With what the UK Guardian described yesterday as the “nearly unprecedented” release of “security service reports of interviews with detainees in Guantánamo Bay and other overseas detention centers,” the new British association government failed in its attempt to sell something to someone the High Court to bring a temporary halt to a civil claim for hurts filed by six former Guantánamo prisoners, unleashing, instead, a torrent of previously classified and deeply unsettling documents.
These reveal, shockingly, how the Labour government was pleased for British nationals and residents seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan to be rendered to Guantánamo by the Bush administration, and how, in one case — that of Martin Mubanga, seized in Zambia — Tony Blair’s office intervened to prevent attempts by the Unknown and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to have him returned to the UK, leading to his imprisonment in Guantánamo for two years and nine months.
In paving the way for its announced inquiry into British complicity in torture, the association government attempted, without accomplishment, to sell something to someone the High Court that, as the Guardian place it, “proceedings should be delayed while attempts at mediation are made” before the inquiry starts. Critics had already articulated their fears that the calls for “mediation” were a smokescreen for compensation deals that would attempt to buy the former prisoners’ silence, so that the inquiry could proceed in secret without too many embarrassments.
Instead, but, the government’s intervention has precipitously kick-started the inquiry in a very public manner, after Tim Otty QC, counsel for five of the men, said that proceedings “should be allowed to continue because the documents that the government is beginning to tell shed new light upon the role that the UK authorities played in the men’s mistreatment,” and the judge, Mr. evenhandedness Silber, chose.
One of the most shocking documents told in the High Court proceedings was issued by the FCO on January 10, 2002, the day before Guantánamo opened. Entitled, “Afghanistan UK Detainees,” it described the government’s “preferred options” in dealing with British prisoners. “Transfer of United Kingdom nationals held to a United States base in Guantánamo is the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objectives, to ensure they are securely held,” the document clarified, adding that the “only alternative” was to any hold these men in British custody in Afghanistan, or to return them to the UK.
In another shocking revelation, it was revealed that, in the case of Martin Mubanga, released documents “bring to somebody’s attention a number of troubling questions as to the role of the former Prime Minister’s office in frustrating the release of one of the claimants,” as Tim Otty described it, adding, “In the cycle of March and April 2002, the Prime Minister’s office apparently countermanded a desire on the part of the Unknown and Commonwealth Office to intervene on behalf on Mr. Mubanga.”
Mubanga, a joint British-Zambian national, had traveled from Pakistan to Zambia, where his sister lived, in February 2002, but had then been seized by the Zambian security services, and according to the documents released in court, the Prime Minister’s Office had intervened to ensure that he was not brought back to the UK. As a upshot, the FCO was place in a hard position: if officials sought consular door, so acknowledging British responsibility for him, he would have been released to the UK authorities, directly contradicting the Prime Minister’s orders, which, as the legal action charity Reprieve noted yesterday, involved Prime Minister Blair “order[ing] the FCO to violate its international law obligations under the Vienna Caucus, which requires the UK to provide consular help to British nationals around the world.”
At the time, an FCO document complained about “the schizophrenic way in which policy on this whole case was handled in London,” which had led to the British High Commission in Lusaka being placed “in an impossible position,” and in an email out-of-date August 22, 2002, an FCO official, recognizing that “we ruined our policy” because of direct interference from Tony Blair’s office, stated, “we are going to be open to charges of concealed extradition.”
According to Mubanga, after the British finished with him — apparently having tried and failed to recruit him as a spy — the U.S. agent who had been dealing with him told him, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, as I reckon you’re a clad guy, but in ten or 15 minutes we’re going to the airport and they’re taking you to Guantánamo Bay.”
In court, Tim Otty highlighted Tony Blair’s complicity in torture by pointing out that, by the spring of 2002, it was abundantly clear that there was a considerable risk that terror suspects in U.S. control would be subjected to rendition and torture. “Despite that,” he told the court, “someone at Number 10 {Downing Street, the home and HQ of the British Prime Minister] saw fit to counter what the Unknown Office wished to do.”
As the Guardian also clarified yesterday, this was “not the only time the Prime Minister’s Office intervened to thwart attempts by Unknown Office officials to obtain a degree of protection for British citizens.” Minutes prepared for the Home Office Terrorism and Protection Unit after a meeting in April 2002 state that the U.S. authorities “had been informed that the British government might start making public supplies for legal door to British men held at Guantánamo.” According to the minutes, “FCO had wanted to do this (and wanted to be seen to be doing it) but had been overruled by No. 10.”
The released documents also highlight the leading role played by Jack Straw, then the unknown secretary, in shaping the policies that led to the interrogations of British prisoners in US custody in Afghanistan, prior to their transfer to Guantánamo. As the Guardian clarified, in mid-January 2002, Straw sent a telegram to several British diplomatic missions around the world in which he “signaled his agreement” with the Guantánamo policy, “but made clear that he did not wish to see the British nationals went from Afghanistan before they could be interrogated.” In the telegram, he wrote:
A specialist team is currently in Afghanistan seeking to interview any detainees with a UK connection to obtain information on their terrorist activities and relations. We therefore hope that all those detainees they wish to interview will remain in Afghanistan and will not be among the first groups to be transferred to Guantánamo. A week’s delay should suffice. UK nationals should be transferred as soon as possible thereafter.
One of these “detainees” was Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held in Guantánamo, and as a court heard in December last year, leading to the launch of a Metropolitan Police investigation, Mr. Aamer has claimed that British agents were present in the room, in the U.S. prison at Kandahar airbase in Afghanistan, when he was subjected to abusive treatment by Americans.
Other interrogations revealed in the documents include those involving Omar Deghayes, seized from a house in Lahore in May 2002, who was treated disdainfully by the British agents who visited him, and an unidentified prisoner held in Kabul, under the bearing, “Warriors 14/1,” about whom the agents involved noted only, “Interview conditions: cold beaten up.”
Extraordinarily, these documents are only the tip of a very murky iceberg, and it is unclear at present how many more will be publicly revealed. As has been previously reported, the government has identified up to 500,000 documents that may be relevant to the former prisoners’ claim for hurts, and, according to the Guardian, “says it has deployed 60 lawyers to examine them, a process that it suggests could take until the end of the decade.” In this first batch, “just 900 papers have been told, and these have included batches of press cuttings and copies of government reports that were published several years ago,” but as they also include these damning insights into the activities of Tony Blair, Jack Straw and the agents who interrogated British prisoners in appalling conditions, it is surely mind-boggling that the government will now be able to conduct a secret inquiry into British complicity in torture, and must, instead, order a full and open inquiry.
This could take place under the Inquiries Act of 2005, like the Baha Mousa inquiry (into the murder, in British custody, of a hotel clerk in Iraq), which, as Reprieve noted when David Cameron announced the torture inquiry two weeks ago, was held under the Act and has been “a model of an inquiry functioning efficiently, counting the hearing of secret evidence,” and has allowed for document classification review proceedings that “are sophisticated and rightly allow the judge to balance the need for national security against the need for intelligibility.”
The time for silence, and the time for secrecy are over. To clear the air, and to draw a line under this most lamentable cycle in Britain’s recent description, we need an inquiry presided over by someone who is able to “balance the need for national security against the need for intelligibility.” For too long now — and with baleful results — the need for national security has been allowed to override everything else, inflicting grave hurt on our claims to be a civilized people, and leading to devastating effects for those trapped up in a “War on Terror” with few checks and balances.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Records: The Tales of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film “Outside the Law: Tales from Guantánamo.” He maintains a blog here, where this article was first published.
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Tags: British Coalition, British Nationals, Bush Administration, Coalition Government, Complicity, Foreign And Commonwealth, Foreign And Commonwealth Office, Former Prisoners, Labour Government, Martin Mubanga, Mr Justice, Otty, Paving The Way, Public Manner, Security Service, Smokescreen, Tony Blair, Uk Authorities, Uk Guardian, Worthington
