"The Government has been both hypocritical and morally bankrupt"

Posted by Joshua Holland at 8:03 AM on January 10, 2007.

Tomorrow will mark the 5th anniversary of the Grand Opening of U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. According to Time, "The number of Guantanamo Bay detainees participating in a hunger strike has more than doubled in recent weeks to 11, including five who are being force-fed..." In other Gitmo news ...

Ten-year-old Anas el-Banna will walk to the door of Number 10 Downing Street this week to ask for an answer to the question he has been trying to have answered for four years: Why can't my Dad come home?

His father, Jamil, is one of eight British residents languishing among the almost 400 inmates at the American base at Guantanamo Bay, which opened five years ago to the day this Thursday - the day of Anas's protest.

Mr Banna, was taken to Guantanamo Bay four years ago after being seized in Gambia along with fellow detainee Bisher al-Rawi. He was accused of having a suspicious device in his luggage. It turned out to be a battery charger. No charges have been made.

He suffers from severe diabetes, but his lawyers say he has not been offered medication and has been denied the food he needs. His eyesight is now failing.

So on Thursday, carrying yet another letter, Anas and his mother Sabah will return with campaigners and MPs to demand the closure of the camp and action to free the British residents.

Their MP, the the Liberal Democrat frontbencher Sarah Teather, said the Banna children, who are of Jordanian origin but have grown up in North London, were devastated by their father's detention.

Many of the British residents have families who are British citizens, and had leave to remain in the UK, but the Government has refused to take responsibility for them. Yesterday, Ed Davey, chief of staff to the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell, used the Commons debate to attack ministers for allowing British residents to "languish" in the camp.

He said: "The Government has been both hypocritical and morally bankrupt. They have condemned Guantanamo Bay but have failed to take action for the British residents." He said the US administration had offered to send the men home, but the UK had refused to accept them. He added: " The Prime Minister should stop talking about closing Guantanamo and start doing something about it."

Human rights lawyer Zachary Katznelson, senior advocate at the charity Reprieve, represents the eight men. He said several were held in solitary confinement, some in cells that were lit 24 hours a day. He added: "If they have committed any crime, of course they should be prosecuted and punished. But I have not seen evidence that they have. If it's there, let's see it."

Meanwhile, in Italy, U.S. and Italian officials are trying to stop the trial, in absentia, of CIA officers for kidnapping Italian residents off the streets and sending them to torture-friendly countries -- a process given the wonderfully non-descriptive euphemism "rendition."

U.S. and Italian spies urged their governments on Tuesday to prevent them going on trial over the 2003 kidnapping of a terrorism suspect, as an Italian judge began hearing arguments on whether to indict them.

Judge Caterina Interlandi must decide if there is enough evidence for a trial. If so, it would be the first criminal procedure over renditions, one of the most controversial aspects of the U.S. global "war on terrorism."

The agents are accused of involvement in abducting Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr and sending him to Egypt, where he says he was tortured.

In an exclusive, the Chicago Tribune obtained a letter from Nasr, describing his ordeal to the court …

According to Abu Omar's written account, obtained by the Tribune, he was walking to his mosque in Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, when he was stopped on the street by a man who identified himself as a police officer. The cleric wrote that he was pulled into a van, beaten and taken by plane to Egypt.

He described in detail how his Egyptian interrogators tried to get him to agree to become an informer, and he says he refused. What followed, according to his letter, was torture with electric shocks, beatings that caused him to lose the hearing in one ear, and sexual abuse.

For long periods of time, he said in his letter, he was kept in an underground cell "where you cannot distinguish between night and day and the cockroaches and rats and insects walk all over my body night and day."

Abu Omar has been locked away for nearly four years, most of it in Egypt's notorious Torah Prison …

Abu Omar wrote that he was driven to a building he later identified as the headquarters of the Egyptian intelligence service, where a man his captors described only as a "great Pasha"--a high-ranking official--asked him:

"Do you accept to work with us in exchange for your safe return to Italy?"

After refusing to become an informer, Abu Omar wrote, he was allowed to sleep and provided with some food before being given paper and pen, ordered to write his life story, and shown "many pictures of people in Italy (Egyptians, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans, etc.)."

Refusals to answer questions were met with electric shocks, "hand beatings," and threats of rape, Abu Omar claimed. "I was hung like slaughtered cattle," he wrote, "head down, feet up, hands tied behind my back, feet also tied together, and I was exposed to electric shocks all over my body and especially the head area to weaken the brain. …"

He also described being tied up and placed on a mattress that was hosed down with water and connected to electricity.

Even when he was not being tortured, he wrote, "I was placed near the torture chambers for long periods of time to hear the screams of the tortured and their moans and their howls so that I would collapse psychologically."

According to El Zayat, Abu Omar has tried to commit suicide at least once in captivity.

Although Abu Omar did not mention it in the handwritten statement, his lawyer, El Zayat, said that his client told the Egyptian prosecutor in his earlier testimony that a man who looked, dressed and spoke English like an American had been present during the first several days of his interrogation.

Asked whether the mystery man had been present during the torture as well as the questioning, El Zayat replied in a recent interview here that his client was "not sure."

A former senior CIA official said it was standard procedure following a rendition for a CIA officer to visit the receiving country and assess how the case was proceeding.

Cell phone and hotel reservation records compiled by the Milan prosecutors show that Robert Seldon Lady, then the CIA's chief in Milan, traveled to Cairo four days after Abu Omar arrived here and that Lady stayed for two weeks.

I've posted this before, but I think it merits repeating:

Some countries try to refute criticism over their treatment of prisoners by saying they are only following the U.S. example on handling terror suspects, a U.N. human rights expert said on Monday.

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. investigator on torture, told a news conference that "all too frequently" governments respond to criticism about their jails by saying they handled detainees the same way the United States did.

He said nations like Jordan tell him, "We are collaborating with the United States so it can't be wrong if it is also done by the United States."

American democracy and respect for human rights -- ain't it grand!

Tagged as: guantanamo, rendition, war on terror

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.