Text 8980, 506 rader
Skriven 2005-02-08 08:18:04 av Stephen Hayes (5:7106/20.0)
Ärende: family.debate: Detention without trial
==============================================
* Forwarded (from: DEBATE_FMY) by Stephen Hayes using timEd/2 1.10.y2k.
* Originally from family.debate@family-list.org (8:8/2) to debate3.
* Original dated: Mon Feb 07, 05:01

From: family.debate@family-list.org(family.debate)
To: debate3@family-bbs.org
Reply-To: family.debate@family-list.org

From: "Steve Hayes" <khanyab@lantic.net>

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1407040,00.html

Revealed: Britain's role in Guantanamo abduction


The Observer (London) Sunday February 6, 2005 by David Rose

British intelligence officials played a crucial part in the secret abduction of
UK citizen Martin Mubanga to Guantanamo Bay. There, he reveals today in an
exclusive interview, he endured 33 months of ill-treatment and often abusive
interrogation.

Documents seen by The Observer disclose that even the Pentagon's own lawyers
now accept that the intelligence that consigned him to Guantanamo may have been
deeply flawed. Mubanga, who was released without charge after his return to
Britain on 25 January, now plans to sue the British government.

In his interview today, the first by any of the four Britons who returned from
Guantanamo last month, Mubanga, 32, describes a horrifying catalogue of abuse:

**  In one interrogation session, he was forced to urinate in the corner
of the interview room while chained hand and foot.

**  He was treated to a regime known as 'BI [basic item] loss'. This meant
his thin mattress, trousers, shirts, towel, blankets, and flipflops were all
taken away, leaving him naked except for boxer shorts in an empty metal box.

**  Last autumn, while Pentagon lawyers were writing memos suggesting that
Mubanga may not have had any involvement in terrorism at all and may not have
been given a fair hearing, the Guantanamo authorities subjected him to the
harshest treatment in his 33 months in Guantanamo, with three brutal assaults
by the 'Instant Reaction Force' riot squad for trivial violations of the camp
rules.

** Mubanga's worst moment came last March, when the first five British
detainees were sent home. He had at first been told he would be joining them,
but was instead confined in a block with prisoners he could not communicate
with, and told he would be held there for many more years.

The disclosure that British intelligence was instrumental in consigning Mubanga
to Guantanamo raises serious questions about the consistency of British policy
towards the controversial US camp. In public, ministers, led by Lord Goldsmith,
the Attorney-General, negotiated for months with the Pentagon for the release
of British detainees.

Mubanga's solicitor, Louise Christian, said yesterday that she planned to take
legal action against the government. His arrest, detention and transfer had
clearly breached British, Zambian and international law, she said. 'We are
hoping to issue proceedings for the misfeasance of officials who colluded with
the Americans in effectively kidnapping him and taking him to Guantanamo.'

Mubanga, a former motorcycle courier, says he went to Afghanistan at the end of
2001 to study Islam. He was never, he insists, a sympathiser with al-Qaeda, and
he condemned the 9/11 attacks. 'I do not approve of the killing of innocent
men, women and children,' he said.

He says he fled to Pakistan after the beginning of the war against the Taliban,
but says that someone stole his passport. A dual British-Zambian national, he
phoned his family from Karachi and asked them to post him his Zambian passport.
He says he used this in February 2002 to go to Zambia, where he was joined by
his sister and stayed with other relatives.

However, on 2 March the Sunday Times claimed Mubanga had been arrested in
Afghanistan, fighting with the Taliban - presumably this referred to the man
who stole or was handed his passport. Soon afterwards, he was seized by Zambian
security men.

He was held in a series of guarded motels, where he was interrogated for days
by a female American official and a Briton who called himself Martin and said
he worked for MI6. 'Martin' produced Mubanga's British passport, together with
a list of Jewish organisations in New York and a military training manual that
he claimed Mubanga had handwritten. They had been found with the passport in a
cave in Afghanistan, he said. Mubanga pointed out that his handwriting was
nothing like that in the manual, and said he had never seen the documents
before, or been to any caves.

A few days later, Mubanga was loaded on to a plane by men in balaclavas and
flown to Guantanamo. For more than two years, the claims made by the MI6 man -
that he had been on a mission to reconnoitre targets in New York and had
travelled to Zambia on false documents - were the main grounds for his
detention.

Last October, this was confirmed by a Guantanamo Combatant Status Review
Tribunal, a panel of military officers. Later, however, this decision was
reviewed by a US military lawyer, who found it deeply flawed. His report shows
that Mubanga had asked to call members of his family in his defence, saying
they prove that he had not travelled to Zambia on false documents for a
terrorist mission, but to visit relatives on his own passport.

Last night a Foreign Office spokesman said he could not comment on the
activities of British intelligence or security agencies. He said Mubanga's
'transfer to Guantanamo Bay is a matter for the Zambian and American
authorities'.

============

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1406987,00.html

How I entered the hellish world of Guantanamo Bay

How I entered the hellish world of Guantanamo Bay

Martin Mubanga went on holiday to Zambia, but ended up spending 33 months in
Guantanamo Bay, some of the time in the feared Camp Echo. Free at last and
still protesting his innocence, he tells the full story to David Rose

The Observer (London) Sunday February 6, 2005
        by David Rose

Martin Mubanga can date the low point of his 33 months at Guantanamo Bay: 15
June, 2004. That sweltering Cuban morning, he was taken from the cellblock he
was sharing with speakers of the Afghan language Pashto, none of whom knew
English, for what had become his almost daily interrogation. As usual, his
hands were shackled in rigid, metal cuffs attached to a body belt; another set
of chains ran to his ankles, severely restricting his ability to move his legs.
Trussed in this fashion, he was lying on the interrogation booth floor.

The seemingly interminable questioning had already lasted for hours. 'I needed
the toilet,' Mubanga said, 'and I asked the interrogator to let me go. But he
just said, "you'll go when I say so". I told him he had five minutes to get me
to the toilet or I was going to go on the floor. He left the room. Finally, I
squirmed across the floor and did it in the corner, trying to minimise the
mess. I suppose he was watching through a one-way mirror or the CCTV camera. He
comes back with a mop and dips it in the pool of urine. Then he starts covering
me with my own waste, like he's using a big paintbrush, working methodically,
beginning with my feet and ankles and working his way up my legs. All the while
he's racially abusing me, cussing me: "Oh, the poor little negro, the poor
little nigger." He seemed to think it was funny.'

A few days later, Mubanga said, the same interrogator began to question him in
one of the camp's 'hot rooms', where the heating was turned up to almost 100F.
'When you went for interrogation, you never knew whether they were going to
take you to a booth where the air conditioning was turned up to the max, so it
was really cold, or a hot room,' Mubanga said. 'This made life very difficult,
because you only had two T-shirts in your cell, and if you wore just one in a
cold room you'd be freezing, but wearing two in a hot room was almost
unbearable. The thing was, once you were in there in your chains, it was
impossible to take one off.'

After several hours of questioning, Mubanga felt severely dehydrated and begged
for a bottle of water. Once again he was lying on the floor: the interrogation
booth chair had been removed. As he tried to drink and cool himself by spraying
a little water around his face and hair, Mubanga said, the interrogator turned
violent: 'The guy started kneeling on me, and I was wriggling backwards to get
away from him, trying to get in the line of sight of the CCTV camera so someone
might see what was going on. Of course, he didn't want to let me do that, so he
stood on my hair. It was painful, but I tried to keep moving. Then he stood on
the leg chain, so my shackles dug in really deeply, cutting into my legs. But I
just took the pain. I'm looking at him, the pain's getting worse but I wouldn't
scream out. I just kept looking at him. From that day on, I refused to talk to
any interrogator. I said nothing at all for the next seven months.'

Mubanga, 32, born in Zambia but brought up in London from the age of three, was
describing his ordeal in an exclusive interview at a secret location in
southern England last Friday - the first by any of the four men who returned to
Britain from Guantanamo at the end of last month.

A lifelong Arsenal supporter, amateur boxer and former motorbike courier, he
became Camp Delta's poet, dealing with his experiences in a series of vivid,
rap-style rhymes, reminiscent of the prison blues from the American Deep South.

Mubanga is a tall man, with a build that remains athletic despite the years
when the longest walk he took was the 10 yards from his cell to one of
Guantanamo's tiny recreation yards. As he struggles to deal with the shock of
his sudden and unexpected release, his words fall from his lips in a rapid,
articulate torrent.

For many months after Mubanga was seized in Zambia with the help of British
intelligence and sent to Guantanamo, the American authorities maintained that
he was a dangerous 'enemy combatant', an undercover al-Qaeda operative who had
travelled from Afghanistan on a false passport and appeared to be on a mission
to reconnoitre Jewish organisations in New York. But documents obtained by The
Observer now reveal that by the end of last October the Pentagon's own legal
staff had grave doubts about his status, and had overturned a ruling that he
was a terrorist by Guantanamo's Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

Like the other three men who were released last month, Moazzam Begg, Feroz
Abbasi and Richard Belmar, Mubanga was held for one night at Paddington Green
police station on his return to Britain and questioned. He was released
unconditionally, the police having concluded within just a few hours that there
was no evidence to sustain charges of terrorism.

His allegations about his treatment at Guantanamo echo similar claims by other
freed detainees, and information from American official sources. In December,
US civil rights groups obtained more than 4,000 pages of documents under the
Freedom of Information Act about the abusive treatment of detainees. They
included memos by FBI men who visited Guantanamo, the US internment camp set up
on American territory on the island of Cuba in early 2002 which still houses
over 500 'enemy combatants' despite attracting international criticism, and
reported their concerns to their superiors.

On Friday, another memo by the US military's Southern Command was leaked to the
Associated Press. It described videotapes of assaults on prisoners by
Guantanamo's 'Instant Reaction Force' or 'IRF', a riot squad deployed against
prisoners deemed to have broken the camp's rules. One video showed guards
punching detainees and forcing a dozen to strip from the waist down. Another
showed a guard kneeing a detainee in the head.

Mubanga said that in his final months at Guantanamo - just as the military
lawyers were having doubts whether he really was a terrorist - the IRF was used
against him three times.

Mubanga was born on 24 September, 1972, and emigrated to Britain with his
mother, brother and two elder sisters three years later, when his father died.
He was 15, a pupil at St George's school near his home in Kingsbury, north-west
London, when his mother died from malaria. Soon afterwards he left school with
just two GCSEs. After an abortive attempt at a college course in engineering,
he began to get into trouble, and at 19 was convicted of trying to steal a car
and sent to Feltham Young Offenders' Institution. It was there that he began to
take an interest in Islam. In 1995 he spent six months in Bosnia, working with
a charity with Muslim victims of the Serbs' ethnic cleansing.

Mubanga left Britain for Pakistan in October 2000, where he says he was
planning to study Islam and Arabic. After a spell in Peshawar he entered
Afghanistan and attended two madrasahs (Islamic schools) in Kabul and Kandahar.

Mubanga had a flight back to Britain booked for 26 September, 2001, from
Karachi, and says he had planned to return to Pakistan by bus. But after the
terrorist attacks of 11 September, the bus stopped running. Hiding in Kandahar
while the American bombing campaign began, he says he discovered that his
British passport and his will were missing. 'I don't know if they were lost or
stolen. I just realised one day they were gone.'

With the war still in its early stages, before the fall of Kabul, he found a
middleman willing to take him back to Pakistan. Mubanga had dual nationality
and says he then phoned his family in England to ask them to post his Zambian
passport to him in Pakistan. Before returning to Britain, he decided to visit
relatives in Zambia. In February 2002 he flew to South Africa. After a week in
Johannesburg, he took a bus to Lusaka, where he was reunited with his older
sister, who was also visiting from the UK. (She has asked us not to publish her
full name.)

It was then that Mubanga's sister was phoned from London by her boyfriend, and
informed that the Sunday Times had published a story on 2 March claiming that a
man called Martin Mubanga had been in custody for at least two months after
being captured by coalition forces fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Here,
Mubanga thought, was the answer to what had happened to his passport. He
travelled north from Lusaka to visit an aunt near the town of Kitwe. There, a
few days after the article was published, he was arrested by the Zambian
security service.

Mubanga's solicitor, Louise Christian, suggested that by this time the
authorities must have realised they did not have Martin Mubanga in Afghanistan,
and would easily have discovered that the real one had recently flown from
Karachi to Africa.

Yet after the first two nights, Mubanga said, he was not held at a conventional
police station or prison, but in a series of guarded motel rooms in and around
Lusaka. There he says he was interrogated for hours at a time each day, at
first by the Zambians. He recalls they asked him whether he wished to be
Zambian or British. 'I chose British. I thought that might be safer. It seems
that may have been a mistake.'

Within a few days, new interrogators arrived: an American female defence
official and a British man. He said he was from MI6 and called himself Martin.
'Martin tried to bond with me by saying he supported Arsenal like me. It was
pretty transparent. You didn't have to talk to him long to realise he hadn't
spent very much time on the North Bank.'

On the third or fourth day, 'agent Martin' produced Mubanga's British passport,
his will and two further documents, which, he claimed, had been found with the
passport in a cave in Afghanistan. One was a list of Jewish organisations in
New York, which, he suggested, Mubanga had been ordered to reconnoitre on
behalf of al-Qaeda. The second was a handwritten military instruction manual,
which he accused Mubanga of writing. Mubanga protested he had not seen them
before, and that he had never been to any Afghan cave, pointing out that his
own untidy hand was nothing like the manual's neat script. There was no proof
that he had any connection to either document, but this remained the most
serious accusation the Americans made against him.

At the same time, Mubanga said, both the American woman and 'Martin' tried to
recruit him as an agent, asking him to settle in South Africa or, if that was
too far, in Leeds. 'They wanted me to go where no one would know me, I suppose
so I could be undercover. I refused.'

After three weeks of these sessions, the American told him one morning:
'I'm sorry to have to tell you this, as I think you're a decent guy, but
in 10 or 15 minutes we're going to the airport and they're taking you to
Guantanamo Bay.' Mubanga knew what this meant. 'Like everyone else I'd seen the
pictures of the prisoners in their goggles and jumpsuits, kneeling in chains in
the dust. They took me to a military airstrip, stripped me, did an anal search
and then put me in a big nappy which they seemed to think was funny. They put
on the blindfold, the hood and the earmuffs and chained me to a bed in the
plane. We stopped somewhere, but in all the flight took about 24 hours.'

Mubanga arrived in Guantanamo at the beginning of May. For the first two months
he was held with other English-speaking prisoners, including one of the three
men from Tipton in the west Midlands released last March. 'He was planning to
write a letter to Tony Blair complaining about our plight, and I suggested he
put in a bit saying that Blair had said he would never talk to terrorists yet
had negotiated with the IRA. Of course they [the Americans] read it. It seemed
to make them mad, because for the next 18 months I was kept in cell blocks
where the only people around me apart from the guards spoke only Arabic. I
always thought one of the main things they were trying to do was break you
mentally, make you go crazy. So I thought, either I sink or I swim. I decided
to swim and that meant learning Arabic.'

In the months that followed, he became proficient in this language. Early last
year, his spirits lifted dramatically when rumours swept the camp that six or
seven British detainees - including Mubanga - were about to go home. He was
transferred to a new block with the other British detainees, but when it came
to getting on the plane Mubanga was left behind. Then the Americans moved him
again - to a block where all the other prisoners spoke neither English nor
Arabic, but only the Afghan lan guage Pashtu. 'I ended up feeling really
abandoned, left behind. They were playing games with me.' As he recalled this
dark time, for a moment Mubanga's eyes brimmed with tears. 'In my
interrogations for a while after that they used to taunt me saying: "Those
other boys have gone home. Do you think you know why you're staying here?" They
wanted to make me think I would be there forever.'

It seems that one reason Mubanga was not sent home last year but interrogated
with new vigour was that the Australian detainee, David Hicks, had made false
allegations - since withdrawn - about him under the stress of his own
interrogation.

Mubanga began to suffer still harsher conditions. In the terse, military
abbreviations of Guantanamo, he was put repeatedly on 'Cl' (comfort item) loss,
so that books, his cup, board games and anything else which might help pass the
time were removed. Later, he endured 'BI (basic item) loss', when his thin
mattress, trousers, shirts, towel, blankets, and flipflops were also taken
away, leaving him naked except for boxer shorts in an empty metal box. 'You had
to be calm, bottle up any anger you might feel, show you were prepared to be
docile. If you did that, slowly you'd get your items back: first your
flipflops, the next day your mattress, the next day your trousers, after that
your blanket and shirts.'

Last autumn he was held in isolation in the punishment 'Quebec block', where
blankets would be removed between 6am and 11pm. There, communication with other
prisoners was almost impossible. It was in this period that he fell victim to
the IRF for small acts of defiance, such as refusing to come in from his 15
minutes of recreation. Each time the squad forced him to the floor, knelt on
him, and trussed him tightly so he could not resist.

Yet even as they intensified the harshness of his conditions, the Americans
were beginning to recognise officially that Martin Mubanga might not be a
member of al-Qaeda at all. In October his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, a
panel of military officers which examines the evidence against detainees
without any legal training or advice, decided he was an unlawful combatant, and
should therefore continue to be detained at Guantanamo indefinitely.

But at the end of October, James Crisfield Jnr, an American military lawyer,
found this decision deeply flawed. His report, which has been obtained by The
Observer, shows that Mubanga had asked for his sister, aunt and brother to
testify in his defence. They could prove, he said, that he had not travelled to
Zambia on false documents for a terrorist mission. The tribunal officers
claimed that these defence witnesses were
'not reasonably available' and that their testimony would be irrelevant.
Crisfield disagreed, stating: 'Under the circumstances, the detainee's reasons
for travelling to various countries was relevant. If the detainee's motive for
travelling was to do something other than join or support al-Qaeda, that
evidence could have sometendency... to make it less likely that the detainee
joined or supported al-Qaeda.' In Crisfield's opinion, the tribunal hearing was
'not sufficient', and he ordered that attempts be made to contact Mubanga's
family.

There is no way to independently verify Mubanga's account of why he travelled
to Afghanistan. But after almost three years of rigorous and sometimes brutal
interrogation, no evidence has been adduced that he was guilty of any
involvement in terrorism.

For the last month before his release, Mubanga was taken to the
supermaximum-security part of Guantanamo known as Camp Echo. 'There, you were
in an individual bungalow without even a gap in the door, so even if you
shouted out you couldn't talk to anyone. There was a camera in the room and
they'd write down what you did every 15 minutes. If you went to the toilet,
they'd write it down.

'I think it was one last attempt to get me to go crazy. One guy went back
to Camp Delta after six months in Camp Echo. He'd lost his mind completely.'
Mubanga remains deeply concerned about some of the prisoners he met in
Guantanamo. One is a former al-Jazeera reporter arrested in Afghanistan whom he
saw being assaulted brutally by the IRF, leaving him with black eyes which took
weeks to go down. 'There's also a lot of people there who think they'll be
killed if they ever went back to their own coun tries. They're in limbo. As far
as they're concerned, it's open season for the American government.'

Yet Mubanga, though traumatised by his ordeal, believes he stayed sane partly
because of his growing religious faith, and partly because of his rapping. He
has a provisional title for the album he'd like to record: Detainee . He also
has a stage name - 10,007, his Guantanamo prisoner number. The content of his
work is strongly political. There were times, Mubanga said, 'that I wanted to
explode. And when I did, I tried to remember Allah, not to use aggression in
that way. I never fought any of the guards, I never spat at them, or like some
prisoners did, threw a packet of faeces. A lot of the time you go on to
autopilot and you just have to tell yourself you're still here, it is
happening, it is real. The golden rule a lot of us had is, if you don't feel
tired, don't force yourself to sleep, stay active. That's why I made myself
learn Arabic.

'For three years, I was locked in a room where I couldn't walk as far as
this chair that I'm sitting in to that window, and now suddenly I'm back in
London. It's hard to adjust: all my friends have got engaged, their lives have
moved on. Yet though it's so different, I still know London from my time as a
courier. Last week a friend gave me a lift and I was giving him directions and
I pinched myself: one week earlier I had been in Guantanamo.'

As he tries to rebuild his life, Mubanga has three wishes.The first is to
record his Guantanamo raps, the second to acquire an Arsenal season ticket for
the 2005-06 season. The third may be more difficult. When he was 18 to 19, he
had a girlfriend in Acton called Angela. They had planned to move in together,
he said, but that summer his older sister took him to Zambia because he was
getting into trouble, saying he would be away two weeks. When they arrived, she
told Mubanga they were going to stay seven months.
'I wrote to Angie, I really loved her. And when I got back the first thing
I did was go round to her house. Her dad opened the door and he says: "Are you
Martin?" I thought maybe he was going to hit me because he'd read my letters or
because I'd broken her heart, but instead he started weeping, saying she'd gone
to Kent and he didn't know where she was.'

Mubanga said he tried to track her unsuccessfully via friends, and although he
realises she may now be married, he hopes that if she's not, she might read
this article and get in contact.

He insisted he doesn't feel bitter: 'I've lost three years of my life, because
I was a Muslim. If I hadn't become a Muslim and carried on doing bad things,
maybe I'd have spent that three years in a regular prison. The authorities
wanted to break me but they strengthened me. They've made me what I am - even
if I'm not quite sure yet who that person is.'

MUBANGA THE POET

Martin Mubanga became Camp Delta's poet and wrote a series of vivid rap-style
rhymes. Here are the choruses of two of them.

Dem labelled me a

terrorist

Calling me a thug.

Dem labelled me a terrorist

Calling me a slug... But I never did join bin Laden's crew anyway And now me
know to be a Muslim is a hard core ting...

And I got no love for the American government

Dey can go suck and I don't mean peppermint.

Now hear da bombs drop

As de Muslim babies, dem a die,

Now hear de bombs drop

As de Muslim mothers dem a cry

Now hear de bombs drop

As de Muslim soldiers dem a fly

Why? Because dey no want fe die.

================

[ Comment ]

And the US and Britain are the ones claiming to bring freedom and democracy to
the world.

Here in South Africa we fought for 30 years against the Nationalist government
that practised such things as detention without trial, and South Africa was
criticised by the US on the grounds of, among other things, the lack of
democratic rights and freedoms.

Now that we have a constitution that protects human rights, these two "mentor"
countries are doing exactly what they criticised us for doing back then.

Twenty years ago, we were the pariah of the world because of our lack of basic
human rights and freedoms. And now, it seems, we stand alone, as the only free
and democratic country left in the world. We abandoned apartheid, and it was
immediately introduced all over Eastern Europe (assisted in some cases by
Nato). We abandoned and prohibited human rights abuses such as detention
without trial, and now those horrorss are being embraced by countries such as
the US and the UK (though the Nats always did use the "tu quoque" argument
against Britain, saying that they practised the detention without trial in
Northern Ireland that they deplored in South Africa).

As a Northern Irish relative said at that time: Tempus fungus -- times is
rotten.
--
Steve Hayes
E-mail: shayes@dunelm.org.uk
   Web: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
Phone: 083-342-3563 or 012-333-6727

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