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How We Survived Jail Hell: The Full Story of the Guantanamo BritonsDate: 18-Mar-2004
Revealed: the full story of
the Guantanamo Britons
The Observer's David Rose hears the Tipton Three give a harrowing account of
their captivity in Cuba
Sunday March 14, 2004
The Observer
Three British prisoners released last week from Guantanamo Bay have revealed the
full extent of British government involvement in the American detention camp
condemned by law lords and the Court of Appeal as a 'legal black hole'.
Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, the so-called 'Tipton Three', speaking
for the first time since their release at a secret location in southern England,
have disclosed to The Observer the fullest picture yet of life inside the camp
on Cuba where America continues to hold 650 detainees.
After more than 200 interrogation sessions each, with the CIA, FBI, Defence
Intelligence Agency, MI5 and MI6, America has been forced to admit its claims
that the three were terrorists who supported al-Qaeda had no foundation.
But fearful of reprisals - the extreme right wing BNP has a stronghold in their
hometown of Tipton in the West Midlands, and their families have warned them
they may not be safe back at home - they all declined to be photographed, and
are choosing a new location in which to rebuild their lives.
During an extraordinary 12-hour interview with The Observer last Friday, two
days after their release from Paddington Green police station where they were
held after being flown home from Cuba, the three men revealed that they were
interrogated by MI5 almost immediately after first arriving at Guantanamo Bay -
in the cases of Iqbal and Rasul, on 15 January 2002, and in Ahmed's case three
weeks later.
The British Government has repeatedly claimed it has been trying to use
diplomatic pressure to introduce more legal process at Guantanamo, including an
opportunity for detainees to show that imprisonment is unjustified.
But the picture painted by the three released prisoners is of a Security Service
which saw them as mere 'interrogation fodder', and questioned them repeatedly
throughout their 26-month stay.
Among other disclosures, the three men revealed:
· How early in their ordeal they survived a massacre perpetrated by
Afghanistan's Northern Alliance troops who herded hundreds of prisoners into
lorry containers and locked them in, so that people started to suffocate. Iqbal
described how only 20 of 300 prisoners in each container lived, and then only
because someone made holes in its side with a machine gun - an action which
killed yet more prisoners;
· The existence of a secret super-maximum security facility outside the main
part of Guantanamo's Camp Delta known as Camp Echo, where prisoners are held in
tiny cells in solitary confinement 24-hours a day, with a military police
officer permanently stationed outside each cell door. The handful of inmates of
Camp Echo include two of the four remaining British detainees, Moazzem Begg and
Feroz Abbasi, and the Australian, David Hicks;
· That they endured three months of solitary confinement in Camp Delta's
isolation block last summer after they were wrongly identified by the Americans
as having been pictured in a video tape of a meeting in Afghanistan between
Osama bin Laden and the leader of the 11 September hijackers Mohamed Atta.
Ignoring their protests that they were in Britain at the time, the Americans
interrogated them so relentlessly that eventually all three falsely confessed.
They were finally saved - at least on this occasion - by MI5, which came up with
documentary evidence to show they had not left the UK;
· That their first interrogations by British investigators - from both MI5 and
the SAS - took place in December 2001 and January 2002 when they were still
being held at a detention camp in Afghanistan. Guns were held to their heads
during their questioning in Afghanistan by American soldiers, and physical abuse
and beatings were rife. At this point, after weeks of near starvation as
prisoners of the Northern Alliance, all three men were close to death.
The Court of Appeal criticised the absence of any legal due process at
Guantanamo as a 'legal black hole' in a case brought on behalf of Abbasi last
year, while the laws lord, Lord Steyn, has described the camp in a speech as a
'monstrous failure of justice'.
In public, the British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has spoken of his
constant pressure on America to improve both physical and legal conditions,
urging them not to deny terror suspects a fair trial.
But the released prisoners told The Observer how MI5 interrogators, in sessions
lasting many hours, tried repeatedly to extract information they did not have
about Islamic groups in Britain and their supposed links with al-Qaeda.
Ahmed described an interrogation session which took place before he left
Afghanistan by an officer of MI5 and another official who said he was from the
Foreign Office: 'All the time I was kneeling with a guy standing on the backs of
my legs and another holding a gun to my head.
'The MI5 says: "I'm from the UK, I'm from MI5, I've got some questions for
you," he told me: "We've got your name, we've got your passport, we
know you've been funded by an extremist group and we know you've been to this
mosque in Birmingham. We've got photos of you."' In fact, none of these
claims was true.
The three men said that as far as they could see, there were few if any genuine
terrorists at Guantanamo Bay: perhaps at worst, a few mullahs who had been loyal
to the Taliban.
They voiced grave fears for the future of Begg and Abbasi, who are due to face
trials by American military commissions, saying that their own experience of the
Guantanamo interrogation and intelligence gathering process was 'almost a
recipe' for other miscarriages of justice.
Last night, a Foreign Office spokesman said he could not comment on the men's
claims to have been interrogated by British officials while they were still in
Afghanistan, saying he could not get access to the relevant files.
Whitehall security sources confirmed that MI5 has had regular access to
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: 'I can say that the purpose of our being given
access to detainees in US custody is to gather information relevant to British
national security,' said one source.
How we survived jail hell
For two years the Tipton Three have been silent prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
Now, in this remarkable interview with David Rose, they describe for the first
time the extraordinary story of their journey from the West Midlands to Camp
Delta
Sunday March 14, 2004
The Observer
'When I woke up I didn't know where I was. I'd lost consciousness at the side of
the container, but when I woke up I was in the middle - lying on top of dead
bodies, breathing the stench of their blood and urine.
'They'd herded maybe 300 of us into each container, the type you get on ordinary
lorries, packed in so tightly our knees were against our chests, and almost
immediately we started to suffocate. We lived because someone made holes with a
machine gun, though they were shooting low and still more died from the bullets.
When we got out, about 20 in each container were still alive.'
In a safe house in southern England at the weekend, Asif Iqbal was describing
his survival, together with his friends Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul, after a
massacre by US-backed Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan - the start of a
26-month nightmare which ended last week with their release from the American
detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.
Their faces gaunt with accumulated stress and exhaustion, they spoke softly,
still stunned by the change in their circumstances: 'I just can't believe we're
sitting here,' Ahmed says. 'This time last week, we were in the cages at
Guantanamo.'
The horror of their story needs no embellishment. One day, perhaps, there will
be an inquiry into Guantanamo. Until then, some of their allegations - which, it
can be assumed, America is likely to deny - cannot be corroborated. However,
many of the experiences they describe, including gunpoint interrogations in
Afghanistan and random brutality both there and in Guantanamo, have been related
in identical terms by other freed detainees. Last October I spent four days at
Guantanamo. Much of what the three men say about the regime and the camp's
physical conditions I either saw or heard from US officials.
Having escaped the truck container massacre, they endured near-starvation in a
jail run by the Afghan warlord, General Dostum. When the Red Cross appeared and
promised to make contact with the British Embassy in Islamabad they thought they
were going home. Instead, with the apparent agreement of British officials, they
were handed over to the Americans, first for weeks of physical abuse at a
detention camp in Kandahar, followed by more than two years in the desolation of
Guantanamo.
Month after month they were interrogated, for 12 hours or more at a time, by
American security agencies and, repeatedly, by MI5 - in all, they say, they
endured 200 sessions each. But when they re-emerged to freedom on Wednesday
after two final days of questioning at Paddington Green police station, every
apparent shred of evidence had melted away. Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed, together
with the other early arrivals at Guantanamo, had been described by US Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as 'the hardest of the hard core', lethal terrorists
'involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans'. Even last week the
British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was claiming America had been justified
in holding them.
Yet despite the denial of legal rights or due process, the authorities on both
sides of the Atlantic have been forced to accept what the three men said all
along - that they were never members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda or any other
militant group. The Americans had justified their detention by claiming they
were 'enemy combatants', but they were never armed and did not fight.
'They formally told us we were going home last Sunday [several weeks after this
news was relayed to the media],' Rasul said. 'We had a final meeting with the
FBI, and they tried to get us to sign a piece of paper which said something like
I was admitting I'd had links with terrorism, and that if I ever did anything
like this again the US could arrest me.' Like the other two detainees freed last
week, Tarek Dergoul and Jamal al-Harith, they refused.
'They took us to the airport in chains,' said Rasul, 'and when we got there this
huge plane was surrounded by armed men. As we walked towards the steps they had
guns trained on us. This military police guy hands us over to the British, takes
off our shackles and tells the Brit he can put on the handcuffs. But the British
policemen say, "no, no, there's no need for handcuffs". We walk up the
steps and they're not even touching me.
'For the first time in two years I'm walking somewhere without being frogmarched.
We get to the door and someone says: "Good morning. Welcome aboard." '
Capture
Rasul, 26, Ahmed, 22, and Iqbal, 22, were boyhood friends from the Midlands town
of Tipton. In Septem ber 2001 they travelled to Pakistan ahead of the marriage
Iqbal's parents had arranged for him to a woman in Faisalabad. Ahmed was to be
best man; Rasul hoped to do a computer course after the wedding.
The three were in no sense fundamentalists: their brand of Islam, they say, was
never that of the Taliban. But like many young Muslims in Pakistan they crossed
the border into Afghanistan in October 2001, as it became clear that, in the
wake of the 11 September attacks on America, one of the poorest countries in the
world was about to be attacked. They had no intention of joining the fighting,
they insist, but only of giving humanitarian aid. In England, none of them was
rich, but in Asia, the little money they had could go a long way. For a short
time they used the savings accumulated for their trip to buy food and medical
supplies for Afghan villagers.
But in Taliban-led Afghanistan one aspect of their appearance made them
dangerously visible - they had no beards. Travelling through a bombed landscape,
they tried to escape in a taxi. But instead of reaching safety they were driven
further into danger - to the city of Kunduz, which was promptly surrounded and
bombarded by Dostum's troops. Aware that a bloodbath was imminent, they tried to
leave on a convoy of trucks but their own vehicle was shelled, killing almost
everyone on board. 'We were trapped,' says Iqbal. 'There was nothing we could do
but give ourselves up. They took our money, our shoes, all our warm clothes, and
put us in lines.'
They were part of a vast column of prisoners, around 35,000, says Rasul: 'You'd
look down the slope and there were lines and lines of people, as far as the eye
could see. We went through the mountains and the open desert. There were these
massive ditches full of bodies. We thought this was the end. We thought they
were going to kill us all.' Many of the prisoners were wounded and died by the
wayside.
After two days they ended up outside Shebargan prison and crammed into the
containers - it was night, says Iqbal, and the massacre began under the glare of
spotlights which the three men claim were operated by American special forces.
'The last thing I remember is that it got really hot, and everyone started
screaming and banging. It was like someone had lit a fire beneath the
containers. You could feel the moisture running off your body, and people were
ripping off their clothes.'
When he came to, Iqbal had not drunk for more than two days. Maddened by thirst,
he wiped the stream ing walls with a cloth, and sucked out the moisture, until
he realised he was drinking the bodily fluids of the massacred prisoners. 'We
were like zombies,' Iqbal says. 'We stank, we were covered in blood and the
smell of death.'
Freed from the trucks which had become mass graves, they were taken into
Shebargan prison, where they were held in appalling conditions for the next
month. Much was open to the elements, and to make room inside its bare communal
cells the prisoners lay down in four-hour shifts. They were fed a quarter of a
naan bread a day, with a small cup of water: sometimes, says Rasul, there were
fights over the rations. Often snow blew into the buildings.
Rasul says: 'There were people with horrific injuries - limbs that had been shot
off and nothing was done. I'll never forget one Arab who was missing half his
jaw. For 10 days until his death he was screaming and crying continuously,
begging to be killed.'
A few days earlier Taliban prisoners had organised the uprising against their
captors at Qala-i-Jhangi Fort at Mazar-e-Sharif, and western reporters paid a
visit to Shebargan. They seemed blind to the misery there, Rasul says. 'All they
seemed to be interested in was if any of us knew the American Taliban John
Walker Lindh.'
After 10 days the Red Cross arrived, bringing some improvement and an increase
in the water supply. But by now all three were malnourished and suffering from
amoebic dysentery. Ahmed says: 'We were covered with lice. All day long you were
scratching, scratching. I was bleeding from my chest, my head.' Iqbal adds: 'We
lost so much weight that if I stood up I could carry water in the gap between my
collar bones and my flesh.'
Prisoners died daily: of the 35,000 originally marched through the desert, only
4,500 were still alive, the three men estimate. All this time they could see
American troops 50 metres from their prison wing on the other side of the gates.
Beatings
After a month of this living hell, on 27 or 28 December, the Red Cross spoke to
the three and promised they would contact the British Embassy in Islamabad and
ask them to intervene on their behalf and notify their families that they were
alive. Rasul's brother, Habib, says he had contacted the Foreign Office at the
end of November and asked for help in tracing his missing brother.
In fact, very soon, the three would meet British officials. But Habib would be
told nothing until February 8 - three weeks after his brother's arrival in
Guantanamo.
Two days after the three talked to the Red Cross, Dostum's troops put them in
chains, marched them through the main gate and handed them over to American
special forces. Ahmed says: 'They put something like a sandbag over my head so
you could see nothing. Then we got thrown on to a truck. They taped the sacks at
the bottom of our necks, making it difficult to breathe.'
The Americans took them to Shebargan airport, where they were beaten, then
loaded on a plane. 'I wanted to use the toilet,' Rasul says. 'Someone smacked me
on the back of my head with his gun. I started peeing myself.'
Trussed like chickens, their chains replaced by plastic ties, they were flown to
the US detention centre at Kandahar. The weather was freezing. Wearing only thin
salwar kameez, with no socks or shoes, they were tied together with a rope and
led into the camp, where they waited to be processed.
In the very different setting of a sitting room in suburban England, Iqbal
demonstrates how they were made to kneel bent double, with their foreheads
touching the ground: 'If your head wasn't touching the floor or you let it rise
up a little they put their boots on the back of your neck and forced it down. We
were kept like that for two or three hours.'
Rasul adds: 'I lifted up my head slightly because I was really in pain. The
sergeant came up behind me, kicked my legs from underneath me, then knelt on my
back. They took me outside and searched me while one man was sitting on me,
kicking and punching.'
All this time they were still wearing their hoods. Then one soldier took a
Stanley knife and cut off their clothes. Naked and freezing, they were made to
squat while the soldiers searched their bodily cavities and photographed them.
At last, they say, they were frog-marched through a barbed wire maze and put
into a half-open tent where they were told to dress in blue prison overalls.
They had not washed since the container massacre a month earlier. There, Iqbal
had sustained a ricochet wound to the elbow. Displaying an ugly purple scar, he
explains that by the time he reached Kandahar, it had become infected. It was
late at night by the time they had been processed, but next morning, they say,
they were taken straight to their first interrogation. Rasul says: 'A special
forces guy sat there holding a gun to my temple, a 9mm pistol. He said if I made
any movement he'd blow my head off.'
Each endured several such sessions at Kandahar: each time, they say, they were
questioned on their knees, in chains, always at gunpoint. Often they were kicked
or beaten. (Other released detainees have described Kandahar in similar terms.)
Not all their interrogators were American. Iqbal and Rasul also describe an
English officer in a maroon beret who said he was a member of the SAS. 'He had a
posh English accent,' Rasul says. 'He mentioned the names of British prisons
like Belmarsh and said we'd end up there.' Iqbal says the SAS officer told him:
'Don't worry, you won't be beaten today because you're with me.'
Ahmed says he was also questioned by an officer from MI5 and another Englishman
who said he was from the British Embassy. 'All the time I was kneeling with a
guy standing on the backs of my legs and another holding a gun to my head. The
MI5 man says: "I'm from the UK, I'm from MI5, and I've got some questions
for you." He says he was called Dave. He told me: "We've got your
names, we've got your passports, we know you've been funded by an extremist
group and we know you've been to this mosque in Birmingham. We've got photos of
you." None of this was true.
'The second occasion was on the morning I left - they said I was going home. In
fact I was on my way to Cuba.'
As Muslims, they were shocked when in repeated 'shakedown' searches of the
sleeping tents, copies of the Koran would be trampled on by soldiers and, on one
occasion, thrown into a toilet bucket. Throughout their stay at Kandahar the
guards carried out head-counts every hour at night to keep the prisoners awake.
Rasul says: 'You'd just be dozing off and then you were made to get up, and
that's the way it was all the way to morning.'
To Cuba
At 3AM on 13 January 2002, Rasul was moved to a new tent with Iqbal. Next
morning their numbers were called out and they were made to sit while soldiers
chained them tightly, sat them in a tent and attached another chain to a hook on
the floor. 'These guys came in with clippers,' Rasul says, 'they shaved my hair
and my beard; they cut all my clothes off and threw this medication over me, to
kill the lice. Then they unlocked me from the floor and led me into another tent
naked where they forced me to squat again and did another intimate cavity
search.'
Instead of the blue overalls they were dressed in orange jumpsuits, chained and
cuffed and made to wear thick gloves taped to their sleeves. Then, says Rasul:
'They made us sit outside on the gravel while they processed everyone. We had no
water all day, but towards the end they gave us an MRE [a ready-to-eat US army
meal] but no spoon. I had to try and trough it like an animal.'
The restraint device they were now forced to wear would become extremely
familiar for the next 26 months - the 'three-piece suit', a body belt with a
metal chain leading down to leg-irons with hand-shackles attached to it. Rasul
says: 'I told the guard they'd put it on much too tight and he said:
"You'll live." '
Before boarding a military aircraft they were dressed in earmuffs, goggles and
surgical masks. Inside, they were chained to the floor with no backrests, and
even when they requested the toilet, they were not released from their chains.
'Basically people wet their pants. You were pissing all over your legs.'
'The only thing that relieved the sensory deprivation and occupied me for the
22-hour flight was that I was in serious pain,' Rasul says. 'The guards told me
to go to sleep but the belt was digging into me - when I finally got to Cuba I
was bleeding. I lost feeling in my hands for the next six months.'
Rasul and Iqbal were on the second flight to the new Camp X-ray - the first had
been three days earlier. (The Australian David Hicks and another British
prisoner, Feroz Abbasi, were on that first flight.) Ahmed followed on 10
February on the fifth flight from Kandahar to Guantanamo Bay. 'When I got
there,' he says, 'I was half dead. We had a two-hour stopover somewhere in
Turkey. As we were being frog-marched from one plane to another, one of the
guards stamped on the metal body bar of my three-piece suit so the leg-irons bit
deeply into the flesh of my ankles.'
But Ahmed, at least, had been told where he was going. When Rasul and Iqbal
landed they had no idea where they were: 'All I knew was that I was somewhere
with intense heat,' Rasul says. 'An American voice shouted: "I am Sergeant
so-and-so, US Marine Corps, you are arriving at your final destination." '
The Guantanamo airstrip lies a three-mile ferry journey across the bay from the
detention facilities, a journey the prisoners made in a school bus. Iqbal says:
'The boat was moving in the swell, making the bus rock and the American guy
says: "Stop moving." I couldn't stop, so he hit me.' Rasul made the
mistake of telling a guard he was English. 'Traitor,' he yelled. Later, when
Ahmed took the ferry, he heard a guard whispering: "This motherfucker
speaks English." Repeatedly the guard kicked his leg: 'I couldn't move it
for days, it was so badly bruised.'
At last they arrived at Camp X-ray, and became part of the group of orange-jumpsuited
prisoners kneeling in the dust, still shackled and blindfolded, whose images
went round the world. Rasul says: 'They made us kneel in that awkward way, and
every time you moved, someone would kick you.
'The sun was beating down and the sweat was pouring into my eyes. I shouted for
a doctor, someone poured water into my eyes and then I heard it again:
"Traitor, traitor." ' Rasul was the last one processed, and by the
time he got to his cage it was dark. First he was stripped naked and, still
wearing his goggles and chains, he was given a piece of soap and told to shower
for the first time since his capture. 'I looked around and I thought what the
hell is this place?'
Iqbal recalls the moment his goggles were finally removed: 'I look up and I see
all these other people who hadn't yet been processed in orange suits and goggles
and I think I'm hallucinating.' Two days after arriving in Guantanamo Bay, with
his family still desperate for information as to his whereabouts, Rasul was
taken in his three-piece metal suit to an interrogation tent. 'I walk in and
this guy says: "I'm from the Foreign Office, I've come from the British
Embassy in America, and here is one of my colleagues who's from the embassy as
well." Later he added his colleague was actually from MI5.'
Rasul asked where he was and the British officials replied: 'We can't disclose
that information.' His family heard nothing for another three weeks. It would be
many months before the British Government - which, in public, was voicing deep
concerns about the lack of legal process at Guantanamo, and claiming it was
trying to exert diplomatic pressure - would confirm that its own Security
Service had connived from the outset.
Camp X-ray
In the early days at Camp X-ray, the conditions of detention were extreme.
The detainees were forbidden from talking to the person in the next cell and,
Rasul recalls, fed tiny portions of food: 'They'd give you this big plate with a
tiny pile of rice and a few beans. It was nouvelle cuisine, American-style. You
were given less than 10 minutes to eat and if you hadn't finished the Marines
would just take your plate away.' After a few more days Rasul was questioned
again by MI5. The officer asked how he was. 'I started crying, saying I can't
believe I'm here. He says: "I don't want to know how you are emotionally,
I'm only interested in your physical state." '
After about a week the prisoners were allowed to speak to detainees in adjacent
cells, and a few weeks later still were given copies of the Koran, a prayer mat,
blankets and towels. Yet all witnessed or experienced brutality, especially from
Guantanamo's own riot squad, the Extreme Reaction Force. Its acronym has led to
a new verb peculiar to Guantanamo detainees: 'ERF-ing.' To be ERFed, says Rasul,
means to be slammed on the floor by a soldier wielding a riot shield, pinned to
the ground and assaulted.
Iqbal and Rasul were at opposite ends of the same block and were forbidden from
talking to each other. There was almost nothing to do. 'Time speeds up,' Rasul
says. 'You just stare and the hours go clicking by. You'd look at people and see
they'd lost it. There was nothing in their eyes any more. They didn't talk.'
As the weeks of detention became months they would sometimes see psychiatrists.
The response to any complaint was always the same: an offer to administer
Prozac. (On my visit to Guantanamo, the camp medical staff told me that at least
a fifth of the detainees were taking anti-depressants.)
It was almost impossible to master the rules and know how to avoid punishment.
There was only one rule that mattered, Rasul says: 'You have to obey whatever US
government personnel tell you to do.'
In mid-2002 the prisoners were moved from the open cages with mesh walls at Camp
X-ray to the pre-fabri cated metal cellblocks of Camp Delta. There, the standard
punishment was transfer to solitary confinement in the sensory deprivation
isolation wing. Once, Ahmed says, he was given isolation for writing 'Have a
nice day' on a polystyrene cup. This was deemed 'malicious damage to US
government property'. On another occasion, he was punished for singing.
The cells were about the size of a king-size mattress, made of mesh and metal,
exposed to the relentless tropical heat, with no air conditioning. They
contained a hole in the floor for a toilet, a tap producing yellow water which
was so low they had to kneel to use it, and a narrow metal cot. Apart from
interrogation, the only break in this confined monotony were showers and 20
minutes' exercise, two or three times a week. 'When we were on a block with
English speakers, we'd go over the conversations again and again,' Ahmed says.
'Often they'd start by someone asking if you remembered a particular kind of
food. Soon you'd exhaust the possibilities, repeat the same stories four or five
times.'
Even this, however, was better than the isolation punishment block, or the fate
which Iqbal endured for five months in 2002 - being placed in a wing where all
the other prisoners spoke only Chinese.
The three Britons were visited at least six times by MI5 and Foreign Office
staff, Rasul says: 'Every time the Foreign Office came we asked about what was
going on, and whether we had solicitors. His reply was "I don't know, all I
know is what's been on TV. Your case hasn't been on TV." '
In fact, their families had engaged lawyers in Britain and America soon after
learning of their whereabouts in February 2002, and a federal lawsuit was
launched in their name which, had they not been released, would have been argued
before the Supreme Court next month. They were told of this by a guard a few
weeks ago, almost two years after the suit was first filed.
In September 2003 Rasul was visited on consecutive days, first by the man from
the Foreign Office, then by an MI5 officer. He asked the Foreign Office man
about his legal status and was told: 'You should ask the MI5 guy who's coming
tomorrow.' When he did so next day, the MI5 agent said: 'You should have asked
Martin from the Foreign Office yesterday.' How long had they thought they would
be at Guantanamo? I asked the three men. They reply in unison: 'Forever!'
Interrogation
For the second six months of 2002, the interrogations ceased. But from the
beginning of 2003, interviews with MI5, the FBI, the CIA and US military
intelligence became increasingly frequent. Rasul says: 'They kept taking us and
taking us, showing us photos saying: "This guy says you've done this, this
guy says you've done that" - what they meant was that other detainees
desperate to get out were making allegations, making stuff up that they thought
would help them get out of the camp.'
Last year the Americans introduced a formal system of rewards for co-operation
with interrogators, so that detainees would be given an increasing number of
so-called 'comfort items' such as books, extra clothes and utensils in return
for their testimony. (The books, best-selling novels, usually came with pages
torn out, which the censor had deemed too subversive or exciting.)
Experts on the psychology of interrogations and false confessions say that for
pris oners who were already depressed and isolated by more than a year of
arduous incarceration, this system seems almost calculated to produce
fantastical accounts. Professor Gisli Gudjonsson of King's College London is
perhaps the world's leading authority in this area, and he has testified in
dozens of trials and helped expose numerous miscarriages of justice. One of the
methods which his research has shown to be particularly prone to generating
unreliable testimony is the use of deception, where an interrogator will claim
he has incontrovertible proof of a suspect's guilt when in reality this does not
exist.
Such methods, the three men say, were employed against them time and time again.
For example, Rasul says, he was told that photographs of him and an 'al-Qaeda
membership form' and his passport had been found in a raid on an Afghan cave.
'Actually I'd left my passport in Pakistan. Then the interrogator told me that
next to my file they'd found my brother Habib's al-Qaeda file. The interrogator
said he wasn't lying, and that next time he'd bring it with him. When it came to
the next time, he claimed he'd made a mistake.'
The interrogators also used the good cop/bad cop routine. 'It was scary although
I knew what they were doing. I think they tried it more with some of the Arabs
and the young kids.'
Less funny were the conditions in which interrogations were conducted, in
so-called 'booths' behind the cell blocks. Throughout their interviews, the
detainees wore their three-piece suits, and were shackled to the floor.
In 2003, many more interrogators were brought in, some of them young and
inexperienced. 'You'd look at these guys in their shorts and polo shirts and
think: 'This guy's an interrogator? He's only 20 years old,' says Rasul. 'About
two months ago one guy asked me: "If I wanted to get hold of surface-to-air
missiles in Tipton, where would I go?" I started arguing with him. Did he
really think I lived in some sort of war zone. I was scared in the
interrogations but towards the end the questions just seemed stupid.'
However, last summer the situation of the Tipton Three suddenly took a seri ous
turn for the worse. The Americans had a video of a meeting in August 2000
between Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers.
Behind bin Laden were three men, and in May 2003 someone alleged they were none
other than Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed.
For the previous two weeks, Rasul had been in the relatively comfortable
conditions of Camp Four, the lower-security section of Guantanamo where
prisoners are freely allowed to associate and play football and volleyball.
Suddenly he and the others found themselves in solitary confinement in the
isolation block for three months. Finally, Rasul says, a senior interrogator
arrived from Washington and played him the video. He protested that the men in
the video looked nothing like him and his friends, and none of them had worn
beards. More to the point, in August 2000, when the video was shot, he had been
working in a branch of the electronics store Curry's, and was enrolled at the
University of Central England - a fact, he suggested, his interrogators could
easily check. Instead, he says: 'They told me I could have falsified those
records, that I could have had someone working with me at Curry's who could have
faked my job records.' I'd got to the point where I just couldn't take any more.
Do what you have to do, I told them. I'd been sitting there for three months in
isolation so I said yes, it's me. Go ahead and put me on trial.' The other two
made similar confessions.
Last September it was MI5 which for once helped them when they arrived at the
camp with the documentary evidence which showed they could not have been in
Afghanistan at the relevant time. Rasul says: 'We could prove our alibi. But
what about other people, especially from countries where such records may not be
available?'
There is also the danger that false testimony from one inmate, extracted by the
Guantanamo incentives system, may breed a false confession from another. Iqbal
recalls: 'One inmate said I had been in the Farouk terrorist training camp in
Afghanistan. It led to a whole series of interrogations where they tried to
persuade me that I had been. The way the system is it's accusation after
accusation; if this one won't work maybe this one will, if that won't work try
this one, until they finally get their confession.'
For those who do confess, and fail to sustain their alibis, trial by an American
military commission and a possible death penalty awaits. Those who have been
charged are no longer at Camp Delta, the three men reveal. They have been moved
to a new, super-maximum security facility outside the main compound - Camp Echo.
A few men have been returned thence to the main Guantanamo Camp; they describe a
white-walled, sound-absorbent hell of 24-hour solitary confinement in cells
smaller than Camp Delta's, with a guard permanently stationed outside each cell
door. Camp Echo's current inmates, say the three men, include the Britons Feroz
Abbasi and Moazzem Begg, and the Australian David Hicks. One detail of Hicks's
life inside Guantanamo Bay reveals the desperate measures prisoners go to retain
their sanity. He occupies his mind all day by catching and killing mice. More
than a year ago, the three men said, Hicks renounced Islam and shaved off his
beard. He no longer answers the call to prayer. 'He's just a little guy with a
very deep voice,' says Rasul. 'If you met him you'd think he was the typical
kind of Aussie you might see drinking Fosters in a bar.'
Freedom
Proof of the Tipton Three's alibis led to rapidly improving treatment. Every
Sunday after last September, Rasul says, they were taken to a shed they called
the 'love shack', and allowed to sit unchained on a sofa to watch movies on DVD.
They were allowed to read magazines, and were sometimes fed with hamburgers from
Guantanamo's branch of McDonald's.
Unaware of the stream of leaks to the media which suggested their release might
be imminent, they began to sense that the end of their ordeal might be drawing
near. Even then, they were still being interrogated regularly. Rasul says:
'They'd still show us pictures, try to get names. My last interrogation was on 5
March. But I could see the guy was getting desperate. At one point he said:
"Look, I'm from the CIA, I can get you anything. What do you want? Coke?
Ice cream?" '
For men who had been through Kunduz and Kandahar, this was not impressive. All
are convinced that there are no 'big-time' terrorists at Guantanamo: arguably
the most dangerous, in American eyes, says Ahmed, is a group of Taliban mullahs.
American intelligence sources have confirmed this view to me. The 'big-timers' -
men such as Khalid Shaikh Mohamed, architect of 9/11, have never been near
Guantanamo. One source says: 'Guantanamo may even be a bit of a front, designed
to divert al-Qaeda's attention. It takes everybody's attention away from more
important matters and locations where big fish are being held. The secrecy
surrounding it makes everybody think that very serious stuff is going on there.'
The three say some of the inmates have seen such suspects - not in Cuba, but at
Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. According to Iqbal, 'we spoke to people who'd
been with them there when they were being interrogated. They said they flew them
out of there alive, but in coffins.'
Reviled so publicly by Rumsfeld, now the Tipton Three must struggle to rebuild
their lives. Their home town, say their families, has become too dangerous:
effigies of men in orange jump suits have been strung from lampposts, while the
area is a strongholds of the extreme right-wing BNP.
For now they have been marvelling at the little things, Rasul says: sitting in
cars without chains and being able to operate the windows; finding that food
does not arrive automatically at set hours, and can be tasty and varied. This
weekend their dominant emotion is relief. As they come to reflect on the
experience over the coming weeks, it seems likely to turn to a burning,
righteous anger.
SOURCE: The Observer
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