Revealed: MI5's role in torture flight hell

There's an interview in today's Observer newspaper with an Iraqi who was a key source of information for MI5 regarding Abu Qatada, the Muslim cleric accused of being Osama bin Laden's 'ambassador in Europe', and the man who British resident Bisher al-Rawi, the interviewee, helped them to track.

Bisher al-Rawi spent four years in American custody - when he was sent to both Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay - before being released without charge.

He was abducted and stripped naked by US agents, clad in nappies, a tracksuit and shackles, blindfolded and forced to wear ear mufflers, then strapped to a stretcher on board a plane bound for a CIA 'black site' jail near Kabul in Afghanistan.

He was taken on to the jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

'All the way through that flight I was on the verge of screaming,' al-Rawi said. 'At last we landed, I thought, thank God it's over. But it wasn't - it was just a refuelling stop in Cairo. There were hours still to go ... My back was so painful, the handcuffs were so tight. All the time they kept me on my back. Once, I managed to wriggle a tiny bit, just shifted my weight to one side. Then I felt someone hit my hand. Even this was forbidden.'

He was thrown into the CIA's 'Dark Prison,' deprived of all light 24 hours a day in temperatures so low that ice formed on his food and water. He was taken to Guantanamo in March 2003 and released after being cleared of any involvement in terrorism by a tribunal.

The stories of how Americans treat their prisoners are now so routine as to be part of a pattern that anyone who ever reads a newspaper will recognise. In fact, they are so recognisable that it simply becomes impossible for anyone to argue that this behaviour is not now routine American policy. Indeed, in recent books "The Torture Papers: the road to Abu Ghraib", and "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the war on terror" the authors argue that torture is now an official American policy.

The Torture Papers provides a blow-by-blow account of how the US adopted torture as a standard policy after the events of 11 September 2001. A few days after the attacks, the deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo wrote a memo in which he reasoned that because Afghanistan under the Taliban was a "failed state" and because al-Qaeda was not a state, the Geneva Conventions were applicable neither to the Taliban nor to Qaeda operatives, given that the conventions dealt only with "states" (Yoo presumably meant "successful" states).

A couple of months later, President George W Bush decided that the "quaint" conventions did not apply to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. All of them, he declared, were "unlawful combatants". Numerous other memos, collected in The Torture Papers and Torture and Truth, show that the president thought his powers were over and above international law. He was not answerable even to Congress. As one memo insists, Congress "may no more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants, than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield". In other words, the president of the United States is a law unto himself.

"Military necessity", argued Bush and his advisers, dictates that no method of interrogation be ruled out. It is legal and necessary for torture to be "part of the process". Only Colin Powell, the US secretary of state at that time, opposed these callous arguments.

The road from Afghanistan to Iraq's prisons was a slippery one. By the time the photographs of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib became public, torture had become routine.

A report by Parliament's intelligence and security committee last week disclosed that the British handed al-Rawi over to the Americans, despite suspicion that this may lead to him being tortured, because he did not possess a British passport. As he held an Iraqi passport, Blair's government decided he was the responsibility of Iraq, where he had fled from as a teenager after his father was tortured by Saddam Hussein. However, the British government's complicity in his arrest and subsequent torture goes way beyond simply washing their hands of him and saying that he is the responsibility of Iraq.

The report confirmed that al-Rawi, 39, was only held after MI5 sent the CIA a telegram, stating he was an 'Islamic extremist' who had a timer for an improvised bomb in his luggage. In reality, before al-Rawi left London, police confirmed the device was a battery charger from Argos.

The committee accepted MI5's claim, given in secret testimony, that it had not wanted the Americans to arrest him, in November 2002, concluding the incident had damaged US-UK relations.

But al-Rawi alleged that the CIA told him they had been given the contents of his own MI5 file - information he had given his handlers freely when he was working as their source. He said an MI5 lawyer had given him 'cast iron' assurances that anything he told them would be treated in the strictest confidence and, if he ever got into trouble, MI5 would do everything in its power to help him.

When al-Rawi was in Guantanamo, he asked the American authorities to find his former MI5 handlers so they would corroborate his story but, because he did not know their surnames, MI5 said it could not assist.

MI5 have claimed that they could not have known that al-Rawi could be the victim of torture, despite a report by Amnesty International eight months earlier which described prisoners being treated in the exact same way as al-Rawi was eventually treated.

The truth is that the British government under Blair didn't care whether or not people like al-Rawi were being tortured, as Blair - like Bush - totally bought into the idea of a clash of civilisations and thought they had to do whatever was necessary to achieve victory. Of course, they told themselves that they weren't torturing people and even invented new descriptions of what they were doing to tell themselves that it wasn't actually torture. Orwell would have turned in his grave as they did somersaults with the English language to justify the unjustifiable.

Even the language used to describe torture has been cleansed of blood. Bush's advisers, firing off memo after memo, talk about "counter-resistance strategies"; these may be "cruel, inhuman and degrading", but they are "not torture". The Red Cross found that the Abu Ghraib prisoners had not been tortured but had simply suffered "ill-treatment". Sleep deprivation is "adjusting the sleeping times". Setting dogs on the detainees is "forced grooming". Shoving a pole up a victim's rectum is "butt stroking". Keeping prisoners in solitary confinement is "segregation". And the policy to send suspects to torture chambers located in various parts of Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba is "rendition".

Indeed, the torture of prisoners became so routine at places like Abu Ghraib that people took pictures of it, such was it's "normality".

To all intents and purposes, these are holiday snaps. The perpetrators adopt familiar poses - smiling, laughing, pointing to the scenery, flirting with the camera. Like most holiday shots, they are taken in full view of others. The background activity in some indicates that the goings-on in the foreground are nothing out of the ordinary. When sent home, these photographs will join others from other holidays - all with the same smiling faces, announcing "I was there".

So the story told by al-Rawi is not a new one, it is the same depressing tale we have heard a hundred times before. There will be many Bush supporters who will claim that these tales do not prove that the US is engaging in torture. I would merely counter that such support for current American policy enables it to continue and is further proof of how the war on terror has dehumanised all of us.

There was a day when tales of this kind would be emanating from third world dictatorships and we would all demand that our country desist from dealing with such savages. Today the tales emanate from the United States, the world's leading superpower, and there are people falling over themselves to either deny it is taking place or to provide justification for why it is necessary.

The stories that have come to light all tell the same story. Indeed, the details are so similar that it becomes impossible to buy that these acts are being committed by "bad apples". "Bad apples" would each come up with their own unique way to degrade people. It is the consistency of these stories that leads one to believe that we are witnessing an official policy.

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Related Articles:

Human Rights Watch: US Torture and Abuse of Detainees.

Each day brings more information about the appalling abuses inflicted upon men and women held by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world. U.S. forces have used interrogation techniques including hooding, stripping detainees naked, subjecting them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, and depriving them of sleep—in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort, and humiliation has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning, and near asphyxiation. Detainees have died under questionable circumstances while incarcerated. This must end. Torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading practices should be as unthinkable as slavery.

Tags: Bisher al-Rawi, Bush, Blair, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, torture, US policy, Abu Qatada, US, UK