The account by the three young British men from Tipton reported by the Guardian last Wednesday, with its graphic images of torture at Guantanamo Bay, reveals the horror of what has been suffered and is still being suffered in that lawless place by British citizens and residents, with the complicity of MI5 (UK counter-intelligence) and the British Foreign Office. It also highlights the lies and incompetence of MI5 and Foreign Office officials. No minister should ignore it for a day, knowing that four British citizens and two residents are living this hell now.
Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed have set out the degradation they and their colleagues of many nationalities suffered: shackling in a bent position to a ring in the floor for hours or days, isolation for weeks or months, being held naked, kept in freezing air conditioning, sleep deprivation, near-starvation, imposed injections, forced shaving of hair and beard, withholding of family mail, refusal of medical attention, beatings, interrogations, psychological torture to force false confessions or false testimony against others, being confronted with confessions they never made, sexual humiliation and being shown pornographic photos and videos.
Their report is newly corroborated by four colleagues and will be impossible to dismiss. Two Frenchmen released on July 27 told their lawyer, Jacques Debray, details of ill-treatment they suffered in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, which Debray described as "close to those of Abu Ghraib." And on radio the Swedish citizen Mehdi Ghezali, also released last month, described torture and sexual humiliation.
Marcos Garcia, the lawyer for a Spaniard, Hamed Abderrahman, who was released in March, said he is bringing a lawsuit against the US and US President George W. Bush. Abderrahman witnessed several prisoners attempt to hang themselves with their clothes.
The Tipton dossier is a crucial tool for the US lawyers trying this week to get urgent habeas corpus hearings for men like Jamil el-Banna and Bishar al-Rawi, who UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is scandalously trying to pretend are not the UK's responsibility, and who wear armbands in the camp saying, respectively, Jordan and Iraq.
Banna is a Jordanian-Palestinian who has lived in the UK for 10 years and has five children, all British citizens. He is now an acute medical case. His London doctor's records since 1999 show him suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and, since 2002, diabetes. The Tipton statement says these illnesses are not given treatment in Guantanamo and he has not received medicine or proper diet.
Shafiq Rasul said that in Guantanamo Banna lost about 40kg and became very thin. He was interrogated only five times, and was told by his US interrogator, when he cried, showing photographs of his children: "We're trying to get you out of here, we know you're an innocent man."
He was repeatedly questioned about the whereabouts of his friend, Abu Qatada. (In fact, Abu Qatada was arrested in the UK in 2002.) Family videos from 2001 show a large, gentle-looking man playing with his children and dancing with his mother. His family have had no letter from him for a year.
Bishar al-Rawi, who is Banna's close friend and translator, has lived in the UK for 20 years, and has a sister and brother here who are British citizens with business interests. The two men were kidnapped by the Americans, with the connivance of the British, while they were on a business trip to Gambia to start a mobile peanut oil factory in October 2002, and taken to Afghanistan.
Rawi's older brother, Wahab, a British citizen, was arrested at the same time in Banjul but released after 27 days' interrogation, and came back to England having lost US$250,000 on his failed business venture. Bishar went through about 50 interrogations in Guantanamo, including some that asked him about the very same battery charger that got him arrested in the UK in 2002 as he was about to board the plane to Gambia. The British judge threw the case out then.
Why did the US investigators not know the outcome of the court case in Britain against Bishar? Or that Abu Qatada, one of the Islamic clerics who interest them so much, is in Belmarsh prison?
Nor were they, or British officials in Guantanamo, very quick to find out that, although the investigators forced the Tipton men to confess they were three men in a video of a Bin Laden rally in Afghanistan, their court, workplace and university records show they were at home when the video was shot in 2000.
And how can British intelligence officials quietly go along with the US practice of sending men like Mamdouh Habib, an Australian, to Egypt to be tortured? When he returned to Guantanamo he bled from his nose, ears and mouth when asleep.
Egypt and other allies who do this dirty work for the US and Britain are also the source of much of the false information that has made being friendly with critics of those governments' corrupt and repressive habits enough to confine men without charge in Guantanamo or Belmarsh.
And how can Britain knowingly be party to another outrageous kidnapping by the Americans, of five Algerians from Bosnia, after a Bosnian court had ordered their release for lack of evidence? Or how can we quietly accept the fate of men like the Kuwaiti Fouad Mahmoud al-Rabiah and numerous Pakistani detainees who were sold to the Americans?
The Pentagon has recently created combatant status review tribunals staffed by US military officers in response to the Supreme Court ruling that allowed petitions for habeas corpus from Guantanamo. Britain must not accept this cynical obstacle to justice in court.
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the ranking US generals in Iraq may have survived the Abu Ghraib scandal, but in Britain we should do things differently. Straw and Eliza Manningham-Buller (the head of MI5) should apologize and resign over Guantanamo. The British citizens and residents should be immediately flown home. If any prisoner has a case to answer that is not based on evidence given under torture or fabricated, their families would welcome their being tried here.
It is nearly two years since Lord Justice Steyn asked: "Ought our government to make plain publicly and unambiguously our condemnation of the utter lawlessness at Guantanamo Bay?"
He spoke for all decent people.
Victoria Brittain, with Gillian Slovo, compiled the play Guantanamo.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs