Victoria Brittain | ukwatch.net

From Goma to Gaza, Mr Miliband

JamieSW — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:21:08 +0000

David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner were quick to fly to Kinshasa and Kigali this weekend to be seen to be responding to the sudden visibility of the long-running horrible humanitarian crisis of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Whether they achieve much more than another temporary truce among the assorted warlords whose troops have been living by rape and pillage in the area for more than a decade, is of course another question.

But Mr Miliband and Mr Kouchner have another invisible humanitarian crisis on their hands in which some highly publicised flying around could have a dramatic effect on the ground. They should announce visits to Jerusalem to speak to Israel’s leaders, and then arrive by helicopter (the airport is destroyed) in Gaza City, breaking the Israel military’s 17-month siege of Gaza.

They would be able to do it with ease, unlike the handful of people who made the trip recently in two boat trips from Cyprus, bringing medicines, hearing aids for the deaf, and hope that the world could hear the horror of what is happening to them.

The two European leaders could see for themselves in Gaza how Israel’s collective punishment of 1.5 million people has crippled Gaza’s economy, cut fuel and electricity, leaving its desperate people hungry, deprived of medicines, with hundreds barred from travelling for operations or healthcare, or for education. Only last week, camps in Gaza City and Khan Yunis saw waist-high water flood homes and roads after heavy rains because the pumping system was not working.

All this suffering is there to be seen.

And they could hear about the many avoidable deaths, and learn the names of men from 77 to 21 who died at Erez checkpoint when their permits were delayed, and about children, like one-year-old Bayyam Abu Hilu, who died at home when she was denied a permit “for security reasons”.

They would hear how underlying these realities the mental health needs of every family – particularly for children – are overwhelming.

Last weekend I was among about 100 foreigners due to arrive in Gaza for a medical conference on the impact of siege on mental health. The World Health Organisation was a co-sponsor of the conference, Walls versus Bridges and, with other international organisations, had applied to the Israeli military authorities for permission for each individual to enter. Everyone – mainly doctors, psychiatrists, academics from the US, Canada and Europe – was barred, and had to fall back on a blurry video conference from Ramallah.

Among the grim testimonies of psychiatrists from Gaza, such as Dr Eyad Saraj from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, which organised the conference, with WHO, was a video from the former US first lady, Rosalyn Carter. Mrs Carter deplored the fact that “the closure of Gaza is making it impossible for people to lead normal lives,” and said she looked forward to the conference’s recommendations.

Do Miliband and Kouchner really not know what Mrs Carter knows about the devastating impact on people of Israel’s continuing control over the Gaza Strip’s borders, airspace and coastal water? Or about the effect of Israeli military occupation, checkpoints, and the wall, in crushing economic, social and intellectual life for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank?

They should go to Gaza now and see for themselves, as Tony Blair has so shamefully failed to do in his role as Special Envoy for the Quartet. Mr Miliband and Mr Kouchner might then want quietly to tell the Israeli government it will become more and more difficult for them at home to resist the calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions which Palestinian civil society has been asking US and European church and other human rights groups to work for.

Spanish Practices

Ellie Keen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:01:11 +0000

The decision by the Spanish magistrate that judge, Balthazar Garzon, cannot bring the case for extradition of the two UK residents, Jamil el-Banna and Omar Deghayes, should end the weeks of uncertainty the two men and their families have endured since proceedings started when they returned to Britain in December, after more than five years of illegal detention and torture by the US in Guantánamo.

It is excellent that the case has been dropped, but the true reason behind the collapse of the case should be known. In a substantive court hearing in the UK for extradition, which was to have been heard in May before Judge Timothy Workman, the conduct of the Spanish government would have appeared extremely poor.

Lawyers for the two men had indicated that they would bring up in court the involvement of spanish intelligence agents in interrogations of them in Guantánamo Bay, overflights of Spain in renditions, and other matters. The judge is leaning on the documents reporting the men’s fragile health as the reason for his decision, thus saving face for Spain, and for himself.

In Guantánamo Bay prison, Spanish security services interrogated these two men, and several others. One of these other men willingly left Guantánamo for Spain to face a court hearing. He was freed by a Spanish court, which found no evidence against him. El-Banna and Deghayes, who had also, in desperation, signed papers in Guantánamo agreeing to be transferred to Spain, were then forgotten again in the US prison. Their Washington lawyer met repeatedly with the Spanish ambassador and asked him to extradite them to Spain – where they would at least have a trial. But Spain did nothing, for years – until Judge Garzon produced his extradition warrant while the men were in the air.

But why should the valuable time and resources of British police and judiciary be spent on satisfying the whim of a Spanish judge over people who had already examined exhaustively by the US and British security services and found to pose no security threat to us or to our allies, including Spain?

The innocence of the men will probably not be acknowledged publicly. It should be, if they are to rebuild their lives after the years of horror. The men and their families have suffered unbearably in this long saga, and Britain has plenty to be ashamed of. British complicity in the rendition of el-Banna from the Gambia to Afghanistan, and then to Guantánamo Bay, is in the public domain and shames us all.

The British government is well aware that lawyers for these men were pressing successive home secretaries to seek their release and return to the UK for the last five years. Only in August last year did the government of Gordon Brown make this request to the Americans.

It is time for the British government to make the smallest of amends to these men by giving them, and their wives, the security of British passports. That’s probably as close to an apology, and to acknowledging the men’s innocence, as we will see.

Nightmare Without End

Alex Doherty — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:14:07 +0000

How does a young man from west London find himself landed in a Kenyan police station, hanging from his wrists, his feet tied to buckets of freezing water? How does he find himself, soon after, being dined by MI5 officers at a Nairobi hotel one moment, then imprisoned underground in the desert the next?

The story of Shahajan Janjua, a British Asian, is a little window into the “war on terror”. As with the cases of the three young men from Tipton who ended up in Guantánamo Bay, MI5 officials in this case showed themselves apparently incapable of making a judgment of young British Asian men’s likely links to terrorism. So, another has come back from an innocent overseas trip traumatised. Would it have happened if he had been white and middle-class?

The backstory is to be found across Kenya’s eastern border, in Somalia. That country’s state weakness, acute poverty, and strategic position on the Red Sea made it a handy client for both sides in the cold war. In 1993, 18 US soldiers were killed there in an ill-advised UN mission. Subsequent years of warlordism and state collapse were ignored abroad. Then, last year, came six months of peace under the Union of Islamic Courts. The US responded recklessly, instigating – and aiding with spy satellites and a special operations unit – an Ethiopian attack that involved airpower and 15,000 troops. The Islamic government was brought down in days. Needless to say, it was all cast as a war against terrorism.

On Christmas Day, Janjua was in Mogadishu for the wedding of a childhood friend to a Somali woman. He was the only guest from London. Janjua, a young man who had put a troubled inner-city past behind him, planned to leave the country on December 31, stopping over in Dubai to see friends before returning to London to celebrate his 22nd birthday in January.

But he fainted at the wedding on Christmas Day, and was admitted to hospital with malaria. Mogadishu was under bombardment, and his passport was stolen. Within days he was taken from the hospital, still linked to his drip, and put in a van with cans of tuna, a gravely wounded Zimbabwean on a stretcher, another wounded Somali, and foreign fighters. It was a grim two-day trip to the southern port city of Kismayo, where the Islamic Courts were still in control and the streets seethed with men carrying AK-47s.

When Janjua was offered the chance to head for the Kenyan border, he leapt at it, desperate as he was to find a British consulate. Still weak from malaria, he was put in one of two crowded vans along with the two wounded men.

The border was closed and they split into three groups to walk. As an argument broke out about carrying the stretcher case, the Zimbabwean took a direct hit from Ethiopian troops. Janjua saw a Tunisian and Swede dead, too. Everyone ran. Janjua’s group of 13 then began a two-week walk with no food and only muddy water to drink. After two days, during which time he heard them speak nothing but Arabic, he discovered that three were British.

They were arrested by the Kenyan military after villagers turned them in. Janjua was smashed in the face with a rifle and his nose fractured. In police cells in Nairobi those in authority assaulted and interrogated him. Next he was taken to expensive hotels and quizzed by six different British MI5 officials. They showed him pictures of British men he mostly did not recognise, and asked him repeatedly: “Who sent you? Who funded you? Who are your friends? Which mosque did you go to?”

His lucky break came when he persuaded a Kenyan policewoman to lend him her phone and alerted lawyers in London. Kenyan lawyers then tried to visit the prison, but were not allowed in. MI5 had ample time to confirm his account of his visit to Somalia, but on February 2, police in London were telling his family that he had been caught on the Kenyan/Somali border with guns.

Janjua and three other British men were flown back to Somalia and held for three days in an underground desert cell. Then he was flown back to Kenya, and on to London, where he was questioned by police, but not charged. It should all be over, but he has nightmares and headaches, and is haunted by the men he left in Kenyan or Somali jails. He, and they, are yet more casualties in a mindless, misbegotten “war on terror” which the US and Britain cannot win militarily.

Victoria Brittain is the co-author, with Moazzam Begg, of Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantánamo and Back.

Victoriacbrittain@hotmail.co.uk

Rotten at the Source

Alex Doherty — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:39:12 +0000

The second Independent Police Complaints Commission report on the events of last June in Forest Gate when one innocent man was shot, another arrested, and a family traumatised, is a poor piece of work which evades the main issue of police use of false intelligence.

Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23 – the man shot in the shoulder – and his brother Abul Koyair, 20, were released without charge a week after the police operation which had involved 250 officers looking for a “dirty bomb”.

How on earth can the IPCC say that it accepts the police had no choice but to act based on the available intelligence, which suggested an “extreme lethal threat”? What kind of intelligence were they working on? And who gave it to them?

In fact there was no bomb factory, no chemical device, no evidence of terrorism-related activity, as the media frenzy, which has so tarnished this family, related.

Why didn’t the IPCC investigate the sources of that false intelligence? Is that source still supplying the police? Surely that source should be in court charged with supplying false intelligence, wasting police time, bringing the police into disrepute and causing harm to individuals and property?

The IPCC commissioner Deborah Glass upheld no complaints about excessive force, saying that the level of force had to be judged in the light of intelligence. This only emphasises the importance of understanding what that intelligence was, and who was responsible for it. The chance of a proper investigation has been missed by the IPCC, but the pressure for one will continue.

The IPCC upheld only a small number of complaints involving treatment in custody. Just one officer has received a written warning, and that for an allegation of neglect. This is scandalous.

Of course it is good that the IPCC says the Metropolitan police should apologise to the family, and recognises that they suffered a terrifying experience. But the damage from the events at Forest Gate goes wider and deeper, not only to the family, but to the Muslim community. Underlying it is the issue of poor intelligence from within the Muslim community by the security services, who too often use informers who have their own agendas to seek police protection.

The Worst Kind of Secrets

Tim Holmes — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 18:26:53 +0000

The Bush administration has now successfully brought Congress into line so that men held in Guantánamo Bay will be denied the right to habeas corpus. If they are tried at all, it will be before military commissions and the prisoners will not know what evidence is given against them. In addition, evidence will be accepted that is hearsay or obtained by torture. And, the US president can now arbitrarily detain anyone, anywhere, who he deems an enemy combatant, and they can no longer count on the legal process to protect them. This is the most serious perversion of the US constitution, and a green light to regimes around the world who prefer to “disappear” people rather than try them – practices that were notorious and condemned worldwide under military regimes in Latin America and Africa a generation ago.

Before this latest twist in the White House saga of keeping Guantánamo outside the law, the most senior of British law officials, Lords Faulkner and Lord Goldsmith, had at last gone on the record with stinging critiques of Guantánamo as “shaming, a symbol of injustice, and a recruiting agent for terrorists”. So, how can it be that the UK is going down the US road in the treatment of Arab refugee prisoners such Detainee 00, a wheelchair-bound, diabetic grandfather with high blood pressure, heart disease and renal failure, now held in the hospital wing at Belmarsh after a brain haemorrhage?

Mr 00 is not allowed to be named – under a contempt of court order from the controversial Special Immigration Appeals Court (Siac) established in 2001 to hear cases of foreign nationals detained or facing deportation on grounds of national security. This secretive court was set up after the government lost a case in the European court of human rights in 1996 when it ruled that it was unfair that detainees and their lawyers were not allowed to see all the government evidence against them. Now that evidence is seen by a special advocate given extensive security vetting, but that lawyer can not reveal it either to the detainee or to his lawyers.

In 1991 Mr 00, then in his mid-30s, came to Britain and was given refugee status on the basis of Red Cross evidence of severe torture in prison in Jordan over several months which had left him partly paralysed. Tension during the first Gulf war saw a wave of political arrests in Jordan. Mr 00 was a well-known Imam and teacher, and a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He was a man who travelled a lot and he had visas in his passport for Saudi Arabia, Pakistan (where he had done medical studies and lived for six years), and the UK. His wife, five daughters and one son joined him in Britain in 1997. All are British citizens.

The family lived quietly in a flat in central London and all the daughters got married, giving Mr 00 12 grandchildren. His own training as a physiotherapist meant he managed his own complex medical problems with diet, exercise, massage. His GP was a diabetes specialist. Mr 00 rarely went out, because of his health problems, but in his sitting room, lined floor to ceiling with Arabic books, many people came to see him: some students, some from the Muslim obligation to visit the sick, and not all because they agreed with his teaching. In the complex currents of Muslim life in Britain, Mr 00 and his students were well known to be in open contradiction with the flamboyant extremism fashionable in the Finsbury Park mosque and its like.

“He is a very calm person, everyone knows his views, he is against violence, he condemned 9/11, and 7/7, everyone knows what he stands for,” one young visitor said. But in January this year the scholarly family world fell apart when Mr 00 was arrested and taken to Belmarsh. His own GP and the doctor who has treated him for strokes signalled extreme concern, and an immediate application for bail was made. The Home Office evidence to Siac was in secret and he was refused bail or even house arrest as, “assessed to be a member of an Islamist extremist group linked to extremist activity in the UK and overseas”.

His wife puzzles over and over the words, wondering what lies behind them. “This is beyond my imagination, we came here for freedom and human rights, but we find no justice or objectivity … how can it be worse here than Jordan where at least they tell you why you are arrested – even if it’s a lie?” Mr 00’s oldest daughter, Hiba, describes, “the two worst humiliations: first, being asked to leave the court while they closed it to consider secret evidence against my father, and second, when I saw him chained in his hospital bed, and with guards standing there even when he had a tracheotomy.”

Her father was expected to die by the doctors treating him after the brain haemorrhage, but he miraculously pulled back. However it has left him extremely weak and confused. He has no other prisoner to talk to in his infirmary room, and he struggles with the Belmarsh feeding. At home the family has used all the routes to power in a democracy, such as letters to his MP, Karen Buck, to the prison authorities, asking at least to let him be cared for at home. He so clearly could not abscond, and at home with his family could work through the current confusion and pull his mind back from living in the past. His lawyers, Birnberg Peirce, have described his as, “the cruellest case in a catalogue of cruelty”.

Twice a day Mr 00 phones his wife, but with his hearing aid not working properly, it is not so much a conversation as an assurance that he is still alive. Twice a week one of her son-in-laws drives her the two hours or more to Belmarsh to visit her husband. At least one of her married daughters stays in the house with her. The youngest child, her son, Issa, is studying for his A levels. He looks older than 17, racked by watching his mother. “Two people are suffering, mother as much as dad. Mum left her country. She left her family. She couldn’t be there when her own mother died.”

This family came here as refugees and successfully remade a life which could have been broken by their father’s torture. The home secretary’s decision to allow his detention on the basis of secret evidence has taken away the future they had built. “Before, I had hope, now, we have no place to go, what place is there for us?” says Mr 00’s wife.

What Is The Media For?

Tim Holmes — Mon, 01 May 2006 13:44:38 +0000

What we want from public service broadcasting:

I want to start by posing two questions in response:

What is media for? And, why am I a journalist?

Let us exclude the tabloids for a start they are a poison in our industry and our society, and you can never say that often enough.

I am essentially talking about the serious media, the former broadsheets, the BBC, Channel 4. (Others have said a great deal more already about the BBC specifically.)

What is media for?

My answer would be:

For gathering and spreading information about our society, and the wider world.

I read speeches by BBC management who seem to be obsessed with the need for media to be entertaining, and embarrassed by the idea that teaching and learning might be the first goal. This worries me a lot it feels like shifting the goalposts.

Why am I a journalist?

It certainly isnt because I set out to be entertaining thats a whole different career choice, and involves a set of talents and personality traits that I dont have and dont aspire to.

Im a journalist because I believe that knowledge is power, the more people that have knowledge the more likely it is that powerful people will get checked on their way to becoming more powerful, and rich, and riding roughshod over the rest of us on the way.

Im proud to be a member of the NUJ because I think our union leadership have given a great lead in this direction, not just with lip-service, but with practical programmes of training, not only in the UK, but in Third Worldsocieties where journalists are even more under the thumb of governments and elites than we are here.

Im also a journalist because I like finding things out, and as I always say to the young would-be journalists who come to see me, its a privilege to spend your life constantly learning new things. I cant imagine being in a job which you master and then keep on doing.

But if you ask, What is media for? in other circles, such as proprietors, or government, you get, of course, very different answers.

The former would mainly say (at least in private), its firstly to make money, hence the great emphasis on entertainment, consumerism/celebrity/lifestyle stories, and secondly, to influence government policy towards helping them make bigger profits, and mould a society that is good for big business. (An exception to this is The Independent, owned by people rich enough to lose £10m a year, in the service of a free press. Good for them.)

While the latter (government) would also say, (also in private) its to get people to understand the world from our viewpoint. Hence the world of government spin and misinformation in which we currently live confused, sceptical, and waiting for the weekend, and Bremner, Bird and Fortune giving the rest of us the chance to laugh at the self-important ministers and mandarins who have tried to pull the wool over our eyes in the previous week.

I imagine that in this room there would be few dissenters from the three propositions that,

1) the dumbing-down of news is a fact of life that we have learned to live with,

2) because of the dominance of monopolies in media, and the priorities Ive already mentioned, and because of the key fact of how circular media is, always feeding off itself, dumbing-down will continue across the board unless theres a powerful grass roots rearguard action to ring fence public broadcasting. If that were successful, it would, because of the circular waves that run through all media, significantly influence other news outlets and we might see a significant backlash against dumbing-down.

3) dumbing-down it is a process which is not just disastrous for our media industry, and our self-respect as journalists, working at something we used to be proud of, but it is catastrophic for our society, and for democracy itself.

You probably all saw the movie, Good night, and Good luck, and shared a pang of nostalgia for the Ed Morrow years consistent investigative journalism with a real team of researchers, a proprietor who backed you (mostly) in government baiting, an obvious enemy of society in Senator McCarthy, and, best of all, the eventual downfall of the enemy.

And of course Morrow was not the only journalist of earlier days in the US to be a national hero because of his facility with a mixture of hard-headed analysis, straight news, and informed documentary Walter Cronkite, and Peter Jennings were others.Today, when you think of US television, it is with a shudder at the spectre of Fox News, Rupert Murdochs fantastically successful, unashamedly partisan, channel with audiences for some shows of over 2 million. Could it happen here? Yes, is the answer.

But back to Morrow and his investigations. We did them here once too: World in Action, the Sunday Times Insight team. But sadly today in the UK media investigations are more associated with News of the World-type sting operations against football managers or unpopular politicians, and more often concerned with peoples private lives than with earth-shaking trends like McCarthyism was, or the things which World in Action went for.

Consistency is what I admire most about Morrows work. Today it is out of fashion, in the constant search for the new and the fashionable, and the fear of being worthy, or oh dear, boring.

So, stories like:

The threats to the future of the planet, and the lives of most people on it, are carried spasmodically, or not at all in much of our Western media. Could this really be boring?

What are these threats, and which paper or TV channel can you rely on to keep them high on the agenda?

The current military-dominated big power economies and the corporations which essentially control them, have created a desperately unstable world:

firstly with the wars they fuel,

secondly with the evasion of the real and coming impact of climate change,

thirdly with the massive pollution they export to the Third World,

fourthly with the corruption they engender and encourage,

fifthly with the export of an economic model which is unsustainable,

sixth with a war on Islam with manifestations from Palestine and Iraq to Guantanamo Bay

All these things are causing deepening mass world poverty and anger: hunger, violence, dropping life expectancy, deprivation of education, mass movements of populations, the HIV/Aids explosion are among the manifestations.

The role of the current US administration in all this, and in particular the office of the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and companies linked to him such as Halliburton, is blurred in such a way that the average alert newspaper reader or TV watcher here has learned from parts of the media to accept that the US claims to be spreading democracy in the Middle East, while utterly destroying societies and killing tens of thousands of people, are rubbish, but they have not really learned that the most powerful country in the world is led by war criminals who are a peril to our world.

Thats considered extremist, not, as it is, just literally true. We can dream of how Morrow might have gone at this US story, like a terrier, from every angle, and never letting go.

But the world story, the unfashionable issue of poverty, world poverty is the story which should preoccupy us all and which has myriad angles to come at it from as I mentioned earlier.

But the consistency I would most regret not finding in this story is the emphasis that:

Poverty is about powerlessness. This is the most dramatic facet of the inequality between our affluent lives in Western social democracies and those of the elites in the Third world who are the ones most journalists and organisations in the West have relations with and the rest of the world. These affluent lives are made possible by the exploitation of the worlds majority.

And of course never forget -the most powerless and the most exploited are women, and I would like to highlight the amazing work of the NYT journalist Nicholas Kristof who has the power of a bi-weekly column and a great travel budget, and seems to use it almost exclusively on this subject of womens powerlessness read him on rape in Darfur, forced prostitution in the Sub-Continent great reportage, an unswerving analysis of what lies behind it, a consistent tone of outrage. If only the BBC had just one journalist, or just one strand, which was famous in this way.

Kristof is exceptional because in the mainstream western media the dominant story lines most of us journalists accept when writing about the Third World, evade looking squarely and consistently at the complex linked issues of poverty and social justice.

Of course we cover all these frightening world trends I mentioned, and many well-informed, distinguished journalists like the BBCs Jeremy Bowen, Channel 4s Jon Snow, or The Guardians Chris McGreal, and George Monbiot, give shining examples of how in the mainstream it is possible to go beneath the surface and consistently pull these lines together.

But these are individuals, and there are many examples of the same organisations dumbing-down with the best, or should I say, the worst, of them. Ill just mention one, because it illustrates some of my points about media management priorities and budgets, and about the circular nature of media, and how those play out in coverage. Ch 4s Washington correspondent did a recent report from Venezuela which played into every prejudice about oil-flush tyrant threatening the US pictured with Saddam Hussein; spreading revolution, pictured with Fidel and Evo Morales; posing a nuclear threat, pictured with Iranian leadership; there was an underlay of interviews with rabid anti-Chavez types in the oil industry and US-funded independent media. It all echoed the hysterical US-based reporting on Chavez which Rugman is no doubt immersed in, how could he not be. It was a low moment in Channel 4 news. Washington-slanted Latin American reporting, or Middle East reporting, like African reporting done from Johannesburg, is reporting on the cheap. It is no substitute for the real thing being there.

The BBCs World Service is a bright icon of thoughtful in-depth coverage: for instance the recent series of young Muslims in Europe, and on extraordinary rendition of Muslims flown about the world to be tortured.

And for just being on the ground, and not flown in for a quick sensation, the World Service is often streets ahead of , say Radio 4, in insight. (Though the World Service has its own manifestation of news on the cheap in its Have your say programme not news at all, but unfiltered opinion and a sop to populism.)

Is the nemesis of all these conventional media outlets, with all their imperfections, going to be the Internet?

When I saw Rupert Murdock talking about this, and predicting a future in which media becomes like fast food, my reaction was that it could be just the opposite highly nourishing.

At the moment the Internet is often part of why our newspapers fail in reporting desk editors tell people to look up the Internet, instead of sending them out to report (budgets again). But, on the other hand, there is an unprecedented explosion of available serious information on almost any subject or region where Western journalists know little. Just to take three examples of areas which I work on:

Iraq,

Palestine,

Guantanamo Bay

there are websites, blogs, and email mass postings, which allow anyone with the will to pay attention, to be extraordinarily well informed. Conventional media will have to face up to this challenge if it is not to become just a backwater, as readers, listeners and viewers will gravitate to new media if the content is simply more informative. Lets believe in our readers, listeners and viewers, they dont only want to be entertained, they want to be well informed.

Trial by Spin Machine

Alex Doherty — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 13:30:19 +0000

The coincidental release of Michael Winterbottom’s prize-winning film about the young men from Tipton, Road to Guantánamo, and Moazzam Begg’s book, Enemy Combatant, predictably brought the US and British spin machines into full swing last week – so that anyone reading the book or seeing the film would have got the idea that these men may have been badly treated, but they certainly were not innocent.

Last week the Daily Telegraph flagged an exclusive on its front page. “Begg told FBI he trained with al-Qaeda,” was the headline over a full-page article by Con Coughlin, the paper’s security correspondent, using an FBI report which, as Begg’s book explains, was written by two FBI agents. After Begg had been tortured, threatened with death, offered a job undercover by the CIA, and come to believe he would never see his family again, he signed the “confession”, confident that it was so illiterate and inconsistent that no court of law would accept it as having been written by an educated man such as himself. Coughlin had a copy of the book from the publishers, so – assuming he read it – knew all this as he prepared his piece, which has so damaged Begg.

Meanwhile, Colleen Graffy, the US deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, was in London last week on a propaganda offensive. Ms Graffy had visited Guantánamo and witnessed no unpleasant interrogation, no torture and plenty of sports facilities, she told Jeremy Vine on Radio 2. The imperturbable Vine was speechless when she drew from her bag a sample tube used for force-feeding prisoners and explained to him that it had no metal edges and was therefore humane.

The force-feeding at Guantánamo has been strongly condemned in a letter signed by 250 doctors in The Lancet. However, wider British audiences will have read not that, but “How Innocent is Moazzam Begg?” over Andrew Gilligan’s interview in the Evening Standard, while in the Daily Mail a rant from Richard Littlejohn linked Begg and the Tiptons, claiming their stories don’t stand up to “close scrutiny”.

Five years ago, in the British Journalism Review, David Leigh reported on cases of intelligence services using journalists. One was the 1995 Sunday Telegraph story about the son of Libya’s Colonel Gadafy and his alleged connection to a currency-counterfeiting plan. The story was written by Mr Coughlin, the paper’s then chief foreign correspondent, and was originally attributed to a “British banking official”. In fact – as emerged in a libel case brought by Gadafy’s son – it had been given to him by an MI6 officer, who, it transpired, had been a regular contact for years.

Whatever the intentions of Coughlin and other journalists, the innocence of Begg, the Tipton Three and the other British detainees who have come home is a part of the story of Guantánamo that no official wants people to hear. Like all major miscarriages of justice finally overturned, the officials concerned will never apologise for breaking these men’s lives, no one in authority will lose their jobs, and sections of the media will continue to question their innocence. The denial of justice for these British Muslims – not to speak of the 490 men, including nine UK residents, still in Guantánamo with no legal rights – will corrode the social fabric of this country far into the future.

But the horror of Bagram, Guantánamo and other secret American detention and torture centres for Muslims, in which the UK government is scandalously complicit, is now so well known throughout the world that no propaganda offensive by western officials and their friends has any prospect of lasting success.

Victoria Brittain is co-author, with Moazzam Begg, of Enemy Combatant victoriacbrittain@hotmail.com

Welcoming the Torturer

Alex Doherty — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 17:53:10 +0000

George Bush is this week having an extravagantly orchestrated series of meetings with Europe’s leaders, designed to show a united front for the creation of democracy around the world. Tony Blair talks of our “shared values”. No one mentions the word that makes this show a mockery: torture.
It is now undeniable that the US administration, at the highest levels, is responsible for the torture that has been routine not only, as seen round the world in iconic photographs, at Abu Ghraib, but at Guantánamo Bay and Bagram. Meanwhile, in prisons in Egypt, Jordan and Syria (and no doubt others we do not know about), Muslim men have been tortured by electric shocks to the genitals, by being kept in water, by being threatened with death – after being flown to those countries by the CIA for that very purpose.

How can it be that not one mainstream public figure in Europe has denounced these appalling practices and declared that, in view of all we now know of cells, cages, underground bunkers, solitary confinement, sodomy and threatened sodomy, beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, mock executions and kidnapping, President Bush and his officials are not welcome? Perhaps it’s not surprising given the British army’s own dismal record in southern Iraq. Why has no public figure had the honesty to admit that the democracy and freedom promised for the Middle East are fake and mask US plans to leave Washington dominant in the area? And why does no one say publicly that what is really happening in the “war on terror” is a war on Muslims that is creating a far more dangerous world for all?

From the flood of declassified material from Guantánamo, from recent reports by the military that reveal evidence of abuse and even deaths at Bagram being destroyed, from the war between the FBI and the CIA about who is responsible for the interrogations, from the utter confusion about who is to be responsible for the prisoners who will never be released, one thing is clear: even in its own terms, the torture strategy is a failure.

A s far back as September 2002, a secret CIA study into the Guantánamo detainees suggested that many were innocent or such low-level recruits to the Taliban forces that they had no intelligence value whatever. You do not have to be a specialist in torture to know that after a short period anyone will confess to anything to stop the pain. Men in Guantánamo have been interrogated more than 100 times – always shackled, always the same questions. No wonder prisoners simply stop answering. No wonder there are so many unconvincing confessions.

Now The Torture Papers – 1,249 pages of government memos and reports, edited by Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the centre on law and security at the New York University School of Law – shows the American government to be guilty of a “systematic decision to alter the use of methods of coercion and torture that lay outside of accepted and legal norms”.

The young women interrogators in Guantánamo who put red ink in their pants, then smeared what appeared to be menstrual blood on devout Muslim men, and mocked them by turning off the water so they could not wash before prayers, did not dream up such an idea and send home for red ink. It was policy. Like the wearing of lacy underwear – only – for work sessions, it was designed to humiliate and break men. These reports have come from an army translator, Eric Saar, as well as from prisoners. Lawyer Michael Ratner of the New York Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents over 100 prisoners, said it reminded him of “a pornographic website – it’s like the fantasy of these S and M clubs”.

The lack of moral courage that prevents our leaders, religious as well as political, from speaking out against all this is deeply disturbing. Either they choose not to know or, by not speaking out, they tacitly condone it.

Whichever it is, their behaviour is in stark contrast to the dignity of the relatives of the prisoners, or of the returned prisoners in many countries. The care and concern that many of them display to the isolated, the sick, the frightened and the traumatised among the families are a testimony to the very best of the human spirit. If only these were the shared values that Tony Blair liked to highlight. These men are driven by a feeling of responsibility for trying to end the ordeal of those 540 men still at Guantánamo, including six UK residents. Among these are a Palestinian refugee, Jamil el Banna, and an Iraqi, Bisher al Rawi, men who have lived here for 10 and 20 years respectively, have families here, and who the foreign secretary shamefully refuses to bring home from hell.

· Victoria Brittain, with Gillian Slovo, compiled the play Guantanamo

v.brittain@lse.ac.uk