was visited by “an officer from MI5 and a policeman,” who allegedly requested him “to drop his allegations of torture” in exchange for a reduced sentence and a financial reward. This was reported in the Guardian the day before David Davis made his statement, prompting Davis to suggest that, if the allegation is true, it may represent “a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.”

Although this allegation preceded Davis’ statement, lawyers for two of the men who were tortured in Pakistan — Rangzieb Ahmed and Salahuddin Amin — have already followed up on the MP’s extraordinary revelations by writing to the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, asking him to “establish a public inquiry to investigate the complicity of government employees in the illegal detention and torture” of both men (as the Guardian reported late last night), and Human Rights Watch also followed up on Davis’ wider allegations, reporting today that:

In off-the-record conversations, knowledgeable civilian and military officials of the government of Pakistan have on numerous occasions told Human Rights Watch that British officials were aware of the mistreatment of several high-profile terrorism suspects, including Britons Rangzieb Ahmed, Salahuddin Amin, Zeeshan Siddiqui, Rashid Rauf and others. Pakistani officials told Human Rights Watch that they were under immense pressure from the UK and the US to “perform” in the “war on terror” and “we do what we are asked to do.”

A well placed official within the UK government told Human Rights Watch that allegations of UK complicity made by Human Rights Watch in testimony to the UK Parliament’s Joint Human Rights Committee in February 2009 were accurate. The official encouraged Human Rights Watch to continue its research into the subject. Another Whitehall source told Human Rights Watch that its research was “spot on.”

In the case of Salahuddin Amin, who was convicted in the UK in April 2007 for “plotting attacks against several potential targets” in London, despite being “tortured repeatedly” in Pakistan and “forced into false confessions,” Human Rights Watch noted that Pakistani intelligence sources told them that “Amin’s was a ‘high pressure’ case and the British and American desire for information from him was ‘insatiable.’” They added that both the British and American agents who were “party” to his detention were “perfectly aware that we were using all means possible to extract information from him and were grateful that we were doing so.”

While I await further information, I urge you not only to read David Davis’ full statement and the Human Rights Watch article, but also to read “The Truth About Torture,” a full-length article by Ian Cobain, based largely on his own research into the cases of Salahuddin Amin, Zeeshan Siddiqui, Rangzieb Ahmed, Rashid Rauf, Tariq Mahmood and Tahir Shah (all held in Pakistan), Binyam Mohamed (held in Pakistan before his rendition to torture in Morocco), Alam Ghafoor and Mohammed Rafiq Siddique (held in the UAE), and Jamil Rahman (held in Bangladesh), which appeared in yesterday’s G2 supplement and provides the best summary to date of how, as America’s closest ally in the “War on Terror,” Britain became complicit in torture to a shocking extent that is still being revealed.

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.

In a major national security speech on May 21, President Obama demonstrated an unnerving ability to keep too many options on the table by proposing five possible courses of action for the prisoners at Guantánamo: release or transfer, trials in federal courts, trials in a revamped version of the Military Commissions (the “terror trials” introduced by former Vice President Dick Cheney in November 2001), and indefinite detention. As I mentioned in an article last week, “At the time, civil liberties groups, lawyers and numerous commentators — myself included — responded with undisguised hostility towards the last two options.”

This hostility to proposals to resuscitate the Military Commissions and to seek approval for plans to legitimize indefinite detention was not assuaged on Tuesday when the Senate Armed Services Committee heard testimony on “legal issues regarding military commissions and the trial of detainees for violations of the law of war” from Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department’s General Counsel (PDF), and David Kris, the Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s National Security Division (PDF). Both men gave Committee members detailed and considered opinions about how to amend the Commissions in an attempt to ensure, as the President stated in May, that the administration would “work with Congress and legal authorities across the political spectrum on legislation” relating to the Commissions, so that they would be “fair, legitimate, and effective.”

These opinions focused on five particular amendments, which, as Kris described them, were rule changes which “prohibited the admission of statements obtained through cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; provided detainees greater latitude in the choice of counsel; afforded basic protections for those defendants who refuse to testify; reformed the use of hearsay by putting the burden on the party trying to use the statement; and made clear that military judges may determine their own jurisdiction.”

However, both men ignored a fundamental problem with the entire proposal; namely, that using Military Commissions instead of federal courts perpetuates the Bush administration’s ludicrous assertion that “terror suspects” seized in the “War on Terror” were “unlawful enemy combatants,” rather than prisoners of war or criminal suspects. In addition, grave concerns over the administration’s adherence to the Bush administration’s central policy of creating a new category of prisoner outside existing laws were not dealt with by simply “discontinu[ing] the use of the phrase ‘unlawful enemy combatant,’” as Jeh Johnson stated on Tuesday.

In his testimony, Johnson hinted at the government’s confusion. “Military commissions should be a viable, ready alternative for national security reasons for those who violate the laws of war,’” he said, but added, as Carol Rosenberg described it in the Miami Herald, “it is the administration view that when you direct violence on innocent civilians in the continental United States, it may be appropriate that that person be brought to justice in a civilian public forum in the continental United States.” He then said that federal courts — Title 18 courts — “appear to be the first preference,” because “the act of violence that was brought against civilians was a violation of Title 18 as well as an act of war.’”

With this comment, it appears to me that Johnson captured the essence of the administration’s post-Bush confusion, regarding the genuine terror suspects in Guantánamo as both criminals and warriors, when they should, instead, be regarded simply as criminals. It led to bizarre efforts by both Johnson and Kris to assure the Committee that providing the accused with greater safeguards on the gathering of evidence would not mean, as Johnson put it, that “soldiers on a battlefield should be required or even encouraged to provide Miranda-like warnings to those they capture” (in other words, the right not to provide self-incriminating statements), even though these issues should not arise at all. Before the Bush administration decided that there was a third category of prisoner, soldiers in wartime were held as prisoners of war until the end of hostilities, and were protected by the Geneva Conventions, and terrorists were criminal suspects, to be put forward for federal court trials.

This was not the only sign of a deep confusion at the heart of the Obama administration. As Carol Rosenberg described it, Jeh Johnson also touched on the administration’s apparent enthusiasm for “preventive detention,” when he “adopted a Bush administration view that a Guantánamo detainee could be acquitted of a crime by a jury but still held indefinitely by the US military on grounds he would be dangerous if set free.” This was always one of the Bush administration’s most intolerable betrayals of the very principles of justice, and was no less chilling when delivered by one of Barack Obama’s most senior lawyers.

Fortunately, Retired Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, who served as a Judge Advocate in the US Navy from 1973 to 2000, and was the Navy’s Judge Advocate General from 1997 to 2000, was on hand to cut through the administration’s fog, to put forward a stout defense of the abilities of the federal courts, and to deliver a withering dismissal of proposals to revive the Military Commissions (PDF).

Hutson said that although he was an “early and ardent supporter of military commissions,” the process created by the Bush administration “did not live up to the traditions” of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (the military’s own judicial system), and had become a “significant distraction for the military,” because “[p]reserving and ensuring justice in the United States is the primary mission of the Department of Justice, not the Department of Defense.” In a detailed analysis of the federal courts’ abilities to try terror suspects — and of how the DoD does not have a track record of conducting “terror trials,” and has been tarnished by its association with the Commissions over the last seven years — he said,

Besides being a distraction to the vital mission of the DoD, military commissions have, to a large extent, become a discredit in spite of the valiant and highly credible efforts of many, many people in uniform. Rather than showcasing the military justice system of which we are all justifiably proud, commissions represent something else entirely. They have not worked often or well. “Fixing” them would help, but won’t eliminate undeserved but inevitable criticism.

On the other hand, during the same period, US District Courts have successfully prosecuted literally hundreds of terrorists who now reside in Federal prisons around the country, keeping all Americans safer. Federal courts, including judges, prosecutors, marshals, and other court personnel have decades of experience in these cases. They have developed a justifiable and universally held reputation for fairness, and consequently, they are largely immune to criticism.

There is also now a large body of law that has been developed over the years in the Federal court system. It would take an equal number of cases and decades of trials for DoD to match the Federal precedent contained in the Federal Reporters.

Moreover, he added, “It is not only unnecessary, it is inappropriate for DoD to operate a system of justice in parallel to DoJ. The UCMJ and the courts-martial it creates are absolutely necessary to ensure our effective fighting force. But … we should resist the temptation of using the military to prosecute foreign criminals when DoJ can perform that critical function quite well.” He also explained, “We don’t ask DoJ to fight wars. We shouldn’t ask DoD to prosecute terrorists.”

In one of the most critical passages, Admiral Hutson highlighted the confusion inherited by the Obama administration from its predecessor, regarding the status of the genuine terror suspects in Guantánamo. “Let us not forget,” he said, “these are not legitimate warfighters. They are thugs, cowards who target innocent civilians. We should treat them as such and not elevate their status to that of legitimate enemies.”

In what was perhaps the most critical passage, however, he pointed out that using Commissions instead of federal court trials appeared to demonstrate only that the government was afraid that some federal court trials would fail, and was therefore seeking a forum that eliminated the possibility of acquittals. “If the point of this exercise is to create a court system that will ensure convictions of alleged terrorists against whom we don’t have sufficient admissible evidence, then we have missed the point,” he said. “You can’t have a legitimate court unless you are willing to risk an acquittal. If you aren’t willing to accept the possibility that a jury will acquit the accused based on the evidence fairly presented, then it isn’t really a court. It’s a charade.”

He added, “The corollary to that is that you can’t have a real court if the evidence and procedure are so stacked against the defendant that he has no real chance to present his case or defend against the government’s case. The admissible evidence against him based on the facts may be so overwhelming that conviction is assured but that must be the consequence of facts, not rules of evidence tilted in favor of the prosecution.”

These were extremely significant comments, as anyone who has studied the history of the “War on Terror” Commissions knows only too well. Military defense attorneys, assigned to represent prisoners in the Commissions, realized early on that the system was designed solely to secure convictions, and this realization was the basis for their unanimous opposition to the Commissions’ very existence. As Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, who represented Salim Hamdan, one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers, explained in 2007, “The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively — what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law.”

In addition, in October 2007, when Col. Morris Davis, the Commissions’ chief prosecutor, resigned, he stated, in subsequent statements, that he had done so not only because of the politicization of the process (which I wrote about in an article last October, “The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials”) and the administration’s insistence on using information derived from the use of torture (despite his implacable opposition), but also because, in a discussion in August 2005 with Jeh Johnson’s predecessor, William J. Haynes II (one of the most significant figures in the development of the Bush administration’s torture policies), the following exchange had taken place (as he explained to the Nation):

“[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time,” recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions.’”

The rest of Admiral Hutson’s testimony was devoted to expanding on his explanation of why federal courts are the only viable forum for “terror trials,” and involved him not only dismissing as “a red herring” the notion that soldiers would have to give Miranda warnings to those captured on the battlefield, but also pointing out that if the government revised the Commissions to a sufficiently high standard, “then we have essentially duplicated our own Federal courts”:

Over the years, federal courts have displayed remarkable ingenuity, flexibility, and resourcefulness in prosecuting terrorists. The Federal Rules of Evidence and Procedure are sufficiently adaptable to accommodate the vagaries of trying those individuals who are captured overseas by military personnel in the midst of performing military operations. I believe the image of the “strategic colonel” having to give Miranda warnings after risking his life to break into the bunker is a red herring.

If you as members of this Committee believe or suspect that the Federal Rule of Evidence or the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure should be amended to accommodate certain cases and situations, it is preferable to superimpose modest new rules on an extant, tried and true judicial system than to create a whole new system — particularly in light of recent efforts.

[I]f we create yet another military commission system that “contains all the judicial guarantees considered to be indispensable by all civilized peoples” as required by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, then we have essentially duplicated our own Federal courts. There is no logical reason to create a system that mirrors one already in existence and is functioning so well. We should strive for the minimum change necessary to accomplish the purpose, not a wholesale change to an already effectively functioning system.

Clearly and undeniably, the Administration and this Committee are dedicated to untying this Gordian knot in a way that serves the very best interest of the country. We are now operating under the Military Commission Act of 2006 which many find to be badly flawed. I very much respect and admire your effort to improve it. My recommendation, however, is to repeal it rather than improve it. In the process, I urge you to express this body’s preference to prosecute alleged terrorists in federal court and thereby demonstrate to the world, friend and foe alike, what kind of Justice the United States wishes to export.

My hope, of course, is that senior officials in the Obama administration and the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee not only digest Admiral Hutson’s words of wisdom, but also shape their still amorphous policies based on his advice. The alternative — a legal quagmire that lacks legitimacy and maintains key policies of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” including trials designed to prevent acquittals, and claims that prisoners can continue to be held even if acquitted after a trial — is, genuinely, almost too awful to contemplate.

Note: For a more detailed analysis of the systemic failings of the Military Commission, see “Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions,” a detailed analysis of testimony to a House Committee (the day after Hutson’s testimony) by Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former prosecutor who resigned in disgust last September.

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

As published on the Huffington Post, CounterPunch (as “Revamping the Military Commissions”) and Antiwar.com (as “Admiral Clears Up Govt’s Terror Trial Confusion”). Cross-posted on Yahoo! News and Foreign Policy Journal.

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), 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), 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), 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), 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), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009).

In a depressing if predictable decision last Monday, District Court Judge John D. Bates ruled that Haji Wazir, an Afghan businessman seized in the United Arab Emirates in 2002 and rendered to the US prison at Bagram airbase, can continue to be held as a prisoner without rights, even though he has never had an adequate opportunity to test whatever allegations the US military is using to justify his detention, and even though he has been given no sign of when, if ever, his detention will come to an end.

In a heroic ruling three months ago, Judge Bates demolished the position taken by the Bush administration — and slavishly followed by the Justice Department under President Obama — which maintained that all prisoners held at Bagram were beyond the reach of the US courts, and, specifically, beyond the reach of Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruling that granted habeas corpus rights to the Guantánamo prisoners in June 2008.

Discerning that there were, in fact, significant differences between Afghans held in Bagram — in an active war zone — and foreigners seized outside Afghanistan and rendered to the prison, Judge Bates ruled that Boumediene extended to the foreign prisoners, because, as he explained, “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same,” and because, without it, it was impossible to review the legality of Executive detention.

For three of the four men whose cases were heard by Judge Bates — Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian seized in Karachi, Pakistan, Amin al-Bakri, a Yemeni gemstone dealer seized in Bangkok, Thailand, and Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni, who have all been held for at least five years — it was clear that some kind of justice had finally been delivered to them, because, as I explained at the time, “only an administrative accident — or some as yet unknown decision that involved keeping a handful of foreign prisoners in Bagram, instead of sending them all to Guantánamo — prevented them from joining the 779 men in the offshore prison in Cuba.”

In theory, Judge Bates’ decision also applies to the other foreign prisoners seized outside Afghanistan and rendered to Bagram, who are thought to number around 30 of the roughly 650 prisoners held, but it is difficult to see how they will be able to file habeas corpus challenges, as the government has refused to reveal their identities. Uncovering their identities and filing habeas claims on their behalf will presumably be the next step for lawyers representing the Bagram prisoners, but only if the government is unsuccessful in the appeal that, shockingly, was lodged immediately after Judge Bates’ ruling in April.

For Haji Wazir, however, no such lifeline now exists. As I mentioned above, Judge Bates’ latest ruling was unsurprising, because, in his first ruling three months ago, he refused to extend habeas rights to the Afghans who make up the majority of the prisoners held in Bagram, agreeing with the government’s claim that to do so would cause “friction” with the Afghan government, because of ongoing negotiations regarding the transfer of Afghan prisoners to the custody of their own government. In the intervening months, Judge Bates reviewed other possible avenues for habeas relief in Haji Wazir’s case, but concluded that they were not applicable (see the PDF of the ruling for further explanation).

Speaking to the Associated Press, Tina Foster of the International Justice Network, which represents Haji Wazir, said the government had given “no indication” of why her client, who, she explained, “owned a money exchange business with an office in Dubai, and split his time between Afghanistan and the UAE,” was being held, and “objected to the idea that his rights should be different based solely on where he was born,” as the AP described it.

“All we know is that he’s being held in US custody and according to this administration there’s no court in which he has an ability to challenge his detention,” she said by ‘phone. “No matter what this administration says about torture ending and abusive practices ending, the fact that it won’t even allow transparency into what it’s doing is extremely troubling.”

This is undoubtedly true, as everything abut the Obama administration’s approach to Bagram is “extremely troubling.” The decision to appeal Judge Bates’ ruling regarding the foreign prisoners defies logic, as Bates not only made clear that “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same,” but also spelled out that the review process at Bagram was both “inadequate” and “more error-prone” than the discredited tribunal process used at Guantánamo.

In his ruling, Judge Bates quoted from a government declaration which stated that the Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Board (UECRB) at Bagram does not even allow the prisoners to have a “personal representative” from the military in place of a lawyer (as at Guantánamo), and that “Bagram detainees represent themselves.” In addition, he stated,

Detainees cannot even speak for themselves; they are only permitted to submit a written statement. But in submitting that statement, detainees do not know what evidence the United States relies upon to justify an “enemy combatant” designation — so they lack a meaningful opportunity to rebut that evidence. [The government’s] far-reaching and ever-changing definition of enemy combatant, coupled with the uncertain evidentiary standards, further undercut the reliability of the UECRB review. And, unlike the CSRT process [the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo], Bagram detainees receive no review beyond the UECRB itself.

This Court need not determine how extensive the process must be to stave off the reach of the Suspension Clause to Bagram. It suffices to recognize that the UECRB process at Bagram falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo.

While it remains abundantly clear that habeas rights must extend to foreign prisoners held in Bagram, and that the Obama administration must be constantly criticized for refusing to accept Judge Bates’ ruling, the worry for Haji Wazir — and, to be honest, for all the other Afghans held in the prison, who were presumably seized in their own country — is that the review process mentioned by Judge Bates, and the prison authorities’ uncertain relationship with the Afghan government, do not inspire confidence that Bagram is being run as it should be following Obama’s inauguration.

In one of his first acts as President, Obama signed a number of Executive Orders, in which he promised to close Guantánamo within a year and to ban torture, and established that the questioning of prisoners by any US government agency must follow the interrogation guidelines laid down in the Army Field Manual, which guarantees humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions. The Order relating to interrogations also specifically revoked President Bush’s Executive Order 13440 of July 20, 2007, which “reaffirm[ed]” his “determination,” on February 7, 2002, that “members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces are unlawful enemy combatants who are not entitled to the protections that the Third Geneva Convention provides to prisoners of war.”

Bagram airbase.

As a result, it was my belief that Bagram — and all other prisons in a US war zone — would be run as prisoner-of-war camps according to the Geneva Conventions, which make no mention of “Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Boards,” and which are not complicated by trying to work out what exactly is the relationship between the government of Afghanistan and the occupying force that is the US military. If this was the case, we would now be able to have a discussion that has not taken place in the last eight years, but which is clearly long overdue: whether it is acceptable to hold prisoners of war until the end of hostilities when the “war” in question — the “War on Terror,” rebranded as “Overseas Contingency Operations” by the Obama administration — has already lasted longer than the Second World War, and may, according to senior officials in the Bush administration (whose opinions have not been publicly repudiated by Obama) last for generations.

Moreover, this is not my only concern. Allied to the above was an expectation that competent tribunals — as prescribed in Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions for suspected “irregular” combatants (as opposed to regular soldiers, who, for example, wear uniforms and have a recognizable hierarchy of command) — would be reintroduced. Held close to the time and place of capture, to separate soldiers from civilians caught up in the fog of war, these were convened in every US war from Vietnam until the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 (and led to around three-quarters of around 1,200 disputed prisoners being released during the first Gulf War), and the Bush administration’s refusal to implement them was a major factor in populating Guantánamo with the “Mickey Mouse” prisoners derided by Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, one of Guantánamo’s earliest commanders, in 2002.

It was also my belief, following the issuing of Obama’s Executive Orders, that the President would call an immediate halt to what I can only describe as the “Rumsfeldization” of the US military, in which, following the directives of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld (and echoing what was happening with the intelligence agencies, where the FBI was sidelined by the CIA), the detention of prisoners was no longer a matter of holding them humanely until the end of hostilities, but became, instead, an ongoing process of interrogation, dedicated to securing “actionable intelligence,” which, of course, degenerated into the use of torture when the presumed “actionable intelligence” was not forthcoming.

It may be that the policies at Bagram changed overnight after Obama issued his executive orders in January, but the suspicion — which is only reinforced by a BBC report two weeks ago, in which 25 out of 27 prisoners, held at Bagram between 2002 to 2008, stated that they had been subjected to abuse during their detention — is that, as far as the administration is concerned, certain key innovations in the “War on Terror — in particular, holding prisoners for their intelligence value, rather than to keep them “off the battlefield” — has become the post-9/11 norm, as a kind of unilateral reworking of the Geneva Conventions.

On this basis, therefore, it seems likely that the administration is still trying to avoid any kind of outside scrutiny of Bagram because its general battlefield detention policies are still as arbitrary as they were in January 2008, when the New York Times reported that Afghan prisoners were held for an average of 14 months before being released or transferred to Afghan custody. This is not perhaps quite as worrying as the administration’s refusal to accept that foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram have any rights whatsoever, but it does indicate that further scrutiny is required before the President’s fine words about the treatment of battlefield prisoners can be accepted at face value.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on Foreign Policy Journal and uruknet.

Last week veteran progressive radio host Peter B. Collins — who recently interviewed me as a guest presenter on another show — asked me to be interviewed for a more in-depth podcast on his website, where he is pioneering a listener-funded new media project to make hard-hitting political interviews available online without editorial interference from networks and without the often extensive advertising breaks that do so much to disrupt the flow of so many shows.

The show is available here (as Podcast #10), or via the front page, by clicking on “Get Podcast,” and over the space of an hour, we had what Peter described as a “wide ranging conversation,” in which he inquired about the origins of US detention and torture policies, asked how it is that the vast majority of prisoners were innocent of any terrorism crimes, and talked about his “crazy Mofo” theory that drove Cheney to the “Dark Side.” As Peter described it, I debunked the claims that Gitmo prisoners were released and, according to the Pentagon, “returned to the battlefield,” and also detailed the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who, as Peter put it, “was tortured into false claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.” During the discussion, we also discussed al-Libi’s recent death by “suicide” in a Libyan prison.

I’d like to thank Peter for providing the time to discuss Guantánamo and the “War on Terror” in the kind of detail that is not often available, which, in addition to the topics mentioned above, also provided an opportunity for me to talk about the taint of Guantánamo, and how distressing it is that prisoners held outside the law, in a peculiarly aberrant project initiated by the Bush administration, are likely to be regarded as “terrorists” for the rest of their lives, despite never having been charged or tried. I also spoke about how prisoners, for the most part, survived their ordeal through their faith, and were therefore extremely unlikely to embrace terrorism on their release, and was very pleased to be given the time to elaborate on the critically important story of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s torture and death.

I was also pleased that Peter started a discussion about the mainstream media’s general lack of interest in the story of the secret prisons, and the prisons in Afghanistan — particularly Bagram — which provided me with an opportunity to express my dismay about the Obama administration’s obstruction of habeas corpus rights for foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram, and my doubts about whether the US military is now holding prisoners according to the Geneva Conventions (as discussed in the following article, “Judge Rules That Afghan ‘Rendered’ To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights”).

And if you make it to the end, you’ll discover that Peter kept recording after the conclusion of the interview, when we had a frank discussion about the new media and the traditional media, the possibilities of cyberspace, and the steady migration of readers to the Internet.

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.

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.

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees (August 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009), Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z, Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction? and URGENT APPEAL on British terror laws: Get your MP to support Diane Abbott’s Early Day Motion on the use of secret evidence (all April 2009), and Taking liberties with our justice system and Death in Libya, betrayal in the West (both for the Guardian).

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.

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.

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees (August 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009), Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z, Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction? and URGENT APPEAL on British terror laws: Get your MP to support Diane Abbott’s Early Day Motion on the use of secret evidence (all April 2009), and Taking liberties with our justice system and Death in Libya, betrayal in the West (both for the Guardian).

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.

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.

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees (August 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009), Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z, Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction? and URGENT APPEAL on British terror laws: Get your MP to support Diane Abbott’s Early Day Motion on the use of secret evidence (all April 2009), and Taking liberties with our justice system and Death in Libya, betrayal in the West (both for the Guardian).

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.

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

As published on CounterPunch (as “Finally, a Trial Date in the African Embassy Bombings Case”), the Huffington Post and Antiwar.com (as “Why Trial Date For African Embassy Bombing Suspect Is Good News”). Also cross-posted on Common Dreams.

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).