Guantanamo Bay: 

Campaigning Against Complicity with Torture

 

There are a number of international and national organisations that are calling for justice for all those detained at the prison camp set up by the United States government in the aftermath of 9/11on territory that US Navy leased from Cuba at Guantanamo Bay.  International bodies include Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch; The Center for Constitutional Rights and Human Rights First work in the United States and in Britain, the charity Reprieve. The group I represent, Save Omar, is different from all of these because it is local, based in Brighton on the south coast of England. Brighton is the home of one of the 520 men detained in the network of camps that make up Guantanamo Bay. His name is Omar Deghayes and he is held in Camp Delta.

The Guantanamo Bay Hunger strike

Omar Deghayes is one of the 208 detainees participating in the Guantanamo Bay hunger strike. The strike is in its ninth week. US authorities have allowed neither lawyers nor media much information about the medical condition of the hunger strikers or provided any details of their attempt to address or, as is probably the case, their determination to ignore the causes of the detainees’ decision to collectively refuse food. It has been reported that 21 detainees have been hospitalised and are being forced fed through their noses. No names have been given and such a refusal to give information, painful for families who do not know if their brother or son is one of those in hospital, serves to depersonalise the protest and dampen public concern. As one US member of the US military told British resident Shaker Aamer “Do you think the world will even learn of your hunger strike?”

(http://www.ccrny.org/v2/reports/report.asp?ObjID=3oOCNpaA4k&Content=632).

Hunger strike is last resort of prisoners who are completely disempowered, who have no access to law or means of political representation. During the South African apartheid regime, members of the African National Congress and the Pan African Congress imprisoned in Robben Island used hunger strikes to seek redress for the punitive terms under which they were held. Most famously, the prolonged campaign of republicans held in the Maze Prison, Northern Ireland, for recognition as political prisoners ended when ten died starved themselves death in the Summer of 1981. Of the Guantanamo Bay hunger strike, Brian J. Foley, a professor at the Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, has stated that it is a direct result of the minimal legal process that our leaders, using our government and in our name, have deigned to provide for these men…The process doesn't give these men a meaningful opportunity to be heard. Nor do most of these men have access to lawyers or the outside world. What else is left for them to do? (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=30335)

It has been more than a month since any Guantanamo documents have been ‘declassified’ and those documents, statements from British residents Omar Deghayes and Binyam Mohammed date from the 19th July and the 11th August, respectively. They do give vitally important insights into the prisoners’ reasons for taking a course of action that could lead to their own deaths. Omar Deghayes explains that internment without end is ‘first and foremost among the issues’. His own words are:  "We are dying a slow death in here. And you have to remember that we have not been charged with any crime. I do not understand what America is doing."

Binyam Mohammed made this statement: "We ask only for justice: treat us, as promised, under the rules of the Geneva Conventions for Civilian Prisoners while we are held, and either try us fairly for a valid criminal charge or set us free."

These ‘declassified’ documents also make clear that this hunger strike, began on 11th August is the second one at Guantanamo. The first began June 28th and was suspended on July 28th when, with six detainees close to death, the military in promised to bring Guantanamo into line with international law. Then nothing changed.

It is in the context of increasing fears for the deteriorating health of detainees and the absence of information about them that the local campaign for justice for Omar Deghayes has developed.

 

Across the globe against Guantanamo 

Local campaigns for the release of Guantanamo Bay detainees have gained widespread support. For example, in Syndey, Australia, ‘a grass-roots political movement’ called GetUp!, which started just two months ago has quickly gathered 7,000 signatures on an on-line petition demanding that Australian citizen David Hicks be brought back from Guantanamo Bay to stand trial (The New York Times, 29.8.05). This case by case approach can end the injustice and suffering of an individual, which should never be underestimated, but it also undermine the Guantanamo regime itself and the attempt by the United States to impose internment on an global scale for those suspected of opposing its authority and supremacy. One of the functions of Guantanamo, which explains its continued existence despite widespread international criticism, is to demonstrate that there really is an enemy in the otherwise unfocussed ‘war on terror’. Many of those released, such as the British citizen Moazzam Beggs, have faced no charges on their return home. Thus the categorisation ‘enemy combatant’ has been exposed as a piece of military jargon, as a lie. Campaigning for justice for any one individual interned at Guantanamo simultaneously challenges the process whereby whole communities, in this case Muslim men, are demonised as the enemy, are treated as a ‘suspect community’ (P.Hiilyard, 1989)  

In the Brighton-based campaign, Save Omar, one of our strategies of resisting these processes of demonisation has been to tell Omar Deghayes’ story, to publicise his life, demonstrating the human scale of injustice meted out at Guantanamo and therefore making it difficult to tolerate the abuses of his human rights. My paper will set out, albeit briefly, some details of Omar Deghayes’ history and his experience since he was captured by bounty hunters in Pakistan in 2001 and sent, via Bagram air base, to Guantanamo Bay as well as indicate the wider implications of his case for those working to protect basic human rights in Britain and Europe. 

Omar’s story

Omar Deghayes is a British resident but a Libyan citizen. Omar had fled Libya as a teenager, along with his mother and four siblings, following the assassination of his father Amer Deghayes, an outspoken lawyer and trade unionist, a case also highlighted at the time by Amnesty International. They had settled at what had been a family holiday home in Saltdean, Brighton and he had subsequently lived there for eighteen years attending school and university where he graduated in law. He married a woman from Afghanistan and had a baby son Suleiman now four years old. When the war in Afghanistan broke out he fled with his family to Pakistan where he was picked up. He was suspected of being a rebel soldier in a video given to the US authorities by Spanish police. The man in the video was, however, later identified by the American Watchdog TV programme as a Chechnyan who was shot in April 2004. Professor Tim Valentine who works with the British Police on cases of photo identity and is an expert in physiognomy later delivered a paper explaining why that face could not possibly be that of Omar Deghayes. 

 

Conditions in Camp Delta

In his three years and eight months of detention Omar has been subjected to long periods of solitary confinement. Camp Delta is comprised of isolation cells. In his 19th July statement he describes his concrete bed with a freezing cold air conditioning vent at one end and stinking toilet at the other and the pain the neon lights cause to his eye as the lights are never switched off.  He only gets to wash once a fortnight and never sees daylight.  There are scorpions and mosquitoes in the cells and in the food unsuitable for Muslims.  The times of prayer are not the prescribed times and prayer is disrupted by turning up the noisy fans and the military police behaving like children and running races in the corridors.  Amputees are tormented by having their prostheses taken away and being denied cream or covering for their stumps so that the cold causes huge pain in the affected limbs.

 

Torture

In June 2005 Amnesty International took up the case of Omar Deghayes as an Urgent Action. They have recorded the following list of allegations of torture that have taken place when Omar was captured in Pakistan, after he was transferred to Bagram and at Guantanamo:

systematic beatings

  • holding stressed positions

  • chaining to a wall, suspended by his wrists

  • food deprivation

  • forced nudity

  • sexual assault

  • petrol and benzene being forced into his anus

  • water tortures (submersion until just before the point of drowning)

  • suffocation (locked in a box with little air for prolonged periods)

  • solitary confinement for 8 months  

  • repeated use of pepper spray

Even Senate Republicans have protested the abuse of human rights by the US military Guantanamo Bay, amongst other places, and have voted 90 to 9 to prohibit the use of  ‘cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishmnt’ against anyone in US custody anywhere (The Guardian, 7.10.05) It is an admirable stance but one that also recognises that such abuse is a widespread practice.

 

Beyond the rule of law

British Labour MP, Jeremy Corbyn, has called Guantanamo Bay a ‘vortex’ and

Ken Coates of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation has pointed that here detainees are kept ‘beyond reach of judicial processes anywhere in the world’ (The Guardian, 13.3.05). UK Director of Amnesty International, Kate Allen, has identified that the ‘legal limbo’ contrived when the US authorities began filling its Cuban naval base with people captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia and Ghana has not essentially changed ‘three and half years later’. She states:

The US authorities have spent over three years preparing “military commission” trial procedures at Guantanamo that fall far below international fair trial standards. “Evidence” extracted under torture could be used in these proceedings, the accused can simply be excluded from his own trialat any moment, and there is no independent review of the process whatsoever (The Argus, 20.9.05)

She added, ‘Even if Omar were ever to be brought before such a trial it is virtually inconceivable that the process would be fair.’

British responsibility and Guantanamo Bay

All British citizens held in Guantanamo Bay have been returned home. There remain, however, at least seven British residents of which Omar Deghayes is one. Binyam Mohammed and Shaker Aamer have already been mentioned in the paper and the names of the others are: Jamal Kiyemba, Bisher Al-Rawi, Jamal El-Banna, Ahmed Errachidi. It is important to note that the higher profile of the campaign to release Omar Deghayes is because his family, unlike the others, has not been intimidated into silence through the ‘Muslim Contact Units’ established by British special branch and MI5 in the wake of 9/11 and the avalanche of the anti-terrorist legislation over the same period that has sustained a culture of fear and self-censorship.

The Save Omar campaign is simply arguing that the British government has a responsibility to British residents. Our initial approaches to government ministers, Home Secretary Charles Clarke and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in Spring this year were ignored. They have since been embarrassed into responding by a growing grass roots movement that has united peace activists, human rights campaigners, socialists, environmentalists, local city councillors and parliamentary MPs as well as, importantly, the local newspaper, The Argus. A government statement to the BBC in 22nd September contained the claim that no action can be taken because Omar Deghayes is ‘a refugee’ and written reply from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office stated that ‘we can only offer consular assistance or make consular representations on behalf of British nationals.’

There are two issues at stake here: firstly, Britain’s relationship to US and, secondly, the ability of the US to render people stateless through their imprisonment. As all are aware, Britain is the United States’ foremost military and political ally, supporter of its ‘war on terror’ since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Shaping British foreign policy to suit the President Bush’s military strategy is explained as a development of the long-standing ‘special relationship’ with the US, which although always unequal is now extremely one-sided. As Mark Jennings recorded in a paper delivered to Amnesty International Conference on Human Rights in the Americas Region (5th March 2005), Jack Straw explained in one of the ‘rare parliamentary debates about Guantanamo’ that his department could not make representations on behalf of British residents adding ‘more to the point, the US government would not accept those representations from us.’  Our demand for the release of Omar Deghayes is just a call for the fair treatment of one of our neighbours but it also addresses the problem of British allegiance and subservience to US no matter where its political policy and military strategy might lead. British ministers have, at the moment, chosen to support the Guantanamo Bay regime rather than protect those who have been recognised as refugees then as residents and whose families are British citizens. Omar and the other British residents have valid claim on Britain, a connection with this country that has been severed through their internment. All prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been deprived of national status, rendered stateless, in the sense that no constitution or legal system can be used to protect them. As British residents held in place controlled by the US the standard of justice of either nation ought to apply. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States states that ‘the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy trial’ and Article 6 of the 1998 UK Human Rights Act, which repeats the words of the European Convention on Human Rights declares that ‘everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law.

The removal of people from their place in a national community and in so doing stripping them of legal, political and human rights then enforcing their loss of status through a prison camp regime that deliberately disregards human dignity has been, in the recent past, considered a war crime. And those that tolerated such actions, who stood by and claimed they could do nothing, just as the British government is doing now, have been regarded as a collaborators.

On what could be regarded as the two most significant breaches of human rights at Guantanamo Bay, indefinite detention without trial and the use of torture, Britain is adopting a relativist rather principled attitude as is evident in other aspects of British legislation and policy. The most recently published anti-terrorist bill would allow, if it was passed, detention for up to 3 months. Law Lord Steyn has already indicated that detaining without charge for such a prolonged period is illegal and suggested that 14 days, which was once the ‘emergency’ and ‘temporary’ provision of the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, should be the maximum (‘Panorama”, BBC, 9.10.05). Warnings to halt the attempt to circumvent international human rights conventions in relation to both anti-terrorist legislation and torture have come from prominent international figures. The President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, René van der Linden, responding to Home Secretary Charles Clarke’s statements about the relevance of the European Convention on Human Rights in ‘the current circumstances of the fight against terrorism’, stated: "The Convention was drafted in the immediate aftermath of the bloodiest, most destructive war the world has ever seen. It is not a luxury for times of peace, but a necessity to prevent tyranny and conflict" (pace.com@coe.int and www.coe.int/press). Equally as critical of Tony Blair’s plans to deport ‘Islamic extremist and foreign nationals’ to ‘home countries’ where they would face torture, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Novak, stated: ‘If you deport people, whether they are British citizens or foreigners, to another country where they are subjected to the risk of torture, then this is absolutely prohibited under international human rights law’ (The Independent, 10.8.05).

Our campaign, in its attempt to save the life of one man, Omar Deghayes, re-asserts the continuing importance, the absolute necessity, of upholding the basic principle of access to justice and protection from torture. With increasing urgency as the Guantanamo Bay hunger strike continues and the camps remain outside international law, we are calling, with others such as Ken Coates, playwright and journalist Victoria Brittain, lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, for an independent body to have full access to the prison camp.