[Vision2020] Freedom and Democracy

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1382033,00.html

Guantanamo Briton 'in handcuff torture' 

David Rose on the allegation that a British detainee was suspended by his 
wrists as punishment for reciting the Koran while in US military custody 

Sunday January 2, 2005
The Observer 

A British detainee at Guantanamo Bay has told his lawyer he was tortured 
using the 'strappado', a technique common in Latin American dictatorships in which 
a prisoner is left suspended from a bar with handcuffs until they cut deeply 
into his wrists. The reason, the prisoner says, was that he was caught 
reciting the Koran at a time when talking was banned. 

He says he has also been repeatedly shaved against his will. In one such 
incident, a guard told him: 'This is the part that really gets to you Muslims, 
isn't it?' 

The strappado allegation was one among many made about treatment at both 
Guantanamo and the US base at Bagram in Afghanistan made to the British lawyer 
Clive Stafford Smith when he visited his clients Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar 
at the Cuban prison six weeks ago, having tried for the previous 14 months to 
obtain the necessary security clearance. 

But it is clear the disturbing claim is only the tip of the iceberg. Under 
the rules the United States military has imposed for defence lawyers who visit 
Guantanamo, Stafford Smith has not been allowed to keep his notes of meetings 
with prisoners, and will not be able to read them again until they have been 
examined and de-classified by a government censor. 

He cannot disclose in public anything the men have told him until it too has 
been been de-classified, on pain of likely imprisonment in the US. 

Stafford Smith has drawn up a 30-page report on the tortures which Begg and 
Belmar say they have endured, and sent it as an annexe with a letter to the 
Prime Minister which Downing Street received shortly before Christmas. For the 
time being - possibly forever - the report cannot be published, because the 
Americans claim that the torture allegations amount to descriptions of classified 
interrogation methods. 

However, Stafford Smith's letter to Tony Blair - which has been declassified 
- says that on his visit to the Guantanamo prisoners, he heard 'credible and 
consistent evidence that both men have been savagely tortured at the hands of 
the United States' with Begg having suffered not only physical but 'sexual 
abuse' which has had 'mental health consequences'. 

Thousands of documents obtained last month under the US Freedom of 
Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union support the claims of torture at 
Guantanamo, which has apparently continued long after the publication last 
April of photographs of detainees being abused at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in 
Iraq. They include memos and emails to superiors by FBI and Defense 
Intelligence Agency officers, who say they were appalled by the methods being used by 
the young military interrogators at Guantanamo. 

According to the memos, the abuse was 'systematic', with frequent beatings, 
chokings, and sleep deprivation for days on end. Religious humiliation was also 
routine, with one agent reporting a case in which a prisoner was wrapped in 
an Israeli flag. 

'On a couple of occasions I entered interview rooms to find a detainee 
chained hand and foot in a foetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or 
water,' an anonymous FBI agent wrote on 2 August. 'Most times they had urinated or 
defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.' 


Reports of identical treatment were first published by The Observer last 
March, in interviews with three British detainees who had been released - Shafiq 
Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed. They were then strenuously denied by the 
Pentagon. But according to another FBI memo dated 10 May, when an agent asked 
Guantanamo's former commander, Major General Geoffrey Miller, about techniques 
the FBI regarded as illegal, he was told that the interrogators 'had their 
marching orders from the Sec[retary] Def[ense]', Donald Rumsfeld. General Miller 
told the US Congress under oath that although Rumsfeld had authorised the use 
of dogs to intimidate prisoners at Guantanamo, this had never happened. 
According to the memos, this was inaccurate. 

Stafford Smith asks Blair in his letter 'to approach the plight of my clients 
with renewed vigour'. Asked by The Observer whether he planned to do this 
last week, a Downing Street spokesman declined to comment. 

In a second letter, to the Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons, Stafford 
Smith suggests that Britain's complicity in abusive techniques at both 
Guantanamo and Afghanistan, where Begg and Belmar were held before being taken to 
Cuba, is wider than previously thought. 

Begg and Belmar, he writes, were both questioned by an MI5 officer who gave 
his name as 'Andrew', while they were being abused by Americans both in 
Afghanistan and Guantanamo. According to the letter, 'he was the one who told Mr Begg 
that the more Mr Begg (falsely) said he was guilty of something, the quicker 
he would get home. Andrew was also the one who said that he would not comply 
with both of my clients' requests for consular notification, as well as Mr 
Begg's requests to learn whether his pregnant wife, Sally, and their three 
children were safe in Pakistan.' Stafford Smith is asking for Andrew's full name and 
access to him, to assist his client's defence. 

Having fled Afghanistan where he had been trying to set up a school before 
the war against the Taliban began in October 2001, Begg was abducted by American 
agents from the house the family was renting in Islamabad. 

Belmar was captured after attending a religious school for a few weeks before 
the 11 September terrorist attacks. An FBI source who personally questioned 
him before he was sent to Guantanamo has told The Observer he recommended his 
immediate release because he had 'no involvement' with terrorism, but was 
overruled by MI5. 

Stafford Smith says in his letter to Baroness Symons that Begg made a false 
written confession after being tortured in February 2003, when two agents who 
had abused him at Bagram - where Begg witnessed the deaths of two prisoners 
officially classed as homicide - came to Guantanamo. But neither he nor Stafford 
Smith have been allowed to see this statement, which apparently forms the main 
grounds for his continued incarceration. Stafford Smith asks the Foreign 
Office for help in obtaining a copy, and asks: 'What kind of civilised legal 
system does not allow the suspect to see his own statements? How can the prisoner's 
statement be said to be classified information when, if it were true, the 
prisoner would already know it?' 

Last night the Foreign Office said 'we are trying to do our utmost' for the 
four British detainees while 'we take every allegation of torture seriously'. 
The request for information about the MI5 man would be considered. 

Azmatt Begg, Moazzam's father, said he had given up hope the British 
government would intervene in a meaningful way to help his son. 'They are not 
protecting their own citizens, but merely falling in with whatever the Americans want 
to do.' 

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V2020 Post by Ted Moffett
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