Signs of a Sick Society: When American Crimes Against Humanity Are Utterly Ignored

When Manners Get You Nowhere: 30 Weeks of Protesting Torture in 2010
By Justin Norman / January 9, 2011

Three years ago, if someone had suggested to me that I don an orange jumpsuit, black hood, and haul a cross down the street in opposition to torture, I would have laughed at them. Yet here I am at the end of 2010 having pulled that stunt or something akin to it more than 30 times in the past year.

Street protests in America today are far less common than they have been in years past, but they are particularly out of place in the relatively upscale business districts of West Des Moines, Iowa. There, week after week, a small, rotating group of ordinary people carry out the old tradition of holding signs inscribed with simple messages. These range in tone from straightforward pleas -- "Shut down Guantánamo", "No More Torture: Not Here, Not There, Nowhere", "Free Shaker Aamer" -- to sarcastic slogans -- "USA: Torturing Our Way to World Peace", "Don't Worry, We'll Tell You What to Confess!"

Note from the marketing department: if you are looking to convert strangers to your ideas, waving signs on a street corner is not your best bet. Nor is shouting through a megaphone, waving a corporate logo-stamped American flag, or acting unruly in general. All of this we did on a regular basis in 2010, and all of this was greeted with predictable hostility from those who passed. We were threatened with violence repeatedly, told we were ungrateful for our freedom, accused of being anti-American, and informed that we would soon burn in hell for defending the "terrorists" our brave soldiers had fought so hard to lock away.

It was all of the things I had imagined it would be when street protesting was first proposed to me after a screening of the film, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. "Counter-productive", "antagonistic", and "mind-numbingly pointless" were phrases that came to mind back then, and it seemed clear that friendlier modes of communication were abundant. After all, how is it that I learned what I know about torture? The books I've read are far more informative than a five-word slogan waved on poster board, and a large number of them -- written by people far more knowledgeable than I -- are readily available to the general public.

For an American soldier's perspective on torture one could turn to Inside the Wire by Erik Saar or How to Break a Terrorist by interrogator Matthew Alexander. To view US detention and interrogation policies from the eyes of innocent detainees, Moazzam Begg's Enemy Combatant or Murat Kurnaz's Five Years of My Life could be easily acquired. Or to put the latest round of American torture in perspective, a copy of historian Alfred McCoy's A Question of Torture or Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy would come in handy. Likewise, writings from lawyers, psychologists, scientists, and journalists are no more than a few clicks away for anyone who is interested.

But the problem, of course, is that most people are not interested. Who wants to read a book about some of the most unpleasant things imaginable when you can just believe the brief summary on the evening news? Even the film screening I'd attended -- a far less time-consuming affair than trudging through 400 pages of misery -- was meagerly visited, with less than 20 people in the room. No, I thought, if people are going to pay attention to this, the issue needs to be brought to a place in which they already gather.

Being raised as Christians, my friend Kirk Brown and I figured that churches would be a prime space for this. After all, one of Christ's central commands was to "love your neighbor as yourself" with specific emphasis on caring for the hungry, sick, and imprisoned. Many innocent captives in the War on Terror easily fit that description. So over the course of a few months we researched and wrote a presentation about two detainees: Dilawar of Yakubi, a 22-year-old peanut farmer who was tortured to death at Bagram Air Base, and Ahmed Errachidi, a London gourmet chef who was held in Guantánamo for five years before being released without charge. Controversy was kept to a minimum as the US itself had declared both of these men completely blameless, and reactionary feelings of helplessness would be partially overcome by inviting our audience to pray for and write letters to torture survivors and their families.

But the project was a near-complete failure. After visiting more than one hundred churches throughout Des Moines, Johnston, Adel, Van Meter, Indianola, and Waukee, and making dozens of follow-up calls and e-mails, we discovered that one thing was consistent across nearly every denomination: Guantánamo did not matter. Or if it mattered, it was not important enough to even warrant reviewing our proposed presentation. The mere fact that it was centered on people who had at one time been labeled "the worst of the worst" was enough to scare pastors away. One of the more forthcoming leaders we spoke to told us that it was simply politically inconvenient. "I agree with you that torture is wrong," he said, "but if you give this presentation we will lose membership." In the end, only one church agreed to let us present, and only if we cut the script in half.

Having been struck down almost unanimously by those worshiping one of the most prominent torture victims in history, our attempts to urgently yet politely point a spotlight on torture had failed. Likewise (and less surprisingly), blog posts I wrote were ignored, satirical podcasts that tackled the issue humorously were shrugged off, and invitations to book studies rejected. Finding myself at a loss to communicate this very important yet very overlooked issue to people, I turned to the method that I least wanted to participate in. Together with Kirk, I bought some black paint, a white board, stenciled the question "Torture for Liberty?" onto it, and perched myself atop a pile of snow by a shopping center in West Des Moines in February, 2010.

And for more than 30 weeks in 2010, that tradition has continued, looking far less tidy and polite than any of my preferred modes of communication. Security officers from the nearby mall accused us of trespassing, police threatened to arrest us for using a 10-watt bullhorn within a 50-watt sound ordinance, angry drivers fabricated stories about us running in and out of traffic in attempts to have us jailed, and insults, racism, middle fingers, and sodas were hurled at us time and again through both the steaming heat and freezing cold.

Note from the marketing department: you catch more flies with honey. Or so the saying goes. Yet one thing I have learned from all this is that people will do nearly anything to avoid talking about victims and survivors of American torture, regardless of what method is employed to communicate it to them. If it's not complaints about political inconvenience, it's whining about tone of voice, wording of slogans, not having all the facts, or just plain looking like a lunatic. Indeed, many of those who comment on the videos and photographs I've posted documenting the vigils would rather focus on our lack of manners than the spotlighted subject matter, allowing the issue of our rudeness to trump the issue of hundreds of innocent men and children being tortured and indefinitely detained.

But despite the general unpleasantness of street protests, one thing is certain about them that is certainly not the case for books, films, and multimedia presentations: they cannot be easily ignored. For at least a few seconds between traffic lights, hundreds of drivers are jolted out of their normal routine and forced to reconnect with something their tax dollars are paying for. The image of a man in an orange jumpsuit laying on a cross is a visual reminder that Christ was tortured by the "just doing my job" soldiers under the empire of his time much like many of those held in American detention centers today. For a few hours each week, the sight of a hooded detainee is pulled from the shadows where victims have been deliberately hidden and thrust into the light of everyday life. It is, in short, working to remember those whom the government works so hard to make us forget.

Of course, when it comes time to suit up and go out there next week, it will not sound that grandiose. It is nothing new, nothing profound, nothing all that exciting. It is a group of four or five people holding signs on a street corner, sharing gloves and conversation to keep from thinking about how damn cold it is outside.

Note from the marketing department: if you smile more, maybe people will actually listen to you. One common denominator of our critics is that they are almost never willing to do anything about the issue themselves. So they raise a middle finger and drive off. They post a message online about how ineffective our methods are. They do anything they can think of to keep from focusing on the issue at hand, and they go about their day. They do this because to them, it doesn't matter that less than 1% of detainees have been convicted in the nine years of the Guantánamo detention center's existence. Those are just passing statistics that have no bearing on the average citizen despite our financial connection to them. No, sadly, facts do not matter, and neither does emotional resonance, and neither does a kick in the teeth.

But it is no longer in the hope of successfully marketing ideas to people who don't want to hear them that I continue to stand in protest. It is out of the desire to love my neighbors as myself, knowing that if I was locked away in a cell for years, one thing I could not tolerate was people discovering this but doing nothing about it. I do it because if my letters to detainees ever make it past the censors, perhaps somewhere in a dark cell one of them will be reassured that they are not forgotten. Perhaps one of them will be encouraged that they are publicly remembered week after week, and that not all Americans are buying the lie of their universal guilt. Perhaps that is too much to hope for, but it is better than voting for presidents and officials who don't keep their word. In any case, if it was me in the cell and you on the street, I think I'd appreciate the lack of indifference.

[Justin Norman is an activist and photographer from Des Moines, Iowa. He is on his way to Washington, DC to join Witness Against Torture's Fast and Vigil for Justice.]

Source / Common Dreams

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Obama: Just Getting Started with Bad Decisions

He was elected in part to drag us out of this trap. Instead, he's dragging us further in. Graphic: Chris Coady/NB Illustrations.
Obama's secret prisons in Afghanistan endanger us all
By Johann Hari / February 12, 2010

He was elected in part to drag us out of this trap. Instead, he's dragging us further in.

Osama bin Laden's favourite son, Omar, recently abandoned his father's cave in favour of spending his time dancing and drooling in the nightclubs of Damascus. The tang of freedom almost always trumps Islamist fanaticism in the end: three million people abandoned the Puritan hell of Taliban Afghanistan for freer countries, while only a few thousand faith-addled fanatics ever travelled the other way. Osama's vision can't even inspire his own kids. But Omar bin Laden says his father is banking on one thing to shore up his flailing, failing cause – and we are giving it to him.

The day George W Bush was elected, Omar says, "my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs – one who will attack and spend money and break [his own] country". Osama wanted the US and Europe to make his story about the world ring true in every mosque and every mountain-top and every souq. He said our countries were bent on looting Muslim countries of their resources, and any talk of civil liberties or democracy was a hypocritical facade. The jihadis I have interviewed – from London to Gaza to Syria – said their ranks swelled with each new whiff of Bushism as more and more were persuaded. It was like trying to extinguish fire with a blowtorch.

The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at first glance like a hangover from the Bush years. Barack Obama was elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap – but in practice he is dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama's orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects. The casualties are overwhelmingly civilians. We may not have noticed, but the Muslim world has: check out Al Jazeera any night.

Obama ran on an inspiring promise to shut down Bush's network of kidnappings and secret prisons. He said bluntly: "I do not want to hear this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that... but as a parent I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence." He said it made the US "less safe" because any gain in safety by Gitmo-ing one suspected jihadi – along with dozens of innocents – is wiped out by the huge number of young men tipped over into the vile madness of jihadism by seeing their brothers disappear into a vast military machine where they may never be heard from again. Indeed, following the failed attack in Detroit, Obama pointed out the wannabe-murderer named Guantanamo as the reason he signed up for the jihad.

Yet a string of recent exposes has shown that Obama is in fact maintaining a battery of secret prisons where people are held without charge indefinitely – and he is even expanding them. The Kabul-based journalist Anand Gopal has written a remarkable expose for The Nation magazine. His story begins in the Afghan village of Zaiwalat at 3.15am on the night of November 19th 2009. A platoon of US soldiers blasted their way into a house in search of Habib ur-Rahman, a young computer programmer and government employee who they had been told by someone, somewhere was a secret Talibanist. His two cousins came out to see what the noise was – and they were shot to death. As the children of the house screamed, Habib was bundled into a helicopter and whisked away. He has never been seen since. His family do not know if he is alive or dead.

This is not an unusual event in Afghanistan today. In this small village of 300 people, some 16 men have been "disappeared" by the US and 10 killed in night raids in the past two years. The locals believe people are simply settling old clan feuds by telling the Americans their rivals are jihadists. Habib's cousin Qarar, who works for the Afghan government, says: "I used to go on TV and argue that people should support the government and the foreigners. But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so?"

Where are all these men vanishing to? Obama ordered the closing of the CIA's secret prisons, but not those run by Joint Special Operations. They maintain a Bermuda Triangle of jails with the notorious Bagram Air Base at its centre. One of the few outsiders has been into this ex-Soviet air-hangar is the military prosecutor Stuart Couch. He says: "In my view, having visited Guantanamo several times, the Bagram facility made Guantanamo look like a nice hotel. The men did not appear to be able to move around at will, they mostly sat in rows on the floor. It smelled like the monkey house at the zoo."

We know that at least two innocent young men were tortured to death in Bagram. Der Spiegel has documented how some "inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". The accounts of released prisoners suggest the very worst abuses stopped in the last few years of the Bush administration, and Obama is supposed to have forbidden torture, but it's hard to tell. We do know Obama has permitted the use of solitary confinement lasting for years – a process that often drives people insane. The International Red Cross has been allowed to visit some of them, but in highly restricted circumstances, and their reports remain confidential. In this darkness, abuse becomes far more likely.

The Obama administration is appealing against US court rulings insisting the detainees have the right to make a legal case against their arbitrary imprisonment. And the White House is insisting they can forcibly snatch anyone they suspect from anywhere in the world – with no legal process – and take them there. Yes: Obama is fighting for the principles behind Guantanamo Bay. The frenzied debate about whether the actual camp in Cuba is closed is a distraction, since he is proposing to simply relocate it to less sunny climes.

Once you vanish into this system, you have no way to get yourself out. The New York lawyer Tina Foster represents three men who were kidnapped by US forces in Thailand, Pakistan and Dubai and bundled to Bagram, where they have been held without charge for seven years now. She tells me there have been "shockingly few improvements" under Obama. "The Bush administration rubbed our faces in it, while Obama's much smoother. But the reality is still indefinite detention without charge for people who are judged guilty simply by association. It's contrary to everything we stand for as a country... I know there are children [in there] from personal experience. I have interviewed dozens of children who were detained in Bagram, some as young as 10."

Today, Bagram is being given a $60m expansion, allowing it to hold five times as many prisoners as Guantanamo Bay currently does. Gopal reports that the abuse is leaking out to other, more secretive sites across Afghanistan. They are so underground they are known only by the names given to them by released inmates – the Salt Pit, the Prison of Darkness. Obama also asserts his right to hand over the prisoners to countries that commit torture, provided they give a written "assurance" they won't be "abused" – assurances that have proved worthless in the past. The British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith estimates there are 18,000 people trapped in these "legal black holes" by the US.

As Obama warned in the distant days of the election campaign, these policies place us all in greater danger. Matthew Alexander, the senior interrogator in Iraq who tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says: "I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight... We have lost hundreds if not thousands of American lives because of our policy." The increased risk bleeds out onto the London Underground and the nightclubs of Bali. I oppose these policies precisely because I want to be safe, and I loathe jihadism.

President Obama has been tossing aside the calm jihad-draining insights of candidate Obama for a year now. Whenever Obama acts like Bush, listen carefully – you will hear the distant, delighted chuckle of Osama bin Laden, and the needless stomp of fresh recruits heading his way.

Source / The Independent

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How Could the US Government Sanction Torture?

Binyam Mohamed, a former detainee at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who was tortured while in U.S. custody, in London after his release in 2009. Photo: Shaun Curry/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
Britain Discloses Data on Ex-Detainee
By John F. Burns / February 10, 2010

LONDON — The British government lost a protracted court battle on Wednesday to protect secret American intelligence information about the treatment of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee, and immediately published details of what it called the “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” administered to the prisoner by American officials.

The seven paragraphs published on the Foreign Office Web site summarized secret information provided by American intelligence officials to Britain’s security service, MI5, on the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a 31-year-old Ethiopian. Mr. Mohamed, the son of an Ethiopian Airlines official, moved to Britain as a teenager and left in 2000 for Pakistan, where he was arrested in April 2002 on suspicion of terrorist links.

Under intense American pressure, Foreign Office lawyers had sought for more than a year to prevent publication of the information. Citing warnings from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others, they argued that the summary’s publication could cause irrevocable damage to intelligence-sharing between the United States and Britain — a relationship that British officials said was essential to Britain’s security, in particular to its counterterrorist operations.

After the court ruling, Mr. Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, who has handled many cases involving Guantánamo detainees, was bitterly critical of the “the shameful way” in which the British government had battled to keep secret what it knew of Mr. Mohamed’s treatment. “Suppressing any evidence of government criminality on the grounds of national security sets a very dangerous precedent,” he said in a comment posted on the Web site of The Guardian.

The newly released document said that while Mr. Mohamed had been in American custody before reaching Guantánamo he had been subjected to “continuous sleep deprivation,” was shackled during interrogations and was exposed to “threats and inducements” that included playing on his fears of being “removed from United States custody and ‘disappearing.’ ”

It also said that he had been kept on a suicide watch and cited that as evidence that the treatment was causing him “significant mental stress and suffering.” But David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, told the House of Commons that Britain had “no information” to support other allegations made by Mr. Mohamed, including claims that interrogators under American orders cut his chest and genitals with a razor and that he was regularly tied to a wall, naked, and exposed to scrutiny by women who were also “naked or part naked.”

The details relate to Mr. Mohamed’s treatment after he was arrested in April 2002 by Pakistani officials, who accused him of using a false British passport, and handed over for a $5,000 bounty to American officials. He was then transported to a “ghost prison” in Morocco, where he said some of the worst abuses occurred, before being taken to the so-called dark prison in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and from there to Guantánamo Bay in 2004.

After the United States military dropped charges that he had planned with others to mount a “dirty bomb” attack on the United States, in part because of concerns that his confessions under interrogation would be voided at trial by the fact that they were obtained under physical duress, Mr. Mohamed was flown back to Britain in February 2009.

In themselves, the revelations in the Foreign Office document contained little that was not already known from previous disclosures by the Central Intelligence Agency about the so-called stress techniques used by American interrogators while questioning terrorist suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

What was starkly new, however, was the Foreign Office’s conclusion that the treatment Mr. Mohamed endured, had it been carried out under the authority of British officials, would have breached international treaties banning torture. It was the first time that Britain has been so blunt about its disapproval of the interrogation techniques approved by former President George W. Bush and curtailed last year by President Obama.

“Although it is not necessary for us to categorize the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities,” the document posted on the Foreign Office Web site said.

The court order, issued by a three-judge panel, could have been further appealed by the Foreign Office. Mr. Miliband told the Commons that the government had decided not to pursue the case because the judges had reaffirmed the so-called control principle governing intelligence-sharing relationships.

That rule, as Mr. Miliband put it, holds “that intelligence material provided by one country to another remains confidential to the country that provided it, and that it will never be disclosed directly or indirectly by the receiving country, without the permission of the provider of the information.”

Mr. Miliband said that he had discussed the case with Mrs. Clinton by telephone on Tuesday night, and that Britain was pledged to “work carefully with the United States in the weeks ahead to discuss the judgment and its implications” for future intelligence sharing. In response to opposition questioners, he hinted at continuing American disquiet, saying that it was “too early to come to this House and say that this will have no effect” on American-British intelligence relationships.

The foreign secretary said that what had persuaded Britain not to mount a further appeal— and by implication, what had opened the door to American agreement that the secret information could be released — was a United States district court ruling in December in Washington, D.C., which he said had “made a finding of fact” in respect to Mr. Mohamed’s allegations of mistreatment that closely paralleled what was revealed in the Foreign Office document.

Mr. Miliband was at pains to say that the government acknowledged that Mr. Mohamed had been right to allege that he had been mistreated. In fact, he said, “this judgment is not evidence that the system is broken; rather it is evidence that the system is working and the full force of the law is available when citizens believe they have just cause.”

See also The Lede: British Court Summary of Secret Documents Says U.S. Mistreated Detainee.

Source / New York Times

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American Crimes Against Humanity Are Pervasive

Omar Deghayes: 'I gave them a really hard time.' Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters.
How I fought to survive Guantánamo
By Patrick Barkham / January 21, 2010

For nearly six years, British resident Omar Deghayes was imprisoned in Guantánamo and subjected to such brutal torture that he lost the sight in one eye. But far from being broken, he fought back to retain his dignity and his sanity

It is not hot stabbing pain that Omar Deghayes remembers from the day a Guantánamo guard blinded him, but the cool sen­sation of fingers being stabbed deep into his eyeballs. He had joined other prisoners in protesting against a new humiliation – inmates ­being forced to take off their trousers and walk round in their pants – and a group of guards had entered his cell to punish him. He was held down and bound with chains.

"I didn't realise what was going on until the guy had pushed his fingers ­inside my eyes and I could feel the coldness of his fingers. Then I realised he was trying to gouge out my eyes," Deghayes says. He wanted to scream in agony, but was determined not to give his torturers the satisfaction. Then the officer standing over him instructed the eye-stabber to push harder. "When he pulled his hands out, I remember I couldn't see anything – I'd lost sight completely in both eyes." Deghayes was dumped in a cell, fluid streaming from his eyes.

The sight in his left eye returned over the following days, but he is still blind in his right eye. He also has a crooked nose (from being punched by the guards, he says) and a scar across his forefinger (slammed in a prison door), but otherwise this resident of Saltdean, near Brighton, appears ­relatively ­unscarred from the more than five years he spent locked in Guantánamo Bay. Two years after his release, he speaks softly and calmly; he has the unlined skin and thick hair of a man younger than his 40 years; he has just remarried and has, for the first time in his life, a firm feeling that his home is on the clifftops of East Sussex.

Deghayes must, however, live with the darkness of Guantánamo for the rest of his days. There are reminders everywhere, from the beautiful picture of Saltdean that was painted for him while he was incarcerated, to the fact that Guantánamo ­remains open 12 months after Barack Obama vowed to close it within a year.

There are still around 200 prisoners left in the detention camp, many of whom have been there for eight years. Of the 800 freed, only one has been found guilty of any crime and he was convicted by a dubious military commission, a verdict that is likely to be overturned. Deghayes, too, does not want to forget. He says there is so much still to be ­exposed about the ­conditions there, and about British ­collusion in the ­extraordinary rendition and torture of men such as him in the months following the American-led ­invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Deghayes, one of five children of a prominent Libyan lawyer, first came to Saltdean from Tripoli aged five, to learn English with his brothers and ­sisters on their summer holidays. He would return and stay with British families every summer. Then, in 1980, his father, an opponent of the increasingly totalitarian Gaddafi, was taken away by the authorities. Three days later, Deghayes' uncle was told to ­collect his body from the morgue. ­Harassed and increasingly fearful for their safety, Deghayes' mother sought asylum for her family in Britain. They settled in the place they knew best, Saltdean, in a large white house with fine views over the sea. More than two decades on, the family still lives there.

After a secular upbringing in ­Saltdean, Deghayes became a practising Muslim while at university in ­Wolverhampton, where he graduated in law. When he finished studying to become a solicitor, he had a "longing" to return to Libya but couldn't because of his family name and opposition to Gaddafi, so he left for a round-the-world trip to ­experience Arabic cultures and visit university friends. He enjoyed ­Pakistan's mixture of west and east, and was then tempted into a trip to ­Afghanistan: he saw business oppor­tunities and the chance to use his ­languages (Farsi, Arabic and English) and legal training (understanding both western and Sharia law) to help ­import-export companies.

He fell in love with the country and an Afghani woman; they married and had a son. "I liked the country – such beautiful rivers and different terrains. The people were difficult to get to know at first, but if they knew you and liked you, they'd open their hearts and houses to you," he says. Afghanistan, it seems, triggered many ambitious dreams: he says he helped set up a school in Kabul, assisted NGOs, ­experimented with an agricultural ­social enterprise and exported apples to Peshawar. "I was generating income for myself but I had more ambition than that – to establish myself as a ­lawyer," he says. "Things were really good. Then this war broke out and ­everything was shattered."

Fearing for his new family's safety, he paid people-smugglers to get them all back to Pakistan in early 2002 after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. He hoped his mother would take his wife and child back to England, while he planned to return to Afghanistan and continue his NGO and legal work. "I still thought I had nothing to fear. Even if there was an invasion, there was nothing I had been doing that was illegal."

They rented a house in Lahore, "far away from the war atmosphere". But then the Americans began paying large amounts of money to find Arabs who had been in Afghanistan. Suddenly, he was lucrative bounty for the Pakistani authorities. "The atmosphere changed completely. Nice Pakistan turned into a trap," he says. One day, their house was surrounded by armed police. He was seized, but not taken to a ­normal police station. Instead he was driven, fast and under heavily armed guard, between secure rooms in hotels and villas. A Kafkaesque nightmare had begun.

Deghayes says he was beaten and ­interrogated first by Pakistani officials. He thinks the Americans and the ­Libyans competed to "buy" him from the Pakistanis, and it appears the Americans won: when he was moved from Lahore to Islamabad, a man ­introduced himself as the head of the CIA's Libyan section. Taken between hotels by armed guards, Deghayes ­believes he saw a man who is now listed as a disappeared prisoner: an Italian Moroccan. "I remember seeing him; he was with me in the same car in Islamabad. He came out crying from the meeting, scared; he was saying, 'No, don't do this to me.'"

Deghayes also describes meeting a British interrogator when he met the CIA section head for the second time. "I was facing the British man, who introduced himself as Andrew. He spoke in an obvious British accent." According to Deghayes, Andrew said he was from the intelligence services and wanted to question him.

"I was really annoyed and said, 'You shouldn't do this, you're helping these people – I'm kidnapped, abducted against my will. Your job is to get me out of here. I'm British and if I go back to England, I will take you to court for what you are doing now.' Andrew was a little bit scared, but he looked at me and said, 'What case would you bring against me?' I had nothing in my mind. He said, 'Listen, if you answer my questions and co-operate with me, I will do my best. I will get you out of there.'"

Deghayes was shown an ­album of 100 photographs of supposed terrorists. He says he did not recognise anyone. One morning, he was tied, bound and blindfolded and taken to an airport. The "thin black bag" was removed from his head: he was standing in front of a mirror, guarded by two US soldiers. They tied another bag over his head, which "felt worse than the first bag – it suffocated me." It smelt "like socks or cheese," he says. "This was an indi­cation of the new regime – there were even harder times coming up."

Inside the plane, it was mayhem: his feet and hands bound together and covered in bags, Deghayes was bundled on top of others in the hold. "People were crying. People were throwing up. Some people were suffocating, and there was a kick here and a kick there: 'Get your head down, you bastard!' Things like that. Then the plane took off and you could smell [the guards] drinking spirits."

They landed in what he later ­realised was Bagram military air base. Here, Deghayes' clothes were taken away and he was given two pieces of blue uniform. He was not allowed to speak to fellow inmates, and was bound to barbed wire before, he says, being beaten and made to suffer "all sorts of humiliation". He spent several months there. "There were no rules in Bagram; people just went in and kicked people if they didn't like them."

He says he did not eat for more than 50 days. "I was really sick; I became a skeleton. I couldn't walk any more. I lost my mind – I was really scared for my mental safety. I tried to eat but I threw up. I started to hear voices in my head because of the hunger. People would say something and I could not understand what they were saying. You hear shouts and you're speaking to yourself inside your head. I started to become really scared because I thought I was losing my brains and ­going crazy."

While he was in Bagram, he was again interrogated several times by ­officials he believes were from Britain. "They felt I was lying to them. I said to them I studied in ­Holborn, London. They said, 'Which train did you take to get there?' They didn't believe anything," he says. "They weren't free to do what they liked; the Americans were running the show." When he said he was too sick to speak, they called him "a bandit".

His British interrogators "came up with lots of ­stupid things" – suggesting the scuba­diving lessons he had taken in the shabby lido in Saltdean, within yards of his family home, were terrorist training. "The Americans took that up in Guantánamo. It was a big headache. They showed me books of military ­scubadiving and ships and mines and they said, 'Which ones did you see?'" The British also accused him of teaching people to fight in terrorist training camps in Chechnya, and claimed they had secret video evidence.

Deghayes had never been to ­Chechnya, and thought all these allegations ­laughable. Only later did he discover through Clive Stafford Smith, director of the human rights charity Reprieve, that his apparent appearance in an ­Islamic terrorist training video in Chechnya was the crucial evidence in a flimsy case against him. The ­authorities refused to give Stafford Smith, who campaigned for Guantánamo detainees, a copy of this videotape, but he eventually obtained one through the BBC.

It was, says the Reprieve director, an ­obvious case of mistaken identity: the person depicted lacked Deghayes' small childhood scar on his face. ­Stafford Smith was able to show that the videotape was of a completely different ­person, actually a Chechnyan rebel called Abu Walid, who was dead. "This was typical of the whole Guantánamo experience," says Stafford Smith. "They said they had evidence and they wouldn't let you see it. Then when you did, it was incorrect."

After two months in Bagram, Deghayes was flown to Guantánamo in autumn 2002. There, prisoners were treated brutally. According to Deghayes, when guards physically subdued them by tying them down, they would "do actions to pretend as if they are raping you. They put you down on your stomach. It was really horrible, all sexual and psychological stuff." On other occasions, he says, guards would hold a prisoner's head and "bang it on the floor".

Deghayes developed a personal ­policy of resistance. Guards would ­typically arrive at a prisoner's cell and spray pepper and other chemicals through the "bean-hole", the hatch in the door. While most prisoners cowered at the back of their cell, Deghayes says he would grab the guards' hands and attack them. He fought back, as viciously as he could, trying to take the fights with guards out of the privacy of his cell and into the corridors.

"It was chaos; they would fall on top of each other and it was embarrassing [for them]. They were wearing all this heavy stuff [body armour] which didn't help either," he says. Some guards ­became afraid of going into his cell. Most, he says, were Puerto Rican and were not driven by the patriotism of the "war on terror". They did not want to get hurt for their meagre wages.

Deghayes did not realise how badly his eye had been beaten until a year ­after the incident, when he looked in a mirror for the first time in four years. He accepts his resistance caused him more physical pain, but believes it ­subsequently helped him. In the camp, he was less fearful.

"I was targeted more, but I was also relaxed compared with others who didn't do that. It was really scary for [the guards] to come into my cell," he says. "Being humiliated by getting beaten up is better than giving your own trousers out. If I'd done those things, I would've been really bitter now. I'm probably less bitter than ­anyone else because I know I gave them a really hard time. If I had given in, and all this was bottled up, I would have been like I see them [other ex-prisoners] – really bitter, full of hatred."

Deghayes says his suffering made his faith stronger; it helped him ­survive. "We knew there's a Muslim [God] ­behind things, there's a hereafter, our patience and hardships will be ­rewarded and the pain has to end sometime. Our religion teaches these things – the good always prevails and the bad is only temporary; the patience of Job, the patience of Moses. All these teachings make a difference." Praying five times a day delivered ­transcendence, removing him from the material world of bodily suffering. "My body and physical being can be chained, can be tarnished, can be beaten, can be raped," he says now, "but not the spiritual: that is something that nobody can bind down. The spirit is what makes us who we are."

As a campaign to free him gained momentum back in Brighton, Deghayes languished in Guantánamo for nearly six years. He was never charged or convicted of anything, by any authority. "And never been apologised to either," he adds. Finally, in August 2007, the British government requested the ­release of Deghayes and four other ­detainees who were legal British ­residents. In the month before his ­release in December 2007, he says, he was deliberately fed well so he would not emerge looking gaunt and half-starved. "For one month we were ­fattened up with milk shakes, ­chocolates and really good cakes."

When he returned to his family in ­Saltdean, he was happy but also dis­orientated. "You know if you are in a forest or walking on the moon, you can't tell what is what. I was like this when I came out," Deghayes says. He was stunned by some of the changes in ­Britain. "To my shock, when I came out from prison the whole country had changed – the surveillance, the Islamophobia, the control orders, secret ­evidence, and people being under ­curfews not being able to leave the house." His neighbourhood also ­appeared to have altered: "We never had thugs and mobs in the street ­before, and kids didn't go binge-drinking or stealing. When I came back, these were some of the changes that I had to adjust to," he says.

While he is very appreciative of the support he had in Brighton, after he was freed his family was targeted by racist teenagers who bullied his ­nephews and threw stones and bottles at their house for months. This stopped, abruptly, after a community meeting and media coverage led the police, rather belatedly, to install a video camera in the window of their home.

His imprisonment also caused his marriage to break down. His wife wrote to him in prison but her letters were never delivered; nor were his to her. "It's cruel, isn't it? These were just ­normal letters between husband and wife." Both believed they had abandoned each other, and they divorced. She now lives with her family in ­Afghanistan. His son, Sulaiman, who is now eight, is staying with Deghayes' mother in the Emirates. They hope eventually to bring him to Britain and give him a western education.

Two years after he was released, Deghayes remarried in ­December and is now busy buying furniture for a new place in Brighton. "Brighton is such a nice city. You can just walk by the sea, and the fresh air comes across. It ­reminds me of Tripoli. ­Before, I used to long for Tripoli; now, only recently, I have started to prefer Brighton. Maybe when you are younger you want to go back to dreams, and when you get to 40 you start to think, this is nicer, this is really what I like."

Deghayes now works with ­Reprieve and other survivors of Guantánamo on legal challenges, ­including a civil case being brought against the Home Office with help from Gareth Peirce, the human rights lawyer. Deghayes hopes there will be a public inquiry into Guantánamo to bring those to account who were ­involved in his interrogation. Financial damages are not, he says, his ­motivation. "Even if I get damages, I will give them to ­charity. The court is an opportunity to embarrass and ­expose those who committed these crimes."

While Reprieve campaigned to get Deghayes released, Stafford Smith ­explains how Deghayes "was a ­tremendously helpful ally in Guantánamo because he was fluent in English and he had a bit of legal training". Stafford Smith brought him legal textbooks but they were censored as a "threat" to national security, and he says he worried for Deghayes' safety during his incarceration. "If it had been me, I would have taken the course of quieter resistance. I was always afraid for Omar, that he would get himself beaten up. I was concerned for him ­because he was constantly being beaten up by the guards, but there's nothing you can do to stop Omar loudly saying what is just and right."

Stafford Smith believes Deghayes has fared better than many veterans of Guantánamo since his release because he had the support of his family, an ­education – and because he has taken a very positive approach to his experiences. "He's not just sat back and taken it; he's tried to do something positive. Omar works a lot with us to try to help other prisoners who are still in Guantánamo. He's also always been up for a good argument or a good ­debate."

Deghayes appears remarkably calm; but his brother, Abubaker, says he has noticed signs of trauma. "His memory is not as good as it was. He forgets to switch off lights. If he opens a window, it stays open. He stays up at night a lot, thinking." Abubaker is not surprised his brother struggles to sleep. "Imagine the lights are on for six years." Has Deghayes changed as a person? "A lot of the things Omar had in his character seem to have deepened, like rebellion and resistance and not accepting oppression. I think they became more rooted in him rather than being beaten out of him."

But isn't he ever tempted to retreat to a quiet place, start his own business, and ­renounce the ­hassles of political campaigning? "I don't want that life," Deghayes says firmly. "I never ­intended to live like that before imprisonment, and nor do I intend that after imprisonment. I would not be true to ­myself if I did.

"Life is worth more. It's good to be a number in society rather than a zero. There are many zeros around but every ­human is ­worthy of being a number, and I hope I will be something of a change for the good, rather than for harm and wars. I hope so. I really hope so."

Source / The Guardian

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Surprise: Iraq War Is Illegal Under International Law

US President George W Bush, left, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2001. The Dutch government's decision to support George Bush and Tony Blair's attack on Iraq had no basis in international law, the Davids report found. Photo: Mario Tama/AFP.
Iraq invasion violated international law, Dutch inquiry finds
By Afua Hirsch / January 12, 2010

Investigation into the Netherlands' support for 2003 war finds military action was not justified under UN resolutions

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a violation of international law, an independent inquiry in the Netherlands has found.

In a damning series of findings on the decision of the Dutch government to support Tony Blair and George Bush in the strategy of regime change in Iraq, the inquiry found the action had "no basis in international law".

The 551-page report, published today and chaired by former Dutch supreme court judge Willibrord Davids, said UN resolutions in the 1990s prior to the outbreak of war gave no authority to the invasion. "The Dutch government lent its political support to a war whose purpose was not consistent with Dutch government policy. The military action had no sound mandate in international law," it said.

The report came as the Chilcot inquiry in the UK heard evidence from Tony Blair's former press secretary, Alastair Campbell, about Britain's decision to enter the war.

Comparisons between the Davids report, which looked at the decision-making process surrounding the Dutch decision to back the war, and Chilcot's have led to criticism that the UK was not conducting a similar analysis of the legal implications in the run-up to the war.

The findings of the Davids report has serious implications for the UK, experts say, as it raises questions about the use of intelligence about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), an issue addressed by Campbell in his evidence before the Chilcot panel this morning.

"In its depiction of Iraq's WMD programme, the [Dutch] government was to a considerable extent led by public and other information from the US and the UK," the Davids report says.

It found that when the Dutch government decided in August 2002 to support the attack on Iraq it treated intelligence about WMD and the legality of an invasion as "subservient". The Dutch cabinet's policy was laid out in a 45-minute meeting, and came at a time when the newly elected prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, was preoccupied with domestic concerns, it said.

The Dutch intelligence agencies were "more reserved" in their assessments than the government when discussing the initiative in parliament, the report found.

During the build-up to the war, in 2003, the US abandoned an attempt to get a UN security council resolution approving the invasion when it became apparent it would not be granted. In 2004, the UN secretary general at the time, Kofi Annan, said the invasion was illegal.

Source / The Guardian

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No Greater Cynicism - US Violates Numerous International Treaties, with Impunity

WMD treaty violations and inspection refusal for biological, nuclear, chemical weapons. Iran? No, US
By Carl Herman / December 11, 2009

First, the length of a headline prevents me from including the damning introduction of treaty violation of torture, illegal war, use of depleted uranium, and refusal to make antipersonnel landmines illegal. Now, to substantiate the headline’s shocking and factual lead:

President Obama rejected inspection protocol for US biological weapons, in Orwellian contradiction to his statement to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). This comes after increased US investment in bio-weapons during the Bush Administration with multiple reports of secret and illegal programs.

The last biological attack, anthrax in the US in 2001, was weaponized and supplied by a US military facility. The official suspect was reported as “committing suicide.” Richard Spertzel, head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom found the FBI’s conclusion as impossible. Other analyses (here, here, here) explain concurrent news that attempted to blame Iraq as the source, and speculate this was a false flag attack for the US to invade Iraq. Ultimately, other false reasons justified that unlawful war.

Ironically and hypocritically, the US filed an official report under BWC stating the US “belief” that Iran is “probably” developing biological weapons in sanctimonious language of the importance of BWC compliance.

The US is also in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for nuclear weapons and energy use. In the history of the treaty, the US has refused to negotiate for complete disarmament and verification per treaty terms and actively plans to use nuclear weapons, including first-strike use against “enemies” who may only become threats in the future. The US is also in violation for refusing Iran their right for nuclear energy development in every act but their empty rhetoric. The US aggresses against Iran, with official policy for nuclear weapons first-strike use having language specifically targeting Iran. This, despite all 16 US intelligence agencies in agreement there is no evidence of Iran developing nuclear weapons, and IAEA’s agreement there is no documented evidence with them either.

Finally, the US is in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The deadline for complete elimination for these weapons passed in 2007; the US requested and received an extension until 2012. The US plans to not fulfill this treaty until 2023, and does not submit to full inspections. Only this last provision is defensible under treaty terms.

The US, under the “leadership” of a Peace Prize President, also has refused to ratify the international antipersonnel landmine treaty, a weapon that kills and maims thousands of civilians and children yearly.

The US uses depleted uranium (DU) in its weapons, a War Crime, according to Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon's depleted uranium project who commanded the US Department of Defense’s first Gulf war depleted uranium desert clean-up. Colonel Rokke, also a former professor of environmental science at Jacksonville University concluded:

There is a moral point to be made here. This war was about Iraq possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction -- yet we are using weapons of mass destruction ourselves. Such double-standards are repellent.

Karen Parker, an attorney who presented her brief, “The illegality of DU weaponry” to the International Uranium Weapons Conference, Hamburg, Germany, October 16 - 19, 2003, concluded the medical evidence of DU as a WMD is clear, convincing, and documented from the medical evidence requested by the UN (summary here). Parker concludes the UN has failed to act upon this evidence from political pressure of the US and other developed nations’ militaries who desire DU despite its clear violation of law as WMD.

And the US tortures (and here); including their own citizens. The US has a history of refusing International Red Cross inspections to verify compliance of international torture law.

“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” – Martin Luther King in his speech: Beyond Vietnam: A time to break silence.

Analysis: The US has invaded and occupied the Middle Eastern countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, is bombing Pakistan, and aggresses toward war with Iran. These acts of war are all unlawful. The US employs Orwellian psychopathic rhetoric to threaten Iran from empty allegations of their “nuclear program” and needing to “fulfill their legal obligations” while hypocritically in murderous violation of their own from several treaties structured to protect humanity. You have to read these facts and analysis from non-corporate media sources, such as here, as corporate media will echo justification of current unlawful wars and propagandize for escalation and new wars.

I’ve thought about how to pierce this Orwellian political and media counter-reality. One way to do so is to imagine if the US were in Iran’s position and China acting as the US. The vicious propaganda the US employs could also be turned against us.

Policy response: Gandhi and Martin Luther King advocated public understanding of the facts and non-cooperation with evil. I’m among hundreds who advocate:

1. Understand the laws of war. These were legislated after WW2 and are crystal-clear that only self-defense, in a narrow legal meaning, can justify war. This investment of your time takes less than an hour and empowers you to legally stand for ending these Wars of Aggression.

2. Refuse and end all orders and acts associated with these unlawful wars. Those involved with US military, government, and law enforcement have an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution. Unlawful acts only move forward with sufficient cooperation and public tolerance. Stop cooperating with the most vicious crime a nation can commit: war. Stop tolerating it.

3. Prosecute the war leaders for obvious violation of the letter and spirit of US war laws. You can only understand how these wars are specifically unlawful by investing the time to do so. Because the crimes are so broad and deep, I recommend Truth and Reconciliation (T&R) to exchange full truth and return of stolen US assets for non-prosecution. This is the most expeditious way to understand and end all unlawful and harmful acts. Those who reject T&R either by volunteering their name and/or responding when named are subject to prosecution after the window of T&R closes.

Below is a one-minute excerpt from the History Channel’s coverage of the US anthrax attacks explaining that the attack was “an inside job.” Following is a 10-minute interview with Eric Nadler of Dead Silence to explain the case that the government's reporting on the anthrax attack is false.





Source / The Seattle Examiner

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