Two plus Two Makes Four – Rendition Flights and Guantanamo Bay

And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too. There came into it -- but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note.

George Orwell – 1984 Chapter 7

A television documentary maker recently asked the Save Omar Campaign if we knew of anyone who had been rendered to a “ghost camp” where the British were involved. We told this man that there were a number of British residents who had been illegally rendered to Guantanamo Bay, that those people remain there and have been subject to torture, and that in each case the British government was complicit in their abduction and torture either through complicity at the time of their abduction, or through inaction after the event and therefore more complicity.

The documentary maker’s reply was that Guantanamo is old news. It has apparently been done. The media, in its eternal search for the new, wanted ghost camps, rendition, CIA flights in the night – not an old, intractable and apparently well-trodden story.

What is the difference between Guantanamo and these “black sites”? We say there is no real difference - just different shades of grey. Guantanamo was a ghost camp in the strict sense of the word until very recently. It was a ghost camp because the detainees were “ghost detainees”: they were kidnapped and held incommunicado for many months with no legal rights, no access to Counsel or the Red Cross/Red Crescent. Much of Guantanamo is still ghostlike – every bit of new information the world learns about the identity of the detainees and their experiences comes only after a lengthy battle with the US censors, and there is still so much not that not even the families of those detained are allowed to know. And how do we surmise those prisoners got there in the first place? “Rendition” merely means being moved from one place to the next – every detainee in Guantanamo has been “rendered”, most were rendered to blacker sites than Guantanamo first. And it is accepted by virtually all but the US administration that all of this, from abduction through to detention, all that happened in between and all that continues to happen, is unlawful.

More central to recent revelations about rendition flights, is that Guantanamo Bay is a template for what we are now learning about the network of US torture camps and the corresponding network of abduction and illegal flights around the world. Lord Steyn said on the subject that:

“I think Guantanamo Bay is the clue to much of what we have seen unraveled…. We have seen a scale of lawlessness unravel which in my opinion is the logical extension of Guantanamo Bay because Guantanamo Bay involved taking prisoners from Afghanistan, and many other places, to an island where there would be a lawless black hole where they can never escape from, where they have no right to trial. This logically is not very different from what the Americans call rendition which, in truth, is abduction. It is not authorised by international law and the connection between this and Guatanamo Bay is very close.”

The battle to end the detention and torture at Guantanamo Bay is and has been a struggle, at its fundament, against the asserted “right” of the US administration to do what it wishes to people by taking them and holding them beyond the reach of law and out of sight of the world. The struggle continues, and recent revelations about Ghost Camps and illegal CIA flights are, in this context, just the latest and most ruthless message yet that the “War on Terror” is even more terrifying than it had previously seemed.

It is more terrifying not because of a qualitative difference, but because of a quantitative difference. The thought had been that this was going on in Guantanamo, Bagram Airbase and a few other locations, and that the human rights abuses involved the US and a few other brown-nosing states who tortured people at their request. Now we know that this is not the case: we know that there are many more prisons – “black sites” - and much more torture. We know that for all of this to happen, all these secret places, flights, and abductions, that apart from those who directly ordered the flights and torture that many more governments have been involved. Involved at the very least as witnesses who turned the other cheek - of itself a crime.

Which brings us to the involvement of the British government in all of this. In England local police in a number of areas are meant to be conducting inquiries into whether CIA flights carrying people to torture and detention beyond the rule of law have passed through our airports. The Lords recently ruled on the inadmissibility of torture evidence in our courts. In Westminster, a cross-parliamentary group of MPs is asking difficult questions of the government. Tony Blair has said that so far he has heard no question that warrants an answer. The shame of Scottish people that this was happening on their doorstep has prompted righteous protest. Members of the Scottish Parliament are pressing First Minister Jack MacConnell, for the first time in his political life, to stand strong against Westminster. Similar stories can be heard echoing through Europe. And without exception our governments are attempting to evade the issue.

All of this is welcome, timely, and crucial, if indeed we succeed in calling people to account. But it is, truth be told, the thin end of the wedge. More has been going on in the name of the British people than turning a blind eye to torture flights.

For 3 years the British Government has been refusing to make representations on behalf of 3 long-term British residents detained in Guantanamo Bay. Omar Deghayes is a British resident and a Libyan citizen. He fled Libya as a teenager, along with his mother and 3 siblings following the assassination of his father, an outspoken lawyer and trade-unionist, by the Gadaffi regime. They settled in what had been a family holiday home in Saltdean, Brighton. Omar lived in Brighton for 18 years, attending school and university where he studied Law. He married a woman from Afghanistan and had a baby son, now 4 years old. When the war in Afghanistan broke out, Omar and his family fled to Pakistan where he was picked up. Omar was suspected of being a rebel soldier in a video given to the US authorities by the Spanish police. The man in the video was, however, later identified as a Chechen who was shot in April 2004. In June 2005 Amnesty International took up the case of Omar Deghayes as an urgent action. They have recorded a long list of torture that Omar has been subjected to, including one particularly brutal assault where he was blinded in one eye. Omar was “rendered” to Bagram Airbase and then to Afghanistan. He has never been charged by the US, yet he remains in Guantanamo. And despite repeated requests by his lawyer, his family, and campaigners, the UK government refuses to take any steps to help him return home to the UK.

In 1997, Britain recognized Jamil el Banna as a refugee from Jordan. His wife and 5 children are all British citizens. Bisher al-Rawi’s family has lived in the UK for 20 years, and they are all British citizens except Bisher, who has long been recognised as a refugee. His family fled Iraq as Bisher’s father had been detained and tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The allegations that Britain is co-operating with the "rendition" system are bolstered by the story behind Bisher and Jamil’s arrests in Gambia: businessmen, they were seized at Banjul airport after a tip-off from the British, having travelled there to offer a mobile peanut processing plant. They were immediately handed over to US authorities. Bisher and Jamil had already been interviewed and freed by Britain's security service, MI5, back in London. They had been asked about Abu Qatada, a radical Islamic cleric now in detention at Belmarsh prison. When Bisher al Rawi asked to see the British high commissioner, he said he was told: "Who do you think ordered your arrest?"

Before they got to Guantanamo, Bisher and Jamil were held in total isolation in a “Dark Prison” for 2 weeks. It was so dark that Jamil couldn’t see his fingers. During this time he was punched, dragged along the floor and kicked. It was winter, but Jamil only had a t-shirt, no shorts and no blanket. They were then moved to Bagram Airforce Base. This was when Jamil’s wife first heard from him, through the ICRC. He asked her how her pregnancy was going and to pray for his safe return. Bisher and Jamil are still being held in Guantanamo Bay, and the Foreign Office refuses to take any responsibility for their situations. They do not care that Bisher has been living here for 20 years, that Jamal has four children born in Britain, and that the British Government played a part in their abduction and torture.

Binyam Mohammed is an Ethiopian refugee who lived in North Kensington. He had been in Afghanistan, leaving just after September 11th because of the escalating violence. He was seized in Pakistan whilst trying to return to the UK after all his travel documentation was stolen. Before his arrival in Guantanamo Bay in September 2004 Binyam he was a victim of the US government’s practice of “extraordinary rendition” – he was forcibly transferred from one country to another, in his case three times He was questioned in Pakistan by the U.S, and then rendered to Morocco by the CIA where he was tortured until out of desperation he confessed to being part of a “dirty bomb plot”. He spent 5 months in the “Dark Prison” in Kabul, and then Bagram Airforce Base. On November 7th 2005, the U.S “charged” Binyam and he now faces “trial” before the universally derided U.S. military commission. The U.K. government is silent on his behalf, and as a refugee and British resident, Binyam has no other hope of consular assistance.

Despite widespread criticism of the Military Commissions and a pending judgement on their legality by the US Supreme Court, on 16th December the US Government announced that it had referred Binyam’s charges and would be arranging a schedule of hearings with his lawyer. Binyam was severely tortured into signing false confessions - these could be used against him at his Military Commission.

British agencies were aware the Pakistani authorities were holding a British resident in custody and yet allowed him to be handed over to a foreign government without a legal and fair extradition process. Binyam said:

“The British talked to me in Pakistan. I was there for three and a half months. They checked out my story, and said they knew I was a nobody. They said they would tell the Americans. I have struggled with how I came to mean such a lot to them. [There] may have been someone I met with who started putting my name in things. I don’t know. I wish I did.”

Even worse, it seems that the British were co-operating with the Morrocans during the illegal detention, interrogation and torture of Binyam in Morocco between 22nd July 2002 and 22nd January 2004. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has still not answered questions over the involvement of Britain in handing over Binyam to the CIA and his subsequent torture in Moroccan and American custody.

Binyam is 1 of 9 Guantanamo detainees – including British citizen David Hicks - named in a US Presidential Order to be tried by Military Commission. Human Rights experts and NGOs have widely denounced these commissions, as has the British Government: 2 UK citizens already released from Guantanamo at the request of the UK government had been designated by the US President to appear before a Military Commission. The British Government said that the US Government could not use this process for UK citizens because it does not meet international legal standards,

Omar Deghayes, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna and Binyam Mohammed are 3 of 9 known UK residents that the British Government refuses to help. British intelligence forces were complicit in both the seizure and interrogation of these detainees in Guantanamo Bay - what is now being referred to as “extraordinary rendition”. In this context, the subsequent refusal of the British Government to seek the detainees’ return, despite repeated requests, is reprehensible and flies in the face of legal and moral obligations: our government is a signatory to numerous international treaties regarding human rights and against torture. The legal representatives of Omar, Bisher and Jamil say that by failing to stand up for these residents the British government is not acting in accordance with those treaties, and since an earlier and unequivocal request by the UK Government to the US government for the return of UK nationals from Guantanamo Bay was successful, to refuse to do so on behalf of non-national British resident detainees is to discriminate against them on grounds of nationality and is in itself a breach of human rights.

In truth, the more “robust” the British government seems at home over these issues, the greater the inequality of the trans-Atlantic power balance. As Mark Jennings recorded in a paper delivered to the Amnesty International Conference on Human Rights in the Americas Region (5th March 2005), Jack Straw explained in one of the “rare parliamentary debates about Guantanamo” that his department could not make representations on behalf of British residents adding “more to the point, the US government would not accept those representations from us.”

The British government is prepared to flout international and domestic laws, sanction abduction and torture, and betray its own citizens and residents, in order to maintain a relationship that looks increasingly to be based on nothing other than servility to a rogue state.

Be that as it may, the removal of people from their place in a national community and in doing so stripping them of legal, political and human rights, enforcing a loss of status through a prison camp regime that deliberately disregards human dignity has been, in the recent past, considered a war crime. And those who tolerated such actions, who stood by and claimed that they could do nothing, just as the British Government and the Scottish Executive is doing now, have been regarded as collaborators.

Clara Gutteridge
Save Omar Deghayes Campaign
28th December 2005