The Great Debate UK

Intelligence cooperation: time to ask the hard questions

- Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher for Human Rights Watch, has worked extensively on counterterrorism issues. The opinions expressed are her own. -

Torture is prohibited under international law, at anytime and anywhere. No exceptions are allowed. Yet the UK, France and Germany are engaged in ongoing counterterrorism cooperation with foreign intelligence services in countries that routinely use torture.

These European governments use foreign torture information for intelligence and policing purposes. And the rules in each country meant to keep torture evidence out of the courts – including foreign torture evidence – don’t work  because the burden falls on defendants to prove the information  was obtained under torture, a nearly impossible task.

In Human Rights Watch’s new report, No Questions Asked: Intelligence Cooperation with Countries that Torture, we argue that uncritical use of foreign torture information violates the duty of all countries under international law to prevent and eradicate torture worldwide.

French, German and UK intelligence services say they cannot always know the sources and methods used to obtain information abroad.

But intelligence officers should be under clear instructions to make the necessary inquiries – ask the hard questions – to ensure that European services are not using foreign torture information.  To do otherwise implicitly validates the use of unlawful methods.

Torture ruling a victory for free speech

-Padraig Reidy is news editor at Britain’s Index on Censorship an organisation promoting freedom of expression. The opinions expressed are his own.-

The Court of Appeal’s decision on Wednesday to release material relating to the torture of “war on terror” detainee Binyam Mohamed is undoubtedly an embarrassment for David Miliband, the Foreign Office and the government.

The redacted evidence, itself a mere seven paragraphs, revealed reports that Mohamed, who has never been charged with any terror offence, was shackled during interrogation, subjected to sleep deprivation and suffered severe mental stress.

The paragraphs did not reveal any evidence of direct British intelligence involvement in torture, though the judges made it clear in the last paragraph: “The treatment reported, if had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom, would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom in 1972. Although it is not necessary for us to categorise the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of BM by the United States authorities.”

So one can understand the Foreign office’s attempts to cover up the evidence: but at a time when Barack Obama’s White House has revealed far more disturbing details of the treatment of renditioned prisones than the ones contained in these paragraphs, it seems disingenuous for Milliband to claim, as he did, that the publication of these paragraphs would endanger U.S.-UK intelligence sharing.

Miliband’s lawyers even went so far as to have a paragraph redacted from the Court of Appeal judgement at the last minute, in a scrabbling effort to defend the reputation of the security services.

So was there a motive beyond this? Embarrassment? Shame? Simple control freakery? Possibly a combination of the three. Both Miliband and his Conservative shadow, William Hague, have spun the judgement as upholding the “control principle” on intelligence sharing. This suggests that there would not be any significant difference in approach to secrecy by any future Conservative government. Meanwhile, Miliband has ruled out a public inquiry into Mohamed’s case — unsurprising when one considers the lengths to which the government went to conceal seven tiny morsels of information.

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.

The real torture is in the waiting

- Marc Callcutt is a casework lawyer for the Reprieve Death Penalty team. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Exactly five years ago, the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, two Britons, Naheem Hussain and Rehan Zaman, were in Dadyal Police Station, in Pakistan having been arrested on murder charges.

The police used their usual interrogation techniques. Rehan was hung upside down, in what is known as an inverse strappado, and had one of his finger nails pulled out. Naheem was tied to a chair and had red chillies rubbed in his eyes. Both had the police attempt to break their legs, and both were subjected to hours of falaka – a torture that involves whipping of the feet with a rod or cane, used because it is incredibly painful but leaves few scars. The torture was such that in the end, both of them signed “confessions” accepting their role in the murders.

Yet, if you talk to the two men now, it is not the 14 days of torture they suffered at the hands of the police they will complain about, but rather their ongoing torture at the hands of the Pakistan criminal justice system. Five years on, they remain in prison, unconvicted, desperate for their trial. Every day they wake up uncertain of how long they will remain in prison – the potential of the death penalty hanging over them like the sword of Damocles. They will tell you that this torture is much crueller than anything that they faced at the hands of the police. Rehan in particular has been told Reprieve that if his case fails to progress by the end of the year he will be forced to “sentence himself”.

The mental anguish that those on death row suffer has become so common that in legal circles it is simply known as “the death row phenomena” and courts have had to take action to limit such suffering. The European Court of Human Rights refused to allow the extradition of a German national to the U.S. on the basis that the “ever-present and mounting anguish of awaiting execution” was a breach of his right not to suffer torture or inhuman or degrading treatment. Similarly, the Privy Council here in the UK decided that to carry out an execution “after holding [defendants] in an agony of suspense” for more than five years would be inhuman and degrading.

If Naheem and Rehan were being held within the Privy Council’s jurisdiction, there would be no chance of them facing execution now that their case has been delayed for more than five years. The courts would simply not permit this tortuous status quo to continue. In fact, the case against both men would be thrown out, given the physical torture that they both were subjected to on their arrest. Instead though, their case limps on – seemingly years away from a conclusion.

Now Reprieve, along with their local lawyers, is working ensure that the torture they suffered five years ago is properly investigated, and no evidence gathered during those 14 days of brutality is used against them at their trial. The British government did contact the Pakistan authorities to request such an investigation, but months have passed and they are yet to have a response. Meanwhile, Naheem and Rehan have remained in prison. Now the Prime Minister himself needs to raise the issue with President Zadari, if we are to see any progress.

Bagram lesser known – but more evil – twin of Guantanamo

-Clara Gutteridge is renditions investigator at Reprieve. The opinions expressed are her own.-

The big surprise in Tuesday’s revelations of prisoner abuse at Bagram is how long these stories have taken to reach the international media, given the scale of the problem.

Bagram Airforce Base is Guantanamo Bay’s lesser known – but more evil – twin. Thousands of prisoners have been “through the system” at Bagram, and around 600 are currently held there. Meanwhile President Obama’s lawyers are fighting to hold them incommunicado; stripped of the right to challenge the reasons for their imprisonment.

In this way, Bagram Airforce Base is just the latest in a long line of U.S.-created legal black holes. And as evidence of abuse there has begun to leak out, the U.S. military has responded in exactly the same way as it did to similar allegations at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere: by insisting that the torture is just the work of a few low-ranking “bad apples” and repeating that the U.S. “does not torture”.

Sad to say, the truth has revealed itself to be just the opposite. Recently released U.S. government memos have shown the efforts of top U.S. lawyers to justify torture techniques to be used in prisons far from U.S. continental territory. Faced with such evidence, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that prisons like Bagram were created in large part because the U.S. wanted to torture certain people held there.

The Obama administration argues that the prisoners in Bagram are not entitled to challenge their imprisonment because Afghanistan is in a state of war, and that therefore different legal rules apply. But many of the former Bagram prisoners, such as British residents Jamil El-Banna and Bisher Al-Rawi, were captured in countries far from the Afghan “battlefield”, and forcibly transferred into the war-zone. It seems wholly unfair that prisoners be denied rights simply because they have been kidnapped and rendered into a legal black hole.

In such renderings, the U.S. has not acted alone. The British government has recently admitted to capturing two men in Iraq who were handed to the U.S. and subsequently rendered to Afghanistan. Reprieve’s investigations suggest that these men were taken out of Iraq because the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal was breaking, and Afghanistan represented a safer, darker place to hold them indefinitely. Yet the British government refuses to assist us in our efforts to offer the men legal representation, preferring to allow them to languish in Bagram.

from The Great Debate:

Should torture be part of the U.S.’s counterterrorism approach?

The following piece was co-written by Matthew Alexander, Joe Navarro and Lieutenant General Robert Gard (USA-Ret.) They are pictured from left to right.

Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a special operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of "How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq." He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.

Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism expert, is an adjunct faculty member at the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.

Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, Jr. (USA-Ret.) is president emeritus at the Monterey Institute for International Studies and a senior military fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. The views expressed are their own.

President Obama decided not to release a new group of detainee abuse photographs because he believes they would inflame our enemies and threaten American troops. Indeed, the shocking photos from Abu Ghraib have served as a powerful recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and have sparked outrage across the world.

It is not the release of the photos, however, that would elicit horror and anger. It is their brutal content and the misguided policies they reflect. The controversy surrounding the photos and the president’s release of four Department of Justice memos have brought into sharp focus a debate that has been in the shadows of public discourse for several years: Should the U.S. include torture and cruelty in its counterterrorism arsenal?

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.