Former prisoners launch the Guantánamo Justice Centre in London

On Thursday, at the Frontline Club in London, former Guantánamo prisoners Sami al-Haj, Binyam Mohamed, Jamil El-Banna, Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg spoke at the launch of the Guantánamo Justice Centre, a non-profit organization, based in Geneva, with an office in London and others to follow in other countries. The GLC has been established by a number of former prisoners “to seek positive and peaceful resolutions to the plight of those who remain in the notorious Cuban prison, as well as other secret prisons around the world,” and it describes its goals as follows:

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

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

• To assist the family members of those being held.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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