Rene — 'One huge US jail'
Topic(s): Afghanistan | Comments Off on Rene — 'One huge US jail'‘One huge US jail’
Afghanistan is the hub of a global network of detention centres, the
frontline in America’s ‘war on terror’, where arrest can be random and
allegations of torture commonplace. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark
investigate on the ground and talk to former prisoners
Saturday March 19, 2005
The Guardian
Kabul was a grim, monastic place in the days of the Taliban; today
it’s a chaotic gathering point for every kind of prospector and
carpetbagger. Foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of
telecoms, irrigation and construction contracts have sparked a
property boom that has forced up rental prices in the Afghan capital
to match those in London, Tokyo and Manhattan. Four years ago, the
Ministry of Vice and Virtue in Kabul was a tool of the Taliban
inquisition, a drab office building where heretics were locked up for
such crimes as humming a popular love song. Now it’s owned by an
American entrepreneur whohopes its bitter associations won’t scare
away his new friends.Outside Kabul, Afghanistan is bleaker, its
provinces more inaccessible and lawless, than it was under the
Taliban. If anyone leaves town, they do so in convoys. Afghanistan is
a place where it is easy for people to disappear and perilous for
anyone to investigate their fate. Even a seasoned aid agency such as
Médécins Sans Frontières was forced to quit after five staff members
were murdered lastJune. Only the 17,000-strong US forces, with their
all-terrain Humvees and Apache attack helicopters, have the run of the
land, and they have used the haze of fear and uncertainty that has
engulfed the country to advance a draconian phase in the war against
terror. Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay.
Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue
regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists
and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing
Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centres where
prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to
torture. The secrecy surrounding them prevents any real independent
investigation of the allegations. “The detention system in Afghanistan
exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a
far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now
beginning to understand,” Michael Posner, director of the US legal
watchdog Human RightsFirst, told us.
When we landed in Kabul, Afghanistan was blue with a bruising cold. We
were heading for the former al-Qaida strongholds in the south-east
that were rumoured to be the focus of the new US network. How should
we prepare, we asked local UN staff. “Don’t go,” they said. None the
less, we were able to find a driver, a Pashtun translator and a boxful
of clementines, and set off on a five-and-a-half-hour trip south
through the snow to Gardez, a market town dominated by two rapidly
expanding US military bases.
There we met Dr Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan
Independent Human Rights Commission, established in 2003 with funding
from the US Congress to investigate abuses committed by local warlords
and to ensure that women’s and children’s rights were protected. He
was delighted to see foreigners in town. At his office in central
Gardez, Bidar showed us a wall of files. “All I do nowadays is chart
complaints against the US military,” he said. “Many thousands of
people have been rounded up and detained by them. Those who have been
freed say that they were held alongside foreign detainees who’ve been
brought to this country to be processed. No one is charged. No one is
identified. No international monitors are allowed into the US jails.”
He pulled out a handful of files: “People who have been arrested say
they’ve been brutalised – the tactics used are beyond belief.” The
jails are closed to outside observers,making it impossible to test the
truth of the claims.
Last November, a man from Gardez died of hypothermia in a US military
jail.
When his family were called to collect the body, they were given a
$100 note for the taxi ride and no explanation. In scores more cases,
people have simply disappeared.
Prisoner transports crisscross the country between a proliferating
network of detention facilities. In addition to the camps in Gardez,
there are thought to be US holding facilities in the cities of Khost,
Asadabad and Jalalabad,as well as an official US detention centre in
Kandahar, where the tough regime has been nicknamed “Camp Slappy” by
former prisoners. There are 20 more facilities in outlying US
compounds and fire bases that complement a major “collection centre”
at Bagram air force base. The CIA has one facility at Bagram and
another, known as the “Salt Pit”, in an abandoned brick factory north
of Kabul.
More than 1,500 prisoners from Afghanistan and many other countries
are thought to be held in such jails, although no one knows for sure
because the US military declines to comment.
Anyone who has got in the way of the prison transports has been met
with brutal force. Bidar directed us to a small Shia neighbourhood on
the edge of town where a multiple killing was still under
investigation. Inside a frozen courtyard, a former policeman, Said
Sardar, 25, was sat beside his crutches. On May 1 2004, he was manning
a checkpoint when a car careened through. “Inside were men dressed
like Arabs, but they were western men,” he said. “They had prisoners
in the car.” Sardar fired a warning shot for the car to stop. “The
western men returned fire and within minutes two US attack helicopters
hovered above us. They fired three rockets at the police station. One
screamed past me. Isaw its fiery tail and blacked out.”
He was taken to Bagram, where US military doctors had to amputate his
leg.
Afterwards, he said, “an American woman appeared. She said the US was
sorry. It was a mistake. The men in the car were Special Forces or CIA
on a mission. She gave me $500.” Sardar showed us into another room in
his compound where a circle of children stared glumly at us; their
fathers, all policemen, were killed in the same incident. “Five
dead. Four in hospital. To protect covert US prisoner transports,” he
says. Later, US helicopters were deployed in two similar incidents
that left nine dead.
In his builders’ merchant’s shop, Mohammed Timouri describes how he
lost his son. “Ismail was a part-time taxi driver, waiting to go to
college,” he says, handing us a photograph of a beardless,
short-haired 19-year-old held aloftin a coffin at his funeral last
March. “A convoy delivering prisoners from a facility in Jalalabad to
one in Kabul became snarled up in traffic. A US soldier jumped down
and lifted a woman out of the way. She screamed. Ismail stepped
forward to explain she was a conservative person, wearing a burka. The
soldier dropped the woman and shot Ismail in front of a crowd of 20
people.”
Mohammed received a letter from the Afghan police: “We apologise to
you,” the police chief wrote. “An innocent was killed by Americans.”
The US army declined to comment on Ismail’s death or on a second fatal
shooting by another prison transport at the same crossroads later that
month. It also refused to comment on an incident outside Kabul when a
prison patrol reportedly cleared a crowd of children by throwing a
grenade into their midst. However, we have since heard that the CIA’s
inspector general is investigating at least eight serious incidents,
including two deaths in custody, following complaints by agents about
the activities of their military colleagues.
There are insurgents active in the Gardez area, as there are
throughout the south of Afghanistan, remnants of the old order and the
newly disaffected.
Every morning it takes Afghan police several hours to pick along the
highway unearthing explosives concealed overnight. And so it was
mid-morning beforewe were able to leave town, crawling over the
Gardez-Khost pass, some 10,000ft high.
No one saw us slipping on to the fertile Khost plain, where Osama bin
Laden once had his training camps – the camps were destroyed by US
cruise missiles in August 1998. Today a shrine to Taliban loyalists
still greets travellers to the city, although no one here would say
they preferred the old life.
US Camp Salerno, the largest base outside Kabul, dominates the area
around Khost. Inside the city, Kamal Sadat, a local stringer for BBC
World Service, told how he was detained last September and found
himself locked up in a prison filled with suspects from many
countries. “Even though I showed my press accreditation, I was hooded,
driven to Salerno and then flown to another USbase. I had no idea
where I was or why I had been detained.” He was held in a small wooden
cell, and soldiers combed through his notebooks, copying down names
and phone numbers. “Every time I was moved within the base, I was
hooded again.
Every prisoner has to maintain absolute silence. I could hear
helicopters whirring above me. Prisoners were arriving and leaving all
the time. There were also cells beneath me, under the ground.” After
three days, Sadat was flown backto Khost and freed without
explanation. “It was only later I learned that I had been held in
Bagram. If the BBC had not intervened, I fear I would not have got
out.” After his release, the US military said it had all been a
misunderstanding, and apologised.
Camp Salerno, which houses the 1,200 troops of US Combined Taskforce
Thunder, was being expanded when we arrived. Army tents were being
replaced with concrete dormitories. The detention facility, concealed
behind a perimeter of opaque green webbing, was being modernised and
enlarged. Ensconced in a Soviet-era staff building was the camp’s
commanding officer, Colonel Gary Cheeks. He listened calmly as we
asked about the allegations of torture, deaths and disappearances at
US detention facilities including Salerno. We read to himfrom a
complaint made by a UN official in Kabul that accused the US military
of using “cowboy-like excessive force”. He eased forward in his chair:
“There have been some tragic accidents for which we have
apologised. Some people have been paid compensation.”
We put to him the specific case of Mohammed Khan, from a village near
the Pakistan border, who died in custody at Camp Salerno: his
relatives say hisbody showed signs of torture. “You could go on for
ages with a ‘he said, she said’.
You have to take my word for it,” said Cheeks. He remembered Khan’s
death: “He was bitten by a snake and died in his cell.” He added, “We
are buildingnew holding cells here to make life better for
detainees. We are systematising our prison programme across the
country.”
For what reason? “So all guards and interrogators behave by the same
code of behaviour,” the colonel said. Is it not the case that an
ever-increasing number of prisoners have vanished, while others are
being shuttled between jails to keep their families in the dark?
Cheeks moved towards his office door: “There are many things that are
distorted. No one has vanished here … Look, the war against the
Taliban is one small part. I want the Afghan people with us.
They are the key to ending conflict. If they fear us or we do wrong by
them, then we have lost.”
However, many Afghans who celebrated the fall of the Taliban have long
lost faith in the US military. In Kabul, Nader Nadery, of the Human
Rights Commission, told us, “Afghanistan is being transformed into an
enormous US jail. What we have here is a military strategy that has
spawned serious human rights abuses, a system of which Afghanistan is
but one part.” In the past 18 months, the commission has logged more
than 800 allegations of human rights abuses committed by US troops.
The Afghan government privately shares Nadery’s fears. One minister,
who asked not to be named, said, “Washington holds Afghanistan up to
the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has
deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system
that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and
without accountability.”
What has been glimpsed in Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace
Guantánamo Bay. When that detention centre was set up in January 2002,
it was essentially an offshore gulag – beyond the reach of the US
constitution andeven the Geneva conventions. That all changed in July
2004. The US supreme court ruled that the federal court in Washington
had jurisdiction to hear a case that would decide if the Cuban
detentions were in violation of the US constitution, its laws or
treaties. The military commissions, which had been intended to
dispense justice to the prisoners, were in disarray, too. No
prosecution cases had been prepared and no defence cases would be
readily offered as the US National Association of Criminal Defence
Lawyers had described the commissions as unethical, a decision backed
by a federal judge who ruled in January that they were
“illegal”. Guantánamo was suddenly bogged down in domestic
lawsuits. It had lost its practicality. So a global prison network
built up over the previous three years, beyond the reach of American
and European judicial process, immediately began to pick up the
slack. The process became explicit last week when the Pentagon
announced that half of the 540 or so inmates at Guantánamo are to be
transferred to prisons in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
Since September 11 2001, one of the US’s chief strategies in its “war
on terror” has been to imprison anyone considered a suspect on
whatever grounds. To that end it commandeered foreign jails, built
cellblocks at US military bases and established covert CIA facilities
that can be located almost anywhere, from an apartment block to a
shipping container. The network has no visible infrastructure – no
prison rolls, visitor rosters, staff lists or complaints
procedures. Terror suspects are being processed in Afghanistan and in
dozens of facilities in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand,
Malaysia, Indonesia and the British island of Diego Garcia in the
southern Indian Ocean. Those detained are held incommunicado, without
charge or trial, and frequently shuttled between jails in covert air
transports, giving rise to the recently coined US military expression
“ghost detainees”.
Most of the countries hosting these invisible prisons are already
partners in the US coalition. Others, notably Syria, are pragmatic
associates, which work privately alongside the CIA and US Special
Forces, despite bellicose public statements from President Bush (he
has condemned Syria for harbouring terrorism, for aiding the remnants
of the Saddam Hussein regime, and most recently has demanded that
Syrian troops quit Lebanon).
All the host countries are renowned for their poor human rights
records, enabling interrogators (US soldiers, contractors and their
local partners) to operate. We have obtained prisoner letters,
declassified FBI files, legal depositions, witness statements and
testimony from US and UK officials, which document the alleged methods
deployed in Afghanistan – shackles, hoods, electrocution, whips, mock
executions, sexual humiliation and starvation – and suggest they are
practised across the network. Sir Nigel Rodley, a former UN special
rapporteur on torture, said, “The more hidden detention practices
there are, the more likely that all legal and moral constraints on
official behaviour willbe removed.”
The only “ghost detainees” to have been identified by Washington are a
handful of high-profile al-Qaida operatives such as Abu Zubayda, Bin
Laden’s lieutenant, who vanished after being picked up by Pakistani
authorities in Faisalabad in March 2002. In June of that year, US
defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Zubayda was “under US
control”. He did not say where, although sourcesin the Pakistani
government said Zubayda was being held at a CIA facility in their
country.
In May 2003, Bush clarified the fate of Waleed Muhammad bin Attash, an
alleged conspirator in the USS Cole bombing, who disappeared after
being arrested by police in Pakistan in April 2003. Bush described
Attash as “a killer … one less person that people who love freedom
have to worry about”; he is also one more person who has never
appeared on a US prison roll.
In June 2004, a senior counterterrorism official in Britain confirmed
that Hambali (a nom de guerre) – accused of organising the October
2002 Bali bombings and unseen since Thai police seized him in August
2003 – was “singing like a bird”, apparently at the US base on Diego
Garcia.
Evidence we have collected, however, shows that many more of those
swept up in the network have few provable connections to any outlawed
organisation; experts in the field describe their value in the war
against terror as “negligible”. Former prisoners claim they were
released only after naming names, coerced into making false
confessions that led to the arrests of more people unconnected to
terrorism, in a system of justice that owes more to Stanley Milgram’s
Six Degrees Of Separation – where anyone can be linked to everyone
else in the world in as many stages – than to analytical
jurisprudence.
The floating population of “ghost detainees”, according to US and UK
military officials, now exceeds 10,000.
The roots of the prison network can be traced to the legal wrangles
that began as soon as the first terror suspects were rounded up just
weeks afterthe September 11 attacks. As CIA agents and US forces began
to capture suspected al-Qaida fighters in the war in Afghanistan,
Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel, looked for ways to “dispense
justice swiftly, close to where our forces may be fighting, without
years of pre-trial proceedings or post-trial appeals”.
On November 13 2001, George Bush signed an order to establish military
commissions to try “enemy belligerents” who commit war crimes. At such
a commission, a foreign war criminal would have no choice over his
defence counsel, no right to know the evidence against him, no way of
obtaining any evidence inhis favour and no right of attorney-client
confidentiality. Defending the commissions, Gonzales (now promoted to
US attorney general) insisted, “The suggestion that [they] will afford
only sham justice like that dispensed in dictatorial nations is an
insult to our military justice system.”
When the first prisoners arrived at Guantánamo Bay in January 2002,
Donald Rumsfeld announced that they were all Taliban or al-Qaida
fighters, and as such were designated “unlawful combatants”. The US
administration argued that al-Qaida and the Taliban were not the
official army of Afghanistan, but a criminal force that did not wear
uniforms, could not be distinguished from civilians and practised war
crimes; on this basis, the administration claimed, it was entitled to
sidestep the Geneva conventions and normal legal constraints.
>From there, it was only a small moral step for the Bush
administration to overlook the use of torture by regimes previously
condemned by the US state department, so long as they, too, signed up
to the war against terror. “Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, Thailand,
Indonesia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and even Syria were all asked to make
their detention facilities and expert interrogators available to the
US,” one former counterterrorism agent told us.
In the UK, a similar process began unfolding. In December 2001, the
then home secretary David Blunkett withdrew Britain from its
obligation under the European human rights treaty not to detain anyone
without trial; on December 18, the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security
Act was passed, extending the government’s powers of arrest and
detention. Within 24 hours, 10 men were seized in dawn raids on their
homes and taken to Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons (some of them will
have been among those released in the past week).
Subsequently the Foreign Office subtly modified internal guidance to
diplomats, enabling them to use intelligence obtained through
torture. A letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office directorate
sent to Sir Michael Jay, headof the diplomatic service, and Mathew
Kidd of Whitehall liaison, a euphemism for MI6, suggested in March
2003 that although such intelligence was inadmissible as evidence in a
UK court, it could still be received and acted upon by the British
government. The government’s attitude was spelt out to the
Intelligence and Security Committee of MPs and peers by foreign
secretary Jack Straw who, while acknowledging that torture was
“completely unacceptable” and that information obtained under torture
is more likely to be embellished, concluded, “you cannot ignore it if
the price of ignoring it is 3,000 people dead” [a reference to the
September 11 attacks].
One former ambassador told us, “This was new ground for the FCO. As
long as we didn’t do it, we’re OK. But by taking advantage of this
intelligence, we’re encouraging the use of torture and, in my opinion,
are in contravention of the UN Convention Against Torture. What
worried me most was that information obtained under torture, given
credence by some gung-ho Whitehall warrior, could be used to keep
another poor soul locked up without trial or charge.”
Although the true extent of the US extra-legal network is only now
becoming apparent, people began to disappear as early as 2001 when the
US asked its allies in Europe and the Middle East to examine their
refugee communities in search of possible terror cells, such as that
run by Mohammed Atta in Hamburg which had planned and executed the
September 11 attacks. Among the first to vanish was Ahmed Agiza, an
Egyptian asylum seeker who had been living in Sweden with his wife and
children for three years. Hanan, Agiza’s wife, told us how on December
18 2001 her husband failed to return home from his language class.
“The phone rang at 5pm. It was Ahmed. He said he’d been arrested and
then the line went dead. The next day our lawyer told me that Ahmed
was being sent back to Egypt. It would be better if he was dead.”
Agiza and his family hadfled Egypt in 1991, after years of
persecution, and in absentia he had been sentenced to life
imprisonment by a military court. Hanan said, “I called my
mother-in-law in Egypt. Finally, in April, she was allowed to see
Ahmed in Mazrah Torah prison, in Cairo, when he revealed what had
happened.”
On December 18 2001, Agiza and a second Egyptian refugee, Mohammed
Al-Zery, had been arrested by Swedish intelligence acting upon a
request from the US.
They were driven, shackled and blindfolded, to Stockholm’s Bromma
airport, where they were cuffed and cut from their
clothes. Suppositories were inserted into both men’s anuses, they were
wrapped in plastic nappies, dressed in jumpsuits and handed over to an
American aircrew who flew them out of Sweden on a private executive
jet.
Agiza and Al-Zery landed in Cairo at 3am the next morning and were
taken to the state security investigation office, where they were held
in solitary confinement in underground cells. Mohammed Zarai, former
director of the Cairo-based Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of
Prisoners, told us that Agiza was repeatedly electrocuted, hung upside
down, whipped with an electrical flex and hospitalised after being
made to lick his cell floor clean. Hanan, who was granted asylum in
Sweden in 2004, said, “I can’t sleep at night without expecting
someone to knock on the door and send us away on a plane to a place
that scares me more than anything else. What can Ahmed do?” Her
husband is still incarcerated in Cairo, while Al-Zery is under house
arrest there. There have been calls for an international independent
investigation into the roles of the Swedish, US and Egyptian
authorities.
We were able to chart the toing and froing of the private executive
jet used at Bromma partly through the observations of plane-spotters
posted on the web and partly through a senior source in the Pakistan
Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). It was a Gulfstream V Turbo,
tailfin number N379P; its flight plans always began at an airstrip in
Smithfield, North Carolina, and ended in some of the world’s hot
spots. It was owned by Premier Executive Transport Services,
incorporated in Delaware, a brass plaque company with nonexistent
directors, hired by American agents to revive an old CIA tactic from
the 1970s, when agency men had kidnapped South American criminals and
flown them back to their own countries to face trial so that justice
could be rendered. Now “rendering” was being used by the Bush
administration to evade justice.
Robert Baer, a CIA case officer in the Middle East until 1997, told us
how it works. “We pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our
partner countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on civilian
transport to a third country where, let’s make no bones about it, they
use torture. If you want a good interrogation, you send someone to
Jordan. If you want them to be killed, you send them to Egypt or
Syria. Either way, the US cannot be blamed as it is not doing the
heavy work.”
The Agiza and Al-Zery cases were not the first in which the Gulfstream
was used. On October 23 2001, at 2.40am at Karachi airport, it picked
up Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiologist who had been
arrested by Pakistan’s ISI and was wanted in connection with the USS
Cole attack. On January 10 2002, the jet was used again, taking off
from Halim airport in Jakarta with a hooded and shackled Mohammed
Saeed Iqbal Madni on board, an Egyptian accused of being an accomplice
of British shoe bomber Richard Reid. Madni was flown toCairo where,
according to the Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners,
he died during interrogation.
Since then, the jet has been used at least 72 times, including a
flight in June 2002 when it landed in Morocco to pick up German
national Mohammed Zamar, who was “rendered” to Syria, his country of
origin, before disappearing.
It was in December 2001 that the US began to commandeer foreign jails
so that its own interrogators could work on prisoners within
them. Among the first were Haripur and Kohat, no-frills prisons in the
lawless North West Frontier Province of Pakistan which now hold nearly
as many detainees as Guantánamo. In January, we attempted to visit
Kohat jail, but as we drove towards the security perimeter our vehicle
was turned back by ISI agents and we were escorted back to the nearby
city of Peshawar. We eventually located several former detainees,
including Mohammed, a university student who described how he was
arrested and then initially interrogated in one of many covert ISI
holding centres that are being jointly run with the CIA. Mohammed
said, “I was questioned for four weeks in a windowless room by
plain-clothed US agents. I didn’t know if it was day or night. They
said they could make me disappear.” One day he was bundled into a
vehicle. “I arrived in Kohat jail. There were 100 prisoners from all
over the Middle East. Later I was moved to Haripur where there were
even more.”
Adil, another detainee who was held for three years in Haripur after
illegally crossing into Pakistan from Afghanistan, where he had
escaped from the Taliban, says, “US interrogators came and went as
they pleased.” Both Mohammed and Adil said they were often taken from
the hot cell and doused with ice-cold water. Adil says, “American
women ordered us to get undressed. They’d touchus and taunt us. They
made us lie naked on top of each other and simulate acts.”
Mohammed and Adil were released without charge in November 2004 but,
according to legal depositions, there are still 400 prisoners detained
in the jails at the request of the US. Among them are many who it is
extremely unlikely took part in the Afghan war: they are too young or
too old to have been combatants.
Some have taken legal action against the Pakistani authorities for
breach of human rights.
A military intelligence official in Washington told us that no one in
the US administration seemed concerned about the impact of the
coercive tactics practised by the growing global network on the
quality of intelligence obtained, although there was plenty of
evidence it was unreliable. On September 26 2002, Maher Arar, a
34-year-old Canadian computer scientist, was arrested at New York’s
JFK airport as a result of a paper-thin evidential chain. Syrian-born
Arar told us, “I was pulled aside by US immigration at 2pm. I told
them I had a connecting flight to Montreal where I had a job
interview.” However, Arar was “rendered” in a private jet, via
Washington, Portland and Rome, landing in Amman, Jordan, where he was
held at what a Jordanian source described as a US-run interrogation
centre. From there, he was handed over to Syria, the country he had
left as a 17-year-old boy. He says he spent the next 12 months being
tortured and in solitary confinement, unaware that someone he barely
knew had named him as a terrorist.
The chain of events that led to Arar’s arrest, or kidnapping, began in
November 2001, when another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, from
Montreal, was arrested at Damascus airport. He was accused of being a
terrorist and askedto identify his al-Qaida connections. By the time
he’d endured two years of torture, El-Maati had reeled off the names
of everyone he knew in Montreal, including Abdullah Almalki, an
electrical engineer. Almalki was arrested as he flew into Damascus
airport to join his parents on holiday in May 2002, and would spend
the next two years being tortured in a Syrian detention facility.
Almalki knew Arward Al-Bousha, also from Ottawa, who in July 2002,
upon arriving in Damascus to visit his dying father, was also
arrested. El-Maati, Almalki and Al-Bousha all knew Maher Arar by sight
through Muslim communityevents in Ottawa. After his release from jail
in Syria, uncharged, in January 2004, El-Maati admitted that he had
erroneously named Maher Arar as a terrorist to “stop the vicious
torture”. Arar, who was eventually released in October 2003 after a
Syrian court threw out a coerced confession in which he said he
hadbeen trained by al-Qaida, told us, “I am not a terrorist. I don’t
know anyone who is. But the tolerant Muslim community I come from here
in Canada has become vitriolic and demoralised.” Arar’s case is now
the subject of a judicial inquiry in Canada, but since his release and
that of Al-Bousha and Almalki, another five men from Ottawa have been
detained in Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Five days after the US supreme court ruled in July 2004 that federal
courts had jurisdiction over Guantánamo, Naeem Noor Khan, a
25-year-old computer programmer from Karachi, disappeared during a
business trip to Lahore. He was not taken to Guantánamo. His father
Hayat told us that he learned of his son’s fate after a neighbour
called on August 2 to say that US newspapers were runninga story about
“the capture of a figure from al-Qaida in Pakistan” who had led “the
CIA to a rich lode of information”. An unnamed US intelligence
official claimed Naeem Noor Khan operated websites and email addresses
for al-Qaida.The following day Pakistan’s information minister
trumpeted the ISI’s seizure of Naeem Noor Khan on behalf of the US on
July 13. The prisoner had “confessedto receiving 25 days of military
training from an al-Qaida camp in June 1998”.No corroborative evidence
was offered.
Babar Awan, one of Pakistan’s leading advocates, representing the
family, said he had learned from a contact in the Pakistani government
that Naeem Noor Khan was wanted by the US, having been named by one of
a group of Malaysian students who had been detained incommunicado and
threatened with torture in Pakistan in September 2003. Awan said, “The
student was subsequently freed uncharged and described how he was
threatened until he offered the names of anyone he had met in
Pakistan. There is no evidence against Naeem Noor Khan except for this
coerced statement, and even worse he has now vanished and so there is
no prison to petition for his release.”
Khan had been swallowed up by a catch-all system that gathers up
anyone connected by even a thread to terror. Unable to distinguish its
friends from its enemies, the US suspects both.
Dawn broke on the festival of Eid and four US army vehicles gunned
their engines in preparation for a “hearts and minds” operation in
Khost city, Afghanistan. A roll call of marines, each with their blood
group scrawled on their boots, was ticked off and we were added to the
muster. The convoy hurtled towards the city. Men and boys began to run
alongside. First a handful and then a dozen. The crowd was heading for
a vast prayer ground, and soon there were thousands of devotees in
brand newEid caps and starched shalwas marching out to pray.
The US Humvees pulled over. The armoured personnel carriers, too. A
dozen US marines stepped down, eyes obscured by goggles, faces by
balaclavas.
They fell into formation and stomped into the crowd while a group of
Afghan police looked on incredulously. “Keep tight. Keep tight. Keep
looking all around us,” a US marines captain shouted. More than 10,000
Pashtun men were now on their knees praying as a line of khaki pushed
between them.
An egg flew. Then another. “One more, sir, and the guy who did it is
going down,” a young sergeant mumbled, as the disturbed crowd rose to
its feet.
Bearded men with Kalashnikovs emerged from behind a stone wall and
edged towards us, cutting off our path. The line of khaki began to
panic, and jostled the children. “Back away, back away now,” shouted
the sergeant. Suddenly an armoured personnel carrier roared to meet
us. “Jump up, people,” the captain shouted, and the convoy sped back
to Camp Salerno.
And perhaps this event above all others – of a nervous phalanx of US
marines forcing its way across a prayer ground on one of the holiest,
most joyous days in the Islamic calendar, an itching trigger away from
a Somalian-style dogfight of their own making – is the one that
encapsulates everything that has gone wrong with the global war
against terror. The US army came to Afghanistan as liberators and now
are feared as governors, judges and jailers. How many US marines know
what James Madison, an architect of the US constitution, wrote in
1788? Reflecting on the War of Independence in which Americans were
arbitrarily arrested and detained without trial by British forces,
Madison concluded that the “accumulation of all powers, legislative,
executive and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced
the very definition of tyranny”