ZGram - 3/17/2004 - "Guantanamo - Part III"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

March 17, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Herewith the conclusion of the terribly disturbing Guantanamo prison 
series!  You will see how confessions are wrought, and how totally 
innocent people can be smeared.

Here is Part III, as it appeared in the Observer, dated March 14, 2004:

[START]

As the weeks of detention became months they would sometimes see 
psychiatrists. The response to any complaint was always the same: an 
offer to administer Prozac. (On my visit to Guantanamo, the camp 
medical staff told me that at least a fifth of the detainees were 
taking anti-depressants.)

It was almost impossible to master the rules and know how to avoid 
punishment. There was only one rule that mattered, Rasul says: 'You 
have to obey whatever US government personnel tell you to do.'

In mid-2002 the prisoners were moved from the open cages with mesh 
walls at Camp X-ray to the pre-fabri cated metal cellblocks of Camp 
Delta. There, the standard punishment was transfer to solitary 
confinement in the sensory deprivation isolation wing. Once, Ahmed 
says, he was given isolation for writing 'Have a nice day' on a 
polystyrene cup. This was deemed 'malicious damage to US government 
property'. On another occasion, he was punished for singing.

The cells were about the size of a king-size mattress, made of mesh 
and metal, exposed to the relentless tropical heat, with no air 
conditioning. They contained a hole in the floor for a toilet, a tap 
producing yellow water which was so low they had to kneel to use it, 
and a narrow metal cot. Apart from interrogation, the only break in 
this confined monotony were showers and 20 minutes' exercise, two or 
three times a week. 'When we were on a block with English speakers, 
we'd go over the conversations again and again,' Ahmed says. 'Often 
they'd start by someone asking if you remembered a particular kind of 
food. Soon you'd exhaust the possibilities, repeat the same stories 
four or five times.'

Even this, however, was better than the isolation punishment block, 
or the fate which Iqbal endured for five months in 2002 - being 
placed in a wing where all the other prisoners spoke only Chinese.

The three Britons were visited at least six times by MI5 and Foreign 
Office staff, Rasul says: 'Every time the Foreign Office came we 
asked about what was going on, and whether we had solicitors. His 
reply was "I don't know, all I know is what's been on TV. Your case 
hasn't been on TV." '

In fact, their families had engaged lawyers in Britain and America 
soon after learning of their whereabouts in February 2002, and a 
federal lawsuit was launched in their name which, had they not been 
released, would have been argued before the Supreme Court next month. 
They were told of this by a guard a few weeks ago, almost two years 
after the suit was first filed.

In September 2003 Rasul was visited on consecutive days, first by the 
man from the Foreign Office, then by an MI5 officer. He asked the 
Foreign Office man about his legal status and was told: 'You should 
ask the MI5 guy who's coming tomorrow.' When he did so next day, the 
MI5 agent said: 'You should have asked Martin from the Foreign Office 
yesterday.' How long had they thought they would be at Guantanamo? I 
asked the three men. They reply in unison: 'Forever!'

Read part two here

Special reports




Interrogation

For the second six months of 2002, the interrogations ceased. But 
from the beginning of 2003, interviews with MI5, the FBI, the CIA and 
US military intelligence became increasingly frequent. Rasul says: 
'They kept taking us and taking us, showing us photos saying: "This 
guy says you've done this, this guy says you've done that" - what 
they meant was that other detainees desperate to get out were making 
allegations, making stuff up that they thought would help them get 
out of the camp.'

Last year the Americans introduced a formal system of rewards for 
co-operation with interrogators, so that detainees would be given an 
increasing number of so-called 'comfort items' such as books, extra 
clothes and utensils in return for their testimony. (The books, 
best-selling novels, usually came with pages torn out, which the 
censor had deemed too subversive or exciting.)

Experts on the psychology of interrogations and false confessions say 
that for prisoners who were already depressed and isolated by more 
than a year of arduous incarceration, this system seems almost 
calculated to produce fantastical accounts. Professor Gisli 
Gudjonsson of King's College London is perhaps the world's leading 
authority in this area, and he has testified in dozens of trials and 
helped expose numerous miscarriages of justice. One of the methods 
which his research has shown to be particularly prone to generating 
unreliable testimony is the use of deception, where an interrogator 
will claim he has incontrovertible proof of a suspect's guilt when in 
reality this does not exist.

Such methods, the three men say, were employed against them time and 
time again. For example, Rasul says, he was told that photographs of 
him and an 'al-Qaeda membership form' and his passport had been found 
in a raid on an Afghan cave. 'Actually I'd left my passport in 
Pakistan. Then the interrogator told me that next to my file they'd 
found my brother Habib's al-Qaeda file. The interrogator said he 
wasn't lying, and that next time he'd bring it with him. When it came 
to the next time, he claimed he'd made a mistake.'

The interrogators also used the good cop/bad cop routine. 'It was 
scary although I knew what they were doing. I think they tried it 
more with some of the Arabs and the young kids.'

Less funny were the conditions in which interrogations were 
conducted, in so-called 'booths' behind the cell blocks. Throughout 
their interviews, the detainees wore their three-piece suits, and 
were shackled to the floor.

In 2003, many more interrogators were brought in, some of them young 
and inexperienced. 'You'd look at these guys in their shorts and polo 
shirts and think: 'This guy's an interrogator? He's only 20 years 
old,' says Rasul. 'About two months ago one guy asked me: "If I 
wanted to get hold of surface-to-air missiles in Tipton, where would 
I go?" I started arguing with him. Did he really think I lived in 
some sort of war zone. I was scared in the interrogations but towards 
the end the questions just seemed stupid.'

However, last summer the situation of the Tipton Three suddenly took 
a serious turn for the worse. The Americans had a video of a meeting 
in August 2000 between Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, the leader 
of the 9/11 hijackers. Behind bin Laden were three men, and in May 
2003 someone alleged they were none other than Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed.

For the previous two weeks, Rasul had been in the relatively 
comfortable conditions of Camp Four, the lower-security section of 
Guantanamo where prisoners are freely allowed to associate and play 
football and volleyball. Suddenly he and the others found themselves 
in solitary confinement in the isolation block for three months. 
Finally, Rasul says, a senior interrogator arrived from Washington 
and played him the video. He protested that the men in the video 
looked nothing like him and his friends, and none of them had worn 
beards. More to the point, in August 2000, when the video was shot, 
he had been working in a branch of the electronics store Curry's, and 
was enrolled at the University of Central England - a fact, he 
suggested, his interrogators could easily check. Instead, he says: 
'They told me I could have falsified those records, that I could have 
had someone working with me at Curry's who could have faked my job 
records.' I'd got to the point where I just couldn't take any more. 
Do what you have to do, I told them. I'd been sitting there for three 
months in isolation so I said yes, it's me. Go ahead and put me on 
trial.' The other two made similar confessions.

Last September it was MI5 which for once helped them when they 
arrived at the camp with the documentary evidence which showed they 
could not have been in Afghanistan at the relevant time. Rasul says: 
'We could prove our alibi. But what about other people, especially 
from countries where such records may not be available?'

There is also the danger that false testimony from one inmate, 
extracted by the Guantanamo incentives system, may breed a false 
confession from another. Iqbal recalls: 'One inmate said I had been 
in the Farouk terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. It led to a 
whole series of interrogations where they tried to persuade me that I 
had been. The way the system is it's accusation after accusation; if 
this one won't work maybe this one will, if that won't work try this 
one, until they finally get their confession.'

For those who do confess, and fail to sustain their alibis, trial by 
an American military commission and a possible death penalty awaits. 
Those who have been charged are no longer at Camp Delta, the three 
men reveal. They have been moved to a new, super-maximum security 
facility outside the main compound - Camp Echo. A few men have been 
returned thence to the main Guantanamo Camp; they describe a 
white-walled, sound-absorbent hell of 24-hour solitary confinement in 
cells smaller than Camp Delta's, with a guard permanently stationed 
outside each cell door. Camp Echo's current inmates, say the three 
men, include the Britons Feroz Abbasi and Moazzem Begg, and the 
Australian David Hicks. One detail of Hicks's life inside Guantanamo 
Bay reveals the desperate measures prisoners go to retain their 
sanity. He occupies his mind all day by catching and killing mice. 
More than a year ago, the three men said, Hicks renounced Islam and 
shaved off his beard. He no longer answers the call to prayer. 'He's 
just a little guy with a very deep voice,' says Rasul. 'If you met 
him you'd think he was the typical kind of Aussie you might see 
drinking Fosters in a bar.'

Freedom

Proof of the Tipton Three's alibis led to rapidly improving 
treatment. Every Sunday after last September, Rasul says, they were 
taken to a shed they called the 'love shack', and allowed to sit 
unchained on a sofa to watch movies on DVD. They were allowed to read 
magazines, and were sometimes fed with hamburgers from Guantanamo's 
branch of McDonald's.

Unaware of the stream of leaks to the media which suggested their 
release might be imminent, they began to sense that the end of their 
ordeal might be drawing near. Even then, they were still being 
interrogated regularly. Rasul says: 'They'd still show us pictures, 
try to get names. My last interrogation was on 5 March. But I could 
see the guy was getting desperate. At one point he said: "Look, I'm 
from the CIA, I can get you anything. What do you want? Coke? Ice 
cream?" '

For men who had been through Kunduz and Kandahar, this was not 
impressive. All are convinced that there are no 'big-time' terrorists 
at Guantanamo: arguably the most dangerous, in American eyes, says 
Ahmed, is a group of Taliban mullahs. American intelligence sources 
have confirmed this view to me. The 'big-timers' - men such as Khalid 
Shaikh Mohamed, architect of 9/11, have never been near Guantanamo. 
One source says: 'Guantanamo may even be a bit of a front, designed 
to divert al-Qaeda's attention. It takes everybody's attention away 
from more important matters and locations where big fish are being 
held. The secrecy surrounding it makes everybody think that very 
serious stuff is going on there.'

The three say some of the inmates have seen such suspects - not in 
Cuba, but at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. According to Iqbal, 'we 
spoke to people who'd been with them there when they were being 
interrogated. They said they flew them out of there alive, but in 
coffins.'

Reviled so publicly by Rumsfeld, now the Tipton Three must struggle 
to rebuild their lives. Their home town, say their families, has 
become too dangerous: effigies of men in orange jump suits have been 
strung from lampposts, while the area is a strongholds of the extreme 
right-wing BNP.

For now they have been marvelling at the little things, Rasul says: 
sitting in cars without chains and being able to operate the windows; 
finding that food does not arrive automatically at set hours, and can 
be tasty and varied. This weekend their dominant emotion is relief. 
As they come to reflect on the experience over the coming weeks, it 
seems likely to turn to a burning, righteous anger.

[END]


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