Britain is complicit in this horror

Straw and MI5 share the blame for the degradation of Guantánamo

by Victoria Brittain

The dossier by the three young men from Tipton reported by the Guardian today, with its graphic images of torture in Guantánamo Bay, reveals the horror of what has been suffered, and is still being suffered in that lawless place, by British citizens and residents, with the complicity of MI5 and the Foreign Office. This is a dossier that highlights the lies and incompetence of MI5 and Foreign Office officials. No minister should ignore it for a day, knowing that four British citizens and two residents are living this hell now.

Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed have set out the degradation they and their colleagues of many nationalities suffered: shackling in a bent position to a ring in the floor for hours or days, isolation for weeks or months, being held naked, kept in freezing air conditioning, sleep deprivation, near-starvation, imposed injections, forced shaving of hair and beard, withholding of family mail, refusal of medical attention, beatings, interrogations, psychological torture to force false confessions or false testimony against others, being confronted with confessions they never made, sexual humiliation, being shown pornographic photos and videos.

Their report is newly corroborated by four colleagues and will be impossible to dismiss. Two of the Frenchmen released on July 27 told their lawyer, Jacques Debray, details of ill-treatment they suffered in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, which Mr Debray described as "close to those of Abu Ghraib". And on radio the Swedish citizen Mehdi Ghezali, also released last month, described torture and sexual humiliation.

Meanwhile, Marcos Garcia, the lawyer for a Spaniard, Hamed Abderrahman, released in March, said last week he is bringing a lawsuit against the US and George Bush. Mr Abderrahman witnessed several prisoners attempt to hang themselves with their clothes.

The Tipton dossier is a crucial tool for the US lawyers trying this week to get urgent habeas corpus hearings for men like Jamil el-Banna and Bishar al-Rawi, who the foreign sEcretary is scandalously trying to pretend are not our responsibility, and who wear armbands in the camp saying, respectively, Jordan and Iraq.

Mr Banna is a Jordanian/Palestinian who has lived here for 10 years and has five children, all British citizens. He is now an acute medical case. His London doctor’s records since 1999 show him suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and, since 2002, diabetes. The Tipton statement says these illnesses are not believed in Guantánamo and he has not received medicine or proper diet.

Shafiq Rasul said that in Guantánamo Mr Banna lost about 40 kilos, and became very thin. He was interrogated only five times, and was told by his US interrogator, when he cried, showing her photographs of his children: "We’re trying to get you out of here, we know you’re an innocent man."

He was repeatedly questioned about the whereabouts of his friend, Abu Qatada. (In fact, Abu Qatada was arrested in the UK in 2002.) Family videos from 2001 show a large, gentle-looking man playing with his children and dancing with his mother. His family have had no letter from him for a year.

Bishar al-Rawi, who is Mr Banna’s close friend and translator, has lived here for 20 years, including schooling at Millfield, and has a sister and brother here who are British citizens with business interests. The two men were kidnapped by the Americans, with the connivance of the British, while they were on a business trip to Gambia to start a mobile peanut oil factory in October 2002, and taken to Afghanistan.

Mr Rawi’s older brother, Wahab, a British citizen, was arrested at the same time in Banjul, but released after 27 days’ interrogation, and came back to England having lost $250,000 on his failed business venture. Bishar went through about 50 interrogations in Guantánamo, including some that asked him about the very same Argos catalogue battery charger that got him arrested in the UK in 2002 as he was about to board the plane to Gambia. The British judge threw the case out then.

What is going on here when the US investigators did not know the outcome of the court case in Britain against Bishar? Or that Abu Qatada, one of the Islamic clerics who interest them so much, is in Belmarsh prison?

Nor were they, or British officials in Guantánamo, very quick to find out that, although the investigators forced the Tipton men to confess they were three men in a video of a Bin Laden rally in Afghanistan, their court, workplace and university records show they were at home when the video was shot in 2000.

And how can British intelligence officials quietly go along with the US practice of sending men like Mamdouh Habib, an Australian, to Egypt to be tortured? When he returned to Guantánamo he bled from his nose, ears and mouth when asleep.

Egypt and other allies who do this dirty work for the US and Britain are also the source of much of the false information that has made being friendly with critics of those governments’ corrupt and repressive habits enough to confine men without charge in Guantánamo or Belmarsh.

And how can Britain knowingly be party to another out rageous kidnapping by the Americans, of five Algerians from Bosnia, after a Bosnian court had ordered their release for lack of evidence? Or how can we quietly accept the fate of men like the Kuwaiti Fouad Mahmoud al-Rabiah, and numerous Pakistani detainees who were sold to the Americans?

The Pentagon has recently created combatant status review tribunals staffed by military officers, in response to the supreme court ruling that allowed petitions for habeas corpus from Guantánamo. Britain must not accept this cynical fresh obstacle to justice in court.

Donald Rumsfeld and the ranking US generals in Iraq may have survived the Abu Ghraib scandal, but in Britain we should do things differently. Jack Straw and Eliza Manningham-Buller should apologise and resign over Guantánamo. The British citizens and residents should be immediately flown home. If any prisoner has a case to answer that is not based on evidence given under torture or fabricated, their families would welcome their being tried here.

It is nearly two years since Lord Justice Steyn asked: "Ought our government to make plain publicly and unambiguously our condemnation of the utter lawlessness at Guantánamo Bay?" He spoke for all decent people.

· Victoria Brittain, with Gillian Slovo, compiled the play Guantánamo, now at the New Ambassadors Theatre in London and in New York from August 20

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1275525,00.html