Guantanamo: How Much Longer?

Report of the Panellists’ Remarks at the JFJHR public meeting Guantanamo: How Much Longer?’ held on 21 May 2007

Keynote speaker Moazzam Begg: Former Guantanamo detainee and spokesman for Cageprisoners, a human rights organization that campaigns for those detained in Guantanamo and elsewhere in the ‘War on Terror’. Panellists Zachary Katznelson: Senior Counsel at Reprieve, which represents 36 Guantanamo detainees his focus is on prisoners held outside the rule of law in the ‘War on Terror’. Gillian Slovo: South African born novelist and co-author with Victoria Brittain of the play Guantanamo - Honour Bound To Defend Freedom. Doug Jewell: Liberty Campaigns Co-ordinator, leading the campaigns on Guantanamo and related issues, especially extraordinary rendition. Chair Professor Sir Nigel Rodley: Professor of Law and Chair of the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex and current UK member of the UN Human Rights Committee.

Professor Nigel Rodley explained why the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights was holding a meeting on Guantanamo. In its concern for human rights, JFJHR had already held meetings about the Occupied Territories as well as Darfur and terrorism. The existence of Guantanamo, and the abuses going on there, have affected people in the UK. The aim is to see what individuals can do. This was not an academic meeting, but a chance to take stock and see what can be done.

Zachary Katznelson began by asking: ‘What is life like for them, the UK residents?’ He said we should keep in mind that on 7 June Guantanamo will have been in existence for five and a half years and almost all the inmates kept without charge, without trial. Only two out of 380 have been charged. Think what these people have missed. They have nothing. Two-thirds are in isolation, cut off from their fellow prisoners.

There was no justice, democracy or human rights in Guantanamo Bay. Zachary said this is the shame of his country, the USA. And it was a shame that nothing was being done to rectify the mistakes of Guantanamo. No due process was taking place. The authorities would not show lawyers from Reprieve the evidence against the inmates, as it was classified and charges were not revealed. He described the case of a prisoner held because of alleged involvement with Al Qaeda in 1998, when he was 12!

The inmates were kept in steel cells 6ft by 8ft. Lights were kept on 24 hrs a day, no contact was permitted with fellow prisoners. They could only scream, or catch a snippet of conversation. They were allowed only 2 hours a day outside, which could be during the middle of the night and went for weeks without seeing the sun. They had to recreate in small steel cages - there was not enough room to have people outside together. Camp 6, the newest was all steel and there was a continual echo. There was no such thing as quiet in camp 6, there were neon lights eight feet up and it was freezing in the winter. The inmates had thin cotton T-shirts and trousers and no way of getting warm. The most they had was a few minutes of sun. A steel box is an ice box. Toilet paper used for covering their eyes had been confiscated. They were given one book a week and the Koran. Family mail only got through after extreme censorship and could take years to get through. In December 2005, Jamil el Banna received letters from his children sent in April 1997.

Many reacted by going on hunger strike. The forced feeding of these men was appalling, brutal, purposely so to break the strike. But all they wanted was a fair trial. To tell their story in court. But 5 years had passed and nothing had been done.

The Americans have yet to respond, Zachary said. Two were standing before a military tribunal where they won’t be able to see all the evidence against them. But the question remains: how to get justice for the 8 British residents still in Guantanamo today? The answer had to be through political pressure by activists: lobbying MPs and MEPs. These were men who could not go back to their countries of origin. He hoped in-coming Prime Minister Gordon Brown would take a different position on this. He urged everyone at the meeting to write one letter to their MP on this. ‘These people are like you,’ he said, ‘their lives are here. It’s time for that to stop.’

Moazzam Begg told the meeting that he was seized in January 2002 in Islamabad, Pakistan and held in Kandahar, Bagram amd Guantanamo, before being released on 25 January 2005 with three others, without charge, compensation or apology. He had described his experiences in his book, Enemy Combatant.

He said it was amazing for him to be addressing JFJHR because of having gone to a Jewish school in Birmingham—King David. All he knew from early schooling about religion was Judaism. He only learned about Islam in the evening at home from his father.

Since leaving Guantanamo he had travelled all over the country, including to Northern Ireland, where people had also been hooded and shackled and a community had been criminalised. One thing he had learned was that reaction to the Bloody Sunday massacre and to incarceration in Ireland was responsible for radicalisation. The families of those killed on Bloody Sunday still hadn’t had an apology. Had Guantanamo stopped terrorism, ended hostility or made the world a safer place? One result was that hostages in Iraq had been shown wearing orange jump suits.

Zachary had spoken about Jamil, whose son was five when he last saw his father. Many others were in the same situation. How would they feel about the injustice that had been done to their fathers. The seed of hatred had been sown. Guantanamo only antagonised and exacerbated the security situation throughout the world. The world was much less safe. We had to remember, Moazzam said, that 9/11 was a terrible tragedy. But it unleashed American revenge, not justice. Evidence, rule of law, due process, innocence, guilt—these luxuries didn’t exist in Guantanamo. Enemy combatants didn’t have to be enemies of the US. The phrase ‘Enemy alien’ made you think of foreigners, not human beings. Dehumanisation took place even before people get there. Strange as it may seem, he had been looking forward to Guantanamo. While this was terrible, the places he had been in before that, Bagram and Kandahar, were worse. He noted that extraordinary rendition continues to take place.

Moazzam explained that he had gone to Kabul in Afghanistan in June 2001to set up a girls’ school. He was evacuated to Pakistan where he had relatives after the allied attack. Those who came to get him in January 2002 were CIA operatives and Pakistanis. He was forced to the ground, hooded, shackled, thrown into the back of vehicle, and didn’t see his wife again until 3 years later.

They hadn’t found his mobile and he made an international call from his Islamabad jail to his father. But the phone went dead. He had expected bad treatment from the Pakistanis, but it didn’t happen. They had to hand him over to the Americans, and that’s when the bad treatment began. He hadn’t expected it. His exposure to American culture had made him think otherwise. But, he said, he should have known. He was led on to a plane bent double from soldiers forcing his arms up behind his back, hooded, thrown on the ground, the cold steel of a knife ripped off his clothing, he was shackled, dogs salivated over him, he was punched and kicked, called all sorts of sacrilegious names, shaved, photographed and interrogated stripped naked. Under interrogation he was asked: ‘When was the last time you saw Osama bin Laden?’

Moazzam was moved to Bagram, which was floodlit with no natural light and no fresh food, just ration packets twice a day. He recalled razor wire, the noise of generators, screams late at night, detainees being beaten. This hadn’t made him anti-American. The problem was what America had become. Strangely, he had become friendly with some American guards. It had been important to be just to the guards and soldiers. Not all were abusers. Some complied with orders, some refused and some were confused.

He said there was a paradox in his story. Clive Stafford-Smith, his lawyer from Reprieve, asked him to give some information about abuse that took place in Bagram. So Moazzam told him about a prisoner who was kicked in the thigh 100 times and died. Each time the prisoner had called out ‘Allah’ and this was amusing for the guards so they kept kicking him. But Moazzam had been asked to be a character witness for Damian, who was a guard in Bagram who had given him Catch 22 to read. This soldier was later sent to Abu Ghraib, where he was charged with the sexual abuse of female prisoners. Moazzam described him as part of a system of dehumanisation. It all began with the language of dehumanisation George Bush had used after 9/11. It came from the top and trickled down to the soldiers and they behaved accordingly.

Thousands were still held in Bagram, Diego Garcia, Thailand and Egypt.

Not one person (even of the two on charge) had been charged with anything to do with 9/11, yet this is what it was supposed to have been all about. An iguana was a protected species in Guantanamo, not humans. The US had told him: ‘“You have no rights’, because I am a non-person.’ This was a process that went way beyond justice and had terrible consequences: it made the world a much less safe place.

Britain had a precedent in Northern Ireland. The very same people who had been demonised were now standing in Stormont, taking power. Britain knew the right way to act in such circumstances. Moazzam said that the positive thing for him was that Lords Goldsmith and Falconer among others had called for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. ‘You don’t have to like the people in Guantanamo Bay, just to want justice.’

Gillian Slovo told the story of Joseph who had been suddenly arrested by 2 men. What sort of people were they? he wondered. ‘I live in a country of law.’ He was put on charge but went round and round trying to find out what was happening . . . This was the story of Joseph K, in Kafka’s The Trial. Gillian said she felt that she had journeyed into The Trial as she and Victoria Brittain had been writing the play.

One month after starting the play, the first British citizen was released from Guantanamo and they had said to each other ‘Maybe it won’t be topical anymore,’ but how wrong they had been. They talked to the people concerned, lawyers, the relatives. Many of the relatives hadn’t wanted to speak, but many had because they wanted their voices heard. Azmat, Moazzam’s father, had been one.

Gillian said that it had been an amazing experience. She realised that she had preconceptions about who these people were. The Tipton 3, all friends, sounded like a conspiracy. She had gone to all kinds of places in England and what had completely surprised her had been the people without a voice who had been thrown into this nightmare of Guantanamo; relatives who had absolutely no idea why their sons, nephews had been incarcerated in Guantanamo. She knew about the knock on the door from her own childhood in South Africa, but her parents knew why they had been being taken away. The Guantanamo relatives had no idea why their loved ones had been taken. All they had was a little help from the lawyers like Zachary who anyway had very little hope. This had been Kafkaesque. She had heard of people being incarcerated in Zambia, the Gambia, Pakistan.

‘The play derived its power from being about my journey into incredulity’, Gillian said. People who came to see it saw that this was their story. The relatives had no inkling that they would be part of this. Guntanamo was happening in our world. It was easy to blame the Americans, but we had to look at the role of the British government. It was easy to have a go at Donald Rumsfeld. But hard to find statements by British politicians. While there were no quotes in favour of Guantanamo, they had been embarrassed, hadn’t spoken out about it. Blair had been mealy-mouthed. He had allowed divisions to be created between British citizens and British residents. Bisher al Rawi was a refugee from Iraq and Jamil el Banna from Jordan, therefore there was no one to speak for them. What’s happened in Guantanamo had divided people. Most who have been born in UK have got out; others haven’t.

Gillian ended by quoting from Lord Steyn’s 2003 speech declaring Guantanamo to be ‘a legal black hole. She reinforced Zachary’s appeal to write to MPs. Lord Steyn quoted John Donne: ‘No man is an island entire of it self; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; ... any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls it; it tolls for thee.’

Doug Jewell said he want to broaden the issue out slightly. It was part of a process, not just about Guantanamo, or the US government, but our government as well. It was about the way, after 9/11, the threat of terrorism was being dealt with outside of legal and human rights frameworks. New laws in the US and the UK had done this. The House of Lords had handed down a great verdict in the Belmarsh case that laws like these are great threat to freedoms in our society and that it was unlawful to discriminate against foreign nationals. The government’s response had been to bring in control orders and to discriminate against British nationals as well. Liberty says bring people to court, not punish them on the basis of suspecting them of something. Control orders were a real infringement for the innocent (eg. children unable to access the internet for homework) but no deterrent to taking part in terrorist activity. Two had gone missing. The Prime Minister had made a statement about 300 dangerous people, but only 22 were under control orders and 2 of those were on the loose.

What was done was not new as the British army had been censured for it before, after the Northern Ireland troubles in the 1970s. But the drift of dealing with things out of process has led to this: to torture. The British government had tried to use evidence gained by torture abroad; our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights should mean that we investigate rendition involving the UK; the government’s use of memoranda of understanding with countries with terrible human rights records so that it could send terror suspects back to those countries—all of these things had been brought to public attention.

The government had been undermining one of the fundamentals; this country almost wrote the Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms outlawing torture completely. There was nothing more dehumanising. This came after the Second World War.

If you tried to justify torture, it would be the thin edge of the wedge, Doug said. This drip, drip, drip undermined the human rights framework, which should be the basis of decent society; allowing the terrorists to win.

How much longer? There was now hope, Doug said, because Guantanamo has failed. No one feels any safer because of Guantanamo and people are increasingly ready to see this. ‘The conversation won’t move on. It depends on us. If we don’t, the consequences will be terrible.’

Last update: Sunday, July 22, 2007 at 3:45:31 PM
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