March 2004

When Is Playing Paintball Terrorism? When You're A Muslim-American In Virginia

Filed under: Imported

 On March 5, in a Virginia federal court, U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema found three American citizens, Masoud Khan, 32, Seifullah Chapman, 31, and Hammad Abdur-Raheem, 35, guilty of participating in a conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism by supporting a Muslim group that the government has deemed a terrorist organization. (The three had waived their right to a jury trial, and allowed the judge to both try them and render the verdict in their case).

The three men, along with eight others, had initially been charged with conspiracy to violate the Neutrality Acts, little-used laws enacted in 1937 and 1939 that make it a crime for American citizens or residents to attack countries with which the United States itself is at peace. 

When the three men did not plead guilty to the Neutrality Act charges, they were the subjects of superseding indictments (which replaced the original indictment) for conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism by allegedly supporting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The antiterrorism law carried stiffer penalties and has the added cachet of containing the "t" word-terrorism.

None of the eleven men, most residents of Northern Virginia, attacked anyone at all. The three who were convicted by Brinkema face prison terms of fifty to one hundred years. The men who pled guilty are going serve from three to 11 years.

Defense attorneys have made a convincing case that the men were indicted and convicted primarily because they are Muslims in the post-September 11 era.

Abusive Prosecutions

If the men didn't attack anyone, why were they charged? Because all of them were, in the past, supporters of Lashkar-i-Taiba -- an Islamic group that would like to oust India from Kashmir.

Lashkar-i-Taiba has been accused by India of mass killings of Sikhs, and of partial responsibility for a December 2001 attack on India's Parliament.  In late 2001, the U.S. declared it a terrorist organization. However, at the time the men were alleged to have plotted to support Lashkar-i-Taiba, the organization was not on the list.

Of what did the men's support for Lashkar-i-Taiba consist?  Prosecutors alleged that they played paintball -- which prosecutors deemed engaging in "paramilitary training" -- to prepare to someday help Lashkar-i-Taiba if necessary.  Prosecutors apparently interpreted this paintball-playing as an "attack" -- or planned attack -- on India, and thus a violation of the Neutrality Acts and, later, under the new indictment, a violation of anti-terrorism laws. At least two of the men had admitted to being in a training camp in Pakistan, and one of them said he helped to recruit others to join in support of the organization.

The men were also charged with using a firearm in a conspiracy to commit terrorism. The usage consisted of firing legally owned firearms in the Virginia countryside on private property, and, like playing paintball, a perfectly legal activity under state law.

But the prosecutors alleged that shooting off guns—like playing paintball—was in preparation for "violent jihad." Thus, firing guns and playing paintball became crimes of terror. Gun charges, in particular, require judges to tack years onto already harsh sentences, thanks to mandatory federal sentencing guidelines.

Confused as to how perfectly legal activities can get you 50 years in prison? Welcome to the world of prosecuting Muslims in John Ashcroft's Department of Justice.

Consider the following hypotheticals:  Would Irish Americans who played paintball and played with guns in order to support the IRA have been similarly treated?   What about Jewish Americans who played paintball and engaged in target practice to train to support the Israeli army's actions in the Palestinian territories?

And even if these Irish and Jewish Americans were charged would anyone possibly suggest that they were terrorists who might someday attack the United States as well?

Judge Brinkema suggested exactly this with respect to the three Muslim American defendants.  She said she believed that those convicted might someday take up arms against the United States.  Yet the defendants' only proven political animosity was toward India, over its actions in Kashmir.  There was no evidence to support that they had any political animosity toward the U.S. -- let alone that they would ever attack violently attack their own country.

Disturbing Tactics: The Fate of The Alexandria 11

These three defendants are part of a group that has been referred to as the "Alexandria 11."  The government plainly did not consider these 11 men true threats.  And why should it have?  Its whole case was based on speculation that they might someday go to fight on the side of Pakistan (which happens to be an American ally, but whose position on Kashmir is adverse to that of India, whose rule of Kashmir the U.S. government does support).

Recognizing that these were not hardened criminals, the government offered the 11 men deals that could mean they would serve only a few years in prison.  But when they rejected these deals, it went after them with all its resources anyway.

Unsurprisingly, four of the 11 pled guilty early on.  Even innocent persons may rationally choose a three-year prison term over the chance of a 50-year sentence.  And Muslims, after September 11, may have seen the 50-year sentence as a certainty.

The remaining seven men were then the subjects of superseding indictments.   Suddenly, the charges against them were new: conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism. Such charges made it even less likely that they could receive a fair trial -- especially in the conservative Eastern District of Virginia. 

These superseding indictments appeared to be a punishment for the refusal of these seven to plead guilty.  They contained allegations that the men conspired to support the Taliban and al Qaeda, allegations which were never proven and which defense attorneys believe the government hurled at the men in order to intimidate them.

Not surprisingly, two more men pled guilty shortly after the superseding indictments were handed down.  For their cooperation, they received promises of sentences of 3 to 11 years. (Ironically, two of the men who pled guilty and got lighter sentences admitted that they went to a Lashkar-i-Taiba training camp between June 2000 and fall 2001.)

That left five men.  Charges against two were completely dropped.  Three insisted on going to trial -- the three that were just convicted by Judge Brinkema. 

Why did these three Americans insist on going to trial?  My guess is that they were innocent.  Why else would they fight what they knew to be an uphill battle, at great risk, rather than accept a few-year plea bargain as others in the same situation had done?  Further, what they would have to admit to, in order to get a lighter sentence, would follow them for the rest of their lives.

A Prejudiced Verdict?  Using Religious Belief As a Sword Against Defendants

The evidence against defendants came from three sources, all of which are troubling. One source was the testimony of their co-defendants who had pled guilty in exchange for light sentences, based on their willingness to give this very testimony.  Again, these co-defendants had been under tremendous pressure to take these plea bargains, regardless of their own guilt or innocence -- and to testify in support of the government, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the men they were testifying against.  Can testimony be truly credible when it is given in exchange for forty-seven years of freedom?  

Another source of evidence was the three men's political beliefs: They thought India ought to get out of Kashmir, and said as much.  But of course, that was their right, as Americans protected by the First Amendment's free speech clause.

The three men's place of worship was a source of evidence used against them.  They attended a Virginia mosque in which the Kashmir issue was discussed, and India's actions criticized.  But of course, that was their right, as Americans protected by the First Amendment's free exercise clause. Three tainted sources of evidence led to three convictions. 

Obviously, the government does not -- and cannot -- prosecute every supporter of a cause of which it does not approve.  But Muslims today are easy targets.  The evidence suggests that these prosecutions and convictions were motivated by discrimination. Terrorism or no terrorism, justice was not done.

Posted by Elaine Cassel at March 27, 2004 3:26 PM

In Their Own Words, Britons Describe the Hell of Guantanamo

Filed under: Imported

Civil Liberties Watch has had the Guantanamo Bay prisoners at the top of its watch list for months. Now, we can finally learn what is going on in the law-free black hole. Though lawyers and journalists who visit the prison camp are forbidden to speak about much except the weather, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush can no longer gag four British citizens, released not only from Cuban confinement last week, but released by their own government.

The U.S. had extracted a promise from the British government that the men would be interrogated, yet again (two years in Gitmo didn't get any confession out of them, but why stop now?) and charged with a crime, if the Brits could find one that they had committed. Well, even with Britain's stiff anti-terrorism law, it found no cause to charge them. So, the government released them. "We don't incarcerate people who have not committed a crime," said British law enforcement.

But the men are far from safe. The government is trying to protect them from the public, as the men face threats and humiliation. Already their images have been hung in effigy. Thanks to Bush and Rumsfeld, the lives of these innocent men are ruined. What about the other 650?

Here, in the words of three of the four released, is their story, reprinted from London's Guardian:

To see this story with its related links on the The Observer site, go to http://www.observer.co.uk

How we survived jail hell

For two years the Tipton Three have been silent prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Now, in this remarkable interview with David Rose, they describe for the first time the extraordinary story of their journey from the West Midlands to Camp Delta

David Rose

Saturday March 13 2004

The Guardian

'When I woke up I didn't know where I was. I'd lost consciousness at the side of the container, but when I woke up I was in the middle - lying on top of dead bodies, breathing the stench of their blood and urine.

'They'd herded maybe 300 of us into each container, the type you get on ordinary lorries, packed in so tightly our knees were against our chests, and almost immediately we started to suffocate. We lived because someone made holes with a machine gun, though they were shooting low and still more died from the bullets. When we got out, about 20 in each container were still alive.'

In a safe house in southern England at the weekend, Asif Iqbal was describing his survival, together with his friends Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul, after a massacre by US-backed Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan - the start of a 26-month nightmare which ended last week with their release from the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

Their faces gaunt with accumulated stress and exhaustion, they spoke softly, still stunned by the change in their circumstances: 'I just can't believe we're sitting here,' Ahmed says. 'This time last week, we were in the cages at Guantanamo.'

The horror of their story needs no embellishment. One day, perhaps, there will be an inquiry into Guantanamo. Until then, some of their allegations - which, it can be assumed, America is likely to deny - cannot be corroborated. However, many of the experiences they describe, including gunpoint interrogations in Afghanistan and random brutality both there and in Guantanamo, have been related in identical terms by other freed detainees. Last October I spent four days at Guantanamo. Much of what the three men say about the regime and the camp's physical conditions I either saw or heard from US officials.

Having escaped the truck container massacre, they endured near-starvation in a jail run by the Afghan warlord, General Dostum. When the Red Cross appeared and promised to make contact with the British Embassy in Islamabad they thought they were going home. Instead, with the apparent agreement of British officials, they were handed over to the Americans, first for weeks of physical abuse at a detention camp in Kandahar, followed by more than two years in the desolation of Guantanamo.

Month after month they were interrogated, for 12 hours or more at a time, by American security agencies and, repeatedly, by MI5 - in all, they say, they endured 200 sessions each. But when they re-emerged to freedom on Wednesday after two final days of questioning at Paddington Green police station, every apparent shred of evidence had melted away. Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed, together with the other early arrivals at Guantanamo, had been described by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as 'the hardest of the hard core', lethal terrorists 'involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans'. Even last week the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was claiming America had been justified in holding them.

Yet despite the denial of legal rights or due process, the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have been forced to accept what the three men said all along - that they were never members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda or any other militant group. The Americans had justified their detention by claiming they were 'enemy combatants', but they were never armed and did not fight.

'They formally told us we were going home last Sunday [several weeks after this news was relayed to the media],' Rasul said. 'We had a final meeting with the FBI, and they tried to get us to sign a piece of paper which said something like I was admitting I'd had links with terrorism, and that if I ever did anything like this again the US could arrest me.' Like the other two detainees freed last week, Tarek Dergoul and Jamal al-Harith, they refused.

'They took us to the airport in chains,' said Rasul, 'and when we got there this huge plane was surrounded by armed men. As we walked towards the steps they had guns trained on us. This military police guy hands us over to the British, takes off our shackles and tells the Brit he can put on the handcuffs. But the British policemen say, "no, no, there's no need for handcuffs". We walk up the steps and they're not even touching me.

'For the first time in two years I'm walking somewhere without being frogmarched. We get to the door and someone says: "Good morning. Welcome aboard." '

Capture

Rasul, 26, Ahmed, 22, and Iqbal, 22, were boyhood friends from the Midlands town of Tipton. In Septem ber 2001 they travelled to Pakistan ahead of the marriage Iqbal's parents had arranged for him to a woman in Faisalabad. Ahmed was to be best man; Rasul hoped to do a computer course after the wedding.

The three were in no sense fundamentalists: their brand of Islam, they say, was never that of the Taliban. But like many young Muslims in Pakistan they crossed the border into Afghanistan in October 2001, as it became clear that, in the wake of the 11 September attacks on America, one of the poorest countries in the world was about to be attacked. They had no intention of joining the fighting, they insist, but only of giving humanitarian aid. In England, none of them was rich, but in Asia, the little money they had could go a long way. For a short time they used the savings accumulated for their trip to buy food and medical supplies for Afghan villagers.

But in Taliban-led Afghanistan one aspect of their appearance made them dangerously visible - they had no beards. Travelling through a bombed landscape, they tried to escape in a taxi. But instead of reaching safety they were driven further into danger - to the city of Kunduz, which was promptly surrounded and bombarded by Dostum's troops. Aware that a bloodbath was imminent, they tried to leave on a convoy of trucks but their own vehicle was shelled, killing almost everyone on board. 'We were trapped,' says Iqbal. 'There was nothing we could do but give ourselves up. They took our money, our shoes, all our warm clothes, and put us in lines.'

They were part of a vast column of prisoners, around 35,000, says Rasul: 'You'd look down the slope and there were lines and lines of people, as far as the eye could see. We went through the mountains and the open desert. There were these massive ditches full of bodies. We thought this was the end. We thought they were going to kill us all.' Many of the prisoners were wounded and died by the wayside.

After two days they ended up outside Shebargan prison and crammed into the containers - it was night, says Iqbal, and the massacre began under the glare of spotlights which the three men claim were operated by American special forces. 'The last thing I remember is that it got really hot, and everyone started screaming and banging. It was like someone had lit a fire beneath the containers. You could feel the moisture running off your body, and people were ripping off their clothes.'

When he came to, Iqbal had not drunk for more than two days. Maddened by thirst, he wiped the stream ing walls with a cloth, and sucked out the moisture, until he realised he was drinking the bodily fluids of the massacred prisoners. 'We were like zombies,' Iqbal says. 'We stank, we were covered in blood and the smell of death.'

Freed from the trucks which had become mass graves, they were taken into Shebargan prison, where they were held in appalling conditions for the next month. Much was open to the elements, and to make room inside its bare communal cells the prisoners lay down in four-hour shifts. They were fed a quarter of a naan bread a day, with a small cup of water: sometimes, says Rasul, there were fights over the rations. Often snow blew into the buildings.

Rasul says: 'There were people with horrific injuries - limbs that had been shot off and nothing was done. I'll never forget one Arab who was missing half his jaw. For 10 days until his death he was screaming and crying continuously, begging to be killed.'

A few days earlier Taliban prisoners had organised the uprising against their captors at Qala-i-Jhangi Fort at Mazar-e-Sharif, and western reporters paid a visit to Shebargan. They seemed blind to the misery there, Rasul says. 'All they seemed to be interested in was if any of us knew the American Taliban John Walker Lindh.'

After 10 days the Red Cross arrived, bringing some improvement and an increase in the water supply. But by now all three were malnourished and suffering from amoebic dysentery. Ahmed says: 'We were covered with lice. All day long you were scratching, scratching. I was bleeding from my chest, my head.' Iqbal adds: 'We lost so much weight that if I stood up I could carry water in the gap between my collar bones and my flesh.'

Prisoners died daily: of the 35,000 originally marched through the desert, only 4,500 were still alive, the three men estimate. All this time they could see American troops 50 metres from their prison wing on the other side of the gates.

Beatings

After a month of this living hell, on 27 or 28 December, the Red Cross spoke to the three and promised they would contact the British Embassy in Islamabad and ask them to intervene on their behalf and notify their families that they were alive. Rasul's brother, Habib, says he had contacted the Foreign Office at the end of November and asked for help in tracing his missing brother.

In fact, very soon, the three would meet British officials. But Habib would be told nothing until February 8 - three weeks after his brother's arrival in Guantanamo.

Two days after the three talked to the Red Cross, Dostum's troops put them in chains, marched them through the main gate and handed them over to American special forces. Ahmed says: 'They put something like a sandbag over my head so you could see nothing. Then we got thrown on to a truck. They taped the sacks at the bottom of our necks, making it difficult to breathe.'

The Americans took them to Shebargan airport, where they were beaten, then loaded on a plane. 'I wanted to use the toilet,' Rasul says. 'Someone smacked me on the back of my head with his gun. I started peeing myself.'

Trussed like chickens, their chains replaced by plastic ties, they were flown to the US detention centre at Kandahar. The weather was freezing. Wearing only thin salwar kameez, with no socks or shoes, they were tied together with a rope and led into the camp, where they waited to be processed.

In the very different setting of a sitting room in suburban England, Iqbal demonstrates how they were made to kneel bent double, with their foreheads touching the ground: 'If your head wasn't touching the floor or you let it rise up a little they put their boots on the back of your neck and forced it down. We were kept like that for two or three hours.'

Rasul adds: 'I lifted up my head slightly because I was really in pain. The sergeant came up behind me, kicked my legs from underneath me, then knelt on my back. They took me outside and searched me while one man was sitting on me, kicking and punching.'

All this time they were still wearing their hoods. Then one soldier took a Stanley knife and cut off their clothes. Naked and freezing, they were made to squat while the soldiers searched their bodily cavities and photographed them. At last, they say, they were frog-marched through a barbed wire maze and put into a half-open tent where they were told to dress in blue prison overalls.

They had not washed since the container massacre a month earlier. There, Iqbal had sustained a ricochet wound to the elbow. Displaying an ugly purple scar, he explains that by the time he reached Kandahar, it had become infected. It was late at night by the time they had been processed, but next morning, they say, they were taken straight to their first interrogation. Rasul says: 'A special forces guy sat there holding a gun to my temple, a 9mm pistol. He said if I made any movement he'd blow my head off.'

Each endured several such sessions at Kandahar: each time, they say, they were questioned on their knees, in chains, always at gunpoint. Often they were kicked or beaten. (Other released detainees have described Kandahar in similar terms.)

Not all their interrogators were American. Iqbal and Rasul also describe an English officer in a maroon beret who said he was a member of the SAS. 'He had a posh English accent,' Rasul says. 'He mentioned the names of British prisons like Belmarsh and said we'd end up there.' Iqbal says the SAS officer told him: 'Don't worry, you won't be beaten today because you're with me.'

Ahmed says he was also questioned by an officer from MI5 and another Englishman who said he was from the British Embassy. 'All the time I was kneeling with a guy standing on the backs of my legs and another holding a gun to my head. The MI5 man says: "I'm from the UK, I'm from MI5, and I've got some questions for you." He says he was called Dave. He told me: "We've got your names, we've got your passports, we know you've been funded by an extremist group and we know you've been to this mosque in Birmingham. We've got photos of you." None of this was true.

'The second occasion was on the morning I left - they said I was going home. In fact I was on my way to Cuba.'

As Muslims, they were shocked when in repeated 'shakedown' searches of the sleeping tents, copies of the Koran would be trampled on by soldiers and, on one occasion, thrown into a toilet bucket. Throughout their stay at Kandahar the guards carried out head-counts every hour at night to keep the prisoners awake.

Rasul says: 'You'd just be dozing off and then you were made to get up, and that's the way it was all the way to morning.'

To Cuba

At 3AM on 13 January 2002, Rasul was moved to a new tent with Iqbal. Next morning their numbers were called out and they were made to sit while soldiers chained them tightly, sat them in a tent and attached another chain to a hook on the floor. 'These guys came in with clippers,' Rasul says, 'they shaved my hair and my beard; they cut all my clothes off and threw this medication over me, to kill the lice. Then they unlocked me from the floor and led me into another tent naked where they forced me to squat again and did another intimate cavity search.'

Instead of the blue overalls they were dressed in orange jumpsuits, chained and cuffed and made to wear thick gloves taped to their sleeves. Then, says Rasul: 'They made us sit outside on the gravel while they processed everyone. We had no water all day, but towards the end they gave us an MRE [a ready-to-eat US army meal] but no spoon. I had to try and trough it like an animal.'

The restraint device they were now forced to wear would become extremely familiar for the next 26 months - the 'three-piece suit', a body belt with a metal chain leading down to leg-irons with hand-shackles attached to it. Rasul says: 'I told the guard they'd put it on much too tight and he said: "You'll live." '

Before boarding a military aircraft they were dressed in earmuffs, goggles and surgical masks. Inside, they were chained to the floor with no backrests, and even when they requested the toilet, they were not released from their chains. 'Basically people wet their pants. You were pissing all over your legs.'

'The only thing that relieved the sensory deprivation and occupied me for the 22-hour flight was that I was in serious pain,' Rasul says. 'The guards told me to go to sleep but the belt was digging into me - when I finally got to Cuba I was bleeding. I lost feeling in my hands for the next six months.'

Rasul and Iqbal were on the second flight to the new Camp X-ray - the first had been three days earlier. (The Australian David Hicks and another British prisoner, Feroz Abbasi, were on that first flight.) Ahmed followed on 10 February on the fifth flight from Kandahar to Guantanamo Bay. 'When I got there,' he says, 'I was half dead. We had a two-hour stopover somewhere in Turkey. As we were being frog-marched from one plane to another, one of the guards stamped on the metal body bar of my three-piece suit so the leg-irons bit deeply into the flesh of my ankles.'

But Ahmed, at least, had been told where he was going. When Rasul and Iqbal landed they had no idea where they were: 'All I knew was that I was somewhere with intense heat,' Rasul says. 'An American voice shouted: "I am Sergeant so-and-so, US Marine Corps, you are arriving at your final destination." '

The Guantanamo airstrip lies a three-mile ferry journey across the bay from the detention facilities, a journey the prisoners made in a school bus. Iqbal says: 'The boat was moving in the swell, making the bus rock and the American guy says: "Stop moving." I couldn't stop, so he hit me.' Rasul made the mistake of telling a guard he was English. 'Traitor,' he yelled. Later, when Ahmed took the ferry, he heard a guard whispering: "This motherfucker speaks English." Repeatedly the guard kicked his leg: 'I couldn't move it for days, it was so badly bruised.'

At last they arrived at Camp X-ray, and became part of the group of orange-jumpsuited prisoners kneeling in the dust, still shackled and blindfolded, whose images went round the world. Rasul says: 'They made us kneel in that awkward way, and every time you moved, someone would kick you.

'The sun was beating down and the sweat was pouring into my eyes. I shouted for a doctor, someone poured water into my eyes and then I heard it again: "Traitor, traitor." ' Rasul was the last one processed, and by the time he got to his cage it was dark. First he was stripped naked and, still wearing his goggles and chains, he was given a piece of soap and told to shower for the first time since his capture. 'I looked around and I thought what the hell is this place?'

Iqbal recalls the moment his goggles were finally removed: 'I look up and I see all these other people who hadn't yet been processed in orange suits and goggles and I think I'm hallucinating.' Two days after arriving in Guantanamo Bay, with his family still desperate for information as to his whereabouts, Rasul was taken in his three-piece metal suit to an interrogation tent. 'I walk in and this guy says: "I'm from the Foreign Office, I've come from the British Embassy in America, and here is one of my colleagues who's from the embassy as well." Later he added his colleague was actually from MI5.'

Rasul asked where he was and the British officials replied: 'We can't disclose that information.' His family heard nothing for another three weeks. It would be many months before the British Government - which, in public, was voicing deep concerns about the lack of legal process at Guantanamo, and claiming it was trying to exert diplomatic pressure - would confirm that its own Security Service had connived from the outset.

Camp X-ray

In the early days at Camp X-ray, the conditions of detention were extreme.

The detainees were forbidden from talking to the person in the next cell and, Rasul recalls, fed tiny portions of food: 'They'd give you this big plate with a tiny pile of rice and a few beans. It was nouvelle cuisine, American-style. You were given less than 10 minutes to eat and if you hadn't finished the Marines would just take your plate away.' After a few more days Rasul was questioned again by MI5. The officer asked how he was. 'I started crying, saying I can't believe I'm here. He says: "I don't want to know how you are emotionally, I'm only interested in your physical state." '

After about a week the prisoners were allowed to speak to detainees in adjacent cells, and a few weeks later still were given copies of the Koran, a prayer mat, blankets and towels. Yet all witnessed or experienced brutality, especially from Guantanamo's own riot squad, the Extreme Reaction Force. Its acronym has led to a new verb peculiar to Guantanamo detainees: 'ERF-ing.' To be ERFed, says Rasul, means to be slammed on the floor by a soldier wielding a riot shield, pinned to the ground and assaulted.

Iqbal and Rasul were at opposite ends of the same block and were forbidden from talking to each other. There was almost nothing to do. 'Time speeds up,' Rasul says. 'You just stare and the hours go clicking by. You'd look at people and see they'd lost it. There was nothing in their eyes any more. They didn't talk.'

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!'

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 pris oners 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 seri ous 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.

Posted by Elaine Cassel at March 14, 2004 5:23 PM

I Hate To Say, "I Told You So," But, I Told You So

Filed under: Imported

It has been almost two years since I first wrote a comprehensive story on the USA Patriot Act. At that time, I warned that the Patriot Act could be construed to render nonviolent protest against government policy  an act of terrorism. One example I used was a fax or e-mail campaign to Congressional representatives (or the White House, for that matter) that could lead to the allegation that the faxes or email had "crippled" the government office and interfered with its normal business. For utilizing tactics that in any way interfere with the government can be an act of terror. Another example was a peaceful protest that blocked a law enforcement vehicle—that could be an act of terror.

In the past couple of weeks, what I predicted has come to pass—and then some. We learned that the Justice Department started an investigation into anti-war protests led by the National Lawyer's Guild at Drake University, in Des Moines, Iowa in November 2003. The FBI's Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Force subpoenaed the records of the National Lawyer's Guild, the student records of student organizers, and the surveillance tapes of campus security.  Demonstrations at the federal courthouse, motions to quash by recipients of the subpoenas, and negative publicity led the government to withdraw the subpoenas. The U.S. Attorney changed his tune and said they were never after anti-war protestors, but were looking for leads into who might have tried to enter a National Guard facility in Des Moines. Aside from casting a pretty wide and chilling net for a would-be trespasser, the affidavits in support of the subpoenas were devoid of any mention of a trespassing incident. Asked to explain the discrepancy, the U.S. Attorney said the affidavit was deficient—not his story.

Shortly after the Drake story broke early in February, the government confirmed that Defense Intelligence Agency operatives had "infiltrated" a conference on Muslim Law at University of Texas-Austin, and that FBI agents were attending ACLU meetings in Texas. They were on the lookout, we were told, for people who might be espousing terrorist tactics. I think they were taking names of attendees so that they could open files on people who dared to think about Islam law, or dared to be a part of an organization that has been in the forefront of taking the Bush Administration's despotism to federal courts.

When Secretary of Education Ron Paige referred to the National Education Association as a terrorist organization, he was parroting the Patriot Act. It was no slip of the tongue, but a calculated shot across the bow at people and organizations that speak out against a Bush policy. Paige later retracted the term, but not the substance of his charge. The NEA, he repeated over and over, has used "obstructionist and scare" tactics to defeat Bush's No Child Left Behind law. That description is one of the ways in which the Patriot Act defines "terror." In an op-ed in the Washington Post on Saturday, Paige lambasted all critics of the law, including state legislators who don't want the damn federal money if it means letting Paige and his cronies tell them how to run their schools, as people willing to sacrifice "children" for political purposes. I found the op-ed alarming—for he went even further than just calling them terrorists. He accused them of wanting to harm children because they don't agree with the Bush policy, driven by the desire to control each and every public classroom in the US (similar to Ashcroft wanting to control the body of every woman in the U.S.).

I could imagine all of the above, but what I read in the Saturday New York Times gave even me pause. The Treasury Department, which forbids doing "business" with countries (Iran, Cuba, Libya, Sudan, and North Korea, for instance) who are considered state sponsors of terrorism and are defined as our "enemies," notified editors and publishers that if they change one comma, word, or syntactical element in a document that came from a person who lives in a "forbidden" country, they may be charged with "trading with the enemy," a crime that carries a penalty of up to ten years in prison and a fine of $500,000. Presumably, an editor could not remove a comma from a story written by a born-again Christian Bush-ite any more than it could correct the pagination of a treatise by an al-Qaeda operative—if the writer was an Iranian national.  

This regulation begs the question, "Are all citizens of all nations our enemy?" Judge T.S. Ellis, Alexandria, Virginia federal district judge, alluded to this mindset of our government when he recently refused to sentence a former Bush Administration most-favored Muslim to two years in prison for carrying money into and out of Libya. Federal prosecutors wanted to put him away for at least ten years because he had "friends" whom the government alleged were "terrorists." Aside having no proof that his friends were terrorists, the pro-Bush Ellis said, last he checked, it was not a crime to know a "terrorist" socially.

The Treasury Department is up to more mischief than I can keep up with. The Washington Post reported on Friday that the Treasury Department was freezing the assets of travel agencies who book trips to Cuba (you do realize, don't you, that some travel to Cuba is legal? Tell that to Treasury), including the legitimate deposits of American citizens. And Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge ordered the Coast Guard to take over any ship, American or otherwise, traveling to Cuba. Cuba, you see, is a "terrorist" state. And if we travel to Cuba, we are supporting terror. A friend recently traveled to a Caribbean island and brought me back a CD of Cuban music. I have it displayed prominently in my office for Ashcroft to easily find. I am surely a terrorist for having Cuban music in my house and listening to it—even enjoying it, and my friend is a terrorist for buying it. (In a disgusting display of idiocy and bigotry, the State Department denied visas to Cuban musicians nominated for Grammy awards this year. Cuban Ibrahim Ferrer won the Grammy for Best Traditional Tropical Latin Album, putting the Grammy organization into the unenviable position of arguably supporting terrorism.)

So, what I predicted, and worse, is upon us, and I am not hearing much outrage about any of it. A yawn, a "what's new," a "does that surprise you, Cassel?" is about all I am getting when I rant and rave. No, it does not surprise me, it terrifies me. Four more years of Bush and I doubt that I will be writing or you will be reading these warnings. We will have been silenced. I wish I were exaggerating, but this past year has taught me that, if anything, my warnings have been too tame.

We have seen a despot, and he is occupying the White House. We have seen tyranny, and it is the Bush Administration. And yes, I am certain that, if there has been any doubt heretofore, now I am sure that I can be labeled a "terrorist" for saying it. And you, likely, are a terrorist for reading it.

Posted by Elaine Cassel at March 1, 2004 6:31 AM

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