Scandalous

As revelations of torture emerge from Guantanamo Bay, the British government appears as chief accomplice, reports Alistair Alexander from London

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The nine British citizens languishing in Guantanamo Bay since the war in Afghanistan have been a source of acute embarrassment for the British government. But the release of five of the men -- the other four are awaiting secret military tribunals -- and their accounts of their innocence, psychological torture and physical abuse are causing Britain's Labour administration at least as much embarrassment as the men's incarceration.

The five men returned to the United Kingdom on Friday last week after months of strained negotiations between the British and American governments. After British police interrogated them for 24 hours, the men were released to see their families for the first time in over two years. While one detainee was too traumatised by his ordeal to talk, the others were less reticent.

One of the detainees, Jamal Hudeen, told the Mirror newspaper: "The whole point... was to get to you psychologically. The beatings were not nearly as bad as the psychological torture -- bruises heal after a week but the other stuff stays with you."

Three others, Asif Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul, provided the Observer newspaper with a harrowing and convincing account of their two years of imprisonment.

They spoke of how they were arrested having only narrowly survived the disgracefully under- reported massacre in Kunduz, Afghanistan, when Northern Alliance troops -- watched over by US forces -- herded supposedly-Taliban troops into metal containers that fried many thousands of prisoners alive in the burning midday sun.

The three men, all boyhood friends from Tipton in central England, explained how they were frequently beaten, held in cages and then interrogated repeatedly over a period of months.

They also revealed that, while the British government was voicing in public its concerns over the treatment of the British prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, British MI5 intelligence officers were interrogating them alongside Americans. The prison regime was brutal with coercion and sensory deprivation applied to extract confessions, whether genuine or otherwise.

What has been clear for sometime is, that after two years of imprisonment without trial, or indeed any legal process, the US authorities had failed to find any evidence whatsoever that these men had any link to Al-Qa'eda or the Taliban. And it hardly looks like a coincidence that their case was about to be heard by the US Supreme Court -- without the prisoners' knowledge of course -- if they weren't released.

While the Bush administration faces little domestic criticism for Guantanamo Bay, the same can hardly be said for the British government. Since the attack on the World Trade Center, Tony Blair has constantly strived to articulate his support for the war on terror in morally righteous terms of a conflict between chaos and the rule of law. But Blair's vision is hard to square with the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay, where the rule of law is apparently left stranded outside the perimeter fence alongside human rights.

For much of the British public, deeply sceptical of both Bush and the war on terror, Blair's moral hypocrisy over Guantanamo Bay is pretty hard to swallow. Still, plenty of other Britons regard any prisoners of Guantanamo Bay as terrorists, almost by definition. In fact, most of the evidence points to Guantanamo Bay being full of hapless unfortunates who were simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time; any serious Al- Qa'eda operatives are being held by the Americans in more secret locations.

The appallingly slow progress on getting British prisoners released has also cruelly revealed the limitations of British influence in Washington, despite the government's unswerving support for America.

That frequently aired accusation might, however, be wide of the mark. The men's lawyers claim the Americans have been willing to release the men for some time; the real sticking point, they say, was the British government's reluctance to have the men return. Far from being an isolated lapse in moral judgement, the British government's ambivalence towards judicial and human rights in Guantanamo Bay fits an increasingly sinister pattern. Less well reported than the recently-returned prisoners are 14 foreign nationals held indefinitely without trial in London's Belmarsh prison -- often referred to as "Britain's Guantanamo".

The men have been held after secret hearings consisting of evidence from Britain's intelligence services -- the same operatives who brought you the Iraq dossiers. Judges have recently ruled that one of the men should be released as his two years of detention have made him psychotic and another should be released because the evidence used against him was "wholly unreliable and should not have been used to justify detention".

But this cuts little ice with Britain's authoritarian Home Secretary, David Blunkett. Mr Blunkett has refused to release both men and will appeal in secret to Lord Woolf -- Britain's most senior judge -- to keep both men in prison.

Interestingly, Lord Woolf launched an unprecedented attack on the government over a range of planned legal reforms, such as refusing failed asylum seekers the right to appeal and the proposed new British Supreme Court.

The latter idea has some merit and would certainly update Britain's archaic legal establishment. But many consider the government's record on upholding basic judicial rights is so dubious that any reform they suggest should be treated with the utmost caution. And the fact that the government would have a veto over appointments to the Supreme Court confirms many people's worst fears; that the new court would be subordinate to the government.

Last week, the potential embarrassment from the Guantanamo Bay prisoners and the Belmarsh appeals was muted by the atrocities in Madrid. As with all terrorist attacks, Mr Blunkett and other ministers have wasted little time in wondering aloud whether civil liberties need to be further eroded in order to counter the threat of terrorism. We need to find a new balance between security and liberty the argument goes, to protect our values and our way of life. That new balance, however, appears to be a more tangible threat to British democratic values than any terrorist attack.

As the shocking case of the Guantanamo Bay shows, when governments appear keen to extend their own liberties at the expense of their citizens, the security of their citizens is rarely foremost in their minds.