The Great Debate UK

from Reuters Investigates:

Bin Laden “wanted to be a martyr.” U.S. obliged.

Today's special report "The bin Laden kill plan" is based on interviews with two dozen current and former senior intelligence, White House and State Department officials. It explores the policies and actions of the United States in its 13-year hunt for Osama bin Laden. 

Richard Armitage, who was deputy secretary of state in Bush's first term, voiced the view that prevailed through two presidencies. "I think we took Osama bin Laden at his word, that he wanted to be a martyr," Armitage told Reuters.  

The U.S. government, he said, would do all it could to help bin Laden realize that goal.

The real breakthrough that led to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden came from a mysterious CIA detainee, Hassan Ghul, according to our sources.

Multiple U.S. intelligence officials told Reuters the real breakthrough that led to bin Laden came from a mysterious CIA detainee named Hassan Ghul. Ghul, who was not captured until 2004 at the earliest, was not subjected to waterboarding, the CIA's roughest and most controversial interrogation technique. It had already been phased out by the time he was captured. But two U.S. officials acknowledged he may well have been subjected to other coercive CIA tactics, possibly including stress positions, sleep deprivation and being slammed into a wall. 

It was Ghul, the officials said, who after years of tantalizing hints from other detainees finally provided the information that prompted the CIA to focus intensely on finding Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti, pseudonym for the courier who would lead them to bin Laden.

Much about Ghul remains obscure, including his nationality. Two U.S. officials told Reuters, however, that at some point the CIA turned him over to authorities in Pakistan. The officials said their understanding is that in 2007, Pakistani authorities released him from custody. The officials said the U.S. government now believes Ghul has once again become a frontline militant fighter.

Doubts linger over Obama’s Guantanamo intentions

-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.

A Bagram betrayal

– 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.

Bagram: Where the future of Guantanamo meets its tortuous past

- 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.

Britain’s torture memos: keeping up appearances

- 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.

No we can’t: Obama’s Guantanamo

- 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.