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Revealed: the full story of the Guantanamo Britons

David Rose
Sunday March 14, 2004
The Observer

Three British prisoners released last week from Guantanamo Bay have revealed the full extent of British government involvement in the American detention camp condemned by law lords and the Court of Appeal as a 'legal black hole'.

Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, the so-called 'Tipton Three', speaking for the first time since their release at a secret location in southern England, have disclosed to The Observer the fullest picture yet of life inside the camp on Cuba where America continues to hold 650 detainees.
After more than 200 interrogation sessions each, with the CIA, FBI, Defence Intelligence Agency, MI5 and MI6, America has been forced to admit its claims that the three were terrorists who supported al-Qaeda had no foundation.

But fearful of reprisals - the extreme right wing BNP has a stronghold in their hometown of Tipton in the West Midlands, and their families have warned them they may not be safe back at home - they all declined to be photographed, and are choosing a new location in which to rebuild their lives.

During an extraordinary 12-hour interview with The Observer last Friday, two days after their release from Paddington Green police station where they were held after being flown home from Cuba, the three men revealed that they were interrogated by MI5 almost immediately after first arriving at Guantanamo Bay - in the cases of Iqbal and Rasul, on 15 January 2002, and in Ahmed's case three weeks later.

The British Government has repeatedly claimed it has been trying to use diplomatic pressure to introduce more legal process at Guantanamo, including an opportunity for detainees to show that imprisonment is unjustified.

But the picture painted by the three released prisoners is of a Security Service which saw them as mere 'interrogation fodder', and questioned them repeatedly throughout their 26-month stay.
Among other disclosures, the three men revealed:

• How early in their ordeal they survived a massacre perpetrated by Afghanistan's Northern Alliance troops who herded hundreds of prisoners into lorry containers and locked them in, so that people started to suffocate. Iqbal described how only 20 of 300 prisoners in each container lived, and then only because someone made holes in its side with a machine gun - an action which killed yet more prisoners;
• The existence of a secret super-maximum security facility outside the main part of Guantanamo's Camp Delta known as Camp Echo, where prisoners are held in tiny cells in solitary confinement 24-hours a day, with a military police officer permanently stationed outside each cell door. The handful of inmates of Camp Echo include two of the four remaining British detainees, Moazzem Begg and Feroz Abbasi, and the Australian, David Hicks;
• That they endured three months of solitary confinement in Camp Delta's isolation block last summer after they were wrongly identified by the Americans as having been pictured in a video tape of a meeting in Afghanistan between Osama bin Laden and the leader of the 11 September hijackers Mohamed Atta. Ignoring their protests that they were in Britain at the time, the Americans interrogated them so relentlessly that eventually all three falsely confessed. They were finally saved - at least on this occasion - by MI5, which came up with documentary evidence to show they had not left the UK;
• That their first interrogations by British investigators - from both MI5 and the SAS - took place in December 2001 and January 2002 when they were still being held at a detention camp in Afghanistan. Guns were held to their heads during their questioning in Afghanistan by American soldiers, and physical abuse and beatings were rife. At this point, after weeks of near starvation as prisoners of the Northern Alliance, all three men were close to death.

The Court of Appeal criticised the absence of any legal due process at Guantanamo as a 'legal black hole' in a case brought on behalf of Abbasi last year, while the laws lord, Lord Steyn, has described the camp in a speech as a 'monstrous failure of justice'.

In public, the British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has spoken of his constant pressure on America to improve both physical and legal conditions, urging them not to deny terror suspects a fair trial.

But the released prisoners told The Observer how MI5 interrogators, in sessions lasting many hours, tried repeatedly to extract information they did not have about Islamic groups in Britain and their supposed links with al-Qaeda.

Ahmed described an interrogation session which took place before he left Afghanistan by an officer of MI5 and another official who said he was from the Foreign Office: '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 says: "I'm from the UK, I'm from MI5, I've got some questions for you," he told me: "We've got your name, we've got your passport, 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."' In fact, none of these claims was true.

The three men said that as far as they could see, there were few if any genuine terrorists at Guantanamo Bay: perhaps at worst, a few mullahs who had been loyal to the Taliban.

They voiced grave fears for the future of Begg and Abbasi, who are due to face trials by American military commissions, saying that their own experience of the Guantanamo interrogation and intelligence gathering process was 'almost a recipe' for other miscarriages of justice.

Last night, a Foreign Office spokesman said he could not comment on the men's claims to have been interrogated by British officials while they were still in Afghanistan, saying he could not get access to the relevant files.

Whitehall security sources confirmed that MI5 has had regular access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: 'I can say that the purpose of our being given access to detainees in US custody is to gather information relevant to British national security,' said one source.