First published in 2010 by Oberon Books Ltd
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Copyright © Victoria Brittain, 2010
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PB ISBN: 9781849430517
E ISBN: 9781783198412
Cover photography by Dan Colcer
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With gratitude to Sabah, Josephine, Dina, Zinnira, Hamda, Ragaa, Wendy, Amani and Saiyeda
Contents
Guantanamo Bay
A “war on terror” was declared by President George Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the United States. The US bombing of Afghanistan, the fall of the Taliban government, a chaotic exodus of refugees into Pakistan, and a world-wide hunt by the US for Osama Bin Laden and his associates, led thousands of muslims to prisons, interrogation centres, and torture chambers in many countries.
On January 11 2002, Muslim prisoners from Afghanistan began being deported by the US to Guantanamo Bay, a prison camp in Cuba where the US retained sovereignty and a military base. Guantanamo was termed a place where the US constitution did not apply.
For four years even the names of most of the prisoners were kept secret.
The 774 prisoners were designated “enemy combatants,” and the Geneva Conventions were declared not to apply to them. Many dozens of men were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” to countries such as Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and Syria where they were interrogated under torture. Another 94 were held in secret prisons run by the CIA in countries such as Afghanistan, Poland and Romania for several years. Twenty eight of these were designated as “high value detainees” and 14 of them were transferred to Guantanamo Bay in September 2006.
Many of the prisoners were handed over to the US in exchange for “bounties” of $5,000 offered for foreigners, particularly Arabs. A study by Seton Hall Law School in the US found that 86% of detainees were not picked up on the battlefields, but captured by Pakistani authorities or the Afghan Northern Alliance. Others were picked up by the Americans in countries as far afield as Bosnia, Gambia, Zambia, often in cooperation with British Intelligence, and flown to prisons in Kandahar and Bagram before ending in Guantanamo Bay.
In June 2004, after prolonged legal battles by US lawyers, the US Supreme Court ruled that men held in Guantanamo had the right to have their cases heard in federal courts. By April 2010 rulings on the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions had been made by US judges in 46 cases. In 34 of these, the judges ruled that the government had failed to demonstrate that the men had any connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Nevertheless, the vast majority of those still held had no idea when, if ever, they would get out. President Obama’s promise to close the camp within a year of taking office was broken, and no new deadline set.
In July 2010, 181 prisoners were still in Guantanamo Bay.
In July 2010, the new coalition goverment in Britain announced that an inquiry was to be set up under Sir Peter Gibson — a former appeal court judge — into the involvement of the British government and security services in the torture and abuse of terror suspects held in other countries.
‘Control orders’
Control orders are – as their name suggests – orders which control people by subjecting them to restrictions on their daily lives. They are applied to persons suspected of involvement in terrorism or support for terrorism, who the security services say cannot be prosecuted.
After 9/11, foreign suspected terrorists who could not legally be deported because of the risk they would be tortured in their home countries were detained indefinitely in high security prisons.
In December 2004, the judicial committee of the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court) ruled indefinite detention unlawful, since it applied only to foreigners, and not to British terrorist suspects.
In March 2005 Control Orders were introduced, and are applied both to British terrorist suspects and to foreign suspects who cannot be deported.
A typical control order contains a 16-hour curfew (meaning that the controlled person must stay in his accommodation for 16 hours a day, eg from 6pm to 10am – and permission is needed even to go into the garden in curfew hours); an electronic tag, worn round the ankle, to allow monitors to track movements; an obligation to report to monitors before leaving the accommodation and on return; a geographical boundary beyond which movement is prohibited; advance vetting of all visitors; restrictions on meetings outside the home; no mobile phone, computer or telecomms equipment except for one land-line phone; restriction to one bank account. The orders are imposed for a year at a time, and some controlled persons have been controlled for five years.1
A high court judge has to give permission before a control order is made, but the proposed controlled person is given no notice and no chance to challenge the order in advance. It generally takes over a year for the controlled person’s challenge to be heard in the courts, during which time all the restrictions are in force.
The controlled persons are generally given very little information about the reasons for the order. Frequently the allegation has been in very general terms, eg ‘It is assessed that you have been engaged in attack planning’, with no further details.
Until 2005 the government accepted that foreign terrorist suspects could not be returned to states such as Algeria, Jordan and Libya because of the serious risk of torture. But in that year, the government began to seek diplomatic assurances from these