If it's all so simple, I need answers to a couple of questions on Guantanamo

WHEN IN SUDAN, criticise the Yanks. The Archbishop of Canterbury, visiting that country over the weekend, was interviewed by Sir David Frost about, among other things, the prison camp at Guantanamo. Rowan Williams told his interlocutor that “any message given that any state can just override some of the basic habeas corpus-type provisions is going to be very welcome to tyrants elsewhere in the world”. Presumably good manners dictated that his critique of the Sudanese neogenocide in Darfur will have to wait until he visits, say, America.

So far, so snippy. But even so, the unfortunate location for his critique doesn’t make the Archbishop wrong. And he certainly isn’t alone. Indeed, this week is practically Guantanamo Week in Britain. Yesterday saw the well-publicised launch of a book by Moazzam Begg, the former British Gitmo detainee, and on Thursday evening Channel 4 will screen the award-winning drama-doc The Road to Guantanamo, which purports to show the experience of three British Muslims — the so-called Tipton Three — at the hands of British and American interrogators, from Afghanistan to Cuba.

I’ll start with the Michael Winterbottom film, because, despite its many virtues, it exemplifies a problem in the way many have come to look at the War on Terror. Mixing dramatised sequences with interviews, and cutting to news footage, The Road to Guantanamo tells how three young Midlanders went off to Pakistan to organise a marriage, soon after 9/11. The film suggests that, after having arranged things, they were at a bit of a loose end and, walking along a Karachi road one day, were swept up by a crowd entering a mosque. There they were moved by a spirit of adventure — and a desire to eat very large naan breads — to volunteer to go to Afghanistan to help in aid projects. A few days later they departed by bus.

They make it, via Kandahar, to Kabul, where they sit around for a fortnight doing nothing, and then get a lift in a van going back to Pakistan. Except it isn’t going to Pakistan, it is heading in the exact opposite direction, and they wind up in the last remaining Taleban stronghold of Kunduz, alongside lots of foreign fighters. They are captured by the Northern Alliance, appallingly treated, then handed over to the Americans who eventually fly them to Guantanamo. There they languish until finally being released last year.

If this account is to be believed then these three are either the luckiest or unluckiest men in Britain, and certainly among the stupidest. Winterbottom, asked about their reasons for going to Afghanistan, replied: “If you’re talking about people’s motives, it’s very difficult . . . It’s very hard to pin down your motives to one thing. But what they say in the film is that they were interested to see Afghanistan, and wanted to help the people there.”

What the film doesn’t tell you is that the Karachi mosque that the three boys happened across, the Binori Mosque, had already, in 2001, been described as “the alma mater for jihadis”. The most militant elements in the battle for Kashmir studied at the Binori madrassa — a centre of the extreme Deobandi ideology — as did many members of the Taleban. It was thought to be the spiritual home of the Harkat ul-Ansar terrorist organisation, and in the autumn of 2001 the mosque and seminary were openly recruiting fighters to go to the aid of the Taleban.

There is also a curiosity in the timeline of the film. The boys left Karachi on the October 12, crossing the border on the 14th. They hadn’t, they told the film-makers, really expected that a war would actually happen. That’s how innocent they were. But the bombing of Kabul and Kandahar began at 7.45pm local time on October 7, and the battle was already five days old before they left Karachi. The film glosses over this fact, too.

Finally, though the Tipton lads are shown as having been lovable rogues back home, there are no interviews with those who have claimed that, by September 2001, they had already become religiously zealous, and anxious to listen to the preaching of men like Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal, the imam later jailed in Britain for calling upon Muslims to murder Jews.

I am emphatically not saying here that I believe that the Tipton Three took up arms in Afghanistan and fought for the Taleban. Their story may be implausible, but it isn’t impossible. What I am noting here is the way in which Winterbottom banishes ambivalence. His Guantanamo detainees are innocent, even if the facts have to be selected carefully so as to reinforce that impression.

I’ll come back to this in a moment. Meanwhile, let’s agree that Guantanamo has been a disaster for America, a disaster for America’s friends and a godsend for America’s enemies. It represents a panicky descent into arbitrary behaviour, a descent that was partly responsible for the Abu Ghraib catastrophe and wholly responsible for the United States Administration authorising the use of torture during interrogation. In August 2002 the Justice Department, in what is now known as the Torture Memo, permitted the CIA to inflict pain and suffering on detainees, and later in the year Donald Rumsfeld gave formal approval to the use of techniques such as stress positions, sleep deprivation, hooding, extra-loud music and extra-bright lights. The result of all this has been precisely as Dr Williams has argued: comfort to every tyrant, encouragement to every zealot. The Lord Chancellor has recently said that Guantanamo should be shut.

So there we are, if things go the way we say they should then it’s all done and dusted, the world set to rights, the camp closed and everyone happy except the terrible Bushites. But if that was really the case — if it was so damn simple — why would we need our Tiptonites to be so very innocent in order to make our case? Surely the argument would stand whether they were jihadis or not.

Just to recap. There are British jihadis who have killed, or planned to kill, dozens of Britons. And the problem is that their profiles are not so very different from the Tiptonites, and certainly not very different from that of Moazzam Begg. They’re always nice guys, family guys, and we simultaneously demand that the intelligence services and the police know who they are and pre-empt their possible acts of terrorism, while demanding that they only be detained if they can be brought to trial and found guilty in a court of law, and that the wrong ones are never detained.

Not all of us are such hypocrites. I have heard, in the past week, an eminent progressive lawyer argue that the threat from jihadis is no greater than that we faced from the IRA. On that basis (conveniently forgetting the extra-legal actions that actually were taken back then), you may argue that we can afford to take the risk that a few bombers escape the net, in order to safeguard our legal integrity.

What you can’t do is what, I think, Winterbottom and all too many Britons now do, which is to obliterate the dilemma, so that the problem becomes entirely one for the authorities and not for us. Guantanamo is a bad reaction to something real, but none of us quite knows what the good reaction looks like.

Comments

[sonic]

"let’s agree that Guantanamo has been a disaster for America, a disaster for America’s friends and a godsend for America’s enemies"

And the people actually incarcerated there?

Not worth a mention at all?

[Backword Dave]

One of your best articles, David. I agree with the stating of the problem and totally with the final sentence, but there's some bits in the middle I don't.

You've clearly been inspired by your appearance on Newsnight Review, where your objections were rather unfortunately ignored. Reading them again, they still make sense to me. But while your co-critics ignored your arguments to their loss, you've glossed Rowan Williams to yours.

None of us may know *exactly* what a good reaction looks like, but we can generally be pretty certain that it's not Guantanamo. We can also be certain that the US Administration thought that over-riding "some of the basic habeas corpus-type provisions" (as Dr WIlliams put it) was ethically and politically difficult because of where they chose for their prison camp. Despite Army bases across the world, and sites in mainland USA, they chose Cuba!

You've presented the situation as either/or: either we keep Guantanamo open, or we release everyone inside even if they're dangerous. Some readers may understand that anyone who opposes Guantanamo operating as it currently does is also against the US holding anyone. As you've said, the interrogation procedures licensed by Donald Rumsfeld bring shame to the US Army and recruit jihadists abroad. That seems like one big reason for closing the camp and moving the inmates somewhere where Federal law applies.

"They’re always nice guys, family guys, and we simultaneously demand that the intelligence services and the police know who they are and pre-empt their possible acts of terrorism, while demanding that they only be detained if they can be brought to trial and found guilty in a court of law, and that the wrong ones are never detained." I'd like it if the wrong people were never detained, but I know that that's not a realistic demand. What it does seem possible to ask is that those who are detained have the reasons for their detention examined as cooly and as rationally as possible, and I believe there is time-served method for this -- a trial. I don't demand that people only be detained if they can be found guilty; that would be ridiculous. And I'm afraid I can't see any barriers to bringing detainees to a court.

As you say, it's possible that the lads in question were stupid and/or unlucky. It's also possible that they were intending to fight against British troops (in which case they may have been, and may yet be, tried as traitors). Instead of attempting to find out the truth, Guantanamo seems to have been a dumping ground for brown people the infantry didn't shoot.

One fact which suits the Winterbottom thesis and not yours (for if it did, I'm sure you would have mentioned it) is that the men in question weren't found in possession of any arms.

Of course I consider it unfortunate (and ethically clumsy) of Rowan WIlliams to attack the US from Sudan and not mention Darfur.

[Nick (South Africa)]

>I am emphatically not saying here that I believe that the Tipton Three took up arms in Afghanistan and fought for the Taleban.<
No one can’t make this assertion, because that would be libellous; but that is by far the most parsimonious explanation after parsing what is known using Occam's razor.

As for the Archbishop of Canterbury that stalwart of the Capitulatii – who the hell does he speak for?

[Nick (South Africa)]

The principle of holding enemy combatants captured in a war zone for the duration of hostilities seems sound enough to me. So in broad terms, I have no problems with the principle of Gitmo. Let’s face it, whatever the Yanks and Brits do with their prisoners will get pillared

Regardless - the template is not the criminal law and 'burden of proof', rather the Prisoner of War model, even though the Jihadis are not covered as legal combatants under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.

In the case of the Jihadis who don’t wear uniform and are a semi irregular force, identifying these combatants is rather difficult and mistakes are quite likely. Caveat Emptor – rather don’t go wandering around war zones dressed like a Mahujaheeden without a really solid reason, the fact that you are not toting a Kalashnikov or RPG when captured is hardly going to be seen as compelling evidence of your benign intent.

Sure, one can argue about the location chosen by the Yanks of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. To my mind it was probably was as good a call as any. Cuba’s hostile to the US anyway, so there was no risk of souring local relations. One can argue about the treatment of prisoners - hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, white noise and loud music. Golly gosh, sounds just like UK forces capture and interrogation phase of escape and evasion training routinely inflicted on a goodly few British servicemen during their training. Sorry if I’m not particularly put out.

Of far more concern than the 500 or so in Gitmo are the thousands, perhaps 10,000 held in Iraq by Iraqi security forces. I bet they are not being treated to 3 square meals per day and gaining weight like those prisoners at Gitmo. This of course was not mentioned by Rowan Williams, who chose his visit to Sudan to have a pop at the Yanks over those 500 well fed prisoners in Gitmo. All while giving a free pass to the UN and the OAU on the tens of thousand murdered in Sudan and their government’s complicity in it, the millions affected by the dictatorship in Zimbabwe and the on going war in the DRC. As well as all the other bollocks all over Africa affecting tens of millions. Rather have a pop at the Yanks than mention the persecution of his co-religionist Christians in Nigeria nor the persecution of Christians in Egypt, Pakistan… all Muslim countries.

There has been no mention from the befrocked Archbishop, nor in the Guardian-BBC cabal of this lot from Northern Iraq – a report filed by freelance blogger Michael Totten on Bathist detention and torture centres http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001068.html
I’m almost tempted to rejoin the Anglican church so I can publically resign in disgust.

For British Jihadis - weather operating in the UK or against British formations abroad, we should dust off the treason laws. There seems to be some reluctance to prosecute under these. I see this as spineless, a seemingly common malady.

[Richard]

Sonic's point is a good one, and I think has to be seen in a general pro-war left blindness to US/UK victims of actions since 9/11. David is by no means the worst offender here, but some of this showed in his dismisall of the John Hopkins report, and his shouting over the top of its author on the BBC2 special.

[CB]

I don't like Gitmo, it should be shut and anyone who is guilty should be brought to trial.

But I don't like what's happening in Sudan a hell of a lot more, and for Rowan Williams to focus on the lesser and ignore the greater is, frankly, disgusting.

[GK]

And, did you see John Bolton adressing AIPAC ? - ANY IDEA WHAT YOUR FELLOW JEWS ARE UP TO ?

[Stan]

Another sensible contribution to the debate on Guantanamo, David. But I think you have excessively leaned over backwards to accommodate the liberal critics. The sad truth is that wars against terrorism have to be dirty wars. If we fight clean, and allow our opponents to slip through the legal niceties of our judicial system even more innocent people die or suffer at the hands of those who fight dirty. And 'dirty' these days not only means 9/11 but could also mean dirty nuclear or germ infested bombs that would make the old IRA outrages look like a children's fireworks display. The stakes are just too high for the old sensitivities to apply. The price of a liberal conscience could be 10,000 dead. This is the harsh reality that needs to be addressed in this debate, not the simplistic anti-American and anti-Blair point scoring that you usually get!

[Subir sinha]

If it was the case that Guantanamo inmates could be connected to any crimes, then surely the US would have initiated action against them. To be locked up for years with no recourse to law seems oriented more to soothe the nerves of a frightened America (look, we are doing something, we have some bad guys locked up in a bad place) than to bring the guilty to justice. If that was the goal, then one would have liked to see American politicians and intelligence agencies, which for years funded the Taliban and the Pakistani jihadis, also represented in Guantanamo. Sorry David, it appears once again that the universal values you claim to defend basically are not applicable to perceived enemies.

[Dave]

Re. Stan's little homily on the need for 'dirtiness' -- what, exactly, do you mean? Are we supposed to lock up people *for ever* just because we think they might have done something? Heck, if you're doing that, and you're wanting a 'dirty war' why not just go the whole hog and shoot them in the back of the neck, like the new Iraqi police force does?

What do you hope to achieve by being 'dirty', other than to tarnish the very nature of the society you claim to defend?

[Mr Maguire]

Excellent David. Encouraging to see legitimate questioning and a wholly valid point of view to the prevailing media Guantanamo perspective. A view that permeates the corridors of the BBC in particular.

As far as the comments from Archbishop of Canterbury's comments go, well let's say it is consistent with the 'leadership' we have come to fully expect over the years.

[Backword Dave]

Stan, substitute "counter revolutionaries" for "terrorists" and try it again. ;)

Like the use of the word "could" though.

[Jason Hynes]

Great review David, obviously the Zionist version any chance I could see the Englsih version?

You f**kers make me sick, perhaps I should bring a bulldozer to your house!

[Ted]

Great article. The more we try to hide from the truth - that our own are actively engaged in the jihad against the west - the more vulnerable we become.

Guantanamo Bay frightens people, but one look at history illustrates the folly of attacking the prevailing superpower. By history's standards, the detainees are being treated extremely well. Many have been released, some to rejoin the fight. The ones remaining are nasty characters indeed and hopefully will remain there for many years to come.

Us Aussies are currently being forced to endure the trials and tribulations of yet another naive boy, David Hicks, who somehow lost the no7 bus to work in Sydney in 1998 and ended up fighting in Albania (1999), Pakistan (2000) and then Afghanistan (2001) with assorted muslim extremists and finally the big league, Al-Qaeda. Miraculously and despite being lost in Afghanistan he managed to stumble across Osama himself and meet him personally. It appears that Osama's directions back to Sydney were not so good - he was eventually found with armed Al-Qaeda forces by the Americans.

Of course, he now protests that he wasn't ever in any of the abovenamed countries (an American smear campaign), that he would never approve of 9/11 - against his faith, dontyaknow - and that even though he was armed when captured in Afghanistan by US forces with Al-Q fighters he was, ahem, not fighting them. And that all he wants is to get home to be with his daughter (last saw Dad in 96).

None of this is reported, nor that 'David Hicks' no longer exists. He changed his name to Mohammed Dawood in 2001. If I had a choice between Mohammed 'Hicks' being on the street or at Guantanamo Bay, I know which choice I'd make.

[Garry]

We simultaneously demand... and that the wrong ones are never detained.

Where's the hypocrisy in that position? Our security services should not be allowed to detain the "wrong ones" with no due process. At the same time, they should do everything within their power to prevent real terrorist activities. Common sense.

Are you arguing that we should accept that innocent people will inevitably be locked up as a consequence of the "war" on terror? Is this not the real hypocrisy? I would argue that a "war" to protect our freedoms which abandons those very freedoms is the hypocritical position.

[Dave Barker]

OK. I like the way you build the case. However the crucial point seems to be not about the guilt or innocence of those held in Guantanomo but the process. The Bush administration deliberately placed these individuals outside the jurisdiction of the US courts presumably because they did not feel current US law would give them sufficient scope in terms of apprehension, investigation and conviction. That being the case should they not have taken the opportunity during the presidential election to make good any deficiencies in the legislation and allow a full and proper debate on the matter – then let the people decide?

[sonic]

Oh and just out of interest what does "neogenocide" mean, I've googled it with no result.

[bruschettaboy (in a personal capacity)]

Just to point out that the ceasefire and peace negotiations in Sudan are currently at an *incredibly* sensitive stage at the moment, with the main rebel group having just seemingly split in two and both halves accusing each other of wanting to restart hostilities against the government again. It is very likely indeed that Rowan Williams received a briefing about how completely homicidally irresponsible it would have been to have started adding any more tension to the situation and I think at the very least this should have been mentioned before having such a sarcastic dig at him. Would you have encouraged George Carey to have done a big number on the iniquities of the Occupied Territories just on the day before the withdrawal of Lebanon was finalised?

[Nick (South Africa)]

>George Carey to have done a big number on the iniquities of the Occupied Territories just on the day before the withdrawal of Lebanon was finalised?<
No if that was his view (and your evidence is by no means compelling) I would have expected him to have said something along the lines of "Negotiations are at a sensitive stage at the moment in Sudan, so I think it best that I refrain from comment on the local situation, other than to say I wish them well and hope they can find a just and lasting peace".

I think it equally if not more insensitive while in Sudan to have a pop at America over Gitmo. Especially given all the massively more egregious things he hasn't had a pop over, both close by in Africa, as well as in the wider World. Not even a comment on the widespread persecution of fellow Christians by Muslims about which, as far as I am aware he has been entirely silent on. He is coming over as an anti American lefty in a frock, the Guardian should give him a slot – he’d fit in just dandy right between Polly Toynbee and Georg Monbiot and the walk on parts they regularly give ‘sassy’ Islamofascists and their apologists.

[bruschettaboy]

while we're at it, if the Tipton Three were zealous wannabe jihadis in Britain, regular attendees at a Deobandi mosque in Pakistan and planning to spend their time alongside the Taliban, why were they clean-shaven?

[Francis Sedgemore]

May I remind bruschettaboy that it's not Dr Williams' job to support or oppose any Sudanese rebel group, but to speak truth to power and defend the people of Darfur. It seems all too clear that the racist Arabs in power in Khartoum care not about the lives of their black African compatriots, even when most of the latter are Muslim. As for the rebels, they are no saints, and many of them are quite prepared to use the suffering of the people in the areas they claim to represent for purely political gain.

As Nick Cohen pointed out in last Sunday's Observer, genocide seems to be out of fashion among the so-called anti-imperialist Left. And as for the solidarity of the Muslim world with their oppressed co-religionists - don't make me laugh!

[Stan]

Dave asks me what I meant by the need to fight a 'dirty' war against terrorism. Well I certainly did not mean to imply that we should come down to their level. 'Dirty' in Guantanamo terms is a good deal cleaner than the dirtiness of the jihadi suicide bombers deliberately targeting innocent civilians and places of worship, taking and executing hostages, murdering schoolchildren etc, etc. We are talking here about dirtiness around the edges.If that means innocent people being caught up in the net blame the perpetrators of terrorist atrocities rather than those who feel they cannot take the risk of allowing a habeus corpus escape route to more suicide bombings.

To Backword Dave (or is that Backward Dave!?) I would answer that I have no qualms about substituting 'counter-revolutionaries' for 'terrorists' if the former use the same mass murdering tactics as the latter.

To Garry, I would say, yes, we have to protect our main freedoms (and our lives) by abandoning some (not all) of our freedoms, as we did in WW2 to stop the Nazis. Regrettably that is what you have to do when fighting unscrupulous foes. It's the difference between a grown-up response to the ills of the world and an adolescent response!

[GK]

While your at it , can you please go through the finer details of the Holocaust, im being force fed supposed facts, but have noway of checking these. I'm relying on you David to fight this political correctness!

[Garry]

Stan, are you seriously suggesting that this group of undoubtedly very dangerous terrorists is comparible to the Nazi war machine? If I was being unkind I'd wonder if you were perhaps a terrorist propagandist. You do seem rather keen to talk up the size of the threat they pose. Do you really believe they really pose anything like an equivalent threat to our way of life?

In the real world, I am not aware of any enormous, powerful, well equipped fundamentalist muslim army occupying large parts of Europe and threatening to invade Britain. Can't imagine I'd have missed such a thing if it existed, to be honest. As such, I'm afraid I find the WW2 comparisons tiresome and misleading.

Perhaps it would be more grown-up to avoid hysterical hyperbole. That's my adolescent view of the situation anyway.

[bruschettaboy]

[May I remind bruschettaboy that it's not Dr Williams' job to support or oppose any Sudanese rebel group, but to speak truth to power and defend the people of Darfur]

"Speak truth to power", the leper's bell of the man who doesn't care whether he's talking in sentences that make sense because he's decided what he's going to think anyway. "Speak truth to power" doesn't even mean anything in this context. It is Dr Williams' job to lead the Anglican Church and worship God.

The people of Darfur are Muslims and not part of the Anglican Communion, so it is hard to see why it is his job to "defend" them, particularly when "defend" in this context means "put them at very great risk of death by scuppering the peace talks". There is just absolutely nothing in scripture or canon law which says "thou shalt always spout the latest Decent Left talking points, even if the consequences be obviously potentially disastrous".

Actions have consequences. There is more to the world than striking political poses and then telling the world off for not having your quality of moral vision. The choice that Williams faced was "speak truth to power" and risk thousands of deaths, or not do so and not risk thousands of deaths. He made the grown-up choice and it is childish of both Dave and Francis to whine about it.