Afghanistan: 'One huge US jail'

[Guest guest]

" Zepp " <zepp

 

 

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 17:15:19 -0800

[Zepps_News] #Afghanistan: 'One huge US jail'

 

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1440836,00.html

 

'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 who hopes 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 last June. 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

Rights First, 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. I saw 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 aloft in 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 before we 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 US base. 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 back to 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 him from 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 his body 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 building new 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 and even 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 will

be 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 sources in 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

after the 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 in his 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, head of 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 had fled 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 to Cairo 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 touch us 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 asked to 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 community events 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 had been 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 running a 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 " confessed to

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 "

 

 

 

--