-Clare Algar is executive director of Reprieve. The opinions expressed are her own.-

Disappointed, but not surprised, was my first response to hearing President Barack Obama’s announcement on Wednesday that he would not make the January 22 deadline for closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay.

During attorney visits over the past few weeks, Reprieve’s clients in Guantanamo have expressed their doubts regarding whether President Obama can live up to his promise to close the prison within a year of assuming office. ‘What is he going to do,’ one man asked, “put 200 people on a plane on the 22nd?”

And it is true – the maths doesn’t work.  Around 245 prisoners were being held in Guantánamo when Obama was inaugurated in January of this year and only around 30 men have left since then. If releases continue at this snail’s pace, the prison won’t close until at least 2017.

Who are the people who are left in the prison and why is it proving so hard to close? First there are the 90 or so prisoners from Yemen who the United States will not repatriate because of the country’s instability.  Another 65 people are considered prosecutable in federal courts or military commissions, the details of which are still being hammered out (the latest development being the recent announcement of the future transfer of five men, accused of involvement in Sept. 11 to U.S. Federal Courts for prosecution).

Then there is a group of around 60 men - Guantanamo’s refugees - 18 of whom are represented by Reprieve. Many of these people have been “cleared for release” by United States authorities, meaning they have been deemed to present no threat whatsoever.  These men would be free to leave Guantanamo tomorrow but they remain stranded there because they cannot return to their countries of origin for fear of torture.

They are from places like Uzbekistan, Syria, China, Algeria and Tunisia, countries where their being branded “terrorists” - despite them having been cleared - will make them sitting ducks for authorities with Kafka-esque human rights records.

In June, there was optimism that European states would offer homes to these men, but only a few countries have moved from talk to action. France, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium and the United Kingdom have accepted former prisoners, as well as the unlikely resettlement locations of Bermuda and Palau.  Why has Europe been so reluctant to assist?

Congress’s refusal – stoked by a scaremongering media - to accept any former prisoners onto American soil, has presented a huge stumbling block that Obama is struggling to scale. It is much more difficult for the U.S. (and Reprieve) to persuade European countries to take former prisoners when the U.S. refuses to do so.  In addition, governments have been hugely wary of the reactions of their political rivals and publics in determining whether to take former prisoners.

It has not helped that Obama himself persists in talking about “The Terrorists” and does not differentiate between the men held in the prison, the bulk of whom were sold for bounties and are far from being the hardened “worst of the worst” some paint them to be. It is worth making the point that the U.S. government has lost 30 of 37 habeas cases – that means that, in 30 instances, a judge, on reviewing the evidence against a prisoner, has found him not to be a threat to the U.S.

It is also worth mentioning the splendid Amherst, Massachusetts, which passed a resolution stating that that the town would welcome ex-Gitmo-prisoners.  This has not and will not happen, but the town’s spirit is commendable.

If European States want Guantánamo to be closed they must do more than continue to shake their collective heads and mutter about Obama’s naivety and optimism in setting so short a deadline.  It is true that it was a meet-able deadline.  But Obama not only needed support from Congress but also from his European allies.  Europe needs to step up and offer a home to the cleared prisoners and perhaps then the U.S. will follow its lead.  Only then can Obama’s promise of change really begin.

– Clive Stafford Smith is the director of Reprieve, the UK legal action charity that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners. The opinions expressed are his own. -

As the British death toll climbed above 200 in Afghanistan this week, it became clearer that the politicians were betraying the soldiers who they were sending to fight and die.

The government talks about winning the battle for “hearts and minds” in Helmand Province – apparently oblivious to the loaded history of that phrase. This was the mantra of those who wasted 50,000 American lives in a futile battle to impose democracy at the end of a gun barrel in Vietnam.

Napalm never won an election, and nobody can expect an Afghan to warm to the rule of law when he witnesses his people being locked up in Bagram Air Force Base every day — abused and held without trial for years in Guantanamo’s evil twin. Bagram already holds three times as many prisoners as the Cuban black hole, and $50 million is being spent on a new prison that will add another 1,100 cells.

Captain Kirk Black, an American soldier I met in Guantanamo Bay, is now stationed in the dusty backroad of Afghanistan. He e-mailed, asking Reprieve to represent Gul Khan, a local sheep farmer who had been locked up in Bagram in error. He said that if we could bring justice to an Afghan peasant, then he and his platoon would be a little bit safer. Gul Khan is now back with his flock, and I hope Capt. Black gets credit for his release.

Conversely, British politicians are endangering the lives of soldiers when they conspire with their American allies to perpetuate injustice in Bagram. This, ultimately, is the headline of the latest litigation we announced yesterday.

The background facts show Britain’s complicity in another illegal act of rendition. In 2004, the British arrested two men in Iraq, and turned them over to the Americans, who took them to Bagram. The men remain there to this day, daily abused and divorced from the most basic due process.

This was kept secret for five years. Only in February 2009 did John Hutton apologize to Parliament, admitting that Britain knew about this illegal rendition at the time. The transfer to Bagram had been necessary, he said, because the two men were Pakistani: the implication was that there were no translators in Iraq since they spoke Urdu.

Assuming him to be sincere, I wrote asking for details about the prisoners, so that we could reunite them with their legal rights. Three months later, I finally received a reply: To tell us the men’s names would violate their rights under the Data Protection Act.

Here is a government that leaves your private details littered over the national rail network, but when they want to cover up a crime suddenly the Data Protection Act swings into action. (Presumably, next time the mafia kidnaps you, Don Corleone will assert a legal duty not to reveal where you are being held.)

It is not easy to identify someone who is in a secret prison like Bagram, but we have located a prisoner, recently released, who was able to fill in a few details. He recalled the two men coming from Iraq. He could not remember their full names, but the man he called Saifullah spoke perfect English. The other, Salah Din, spoke Arabic, but suffered from a serious mental illness thanks to the abuse he had been through.

But we can’t help them until we know their real names, and are able to contact their families for authorization.

Bob Ainsworth has taken over Hutton’s job. Now he faces a simple choice: He can do right, or he can do wrong. What he cannot do is tell young British soldiers to fight and die for the rule of law, while simultaneously stabbing them in the back by promoting injustice in Afghanistan.

- Moazzam Begg is Director for the British organisation, Cageprisoners. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Little seems to have changed regarding the treatment of prisoners held at the U.S. military-run Bagram prison since I was there (2002-2004). The recent study conducted by the BBC shows allegations of sleep deprivation, stress positions, beatings, degrading treatment, religious and racial abuse have gone unabated. On a personal level though, I can’t help wonder if British intelligence services are still involved.

In April this year, a report issued by Cageprisoners entitled Fabricating Terrorism II highlighted through eyewitness testimony the cases of 29 people, all of them either British residents or citizens, who had allegedly been tortured and abused in the presence of British intelligence agents or at their behest.

One of them, the case of Farid Hilali, featured in the Guardian newspaper, showed how allegations of complicity in torture against British intelligence predated the Sept. 11 attacks. The story of Jamil Rahman too – regarding allegations of British complicity in his torture in Bangladesh – would have been included in the report but he was worried at the time about the safety of his family. The recurrent factor in all these cases is the extent to which denial and prevarication remain as much a part of the intelligence services’ arsenal as outsourcing torture and abuse. The others include the British cases of Omar Deghayes, Bisher Al-Rawi, Jamil Elbanna, Richard Belmar, Shaker Aamer and Binyam Mohamed – all of whom were held at Bagram.

Shortly after I returned from Guantanamo my father showed me a letter he received from the British Foreign Office. The letter, written in 2002, claims that UK officials were not given access to prisoners in Bagram. At the time, I was being held captive there by the U.S. military and, amongst other alphabet intelligence agencies, was being interrogated by MI5, who were aware that torture, abusive and degrading treatment was being meted out to prisoners– including British citizens.

During my time there I saw two people being beaten severely: one after he’d lost consciousness following days of having his hands shackled to the top of a cage; the other after a very crude and ultimately futile escape attempt. Both were killed.

In eleven months of custody in Bagram I was hogtied, punched, kicked, shackled to the top of a door, hooded, strip-searched regularly, put in stress positions and deprived of sleep.

Of course, this wasn’t always the case, and there were some decent soldiers who balked at the very idea of such abuse. (Some of the soldiers have even expressed clear remorse and regret to me since my return. One of them is Damien Corsetti who was brought up for charges of detainee abuse in both Bagram and Abu Ghraib prisons).

Nonetheless, such treatment wasn’t unusual. The worst of it for me was hearing the sounds of a woman screaming I was led to believe was my wife being tortured while an interrogator waved pictures of my children in front of me asking: “Do you think you’ll ever see them again?” or “What do you think happened to them the night we took you?” Several months later I learned that my family were safe but, those screams I knew were not make-believe.

In July 2005, four prisoners carried out an unprecedented but successful escape attempt from Bagram. Later, they participated in an interview on an Arabic language television channel describing how they had seen a woman in custody. After his release from Guantanamo earlier this year, Binyam Mohamed told me that he recognised the picture I showed him of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani woman - whom the U.S. authorities deny was ever held at Bagram – who he had last seen in Bagram in a state of near insanity.

I met at least five children in Bagram (2002) – four of whom were taken to Guantanamo and two of whom are still there. One of them, Omar Khadr, a Canadian national, was brought in at the age of fifteen so terribly wounded he looked like he was dead. His left eye was shot out and there were two huge exit wounds to his shoulder and chest. Another, a young Afghan teenager called Shams was shot in his hip by a U.S. soldier and unable to walk. I used to help to carry him to take him to the improvised barrel we had to use as a toilet – amongst 10 of us. Other than that walking and talking were prohibited in Bagram.

Earlier this year, when the new U.S. president was promising the world he’d close down Guantanamo and the secret detention sites and put an end to torture, I was touring the UK with a former U.S. soldier who had guarded some of us in Guantanamo. We were both telling the world that while we welcomed the announcement of the closure of the world’s most infamous prison, nothing was being said about places like Bagram. Several films, including the oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, were made about this place, but still little Bagram was off the international radar. As people who had served time on both sides of the wire we hoped that someone was listening. The truth is that by the time I’d passed through Bagram I was looking forward to Guantanamo.

After becoming the public relations disaster Guantanamo clearly is, we’re told days are numbered. But judging by the escalation of military activity in Afghanistan and the possibility that some Guantanamo prisoners might be transferred there , the abuses in Bagram may continue to get noticed – every couple of years or so.

- Daniel Gorevan is head of Amnesty International’s Counter Terror with Justice campaign. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Tony Blair’s government reportedly advised MI5 officers that the UK must not be “seen to condone” torture. However, evidence is mounting that British agents knowingly exploited torture perpetrated by others.

Take the case of Khaled al Maqtari, a Yemeni arrested by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2004. He told Amnesty International that he was frogmarched from a “torture room” at Abu Ghraib out to a UK special forces jeep, huddled in a wet blanket, with the marks of beatings clearly visible on his body.

The British agents did not mistreat him, but neither did they make any effort to find out what had happened to him. Instead they drove him through the darkened streets of Baghdad, asking him to identify suspect locations, before returning him at dawn to Abu Ghraib. Three days later he disappeared into the CIA’s secret jails, not to resurface for more than two years.

Turning a blind eye to torture or abuse, benefiting from the results of that mistreatment, and delivering a man back to certain further abuse begs serious questions about the UK’s understanding and respect for its human rights and humanitarian law obligations. The question is not just whether British agents are “seen” to be cheering on torture. Whatever else might be said about keeping up appearances, states and their officials are required to do much more in the face of torture than simply mutter politely that they do not condone it.

What we should be asking is whether the UK and its agents knew, or should have known, that detainees held in U.S. custody in Abu Ghraib, or by the secret police in countries such as Pakistan or the Gambia were likely to be tortured or abused. What did the UK and its agents do or fail to do in the face of that knowledge? These are serious questions, with legal and even criminal consequences, and urgently need to be publicly and comprehensively answered.

Other incidents highlight the need for broader public inquiry. The UK provided information leading to the arrest of several men who subsequently suffered  rendition and torture at the hands of the CIA. Jamil el Banna and Bisher al Rawi, for instance, were British residents arrested in the Gambia and transferred to U.S. detention in Afghanistan, finally resurfacing in Guantánamo Bay. British agents have also been involved in the interrogation of detainees in Pakistani custody, where the risks of torture or other ill-treatment are well known.

In the case of British resident Binyam Mohamed, interrogation by UK agents in Pakistan was the prelude to rendition, torture and secret detention in Morocco and Afghanistan, followed by years in Guantánamo.

When questioned recently about British involvement in the rendition and secret detention programme, Tony Blair claimed that “It’s only ever journalists who ask me questions about issues like that. It’s not an issue [with people] out there.”

The individuals whose lives have been broken by torture might disagree. So too would those who believe in respect in for human rights; or anyone who believes that action – and not just words or appearances – are necessary if torture is ever to be eradicated.

We need a proper investigation, simple assurances are not good enough. Government investigations to date have been piecemeal and inadequate. What information we have has been revealed primarily through litigation and investigations in the press and by Amnesty International and other NGOs.

We need to know who authorised British agents to turn a blind eye to torture, ill-treatment and renditions, and how far such authorisations went. As long as questions about Britain’s involvement in rendition and torture remain it will be an issue for Tony Blair and for the government. Whether they like it or not.

There is one, and only one, way to stop the questions: reveal the full truth and hold those responsible to account.

- Cori Crider represents 30 Guantánamo prisoners as an attorney with legal charity Reprieve. The opinions expressed are her own. -

You would be hard-pressed to find a kid more thrilled on Barack Obama’s first day in office than Mohammed el Gharani. On January 21, had you been standing at the right corner of Guantanamo Bay, you could have heard him whoop for joy when the U.S. President made history—so we thought—by closing the prison where el Gharani grew up.

It is four months since that decision. The president gave a speech, “clarifying” his plans for Guantanamo on Thursday. But I fear we will all look back on May 21, 2009, as the day real history was made—The Day President Obama Un-Closed Guantanamo.

In many ways the die seems already cast. The President revived the military commissions last week, a move that risks stretching the prison’s life out for months. Just two prisoners have left Guantanamo since January. One, Binyam Mohamed, had humiliated the U.S. and the UK over his torture; the other, Lakhdar Boumediene, had been ordered released by a federal judge.

It is unclear what the administration is waiting for in Mohammed el Gharani’s case. He was found innocent in court, just like Boumediene, and he has a country to go to. He could climb on a plane to Chad tomorrow, were the administration simply to wake up and do what it has been ordered to do.

In this, el Gharani is luckier than many—namely, Guantanamo’s sixty refugees, who require the U.S. or a goodwilled third country to save them from torture at home. For these men, the administration’s dithering spells disaster. For while the government frittered away the global goodwill that would have helped them house refugees in January, the right regrouped.

Now, talking heads and demagogues have found a new target in Gitmo for scaremongering— a group of innocent Muslim refugees from China called the Uighurs. After rumors swirled that a couple of Uighurs might be released into the U.S., members of the right published libellous statements saying they were tied to al Qaeda. (Even the Bush administration conceded the Uighurs were not the enemy.)

Republicans in Congress have vowed to fight “putting terrorists in American towns” to the bitter end. On the heels of this panic, even the Democrats yanked from a bill funding to close Guantanamo. Yet nearly every country in Europe has made clear: if the US takes no refugees, Europe will take no refugees.

Up to now, the Obama administration has kept silent before this storm of falsehoods, though it well knows it could doom the closure of Guantanamo. We know of no other options the US has pursued for the refugees, aside from Europe and the US. Rumors of Middle Eastern havens have not, apparently, been pursued. Those options closed by inaction, what is left? Filling cells in Bagram, perhaps, or worse still, returning men to Tunisia, China, or Uzbekistan. These no longer seem beyond possibility.

The xenophobia we have seen on the U.S. airwaves and on the Hill this week reflect the worst of America. El Gharani knows a lot about such racism; as a black boy in Medina, local schools shut him out; and as a teen in Guantanamo, he bore the brunt of abuse because he was both dark-skinned and Muslim.

We at Reprieve have watched Mohammed el Gharani grow up in prison. It is high time he left. And while it is not too late for President Obama to let him go, and take a strong stand on these issues, he has lost precious time. Today we heard moral equivocation from the lips of the very man who lambasted Guantanamo repeatedly on the campaign trail.

*This post was updated after the speech President Obama made on Thursday.