posted 03-13-2004 12:05 AM            

MY HELL IN CAMP X-RAY
Mar 12 2004
WORLD EXCLUSIVE
By Rosa Prince and Gary Jones

A BRITISH captive freed from Guantanamo Bay today tells the world of its full horror - and reveals how prostitutes were taken into the camp to degrade Muslim inmates.

Jamal al-Harith, 37, who arrived home three days ago after two years of confinement, is the first detainee to lift the lid on the US regime in Cuba's Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta.

The father-of-three, from Manchester, told how he was assaulted with fists, feet and batons after refusing a mystery injection.

He said detainees were shackled for up to 15 hours at a time in hand and leg cuffs with metal links which cut into the skin.

Their "cells" were wire cages with concrete floors and open to the elements - giving no privacy or protection from the rats, snakes and scorpions loose around the American base.

He claims punishment beatings were handed out by guards known as the Extreme Reaction Force. They waded into inmates in full riot-gear, raining blows on them.

Prisoners faced psychological torture and mind-games in attempts to make them confess to acts they had never committed. Even petty breaches of rules brought severe punishment.

Medical treatment was sparse and brutal and amputations of limbs were more drastic than required, claimed Jamal.

A diet of foul water and food up to 10 years out-of-date left inmates malnourished.

But Jamal's most shocking disclosure centred on the use of vice girls to torment the most religiously devout detainees.

Prisoners who had never seen an "unveiled" woman before would be forced to watch as the hookers touched their own naked bodies.

The men would return distraught. One said an American girl had smeared menstrual blood across his face in an act of humiliation.

Jamal said: "I knew of this happening about 10 times. It always seemed to be those who were very young or known to be particularly religious who would be taken away.

"I would joke with the other British lads, 'Bring them to us - we'll have them'. It made us laugh. But the Americans obviously knew we wouldn't be shocked by seeing Western women, so they didn't bother.

"It was a profoundly disturbing experience for these men. They would refuse to speak about what had happened. It would take perhaps four weeks for them to tell a friend - and we would shout it out around the whole block."

Jamal added: "The whole point of Guantanamo was to get to you psychologically. The beatings were not as nearly as bad as the psychological torture - bruises heal after a week - but the other stuff stays with you."

HE was talking from a secret location after being reunited with his family. The website designer, a convert to Islam, had gone to Pakistan in October 2001, a few weeks after September 11, to study Muslim culture.

He accidentally strayed into Afghanistan - believing he was being driven to Turkey - and was arrested as a spy, perhaps because of his British passport. He was held in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and fell into US hands.

Now Jamal bears the scars of Guantanamo. He stoops into a hunch as he walks because the shackles that bound him were too short.

As a punishment, inmates would be confined so tightly they would be forced to lie in a ball for hours. During lengthy interrogation, they would be tethered to a metal ring on the floor.

Jamal said: "Sometimes you would be chained up on the floor with your hands and feet actually bound together. One of my friends told me he was kept like that for 15 hours once.

"Recreation meant your legs were untied and you walked up and down a strip of gravel. In Camp X-Ray you only got five minutes but in Delta you walked for around 15 minutes."

Jamal said victims of the Extreme Reaction Force were paraded in front of cells. "It was a horrible sight and it was a frequent sight."

He said one unit used force-feeding to end a hunger strike by 70 per cent of the 600 inmates. The strike started after a guard deliberately kicked a copy of the Koran.

Rice and beans was the usual diet and the water was "filthy". Jamal added: "In Camp X-Ray it was yellow and in Delta it was black - the colour of Coca-Cola.

"We had it piped through with a tap in each 'cage' but they would often turn the water off as punishment.

"They would shut off the water before prayers so we couldn't wash ourselves according to our religion.

"The food was terrible as well, up to 10 years out-of-date. They would open a hatch and shove it through a section at a time.

"We had porridge and something they called 'like-milk', which was disgusting and 'like-tea' and a piece of fruit. The fruit had been frozen and pounded with chemicals. An apple might look red but there was waxy white stuff all over it and inside it would be black and brown.

"They would play tricks on people by denying them things - you might be the only person on your block who didn't get any bread. I prided myself on never asking them for anything. I would not beg." Jamal said they were told they had no rights. "They actually said that - 'You have no rights here'. After a while, we stopped asking for human rights - we wanted animal rights. In Camp X-Ray my cage was right next to a kennel housing an Alsatian dog.

"He had a wooden house with air conditioning and green grass to exercise on. I said to the guards, 'I want his rights' and they replied, 'That dog is member of the US army'.

"You would be punished for anything - for having six packets of salt in your cell rather than five, for hanging your towel through the cage if it wasn't wet, even for having your spoon and things lined up in the wrong order."

Being forced to use a bucket as a toilet in view of other inmates and guards was particularly embarrassing. Jamal said: "I never got used to it - we would all put our towels and clothes around us.

"But the Military Police up in the tower would see us and would shout to each other.

"We were only allowed a shower once a week at the beginning and none at all in solitary confinement.

"This was very tough because you are supposed to be clean when you pray.

"Gradually the number of showers rose to three a week. They were always cold.

"You would be chained by two MPs while you were still in the cage before being taken off for what they called 'rec and shower'.

"You could sometimes see the guards tampering with the shower heads to make water squirt all over the inmate's clothes if he had put them up to protect his privacy."

Inmates were issued with "comfort items" - known as CIs - like shampoo, towels, a washcloth and boxer shorts. CIs would be removed as a punishment.

Jamal defiantly refused "treats", such as watching a James Bond film in a room dubbed The Love Shack by inmates.

He added: "Some people were given pizzas, ice-cream and McDonald's, but they didn't offer them to me. I guess they knew bribery would work with some and not with others."

To pass the time, inmates would chat to each other, pray, read the Koran and sing Islamic songs. In Camp X-Ray, they were given Mills and Boon-style romance novels in Arabic, which they refused to read.

Describing medical treatment, Jamal said he knew of 11 men who had legs amputated and two who lost toes and fingers. He was told that the Americans had removed far more tissue than was necessary.

HE added: "The man in the cell next to me had frostbite in two fingers and two toes. He also had it in his big toe, but they didn't treat that for a year by which time they had to cut off much more than was needed.

"All the men who had lost limbs complained they would chop them off high up and not bother to try to save as much as possible."

Jamal added that he didn't have close friends in Guantanamo, saying: "When I did meet the other Brits, we would reminisce about home - particularly the food.

"We were all obsessed with Scottish Highland Shortbread - we wanted some so much.

"One of the Brits told me he was asked why he was a Muslim, because he ought to be praying to the Queen."

Jamal, who is divorced with daughters aged three and eight and a son of five, is convinced his refusal to succumb to mind-games gave him the will to come through.

He said: "It was very, very hard at times, but I tried to think about nothing but survival.

"I kept my thoughts from home as much as possible because it would drive me crazy.

"About a year into my time, I had a dream. A voice said, 'You will here for two years'.

"In my dream I said, 'Two years! You're joking'. But when I woke up, I was calmer because at least that meant I would be getting out one day.

"I was sent to Guantanamo on February 11, 2002 and left on March 9, 2004, so I was there for just over two years, just like the voice in the dream said."

posted 03-13-2004 12:07 AM            

TERROR OF TORTURE IN CUBA CAMP
Mar 12 2004

WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Jamal says: 'I was beaten by special squad in show of force. Guards chant while kicking and punching"

By Gary Jones and Rosa Prince

JAMAL al-Harith told last night how he suffered a brutal attack by US military police because he refused to have a mystery injection.

A squad of five men used batons, fists, feet and knees in an assault that left him with severe bruising.

During the beating the officers barked in automated unison: "Comply, comply, comply. Do not resist. Do not resist."

Jamal told how the men swung into action after he politely refused a jab an orderly was trying to give him because he didn't know what it was and he was fit and healthy.

The squad was from the US military's Extreme Reaction Force, a unit trained to hand out beatings and known to prisoners at Guantanamo as ERF.

Jamal said: "I could hear their feet stomping on the ground as they got closer and closer to my cell. They were given a briefing about me refusing the injection, then I heard them readying themselves outside.

"I was terrified of what they were going to do. I had seen victims of ERF being paraded in front of my cell.

"They had been battered and bruised into submission. It was a horrible sight and a frequent sight."

Jamal, who had been warned by interrogators they would inject him with drugs if he did not answer their questions, cowered in his cell awaiting the inevitable.

When it came the full force of heavily protected men in riot gear, with batons and shields, was used against him.

He said: "They were really gung-ho, hyped up and aggressive. One of them attacked me really hard and left me with a deep red mark from my backbone down to my knee. I thought I was bleeding, but it was just really bad bruising.

"I said to myself, 'You shouldn't have put yourself through that', but said nothing to the ERFs. I didn't want to give them the satisfaction.

"There is principle and I wasn't going to take the injection so if they wanted to beat me up that was down to them. This huge black bruise was there for days after that."

But Jamal's ordeal didn't end there. Half an hour later as he was recovering, a second ERF squad arrived to dish out more punishment.

HE SAID: "They accused me of biting a military policeman. I said nothing. I knew it wouldn't help whatever I said.

"They laid into me again. When they were finished I sat down, picked up the Koran and started reading. Then two guards put me in more chains and said: 'Will you comply?'"

Jamal was taken to the feared isolation units, nicknamed ISOs, where those accused of misbehaving are kept in solitary confinement with just a mat and towel.

A toothbrush, toothpaste and soap, considered "comfort items", were denied. Jamal admits this was the first time he cried, although he did not let the guards see he was upset.

He added: "I sobbed a little, twice. Everything had been taken away from me. All I had was my dignity."

Jamal told of the psychological torture used on those in the isolation unit by guards who were trying to break their resolve.

Bright lights were left on in their cells overnight making it impossible to sleep properly. And the rooms were turned very hot in the day or freezing in the early morning by using fans in the ceiling.

Jamal said: "I'd wake up at 3am shivering like crazy. Just to keep a little bit warm I'd try to sleep under a metal bed to protect me from the cold air that was blowing in.

"I'd kept a towel which I hid from a guard to lie on. It wasn't much, but it made things a bit better."

He was put in the isolation unit twice more. Once when he kept ripping off wrist bands with his name and the number 490 written on and another time after guards set up a group of detainees by pretending some spoons had gone missing. Jamal said: "Non-compliance were the favourite words thrown at us."

Jamal told how he was interrogated on a regular basis by FBI and CIA agents and later MI5.

On 40 occasions he was quizzed in chains, which were bolted to the floor, for up to 12 hours at a time.

Jamal quickly became an expert in their interrogation techniques, often turning questions on his tormentors.

He said: "They'd ask me the same thing over and over again. Sometimes I'd say nothing and they asked me why I wasn't responding.

"I'd say: 'You're boring me, ask me something new and I will reply'." After the Americans failed to glean any information, MI5 officers and British consular officials interviewed him. On eight or nine occasions they tried to make him admit he was involved in terrorism.

Jamal said: "They would say: 'Are you a terrorist?' I'd say 'no, get me out of here'."

Speaking about his British interrogators, Jamal added: "They were a mixed bunch. There was one young nervous guy who looked about 21. I called him Youth Training Scheme MI5.

"He wasn't very professional and hadn't even checked out my background. One of them did say they had run my name and details through every Interpol check, but could find nothing. I told them that's because I'm innocent. There's nothing on me. I haven't even got a parking ticket.

"The young guy got a bit frustrated with me and said: 'Are you trying to tell me how to do my job?'

"One MI5 guy I just didn't want to talk to. He kept asking me questions and I'd say 'it's in my file'.

"In the end I said: 'I'm not talking any more.' He replied: 'I've come all this way from England to see you.' I only saw him for 10 minutes. He was very red faced and angry."

Jamal said his US interrogators were much meaner in their approach to questioning.

One told him after not getting the answers he wanted: "We are going to inject you with drugs."

Jamal said: "They were trying everything they could to frighten me. They even staged a mock beating up in the next room to me. They started shouting and pulling a chair around, but I knew there wasn't anyone there because I couldn't hear any chains clanking on the floor."

Another officer threatened Jamal with torture to get a confession. He told him: "Then we will kill your family and you."

Jamal said: "Sometimes they'd joke about what they were going to do to me. But I was determined to show no weakness. I didn't want to let them think they were getting to me.

"Other times they'd play a good cop, bad cop routine. I tried to remain calm, although I was fuming inside. It would been giving in to have lost my temper and I never did, not once.

"I don't swear and I didn't fight back. It was only on principles that I stood my ground.

"The mental torture was far tougher than any of the physical punishments. I knew I was being treated a lot worse than any of the other detainees. They tried everything to break me.

"Ridiculously, they even accused me of being an MI5 spy.

"I began to tease them a little because it was my way of coping. They could never work out when I was serious or not.

I HAD three plaits in my beard. I suggested, although I didn't say it, that it was for three people I had killed during drug deals in Moss Side, Manchester.

"I was making the whole thing up but they believed me. Next time I saw an officer he said MI5 had confirmed the story.

"They couldn't get a handle on me and that frustrated them. In the end one said: 'Who are you?' And I said: 'I've been here for over one a half years and you're asking who I am?'

"I took a stand against them because what they were doing to me was barbaric. I wouldn't get down on my knees for the chains to be pulled around my body because it was demeaning.

"About 20 per cent of us wouldn't co-operate. Eventually they backed down and we would stand while the guards went on their knees to chain us up.

"That was a small victory. There weren't many, but they were memorable. I will cherish them."

Despite the horror, Jamal said there were lighter moments.

One particular interrogation technique amused him. He said: "They started playing different music to see how I would react.

"They started with country singer Kris Kristofferson which I said I quite liked. Then some Fleetwood Mac songs.

"They watched my reactions on camera. I just said the music's great and even started singing along. They didn't play it again."

In the isolation unit, Jamal met for the first time fellow British detainee Tarek Dergoul.

He said: "He was suave and had a pencil moustache. We had a good chat about life back in Britain."

Jamal was released on Tuesday after being flown from Cuba to RAF Northolt, West London.

He arrived back with four other former Guantanamo Bay Britons - Asif Iqbal and Ruhal Ahmed, both 22, and 26-year-olds Shafiq Rasul and Tarek.

They were freed on Wednesday night after being quizzed by anti-terrorist police in London.

Four other British suspects are still being held in Cuba.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw last night said the US was right to keep the men locked up and the release of the five did not necessarily prove their innocence.

He added: "The Americans as far as they were concerned had good reason for detaining them."

posted 03-13-2004 12:08 AM            

I WAS IN THE WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME
Mar 12 2004
WORLD EXCLUSIVE
By Rosa Prince And Gary Jones

JAMAL al-Harith's incredible journey to Guantanamo Bay began in the tough streets of Manchester's Moss Side.

He was born Ronald Fiddler in a family of Jamaican origin and grew up with his father and two sisters after their mother walked out.

At 23, Ronnie began learning about Islam and converted soon afterwards, taking the name Jamal al-Harith "just because I liked it".

He took a computer course alongside his religious studies and became a web designer.

He visited several European countries before deciding to go further afield to learn more about Muslims and how they lived.

He began studying the Koran and learned Arabic on a trip to Sudan.

The ill-fated trip to Pakistan in October 2001, just a few weeks after September 11, was his second and he planned to stay for three weeks, learning about Muslim culture and studying the holy book.

Divorced Jamal, who has three children aged three, five and eight, said: "Yes, I travelled to Pakistan in October 2001 but if that's my crime then you would have to arrest whole planeloads of people.

"When I was interrogated, the Americans used to say 'How come you're so clean? We've put your name and face through Interpol and we can't even find a speeding ticket'.

"I told them: 'That's because I've never done anything wrong in my life. You don't have anything on me and you still won't have anything on me when I walk out of here' - and that's exactly what happened.

"I think that's why they were so hard on me. They couldn't bear to admit they had made a mistake."

Jamal was in Quetta, on the border with Afghanistan and just four days into his trip to Pakistan, when the Americans began bombing Taliban strongholds.

He decided to leave for Turkey and paid a local truck driver 4,000 rupees - around £47 - to drive him.

He was told their route would take them through Iran, but he had no idea he would be passing through Afghanistan.

A few days into the trip, the truck was stopped by an armed gang.

They grew excited when they saw Jamal's British passport and after looking at his other possessions, which included a clockwork radio, accused him of being a spy.

He was taken to a filthy jail, held in solitary confinement then transferred to another prison.

He was again held in isolation and was beaten and interrogated, during which he denied he had been spying against the Taliban for the British.

Jamal later told the Americans how a man he presumed was a US agent had died after suffering a particularly brutal beating.

He said: "They tried to say the man wasn't an American, but I know he was. I am sure I would have got the same treatment but I made sure that every time my guards saw me I was praying.

"The Taliban liked me because I always had the Koran in my hands. I was beaten very badly, but not as badly as most of the other inmates.

"Afghanistan finally fell and I was visited in jail by the Red Cross.

"There were a couple of Pakistanis in the prison and they were allowed to go across the border.

"The Red Cross asked me if I wanted to go with them, but I had no money and no way of getting back to Britain so I asked them to put me in contact with the British Embassy in Kabul.

"That is incredible to me now - I could have gone home on my own."

Jamal stayed with the Red Cross in Kandahar for a week and, in phone calls to the British Embassy was assured he would soon be put on a flight to Kabul and then back to Britain.

But two days later, the Americans arrived. They drove him to a place described by Jamal as "a concentration camp", complete with watchtowers and barbed wire.

He said: "I begged the Red Cross to get me out or at least contact the embassy for me. On January 24, I was taken to a US air base and held there for another three weeks.

"Then my interrogator told me I was being sent to Cuba, but it was just standard procedure.

"I was assured it would take about two months to process me and then I could go free. I believed him."

For the next two years, Jamal continued to protest his innocence.

He said his interrogators would often taunt him by promising he was about to go home, only to pretend they had never said it.

But two weeks ago, Jamal and the four other Britons were met by the Red Cross and told they were finally to be freed.

Before they were released, the Americans asked the five men to sign a piece of paper confessing to links with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Jamal said: "This was given to me first by the Americans and then by a British diplomat who asked if I agreed to sign it. I just said 'No'.

"I would rather have stayed in Guantanamo than sign that paper.

"That night, all the inmates sang Islamic songs for me, wishing me well.

"The next morning, as I walked past them in chains for the last time, they shouted out: 'Don't forget us, Jamal. Tell the world, tell the Press, about what is happening here'."

Jamal was the only one of the five men not to be arrested when they landed at RAF Northolt in West London.

While Tarek Dergoul, 26, Ruhal Ahmed, 22, Asif Iqbal, 22, and Shafiq Rasul, 26, were taken to Paddington Green police station, Jamal was questioned with his solicitor.

"Then suddenly it was all over and they told me I could go," he said.

Jamal has vowed to sue America for compensation for his two lost years.

He said: "They deprived me of my liberty, interrogated and tortured me and let me go without even a word of apology."

He also plans to campaign for other detainees to be freed and given human rights.

He said: "I can speak freely at long last and let the world know what's happening there.

TO be honest I'd rather go on a camping holiday with my family, but I know I have a grave responsibility to those still there.

"That's why I want my story told in the Daily Mirror."

Jamal, who has yet to be reunited with his two girls and a boy, said: "I want so much to hug my children and tell them I love them.

"They think I have been on holiday. They don't know the truth.

"I woke up last night when I heard the keys of someone returning to their hotel room. I woke up in a fright and thought one of the guards was coming to put on my chains.

"I then realised that the light in the room was on. When locked up in our cages, the lights were on as well, and I thought to myself: 'You can sleep in the dark now' - and I switched it off."

Jamal added: "One thing good about being in Guantanamo, was that it made you think. Time actually went very quickly.

"There was always something or other on your mind. It didn't pay to dwell on things.

"I tried not to think about my family for two years, because it hurt so much.

"I tried to contain everything.

posted 03-13-2004 12:10 AM            

A TALE TO SHAME THE FREE WORLD
Voice of The Mirror

YESTERDAY saw another appalling reminder of the curse of terrorism.

The terrible toll in human life and suffering in Madrid unites people around the world.

No wonder there is hatred for the fanatics who inflict such pain and misery.

Which is why some people are critical of the men who have just returned to this country from the camp at Guantanamo Bay.

They assumed the five were linked to terrorists in Afghanistan because we knew nothing about them or what happened to them. Until now.

Today the Mirror tells the story of Jamal al-Harith who has spent the past two years incarcerated in the hell of Camp Delta.

He had gone on a visit to Pakistan - as he says, like thousands of other Britons - but a truck he hired to get him out drove into Afghanistan.

That led to his capture by the brutal Taliban. He was lucky to survive.

When he was freed, it was only to be seized by the Americans and sent to Cuba. Which is when a greater torment began.

What Jamal reveals about the treatment of prisoners at Camp Delta will shock everyone who believes in the rule of law.

They were abused, beaten, threatened, tortured and humiliated.

Naked prostitutes were paraded in front of the most religious men. They were mockingly told they had no rights.

Jamal suffered as much as anyone even though, as he says, he had never received as much as a parking ticket before his incarceration.

Both President Bush and his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, contemptuously dismissed everyone at Guantanamo as a dangerous terrorist.

That was a blatant lie and shames the United States - the leader of the free world and supposed upholder of justice and decency.

Jamal al-Harith has exposed the disgrace of what has gone on at Camp Delta - and is still going on to hundreds who remain there.

His story should make the international community insist that the Americans stop their shameful behaviour.

And not just for the sake of justice. For there is a connection between the prisoners there and the broken and bleeding bodies in Madrid.

Just as the free world must unite against terrorism, so it must stand together to uphold civilisation and the rule of law.

We will not beat the terrorists by the scandalous and debasing treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners.

posted 03-14-2004 02:44 PM            

There's a second released prisoner that is confirming the beatings in Guantanamo Bay. This article has Powell's statement re: the ill-treatment charges.

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2643835

Second Guantanamo Briton Tells of Beatings
By Neville Dean, Caroline Gammell and Vik Iyer PA News

Concerns were mounting over human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay today as another British former detainee claimed he suffered beatings and inhuman treatment during his incarceration.

Tarek Dergoul – one of five Britons freed from the Cuban detention camp after more than two years there – said he suffered gunpoint interrogations and beatings.

Meanwhile another former detainee, father-of-three Jamal al Harith, 37, from Manchester, claimed religious men were humiliated by prostitutes and accused the military of psychological torture.

But US Secretary of State Colin Powell has dismissed any suggestions that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were ill-treated.

In a statement issued through his solicitor, Louise Christian, Mr Dergoul, 26, a former care worker from Bethnal Green, east London, condemned the “horrific” treatment he received at the hands of the US government.

The statement said: “Tarek Dergoul has started to try and give his family and his solicitor Louise Christian an account of the horrific things which happened to him during detention at Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo Bay.

“This has included an account of botched medical treatment, interrogation at gunpoint, beatings and inhuman conditions.

“Tarek Dergoul condemns the US and the UK governments for these gross breaches of human rights and demands the immediate release of all the other detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

“Tarek finds it very difficult to talk about things and his family believe his mental health has been severely affected by the trauma he has suffered.

But Mr Powell, in an interview with Sir Trevor McDonald for ITV1’s Tonight programme, dismissed the Britons’ claims.

He said: “We have watched Guantanamo Bay very carefully knowing of the interest of a number of nations, including the United Kingdom, and knowing that we have responsibilities under the Geneva Convention and because we are Americans, we don’t abuse people who are in our care.”

Mr Powell said it was “not in the American tradition to treat people in that manner”.

Mr Powell said: “I think we have discharged all of our obligations under the Geneva Convention to treat people in our custody, our detainees, in a very, very humanitarian way.

“Now, it is not a resort area in Guantanamo Bay, but at the same time, we did not abuse the individuals who were down there.”

Mr al Harith, also speaking on the programme, said he was told that his family would be evicted from their house in Britain unless he admitted being a terrorist.

Asked if he ever thought he was going mad, Mr al Harith said: “Not mad but you can see the psychological effects on people on how they just stopped, I don’t know, resisting in their mind, maybe I suppose and you know they would just sit there all day and not do anything and like once a month or once a week the doctor would come along and inject them with I don’t know what, and they would just sit there like in a daze and sometimes you would see them shaking.”

Mr al Harith said that when he refused to be injected he was “beat up” and put in isolation for a month.

The other three Britons who were released are Ruhal Ahmed, 22, a student from Tipton, Asif Iqbal, 22, a former parcel depot worker and 26-year-old Shafiq Rasul, who are both from Tipton in the West Midlands.

A further four Britons remain in US custody at Guantanamo Bay.

They are Feroz Abbasi, 23, from Croydon, south London, a former computer studies student, captured at Kunduz, Afghanistan in 2001; Moazzam Begg, 36, from Sparkhill, Birmingham, arrested in Pakistan in February 2002; Martin Mubanga, 29, from north London, a former motorcycle courier; and Richard Belmar, 23, from Maida Vale, London, who converted to Islam in his teens.

posted 04-20-2004 06:15 PM            

Olson's wife, Barbara, was killed aboard the jet that slammed into the Pentagon in September 2001. She called him on her cell phone minutes before the crash, and reported the plane had been hijacked

I know it’s just one mere lying statement, but it rubbed me the wrong way! Crock of bull! Olson himself said she DID NOT have a cell phone! In an article entitled The Mother of All Lies - http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steveseymour/lies911/lies.htm - Olson says the following:

“She [Barbara] had trouble getting through, because she wasn’t using her cell phone – she was using the phone in the passengers’ seats,” said Mr Olson. “I guess she didn’t have her purse, because she was calling collect, and she was trying to get through to the Department of Justice, which is never very easy.” … “She wanted to know ‘What can I tell the pilot? What can I do? How can I stop this?”

Here is today’s story: http://apnews.myway.com//article/20040420/D822QPU81.html

Court Hears Testimony of How Detainees Handled
Apr 20, 7:06 PM (ET)
By ANNE GEARAN

The government can't throw out prisoners' constitutional rights to make their case in court just because the country faces new threats in the war on terrorism, a lawyer for foreign-born detainees argued Tuesday in the Supreme Court's first case arising from the Sept. 11 attacks.

"It's been plain for 215 years," lawyer John Gibbons argued. The government, he said, cannot create a "lawless enclave" where no court, American or otherwise, can check up on things.

"The United States is at war," responded Theodore Olson, the Bush administration's top Supreme Court lawyer.

Foreigners held at the Navy's prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, want the Supreme Court to give them a legal right "that is not authorized by Congress, does not arise from the Constitution, has never been exercised by this court," said Olson, himself a symbol of the cost of terrorism.

Olson's wife, Barbara, was killed aboard the jet that slammed into the Pentagon in September 2001. She called him on her cell phone minutes before the crash, and reported the plane had been hijacked.

The justices seemed deeply divided over the fate of more than 600 men from 44 countries who have been held for more than two years at the Guantanamo camp, and about the underlying questions concerning presidential powers in wartime.

"I'm still honestly most worried about the fact that there would be a large category of unchecked and uncheckable actions dealing with the detention of individuals that are being held in a place where America has the power to do everything," said Justice Stephen Breyer.

Two and a half years after Sept. 11, the high court is starting small, with a simple question about whether federal judges can even hear the complaints of the Guantanamo prisoners.

Next week, the court takes up two related cases that may hit closer to home for many Americans. Those cases test President Bush's power to detain U.S. citizens for long periods without charges, and with virtually no access to the outside world.

The terrorism cases before the Supreme Court this year will draw some boundaries for White House and military authority in a war without defined opponents or a clear end.

The Kuwaiti, British and Australian prisoners at issue in Tuesday's case were swept up by U.S. forces during fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the weeks after the jetliner attacks that killed thousands in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

The Supreme Court's answer, due by late June, will not settle whether the men are dangerous terrorists or, as their lawyers contend, innocent victims of circumstance.

The administration claims exclusive power to hold the men and interrogate them as long as necessary, with no guarantee of a lawyer or a trial to determine their guilt. Judges have no business second-guessing the detention of foreigners held on foreign soil, Olson told the court.

The Bush administration calls the men "enemy combatants," similar to traditional prisoners of war but outside the guarantees of the Geneva Convention. The administration has recently assigned lawyers to represent some Guantanamo prisoners, and is making plans to hold the first military tribunals since World War II at the base.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a centrist whose vote may be pivotal, appeared skeptical at times that the government could simply declare the courthouse door closed to the prisoners.

True, the men are not U.S. citizens with clear rights to petition their government, Kennedy said, but the law "doesn't talk about citizens. It says prisoners held under the authority of the United States."

On the other side, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia seemed convinced that federal courts cannot referee every complaint from foreigners held abroad.

The Supreme Court is also no place to write some detailed new rulebook for the government to follow, Scalia said. He was speaking to Olson, but his real audience was Breyer, seated at the opposite end of the bench.

"We have only lawyers before us," Scalia said. "We have no witnesses. We have no cross examination. We have no investigative staff."

Central to the case is the reality of U.S. control in Guantanamo. Leased from Cuba since 1903, the base is independent of the communist country that surrounds it. As a legal matter, however, the Supreme Court must decide whether Cuba's technical sovereignty over the land means the United States courts are off-limits to prisoners.

American courts must have jurisdiction, because only American law and American authority govern what happens at Guantanamo, Gibbons argued.

"Cuban law has never had any application inside that base. A stamp with Fidel Castro's picture on it wouldn't get a letter off the base."

The cases are Rasul v. Bush, 03-334, and al-Odah v. United States, 03-343.

posted 04-20-2004 08:03 PM            

But Couch potato Americans will say.."Its okay...its just for those Brown people with funny hats on their heads".

Wonder how they'd feel about it if THEY were in that situation.

But Torture is only bad if the North Vietnamese do it. Its okay for America to do it right?

posted 04-20-2004 08:34 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by Mech:
What they've done at Guantanamo are war crimes as far as i'm concerned and multiple violations of the articles of the Geneva Convention.

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Agreed! When will it end? And more important, why is it allowed to continue?

posted 04-21-2004 07:08 PM            

Over in Iraq!

Get Out Now
By John Pilger
New Statesman

Friday 16 April 2004

Iraq - Invaders have ripped up the fabric of a nation that survived Saddam Hussein. This is a war of liberation and we are the enemy.
Four years ago, I travelled the length of Iraq, from the hills where St Matthew is buried in the Kurdish north to the heartland of Mesopotamia, and Baghdad, and the Shia south. I have seldom felt as safe in any country. Once, in the Edwardian colonnade of Baghdad's book market, a young man shouted something at me about the hardship his family had been forced to endure under the embargo imposed by America and Britain. What happened next was typical of Iraqis; a passer-by calmed the man, putting his arm around his shoulder, while another was quickly at my side. "Forgive him," he said reassuringly. "We do not connect the people of the west with the actions of their governments. You are welcome."

At one of the melancholy evening auctions where Iraqis come to sell their most intimate possessions out of urgent need, a woman with two infants watched as their pushchairs went for pennies, and a man who had collected doves since he was 15 came with his last bird and its cage; and yet people said to me: "You are welcome." Such grace and dignity were often expressed by those Iraqi exiles who loathed Saddam Hussein and opposed both the economic siege and the Anglo-American assault on their homeland; thousands of these anti-Saddamites marched against the war in London last year, to the chagrin of the warmongers, who never understood the dichotomy of their principled stand.

Were I to undertake the same journey in Iraq today, I might not return alive. Foreign terrorists have ensured that. With the most lethal weapons that billions of dollars can buy, and the threats of their cowboy generals and the panic-stricken brutality of their foot soldiers, more than 120,000 of these invaders have ripped up the fabric of a nation that survived the years of Saddam Hussein, just as they oversaw the destruction of its artefacts. They have brought to Iraq a daily, murderous violence which surpasses that of a tyrant who never promised a fake democracy.

Amnesty International reports that US-led forces have "shot Iraqis dead during demonstrations, tortured and ill-treated prisoners, arrested people arbitrarily and held them indefinitely, demolished houses in acts of revenge and collective punishment".

In Fallujah, US marines, described as "tremendously precise" by their psychopathic spokesman, slaughtered up to 600 people, according to hospital directors. They did it with aircraft and heavy weapons deployed in urban areas, as revenge for the killing of four American mercenaries. Many of the dead of Fallujah were women and children and the elderly. Only the Arab television networks, notably al-Jazeera, have shown the true scale of this crime, while the Anglo-American media continue to channel and amplify the lies of the White House and Downing Street.

"Writing exclusively for the Observer before a make-or-break summit with President George Bush this week," sang Britain's former premier liberal newspaper on 11 April, "[Tony Blair] gave full backing to American tactics in Iraq . . . saying that the government would not flinch from its 'historic struggle' despite the efforts of 'insurgents and terrorists'."

That this "exclusive" was not presented as parody shows that the propaganda engine that drove the lies of Blair and Bush on weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda links for almost two years is still in service. On BBC news bulletins and Newsnight, Blair's "terrorists" are still currency, a term that is never applied to the principal source and cause of the terrorism, the foreign invaders, who have now killed at least 11,000 civilians, according to Amnesty and others. The overall figure, including conscripts, may be as high as 55,000.

That a nationalist uprising has been under way in Iraq for more than a year, uniting at least 15 major groups, most of them opposed to the old regime, has been suppressed in a mendacious lexicon invented in Washington and London and reported incessantly, CNN-style. "Remnants" and "tribalists" and "fundamentalists" dominate, while Iraq is denied the legacy of a history in which much of the modern world is rooted. The "first-anniversary story" about a laughable poll claiming that half of all Iraqis felt better off now under the occupation is a case in point. The BBC and the rest swallowed it whole. For the truth, I recommend the courageous daily reporting of Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad (www.wildfirejo.blogspot.com).

Even now, as the uprising spreads, there is only cryptic gesturing at the obvious: that this is a war of national liberation and that the enemy is "us". The pro-invasion Sydney Morning Herald is typical. Having expressed "surprise" at the uniting of Shias and Sunnis, the paper's Baghdad correspondent recently described "how GI bullies are making enemies of their Iraqi friends" and how he and his driver had been threatened by Americans. "I'll take you out quick as a flash, motherfucker!" a soldier told the reporter. That this was merely a glimpse of the terror and humiliation that Iraqis have to suffer every day in their own country was not made clear; yet this newspaper has published image after unctuous image of mournful American soldiers, inviting sympathy for an invader who has "taken out" thousands of innocent men, women and children.

What we do routinely in the imperial west, wrote Richard Falk, professor of international relations at Princeton, is propagate "through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen positive images of western values and innocence that are threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence". Thus, western state terrorism is erased, and a tenet of western journalism is to excuse or minimise "our" culpability, however atrocious. Our dead are counted; theirs are not. Our victims are worthy; theirs are not.

This is an old story; there have been many Iraqs, or what Blair calls "historic struggles" waged against "insurgents and terrorists". Take Kenya in the 1950s. The approved version is still cherished in the west - first popularised in the press, then in fiction and movies; and like Iraq, it is a lie. "The task to which we have set our minds," declared the governor of Kenya in 1955, "is to civilise a great mass of human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state." The slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were never called nationalists, was British government policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that the Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic white settlers. In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32 Europeans, compared with the estimated 10,000 Kenyans killed by the British, who ran concentration camps where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace. "The special prisons," wrote the imperial histor-ian V G Kiernan, "were probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese establishments." None of this was reported. The "demonic terror" was all one way: black against white. The racist message was unmistakable.

It was the same in Vietnam. In 1969, the discovery of the American massacre in the village of My Lai was described on the cover of Newsweek as "An American tragedy", not a Vietnamese one. In fact, there were many massacres like My Lai, and almost none of them was reported at the time.

The real tragedy of soldiers policing a colonial occupation is also suppressed. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same number, according to a veterans' study, killed themselves on their return home. Dr Doug Rokke, director of the US army depleted uranium project following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates that more than 10,000 American troops have since died as a result, many from contamination illness. When I asked him how many Iraqis had died, he raised his eyes and shook his head. "Solid uranium was used on shells," he said. "Tens of thousands of Iraqis - men, women and children - were contaminated. Right through the 1990s, at international symposiums, I watched Iraqi officials approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence and ask, plead, for help with decontamination. The Iraqis didn't use uranium; it was not their weapon. I watched them put their case, describing the deaths and horrific deformities, and I watched them rebuffed. It was pathetic." During last year's invasion, both American and British forces again used uranium-tipped shells, leaving whole areas so "hot" with radiation that only military survey teams in full protective clothing can approach them. No warning or medical help is given to Iraqi civilians; thousands of children play in these zones. The "coalition" has refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to send experts to assess what Rokke describes as "a catastrophe".

When will this catastrophe be properly reported by those meant to keep the record straight? When will the BBC and others investigate the conditions of some 10,000 Iraqis held without charge, many of them tortured, in US concentration camps inside Iraq, and the corralling, with razor wire, of entire Iraqi villages? When will the BBC and others stop referring to "the handover of Iraqi sovereignty" on 30 June, although there will be no such handover? The new regime will be stooges, with each ministry controlled by American officials and with its stooge army and stooge police force run by Americans. A Saddamite law prohibiting trade unions for public sector workers will stay in force. Leading members of Saddam's infamous secret police, the Mukhabarat, will run "state security", directed by the CIA. The US military will have the same "status of forces" agreement that they impose on the host nations of their 750 bases around the world, which in effect leaves them in charge. Iraq will be a US colony, like Haiti. And when will journalists have the professional courage to report the pivotal role that Israel has played in this grand colonial design for the Middle East?

A few weeks ago, Rick Mercier, a young columnist for the Free-lance Star, a small paper in Virginia, did what no other journalist has done this past year. He apologised to his readers for the travesty of the reporting of events leading to the attack on Iraq. "Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage," he wrote. "Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations . . . Maybe we'll do a better job next war."

Well done, Rick Mercier. But listen to the silence of your colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. No one expects Fox or Wapping or the Daily Telegraph to relent. But what about David Astor's beacon of liberalism, the Observer, which stood against the invasion of Egypt in 1956 and its attendant lies? The Observer not only backed last year's unprovoked, illegal assault on Iraq; it helped create the mendacious atmosphere in which Blair could get away with his crime. The reputation of the Observer, and the fact that it published occasional mitigating material, meant that lies and myths gained legitimacy. A front-page story gave credence to the bogus claim that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks in the US. And there were those unnamed western "intelligence sources", all those straw men, all those hints, in David Rose's two-page "investigation" headlined "The Iraqi connection", that left readers with the impression that Saddam Hussein might well have had a lot to do with the attacks of 11 September 2001. "There are occasions in history," wrote Rose, "when the use of force is both right and sensible. This is one of them." Tell that to 11,000 dead civilians, Mr Rose.

It is said that British officers in Iraq now describe the "tactics" of their American comrades as "appalling". No, the very nature of a colonial occupation is appalling, as the families of 13 Iraqis killed by British soldiers, who are taking the British government to court, will agree. If the British military brass understand an inkling of their own colonial past, not least the bloody British retreat from Iraq 83 years ago, they will whisper in the ear of the little Wellington-cum-Palmerston in 10 Downing Street: "Get out now, before we are thrown out."

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