Former Gitmo Guard Tells All

[luke]

British Government Buries Its Torture Guilt

There is an extremely important article by Gareth Peirce in the London Review of Books. Gareth is our greatest human rights lawyer. She exposed some of the most famous human rights abuses in recent British history. In the film "In the Name of the Father", Gareth was played by Emma Thompson. It was Gareth to whom I turned when the government was attempting to destroy me with false allegations. She advised me, as she very often does, pro bono. She manages at the same time to be one of our most famous lawyers, and one of our poorest.

At one stage, when the goon squad were entering and turning over my flat to try and put the frighteners on me, Gareth and her husband invited me to live with them for a while. I declined and toughed it out, but I tell the story as an example of her kindness and devotion to the cause of human rights.

I have been fighting New Labour's use of torture more or less full time for five years now. This is the best and most important analysis I have read in that time. Anybody with the tiniest interest in British politics should read it.

Frankly, that will not happen. It will fall victim to the very stifling of debate and information which it analyses so brilliantly.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n09/peir01_.html

Here are some key extracts:

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been unprecedented worldwide monitoring of man’s propensity to torture, and yet its use has not abated but appears to be thriving. How has this come about? Monitoring of torture depends on two strategies: exposing it to public censure through careful documentation, and holding state agents responsible for torture conducted on their watch. The first has encouraged torturers to adopt techniques that are less visible and hence harder to document. The second has encouraged politicians to seek acceptance of their methods from a public that condemns those who are soft on terrorism. In this country, in fact, the government hardly needs such acceptance, because of the additional and crucial factor that the public is unlikely to be given sufficient information to trigger its revulsion. (My emphasis).

Whether we will in this country ever properly know the extent of British participation in criminal acts of the utmost seriousness should be a burning issue. We should not take for granted that court cases or a judicial inquiry will tell us what we need to know about the complicity of our government in crimes against humanity. The Baha Mousa inquiry into the activities of the British military in Iraq will not touch on the interaction of the British state with the US or the intelligence services, or with any torturing foreign state. Instead, the government will claim, as it does with ever greater frequency, that any issue relating to the intelligence services, or to the conduct of diplomatic relationships, should be confined entirely to special courts, or the evidence heard in large part in secret. The use of these procedures expands daily.

...Once we have arrived at a position where acquiescence in crimes against humanity by our government may well have occurred, the state can no longer demand that we acknowledge it as our protector and assert that in consequence the nation’s security is at stake if secrets are revealed. This after all is the thesis on which the claim for secrecy is built. For years the government has sidestepped report after report on these issues by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Justice and Liberty, and has considered the interventions of those organisations as interventions of which they need take no note whatsoever. And for the past seven years the United Kingdom has also shown disturbing indifference to the criticism of international organisations. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture conducted repeated checks on those interned indefinitely without trial between December 2001 and March 2005. Their observation that those being detained on secret evidence were being driven to madness were ignored; so too was the stinging critique of the European Commissioner for Human Rights. The government carried on with the detentions to the bitter end, months after the House of Lords had declared the legislation to be in violation of the fundamental provisions of the Human Rights Act. Similarly, the concerns the special rapporteur expressed in his report this year appear to have remained unread. Is arrogance the reason that criticisms can never correctly apply to the UK? Are they only for others?

...Staggeringly, not only do we therefore know nothing of what the intelligence services have actually witnessed in Afghanistan, but in each of the committee’s inquiries into their involvement or otherwise in torture, the government’s witnesses and the committee in turn appeared to miss entirely the wider legal and moral point. Instead, they focused on individual errors of judgment, even though members of the intelligence services were present during unlawful transfer and confinement: that is, in situations comprehensively meeting the definition of internationally prohibited crimes against humanity.

Equally disturbingly is that later in 2002, some months after MI6 sent its advice, the recently arrived British ambassador to Uzbekistan inquired urgently of the Foreign Office what its legal justification was for receiving information from Islamic dissidents who had been boiled alive to produce it. Craig Murray records his astonishment on being recalled to London to be told that the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, had decided that in the ‘War on Terror’ we should, as a matter of policy, use intelligence obtained through torture by foreign intelligence services. A follow-up memo from a Foreign Office legal adviser in March 2003 explained that it was not an offence to do so. How sound was this advice legally? Morally, there is no question. But what of the encouragement to torture resulting from our enthusiastic receipt of information?

There have been no resignations over any of this. The government on whose watch it has occurred may be vulnerable for other reasons, but at present it seems not for possible complicity in grave crimes. From where does it derive its confidence? Control of information is a powerful tool: the answer must undoubtedly lie in the extent to which the secret state believes it has consolidated and can control any mechanism that might allow discovery and challenge, so that it can rely on its citizens never knowing properly, or often at all.

It is horrible for me to read this against the background of my own despair at the virtual media blackout of my evidence last week to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. I thought that my evidence of ministerial collusion in torture was so shocking that the mainstream media would have to carry it. I realise reading Gareth that even now I am still naive. I also understand better now the Committee's extraordinary dispassion.

from http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/british_governm_3.html

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n09/peir01_.html

[faceless]

Guantanamo: the Xbox game
Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg will take the starring role in a new computer game based on life at the prison camp.
31 May 2009

Begg, from Birmingham, was captured by the CIA and thrown in jail at Guantanamo Bay in 2003. The 41-year-old, who was released in 2005, will now feature as himself in the game for Microsoft's Xbox 360.

In the game, players control a detainee at the camp, which has been sold by the US Government to a shadowy agency called Freedom Corp. Before he is subjected to torture and scientific experiments, the character must shoot his way out of the detention camp to bring down his captors.

Moazzam, who has a financial stake in the game, said he has not yet received any money from the producers. He said: "The software firm approached me with this idea about making a game based on my experience in Guantanamo. My first response was hesitation - I was worried that it might trivialise my experience. I'm involved to make sure it is as true to life as possible.

"My wife gave birth to my son six months after I was arrested and I saw him for the first time when he was three years old. This game will not demean the reality of Guantanamo but will help to bring those issues to people who would not usually think about it."

Begg said he went to Afghanistan in 2001 to help build schools and improve the water supply but had to flee to neighbouring Pakistan when coalition forces attacked the country. It was there that the CIA, who said that he had been training with al-Qaeda, arrested him.

The Glasgow firm T-Enterprise is making the game called Rendition: Guantanamo. Zarrar Chishti, the firm's director, said: "We approached Moazzam because it's very hard for us to know how to design the layout of the prison and he helped. It's been in production for a year and two months. You start the game with the orange boiler suit, cuffs and earmuffs. We have had a lot of hate mail about this, mainly from America, saying things like 'don't dare put out a game that shows them killing our soldiers'. But no US or British soldiers get killed in it. The only ones being killed are mercenaries."

[faceless]

Gitmo guard who converted to Islam
Six months into his stint as a guard at Guantánamo, Terry Holdbrooks converted to Islam. What made him do it, asks Sarfraz Manzoor
The Guardian
7 October 2009

Terry Holdbrooks arrived at Guantánamo detention camp in the summer of 2003 as a godless 19-year-old with a love of drinking, hard rock music and tattoos. By the time he left Cuba the following year, he had alienated his army colleagues, won the respect of the detainees and, most astonishingly, converted to Islam in a midnight ceremony in the presence of one of the detainees, who had become his mentor.

When I meet Holdbrooks, now 26 and named Mustafa Abdullah, he is wearing a black Muslim cap, a thick beard and long-sleeved traditional robes that almost obscure the tattoo on his right arm that reads "by demons be driven".

Holdbrooks grew up in Arizona, the only son of junkie parents who split up when he was seven years old. He was raised by his ex-hippie grandparents. Tired of being poor, determined not to follow in his parents' footsteps and keen to see the world, Holdbrooks signed up for the military. He was stationed with the 253rd Military Police Company, mostly doing administrative support work, when he was told he was to be deployed to Guantánamo.

During a two-week training course, the new guards took it in turns to act as detainees, and were also taken to Ground Zero. "We were not taught anything about Islam," he says. "We were shown videos of 11 September and all we kept being told was that the detainees were the worst of the worst – they were Bin Laden's drivers, Bin Laden's cooks, and these people will kill you the first chance they get."

Holdbrooks skims over the words, as if he is quoting from his forthcoming memoir, Traitor? "I was questioning things from day one," he says. "The first thing I saw was a kid who is all of 16 who had never seen the ocean, didn't know the world was round. I am sitting there thinking, what can he possibly know about the war on terror, what could he possibly know?"

Holdbrooks' duties at Guantánamo including cleaning, collecting rubbish, walking up and down the block to ensure detainees weren't passing anything between cells and ferrying them to and from interrogations. There were plenty of opportunities for communication. Holdbrooks's friendliness towards the detainees – they called him "the nice guard" – earned him unwelcome attention from his fellow guards.

"I didn't have a very high impression of my colleagues," he says. Many of them were "ridiculous Budweiser-drinking, cornbread-fed, tobacco-chewing drunks, racists and bigots" who blindly followed orders, and within months he had stopped talking to them altogether. There were frequent physical altercations: "One time one of them said to me, 'Hey, Holdbrooks, you know what we are going to do today? We are going to skull-fuck the Taliban out of you – you're a sympathiser and we don't like that." That led to another fist fight."

While the guards indulged in alcohol, porn and sports, Holdbrooks says he needed to learn how the detainees could endure abuse and still smile, while he was utterly miserable.

"I knew nothing about Islam prior to Guantánamo," he says, "so this was a complete culture shock to me. I wanted to learn as much I could, so I started talking to the detainees about politics, ethics and morals, and about their lives and cultural differences – we would talk all the time." What began as curiosity turned to disciplined study, with Holdbrooks spending at least an hour a day learning about Islam and talking in chatrooms online. Among those he talked to were the Tipton trio of British Muslims who featured in Michael Winterbottom's docudrama, The Road to Guantánamo; another was a man the other detainees referred to as the General – Moroccan-born Ahmed Errachidi, who had lived in Britain for 18 years, working as a chef, and spent five and a half years in Guantánamo accused of attending al-Qaida training camps. (He was later released and cleared of any wrongdoing.)

"We'd talk for hours and hours," Holdbrooks says. "We'd talk about books, about music, about philosophy: we would stay up all night and talk about religion."

Finally, six months into his time at Guantánamo, Holdbrooks was ready. On 29 December 2003, in the presence of Errachidi, he repeated the shahada, the statement of faith that is the sole requirement for converting to Islam: "There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet". The Guantánamo guard was now a Muslim.

He stopped drinking and even gave up music, because his interpretation of Islam suggested that this, too, was unacceptable. "It was not easy praying five times a day without my colleagues finding out," he says. "I told them I had to go the bathroom a lot."

Converting to Islam made Holdbrooks even more unhappy about his work – he felt he was worse off than the detainees. "They were having a lot more fun than I was. The Tipton trio were always playing tricks on the guards and the interrogators. The detainees had a lot of freedom in their confinement: I had all the freedoms they didn't have, but I was a slave to what the army wanted me to do."

This claim sounds implausible, but Holdbrooks says he is referring to their freedom of thought: he was impressed by the independence he saw in the detainees, compared to his fellow guards. This still seems a rather self-pitying analysis, particularly when he goes on to describe how he had seen detainees being tortured. "It was my job to take prisoners to interrogations, so sometimes I would sit and watch," he says. "I would see detainees who would be locked up for hours in horrible positions – for hours upon hours upon hours, in a room that might be 50 degrees or 60 degrees.

"There was one man who had defecated on himself and this ogre of an interrogator would douse water on him and then ask him if he was going to talk, and he would say he had nothing to talk about, and I remember thinking, what good is this going to accomplish? You cannot abuse and torture people and expect to get results that are accurate and credible."

In the summer of 2004, Holdbrooks left Guantánamo and was later discharged from the army on the grounds of a "general personality disorder". The alcohol problem that had plagued him before enlisting returned, and when his marriage dissolved, he sought solace in the old comforts of drinking, casual sex and music. "I was having nightmares about my time in Guantánamo," he says, "and I spent the best part of three years just trying to drink Guantánamo out of my mind."

Today, Holdbrooks is a practising Muslim again, but he does not seem to be at peace. There is a blankness in his gaze that hints at the scars his childhood and Guantánamo have left on him.

Why had this hard-living Arizona boy embraced Islam? The question needles me throughout our conversation. It is only when, towards the end, Holdbrooks reveals that his favourite words are "structure", "order" and "discipline" that the pieces fall into place. Holdbrooks's life had been a search for order: the regimentation of army life had appeared to offer structure, and when it let him down, he turned to religion.

Holdbrooks has more in common with his former colleagues than he realises: their allegiance to the army is matched by his adherence to faith. "Islam is a very disciplined, regimented faith and it requires a great deal of effort and conviction," he says. "I've had an unbelievable fascination with structure and order for as long as I can remember: structure, order and discipline – I just love them."

---------------------

What a great story - I wonder why I''ve not heard of it before though? I wonder if many of the illegal prisoners converted to 'capitalist pig'?

[luke]

Ministry of Defence named and shamed over British troops' behaviour in Iraq
• Court says non-disclosure a 'serious breach' of duty
• Evidence from MoD's chief witness 'seriously flawed'

The Ministry of Defence was accused today by three high court judges of "lamentable" behaviour and "serious breaches" of its duty of candour over the failure to disclose crucial information about allegations of murder and ill-treatment by British soldiers in Iraq in 2004.

In a withering attack, they damned the ministry's chief witness – the deputy head of the military police – as lacking all credibility. They described his evidence to the court as "seriously flawed".

The MoD's failure to conduct a proper investigation of its own into the allegations has forced Bob Ainsworth, the defence secretary, to hold an independent public inquiry, the high court heard.

The MoD has already been forced into a public inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa while in the custody of British soldiers in Basra in 2003. Yesterday's case relates to allegations that an Iraqi named al-Sweady was murdered and others ill-treated after they were taken prisoner at a British base near Majar al-Kabir, north of Basra, in May 2004.

The Iraqis' lawyers demanded a public inquiry under the Human Rights Act, saying the original military police investigation into the claims was inadequate. The police, officials and ministers resisted the demand and withheld vital information in attempting to do so, the court heard.

"We are forced to the conclusion that the approach of the secretary of state to disclosure in this case was lamentable," Lord Justice Scott Baker, Mr Justice Silber and Mr Justice Sweeney ruled today.

They said that when he was armed forces minister earlier this year Ainsworth signed a demand for a gagging order even though the information he sought to suppress had already been published. The matter caused the judges "very considerable concern", they said.

Over more than eight months, "the secretary of state's agents had simply failed for no good reason during that lengthy period to carry out these critically important and obviously highly relevant searches [for documents]", the judges added.

They singled out Colonel Dudley Giles, deputy provost marshal – deputy head of the military police – for "lamentable disclosure failures". Asked why he had not referred in his witness statement to a document stating that the soldiers had detained between 10 and 12 Iraqi detainees, Giles replied that he did so to avoid prejudicing any future prosecution.

"When this assertion was examined, it became obvious that it was wholly without foundation," said the judges.

Wrong, too, they said, was the colonel's assertion that there was a six-day delay before the initial investigation into the claims got under way.

The evidence showed that the investigation was blocked for a month "thereby resulting in a crucial loss of vital time and investigative opportunity".

That was something Giles either did know or should have known to be the case, said the judges, adding that any court hearing evidence from him in future should do so "with the greatest caution".The MoD has already had to pay out £1m in costs in hearings estimated to have cost more than £2m.

In court the judges made it clear they shared the concerns of Rabinder Singh QC, for the Iraqis, that the MoD would "blackslide" on a commitment to hold an independent public inquiry into the incident, which happened after a fierce gunfight nearby between British troops and insurgents.

James Eadie QC, for the MoD, assured the court that Ainsworth agreed to an inquiry, though he said that did not mean the defence secretary accepted that "there may have been murder or ill-treatment in the manner alleged".

The court will reconvene in two weeks' time to discuss the inquiry's terms of reference and which judicial figure will chair it.

The court heard earlier that the Met declined to investigate the allegations, saying it was "not feasible".

Scott Baker replied: "That puts the cart before the horse." The Met's conclusion was "frankly not good enough", he added.

from http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/02/ministry-of-defence-shamed-iraq

see also Justice in Shades : A damning judgement on army killings suggests that officials at every level have covered up torture and murder.

and Ex-officer alleges Iraq cover-ups

[luke]

Binyam Mohamed torture evidence must be revealed, judges rule
High court ruling compels British government to disclose what MI5 and MI6 knew of refugee's treatment in Guantánamo Bay

Three of Britain's most senior judges have ordered the government to reveal evidence of MI5 and MI6 complicity in the torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed – unanimously dismissing objections by David Miliband, the foreign secretary.

In a ruling that will cause deep anxiety among the security and intelligence agencies, they rejected Miliband's claims, backed by the US government, that disclosure of a seven paragraph summary of classified CIA information showing what British agents knew of Mohamed's torture would threaten intelligence sharing between London and Washington and therefore endanger Britain's national security.

The judges – Igor Judge, the lord chief justice; Lord Neuberger, the master of the rolls; and Sir Anthony May, president of the Queen's Bench - shattered the convention that the courts should not question claims by the executive relating to national security.

In damning references to claims made by Miliband and his lawyers, and stressing the importance of the media in supporting the principle of open justice, they said the case raised issues of "fundamental importance", of "democratic accountability and ultimately the rule of law itself".

Publication of the material Miliband wanted to suppress was "compelling", Judge said, since they concerned the involvement of wrongdoing by agents of the state in the "abhorrent practice of torture". The material helped to "vindicate Mr Mohamed's assertion that UK authorities had been involved in and facilitated the ill treatment and torture to which he was subjected while under the control of USA authorities".

Key to the appeal court's ruling was a recent case in a US court where the judge noted that Mohamed's "trauma lasted for two long years. During that time he was physically and psychologically tortured. His genitals were mutilated ... All the while he was forced to inculpate himself and others in various plots to imperil Americans."

The US court, which was hearing a case relating to another detainee at Guantánamo Bay, noted that Mohamed was told "that the British government knew of his situation and sanctioned his detention".

An MI5 officer known only as Witness B is being investigated by the Metropolitan police over his alleged role in questioning Mohamed incommunicado in a Pakistan jail.

The whole basis of Miliband's case had "fallen away" because of the US court case, said Neuberger, who added: "It is a case which is now logically incoherent and therefore irrational and is not based on any convincing evidence."

In his ruling , May said: "In principle a real risk of serious damage to national security, of whatever degree, should not automatically trump a public interest in open justice which may concern a degree of facilitation by UK officials of interrogation using unlawful techniques which may amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degradng treatment."

In a stinging reference to claims by Jonathan Sumption QC, Miliband's counsel, that high court judges in earlier rulings were "irresponsible" in saying that CIA intelligence relating to ill treatment and torture and Britain's knowledge of it should be disclosed, the lord chief justice said: "No advantage is achieved by bandying deprecatory epithets."

Mohamed was detained in 2002 in Pakistan, where he was questioned incommunicado by an MI5 officer. The US flew him to Morocco, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, where he says he was tortured with the knowledge of British agencies.

In the high court last year, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones ruled that it was clear from the evidence "that the relationship of the United Kingdom government to the United States authorities in connection with Binyam Mohamed was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing".

from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/10/binyam-mohamed-torture-ruling-evidence

[luke]

Appeal judge watered down Binyam Mohamed torture ruling
Government persuaded Lord Neuberger to delete damning references to MI5 'culture' of suppressing evidence

The government launched a successful last-minute bid to persuade the court of appeal to erase the most damning details of MI5's complicity in torture from its decision in the Binyam Mohamed case – but has been unable to suppress a letter that details some of the contents of the original draft ruling.

On Monday, Jonathan Sumption QC wrote to the court warning that the paragraph in question was "likely to receive more public attention than any other parts of the judgments".

This, Sumption pointed out, was because the paragraph would state that MI5 did not operate in a culture that respected human rights or renounced "coercive interrogation techniques".

The letter also reveals that the judgment, before being rewritten, said this was particularly true of the MI5 officer known as Witness B who gave evidence in the case – and that this man's conduct was characteristic of MI5 as a whole.

Furthermore, the letter shows, the judges originally ruled that MI5 officers had "deliberately misled" the Intelligence and Security Committee, the body of MPs and peers supposed to oversee its work, on the question of coercive interrogations, and that this "culture of suppression" reflected its dealings with the committee, the foreign secretary and the court.

Finally, the letter makes clear that the court ruled MI5's culture of suppression "penetrates the service to such a degree" that it undermines any government assurance based upon information that comes from MI5 itself.

The master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger, told the court this morning that he had discussed Sumption's request with the lord chief justice, and decided to amend the relevant section "quite significantly". However, it transpired that Sumption's letter had not been circulated to all the other parties. "I have received a number of letters from interested parties complaining about the way the amendment was made."

The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, wrote to the court after the Sumption letter came to light, as did Liberty.

Judges were entitled to change their draft judgments, the master of the rolls said, but "it was over-hasty of me" to do so without giving others the opportunity of making representations.

He would therefore give parties who wished to object until 4pm on Friday to make representations, when he would decide whether to reinstate his judgement.

Rusbridger said: "It is good news that – after a challenge from the Guardian and other news organisations – the courts have finally ordered the government to reveal evidence of MI5 complicity in torture. This is a watershed in open justice in an area in which it is notoriously difficult to shine a light.

"But it was extremely disturbing that the government's lawyers made a successful last-ditch attempt to get the master of the rolls to rewrite his judgment, which had already been circulated in draft form.

"There are now effectively two judgments. The one released today is a watered down version of the original judgment – diluted at the request of the government, via its leading counsel, Jonathan Sumption QC. A crucial passage has been removed.

"The Guardian and Liberty intervened last night to express their concern at what had happened. We are today publishing Sumption's extraordinary letter, which describes the passage which was dropped from the published judgment. It is good that the master of the rolls has agreed to reconsider his decision to rewrite his judgment in response to government representations."

Read the letter that reveals the draft ruling
Breakdown of David Miliband's Commons statement

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/10/binyam-mohamed-judge-deleted-ruling

[luke]

Obama's secret prisons in Afghanistan endanger us all
He was elected in part to drag us out of this trap. Instead, he's dragging us further in

Osama bin Laden's favourite son, Omar, recently abandoned his father's cave in favour of spending his time dancing and drooling in the nightclubs of Damascus. The tang of freedom almost always trumps Islamist fanaticism in the end: three million people abandoned the Puritan hell of Taliban Afghanistan for freer countries, while only a few thousand faith-addled fanatics ever travelled the other way. Osama's vision can't even inspire his own kids. But Omar bin Laden says his father is banking on one thing to shore up his flailing, failing cause – and we are giving it to him.

The day George W Bush was elected, Omar says, "my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs – one who will attack and spend money and break [his own] country". Osama wanted the US and Europe to make his story about the world ring true in every mosque and every mountain-top and every souq. He said our countries were bent on looting Muslim countries of their resources, and any talk of civil liberties or democracy was a hypocritical facade. The jihadis I have interviewed – from London to Gaza to Syria – said their ranks swelled with each new whiff of Bushism as more and more were persuaded. It was like trying to extinguish fire with a blowtorch.

The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at first glance like a hangover from the Bush years. Barack Obama was elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap – but in practice he is dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama's orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects. The casualties are overwhelmingly civilians. We may not have noticed, but the Muslim world has: check out Al Jazeera any night.
Related articles

Obama ran on an inspiring promise to shut down Bush's network of kidnappings and secret prisons. He said bluntly: "I do not want to hear this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that... but as a parent I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence." He said it made the US "less safe" because any gain in safety by Gitmo-ing one suspected jihadi – along with dozens of innocents – is wiped out by the huge number of young men tipped over into the vile madness of jihadism by seeing their brothers disappear into a vast military machine where they may never be heard from again. Indeed, following the failed attack in Detroit, Obama pointed out the wannabe-murderer named Guantanamo as the reason he signed up for the jihad.

Yet a string of recent exposes has shown that Obama is in fact maintaining a battery of secret prisons where people are held without charge indefinitely – and he is even expanding them. The Kabul-based journalist Anand Gopal has written a remarkable expose for The Nation magazine. His story begins in the Afghan village of Zaiwalat at 3.15am on the night of November 19th 2009. A platoon of US soldiers blasted their way into a house in search of Habib ur-Rahman, a young computer programmer and government employee who they had been told by someone, somewhere was a secret Talibanist. His two cousins came out to see what the noise was – and they were shot to death. As the children of the house screamed, Habib was bundled into a helicopter and whisked away. He has never been seen since. His family do not know if he is alive or dead.

This is not an unusual event in Afghanistan today. In this small village of 300 people, some 16 men have been "disappeared" by the US and 10 killed in night raids in the past two years. The locals believe people are simply settling old clan feuds by telling the Americans their rivals are jihadists. Habib's cousin Qarar, who works for the Afghan government, says: "I used to go on TV and argue that people should support the government and the foreigners. But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so?"

Where are all these men vanishing to? Obama ordered the closing of the CIA's secret prisons, but not those run by Joint Special Operations. They maintain a Bermuda Triangle of jails with the notorious Bagram Air Base at its centre. One of the few outsiders has been into this ex-Soviet air-hangar is the military prosecutor Stuart Couch. He says: "In my view, having visited Guantanamo several times, the Bagram facility made Guantanamo look like a nice hotel. The men did not appear to be able to move around at will, they mostly sat in rows on the floor. It smelled like the monkey house at the zoo."

We know that at least two innocent young men were tortured to death in Bagram. Der Spiegel has documented how some "inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". The accounts of released prisoners suggest the very worst abuses stopped in the last few years of the Bush administration, and Obama is supposed to have forbidden torture, but it's hard to tell. We do know Obama has permitted the use of solitary confinement lasting for years – a process that often drives people insane. The International Red Cross has been allowed to visit some of them, but in highly restricted circumstances, and their reports remain confidential. In this darkness, abuse becomes far more likely.

The Obama administration is appealing against US court rulings insisting the detainees have the right to make a legal case against their arbitrary imprisonment. And the White House is insisting they can forcibly snatch anyone they suspect from anywhere in the world – with no legal process – and take them there. Yes: Obama is fighting for the principles behind Guantanamo Bay. The frenzied debate about whether the actual camp in Cuba is closed is a distraction, since he is proposing to simply relocate it to less sunny climes.

Once you vanish into this system, you have no way to get yourself out. The New York lawyer Tina Foster represents three men who were kidnapped by US forces in Thailand, Pakistan and Dubai and bundled to Bagram, where they have been held without charge for seven years now. She tells me there have been "shockingly few improvements" under Obama. "The Bush administration rubbed our faces in it, while Obama's much smoother. But the reality is still indefinite detention without charge for people who are judged guilty simply by association. It's contrary to everything we stand for as a country... I know there are children [in there] from personal experience. I have interviewed dozens of children who were detained in Bagram, some as young as 10."

Today, Bagram is being given a $60m expansion, allowing it to hold five times as many prisoners as Guantanamo Bay currently does. Gopal reports that the abuse is leaking out to other, more secretive sites across Afghanistan. They are so underground they are known only by the names given to them by released inmates – the Salt Pit, the Prison of Darkness. Obama also asserts his right to hand over the prisoners to countries that commit torture, provided they give a written "assurance" they won't be "abused" – assurances that have proved worthless in the past. The British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith estimates there are 18,000 people trapped in these "legal black holes" by the US.

As Obama warned in the distant days of the election campaign, these policies place us all in greater danger. Matthew Alexander, the senior interrogator in Iraq who tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says: "I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight... We have lost hundreds if not thousands of American lives because of our policy." The increased risk bleeds out onto the London Underground and the nightclubs of Bali. I oppose these policies precisely because I want to be safe, and I loathe jihadism.

President Obama has been tossing aside the calm jihad-draining insights of candidate Obama for a year now. Whenever Obama acts like Bush, listen carefully – you will hear the distant, delighted chuckle of Osama bin Laden, and the needless stomp of fresh recruits heading his way.

from http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-obamas-secret-prisons-in-afghanistan-endanger-us-all-1896996.html

[luke]

E-liar Manningham Buller

Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5, is engaged in an outrageous attempt to rewrite history, by claiming we were unaware that the CIA was getting intelligence from torture.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/exmi5-head-us-hid-torture-tactics-from-uk-1918945.html

The government knew the CIA was sending us intelligence from torture from at least November 2002, when I sent a diplomatic telegram to Jack Straw and others - including MI5 - informing them so. I repeated it in February 2003, and was called back to a meeting on March 7 2003 where I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law.

I have made available indisputable documentary evidence of this, and that the policy of using intelligence from torture was sanctioned by Jack Straw:

http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/duffieldminute.pdf
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/mcDonald.pdf
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/Wood.pdf

The redactions were made by the government.

I am astounded that, having obtained the first two documents under the Freedom of Information Act last November, no mainstream media outlet will mention them and refer to them, despite acres of reporting on whether Ministers had an intelligence from torture policy.

Plainly these documents disprove entirely the Eliza Mannigham Buller claims that we did not know. But don't expect to see them referred to in the media.

from http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/03/eliar_manningha.html

[luke]

Government has used terror threat to justify torture abroad and security crackdown at home, say MPs

Ministers fiddled their definition of complicity in torture to conceal the way British spies turned a blind eye to the abuse of suspects, a damning new report reveals today.

In a withering report on counter-terrorism policy, a panel of senior MPs and peers condemns the Government for keeping Britain in a ‘permanent state of emergency’ about terrorism since the 9/11 attacks.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights concludes that ministers have used claims that terrorists are a ‘threat to the life of the nation’ for more than eight years to justify torture abroad and a draconian security crackdown at home.

The panel says Labour’s claims of innocence about torture have no ‘legal basis’ and that the case for a full blown judicial inquiry into Britain’s role in harsh interrorgations is now ‘irresistible’.

The Committee reserves its harshest criticism for the way ministers tried to conceal British knowledge of the treatment meted out to terrorism suspect Binyam Mohamed.

The Court of Appeal found that the security services were complicit in the ‘cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment’ he endured while in US custody.

The Human Rights Committee condemned as ‘significant and worrying’ the government’s ‘narrow’ definition of complicity in torture.

Ministers have maintained that even if officials accepted intelligence material likely to have been tortured - they were not complicit as long as they did not ‘encourage the use of torture by other States’.

In their hard-hitting report, the Committee said: ‘We are concerned about the Government’s narrow definition of what amounts to complicity in torture.

‘We cannot find any legal basis for the Government’s narrow formulation of the meaning of complicity. Complicity, in the sense used in the relevant international standards, does not require active encouragement.

‘The systematic receipt of information obtained by torture is a form of aquiescence, or tacit consent.’

The courts have found that MI5 officers passed questions to Mr Mohamed’s interrogators and received reports on his treatment.

‘The case for setting up an independent inquiry into the allegations of complicity in torture is now irresistible,’ the Committee says.

Today’s report condemns MI5 boss Jonathan Evans, Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Home Secretary Alan Johnson for suggesting that using intelligence obtained under torture was ‘the lesser of two evils’.

The committee says it received ‘evasive answers’ from ministers quizzed on the subject.

Gordon Brown has promised to publish new guidance being drawn up for the intelligence services on how to handle interrogations.

But the Human Rights Committee said there was ‘no justification’ for the government’s refusal to release the guidance that existed when Mr Mohamed was tortured - since President Obama has already released similar US rules.

In a sweeping criticism of the government’s entire approach to terrorism, the report concludes: ‘Since September 11th 2001 the Government has continuously justified many of its counter terrorism measures on the basis that there is a public emergency threatening the life of the nation.

‘We question whether the country has been in such a state for more than eight years. We are concerned that the Government’s approach means that in effect there is a permanent state of emergency.’

The Committee also condemns the refusal of MI5 Director General Jonathan Evans to give evidence to them on the scale of the terrorist threat, when he ‘is prepared to give public lectures’.

Mr Evans only talks to the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), but the Court of Appeal and the ISC itself have both revealed that MI5 officers misled that committee over their role in the Binyam Mohamed affair.

The Human Rights Committee demanded reform to beef up the powers of the ISC ‘with independent legal advice and access to an independent investigator’, reporting to Parliament rather than the Prime Minister.

The Committee called for a wholesale review of the counter-terrorism legislation brought in since 2001 - urging ministers to finally tear up the bill that would allow detention without trial for 42 days which has been kept on the shelf since it was last defeated two years ago.

The committee called for a review of the way ‘secret evidence’ is used in court cases and warned that attempts to use material from electronic intercepts in terrorism court cases seems ‘doomed to failure’ because of the differing demands of secrecy and human rights legislation.

Committee chairman Andrew Dismore said: ‘There is no question that we face a serious threat from terrorism, or that we need legislation to counter that threat.

‘The idea that we have consistently faced an emergency level threat for over eight years since September 11 is, we believe, questionable.

‘What is needed now is a thoroughgoing, evidence-based review of the necessity for and proportionality of all the counter-terrorism legislation passed since that day. This should be an urgent priority for the next Parliament.’

Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling said: 'We agree there is a need for an urgent review of terror laws. The committee is right to question whether all of the legislation introduced since 2001 is proving effective or necessary.

'But even more important is the need to stop the use of terror laws for other purposes, like routine stop and search and local authorities’ surveillance of recycling habits.'

from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1260419/MPs-claim-government-used-terror-threat-justify-torture-abroad.html

"Since September 11 2001 the government has continuously justified many of its counterterrorism measures on the basis that there is a public emergency threatening the life of the nation. We question whether the country has been in such a state for more than eight years. This permanent state of emergency inevitably has a deleterious effect on public debate about the justification for counterterrorism measures."

more here and here

[luke]

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”

He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

He added: “I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.”

Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.

He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr Hamad claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damages action against a list of American officials.

Defenders of Guantánamo said that detainees began to be released as early as September 2002, nine months after the first prisoners were sent to the jail at the US naval base in Cuba. By the time Mr Bush left office more than 530 detainees had been freed.

A spokesman for Mr Bush said of Colonel Wilkerson’s allegations: “We are not going to have any comment on that.” A former associate to Mr Rumsfeld said that Mr Wilkerson's assertions were completely untrue.

The associate said the former Defence Secretary had worked harder than anyone to get detainees released and worked assiduously to keep the prison population as small as possible. Mr Cheney’s office did not respond.

There are currently about 180 detainees left in the facility.

from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7092435.ece

[faceless]

The corruption and anti-democratic behaviour of this bunch of utter scumbags just gets deeper and more disgusting with time.

[luke]

Government cannot use secret evidence in Guantánamo torture case, court rules
Government not allowed to use secret evidence to defend itself against claims by detainees it was complicit in their torture

The court of appeal has dismissed an attempt by MI5 and MI6 to suppress evidence of their alleged complicity in the torture and secret transfer of British residents to Guantánamo Bay.

In a devastating judgment, it ruled that the unprecedented attempt by the security and intelligence agencies, backed by the attorney general and senior Whitehall officials, to suppress evidence in a civil trial undermined deep-seated principles of common law and open justice.

MI5 and MI6 said evidence in the case, in which the Guardian, the Times and the BBC intervened, should be kept secret from everyone except the judges and specially appointed and vetted counsel.

The former detainees – Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes and Martin Mubanga – have denied any involvement in terrorism and allege that MI5 and MI6 aided and abetted their unlawful imprisonment and extraordinary rendition to various locations around the world, including Guantánamo. They are seeking compensation for abuse and wrongful imprisonment.

In their ruling, Lord Neuberger, master of the rolls, Lord Justice Maurice Kay, and Lord Justice Sullivan said that accepting the case of the security and intelligence agencies would amount to "undermining one of [the common law's] most fundamental principles".

"A further fundamental common law principle is that trials should be conducted in public, and the judgments should be given in public.

"In our view the principle that a litgant should be able to see and hear all the evidence which is seen and heard by a court determining his case is so fundamental, so embedded in the common law that, in the absence of parliamentary authority, no judge should override it, at any rate in relation to an ordinary civil claim ..."

Moreover, the judges said, if a party was to win a case where the evidence was heard in secret, there was a "substantial risk" that it "would not be vindicated and that justice would not be seen to have been done. The outcome would be likely to be a pyrrhic victory for the defendants whose reputation would be damaged by such a process, but the damage to the reputation of the court would in all probability, be even greater."

Corinna Ferguson, legal officer at the civil rights group Liberty, said: "Yet again, the court of appeal has sent the strongest signal to the security establishment that it cannot play fast and loose with the rule of law. Fair and open justice belongs to people, not governments. Whoever governs us from Friday would be wise to bear this in mind."

from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/04/government-secret-evidence-guantanamo-torture

[faceless]

That sounds like good news, but I'll remain cynical about anything to do with it until all the people responsible are behind bars.

[luke]

This may be Britain's Abu Ghraib
The allegations of torture by British soldiers in Iraq bear chilling comparison with America's worst excesses

The inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa is due to report by the end of the year. It will detail how Mousa died in Iraq in September 2003, allegedly brutalised by British soldiers in a "free for all"; and how it was that he and nine other men in the same incident were allegedly hooded, forced into painful stress positions, and deprived of sleep, food and water.

The Guardian article this week, which reported that many more civilians died in army custody than previously thought, should shock the conscience of the nation. The evidence of Lieutenant Colonel Mercer to the inquiry reveals that as early as May 2003 – four months before Mousa's death – there were "a number of deaths in custody" with "various units". It appears there were, by then, at least nine deaths. The Ministry of Defence refuses to answer questions from us or the Guardian as to where, how or why these Iraqis died, and refuses to confirm or deny whether any of these deaths were ever investigated and if so with what outcome.

Although we are acting for one family referred to in the article, we have no idea about the other cases. And the story could be a lot worse: an ex-Royal Military Police (RMP) major told BBC radio last October that there were "hundreds" of similar cases.

Further, there are thousands of torture allegations being made by more than 100 Iraqi clients in new cases. We applaud the efforts of those who have succeeded in obtaining an inquiry into alleged British complicity in torture by various overseas regimes. But the public and the government also need to face up to our history of actual torture. The evidence from the Mousa inquiry and the allegations in these other cases may allow a chilling comparison to be made with the worst excesses of the US at Guantánamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, with the Stasi in the cold war, or the British in post-colonial wars.

Apart from the techniques banned by the Heath government in 1972 (hooding, stressing, food and water deprivation, sleep deprivation, the use of noise), which returned as standard operating procedure in Iraq, the array of allegations is staggering: mock executions; the use of tiny refrigerated spaces; electric shocks; forced nudity; threats of rape to female relatives; prolonged solitary confinement; loud, hardcore pornography played incessantly; disorientation by various means; simulated drowning; dog attacks; masturbation and other sexual acts; urinating on detainees; giving urine not water to drink; as well as systematic abuse through rifle-butting, kicks, punches, forced exertion and prolonged shouting at detainees.

The MoD insists our brave soldiers behaved impeccably save for a few rotten apples and that there is no evidence of coercive interrogation techniques. Now the Iraq historic allegation team, comprising of RMP investigators and others, will investigate whether anyone should be prosecuted by a military court martial.

However, these other deaths in custody are not being investigated; the thousands of allegations of the use of coercive interrogation make it difficult to see how much more evidence of systemic issues is needed; and the RMP is a discredited and failed organisation that is incapable of dealing with these cases, and in any event its soldiers are the subject of some of the allegations.

The damage caused to the French in Algeria by its use of torture is well known. The same damage may have been caused to the British battle for Iraqi hearts and minds. To perpetuate that damage by this alleged cover-up would be immeasurably stupid: as we now know from Bloody Sunday, when the state is involved in wrongdoing the nation requires not a Widgery but a Saville.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/03/abu-ghraib-baha-mousa

[luke]

Classified documents reveal UK's role in abuse of its own citizens
Previously secret papers show true extent of involvement in abduction and torture following al-Qaida attacks of 2001

The true extent of the Labour government's involvement in the illegal abduction and torture of its own citizens after the al-Qaida attacks of September 2001 has been spelled out in stark detail with the disclosure during high court proceedings of a mass of highly classified documents.

Previously secret papers that have been disclosed include a number implicating Tony Blair's office in many of the events that are to be the subject of the judicial inquiry that David Cameron announced last week.

Among the most damning documents are a series of interrogation reports from MI5 officers that betray their disregard for the suffering of a British resident whom they were questioning at a US airbase in Afghanistan. The documents also show that the officers were content to see the mistreatment continue.

One of the most startling documents is chapter 32 of MI6's general procedural manual, entitled "Detainees and Detention Operations", which advises officers that among the "particular sensitivities" they need to consider before becoming directly involved in an operation to detain a terrorism suspect is the question of whether "detention, rather than killing, is the objective of the operation".

Other disclosed documents show how:

• The Foreign Office decided in January 2002 that the transfer of British citizens from Afghanistan to Guantánamo was its "preferred option".

• Jack Straw asked for that rendition to be delayed until MI5 had been able to interrogate those citizens.

• Downing Street was said to have overruled FO attempts to provide a British citizen detained in Zambia with consular support in an attempt to prevent his return to the UK, with the result that he too was "rendered" to Guantánamo.

The papers have been disclosed as a result of civil proceedings brought by six former Guantánamo inmates against MI5 and MI6, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, and the Attorney General's Office, which they allege were complicit in their illegal detention and torture.

The government has been responding to disclosure requests by maintaining that it has identified up to 500,000 documents that may be relevant, and says it has deployed 60 lawyers to scrutinise them, a process that it suggests could take until the end of the decade. It has failed to hand over many of the documents that the men's lawyers have asked for, and on Friday failed to meet a deadline imposed by the high court for the disclosure of the secret interrogation policy that governed MI5 and MI6 officers between 2004 and earlier this year.

So far just 900 papers have been disclosed, and these have included batches of press cuttings and copies of government reports that were published several years ago. However, a number of highly revealing documents are among the released papers, as well as fragments of heavily censored emails, memos and policy documents.

Some are difficult to decipher, but together they paint a picture of a government that was determined not only to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States as it embarked upon its programme of "extraordinary rendition" and torture of terrorism suspects in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but to actively participate in that programme.

In May, after the appeal court dismissed attempts to suppress evidence of complicity in their mistreatment, the government indicated that it would attempt to settle out of court.

Today the government failed in an attempt to bring a temporary halt to the proceedings that have resulted in the disclosure of the documents. Its lawyers argued that the case should be delayed while attempts were made to mediate with the six men, in the hope that their claims could be withdrawn in advance of the judicial inquiry. Lawyers for the former Guantánamo inmates said it was far from certain that mediation would succeed, and insisted the disclosure process continue.

In rejecting the government's application, the court said it had considered the need for its lawyers to press ahead with the task of processing the 500,000 documents in any event, as the cases of the six men are among those that will be considered by the inquiry headed by Sir Peter Gibson. Last week, in announcing the inquiry, Cameron told MPs: "This inquiry will be able to look at all the information relevant to its work, including secret information. It will have access to all relevant government papers – including those held by the intelligence services."

Cameron also made clear that the sort of material that has so far been made public with the limited disclosure in the Guantánamo cases would be kept firmly under wraps during the inquiry. "Let's be frank, it is not possible to have a full public inquiry into something that is meant to be secret," he said. "So any intelligence material provided to the inquiry panel will not be made public and nor will intelligence officers be asked to give evidence in public."

The coalition government is anxious to draw a line under what is currently described in Whitehall as "detainee legacy issues". It hopes that mediation, followed by the inquiry, will lift the burden of litigation that it is currently facing while restoring public confidence in MI5 and MI6.

It also wishes to preserve what it calls "liaison relationships" – operational links with overseas intelligence agencies, including those known to use torture – on the grounds that they are a vital part of the country's counterterrorism strategy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2010/jul/14/torture-classified-documents-disclosed

Covert words that paint a vivid picture of complicity in torture
The torture files: key passages in the disclosed documents