Allied to the torturers?

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee relies on the dubious evidence of the U.S. military to falsely brand British Guantánamo detainees a threat to public safety.

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee sounds exclusive and grand, and it should be. The Committee is comprised of a small group of MPs who assess the operations of the government. They are meant to act as a watchdog, identifying failings in government policy.

In the Sunday papers, they issue findings with respect to Guantánamo Bay. The report is a terrible disappointment to anyone who believes in justice, and an abnegation of the Committee’s duties.

The report is riddled with mistakes. For example, the Committee talks of the nine British residents in Guantánamo Bay. This is, at least, some improvement on the British government’s previous statements, five years into the process, that there were only five. But it is still wrong. There are ten. Surely the Committee could have figured this much out, with all the ‘high quality intelligence’ that is supposedly generated at the prison.

In September, the Committee went on a fact-finding mission to Guantánamo, where they were given the U.S. military propaganda tour of the base. They will have been filled up with confidential information about the dangers posed by those held there. They will not, of course, have been permitted to speak with any of the prisoners to get their side of the story. Indeed, the prisoners will not even be permitted to know what the story against them is. Yet this cursory tour of the prison was sufficient for the Committee to condemn the British residents to remain there in perpetuity, recommending “that the Government maintain its current position,” refusing to allow these men to return to their homes and families in Britain.

The Committee has also apparently been briefed on the Military Commissions Act, the recent law establishing new tribunals for the prisoners. To be sure, the Committee expresses passing concern that the MCA allows secret evidence, and that evidence that was coerced out of a prisoner may be used, but the Committee feels that the MCA is a welcome improvement. One can only ask who briefed them. The MCA is identical in virtually all substantive elements to the old law.

Yet relying on secret evidence coerced out of a prisoner is apparently good enough for government work because “many of those detained present a real threat to public safety.” The conclusion that these prisoners are dangerous could only come from the allegations made by the military who gave them their tour. In advocating that these ten men be barred from Britain based on the same secret evidence, the Committee has therefore condemned them without a trial, based on evidence someone else exacted through coercion and abuse.

It is one thing to rely on secret evidence; it is quite another to tar someone as dangerous without even disclosing the allegations that suggest the offence. Yet the Committee would apparently have us trust their judgement, based on whatever the material may have been that was shared by the U.S. government. Many of us will find that unacceptable, particularly since past history does not give us much reason to have confidence in Guantánamo intelligence.

According to the U.S. military, Omar Deghayes, for 20 years a British refugee from Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, is meant to have been a rebel brandishing a Kalashnikov in a Chechen videotape. When I, as his lawyer, was finally allowed to see it, I discovered that the man in the video was really a man called Abu Walid. Omar has never been to Chechnya. But the Committee would have him sent to die in Libya.

Ahmed Errachidi, for 18 years a London chef, was meant to have been the ‘General’ marshaling terrorists in an Afghan training camp in July 2001. When the allegation was finally made public, we proved that he was cooking in the Westbury Hotel at the time, his passport safely in the hands of the Home Office. But the Committee would not let him come home.

The only evidence against Binyam Mohamed comes from a torture chamber in Morocco, where he had a razor blade taken to his penis for 18 months. But according to the Committee a hand-picked jury of seven colonels is justice enough for him, so he should never be allowed back to Kensington.

And so on, through all ten of the British residents. The Committee members have swallowed the nonsense fed to them by the U.S. military in a way that can only be described as naïve – but this is a naiveté that carries with it terrible consequences. According to the Committee, Shaker Aamer’s British wife and four children should never see him again. Jamil el Banna’s British wife and five children should similarly be left without hope. That is profoundly unfair – these British politicians are compounding the abuses that the prisoners suffer in Guantanamo itself.

We must hope that the Sunday editors consider the report carefully, and question whether it is fair. The papers, at least, should insist on hard facts, and provide the opportunity for the prisoners to reply. Anything short of this would be trial-by-newspaper, based on evidence exacted through trial-by-ordeal, regurgitated in trial-by-Government Committee. 

This article also appeared in the Guardian newspaper.