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One victim's story
By Neil Mackay
10/17/05 "sunday
herald" -- -- ON each stage of his journey, as
he descended further and further into the gulags and torture
chambers of the war on terror, Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi was
shadowed by British intelligence. The British were there in
Karachi when Americans interrogated him and Pakistanis tortured
him; they were feeding questions to the Moroccan torturers who
took a scalpel to his penis; they stood back and watched as he
was dragged to an American torture chamber in Afghanistan and
then to the gulag of Guantanamo, where he languishes to this
day.
Al-Habashi is a perfect example of what happens to a person who
has been subjected to “extraordinary rendition”. This process
sees someone suspected of involvement in terrorism snatched off
the streets, usually in a third world country, then flown around
the world by the CIA to regimes which indulge in torture, to be
questioned on behalf of the US.
Hundreds of these “rendition flights” come through the UK, and
the payback for the UK is that British intelligence gets to
question some of the suspects by proxy – the proxy usually being
a Middle Eastern torturer.
If al-Habashi was anything, he was naive, according to Clive
Stafford Smith, his internationally acclaimed campaigning
lawyer, who has been awarded the OBE for his human rights work.
An Ethiopian by birth, al-Habashi came to the UK when he was
just 16, seeking political asylum. He soon became a popular
young teenager in the Kensington area of London, but got mixed
up with a bad crowd and wound up on drugs.
In a bid to kick his habit, he decided to take a trip to
Pakistan and Afghanistan to get himself together and to see what
life under Islamic law was like. Stafford Smith says: “He wanted
to see the Taliban with his own eyes to decide whether it was a
good Islamic country.”
September 11 happened, and al-Hab ashi was on his way back to
the UK when he was seized at Karachi airport. The authorities
said his passport was invalid. Many young Muslims from around
the world, who had been foolish enough to take a voyeuristic
trip to the Taliban’s regime around the time of the attacks on
the twin towers, were seized in Pakistan and Afghanistan in
follow-up anti-terror swoops. A lot of them, like al-Habashi,
claim they were just curious civilians and devout Muslims, with
no links to terrorism.
Al-Habashi was seeking refugee status in the UK and thought of
himself as British, so he was surprised when the American FBI
arrived at the Pakistani jail to interrogate him. They told him
he was a top al-Qaeda operative. Al-Habashi pointed out that he
couldn’t even speak Arabic.
He laughed at them, and the Americans told him that if he didn’t
start talking, he’d be taken to an Arabic country and tortured.
When they left, angry at his refusal to talk, the Pakistanis
came into his cell. He was beaten with a belt and had a gun
stuck in his chest. In comparison to what he was to go through
later, this was nothing.
After his beating, two MI6 officers came into the room. In a
statement taken by Stafford Smith in Guantanamo Bay, Habashi
says: “They gave me a cup of tea with a lot of sugar in it. I
initially only took one. ‘No, you need a lot more. Where you are
going, you need a lot of sugar,’ they said.
“I didn’t know exactly what [the MI6 officer] meant by this, but
I figured he meant some poor country in Arabia. One of them did
tell me that I was going to get tortured by the Arabs.”
This is the first time evidence has come forward to show British
intelligence directly co-operating with torture – in this case
the torture of a man claiming political asylum in the UK.
Previously, the UK was thought only to have offered logistical
support in the torture of terror suspects, allowing planes
ferrying captives held by the Americans to regimes such as Egypt
and Syria where they would be tortured, to refuel at airports
such as Glasgow International.
The Pakistanis then gave al-Habashi to masked American soldiers.
A report by Stafford Smith reads: “They stripped him naked, took
photos, put fingers up his anus and dressed him in a tracksuit.
He was shackled, had earphones put on, and was blindfolded. He
was put into a plane.” He landed in Morocco eight hours later.
The Americans told al-Habashi that they wanted him to give
evidence against Jose Padilla, an American who has been in
custody awaiting trial for three and a half years, accused of
planning to plant a “dirty bomb” in the US. They also wanted him
to give evidence against senior al-Qaeda figures in captivity,
including Abu Zubaydah, the number three in the terror
organisation, and Khalid Sheikh Moh ammed, the mastermind of
9/11. The Americans told him they believed he was al-Qaeda’s
“ideas man” – an accusation that Stafford Smith says is “beyond
absurd”.
Al-Habashi was then confronted with the Moroccan torture team.
With a macabre flourish, some even wore bondage-type masks to
give the torment an added mediaeval flavour. Stafford Smith
says: “The British government was complicit in some of the abuse
that took place against Benyam, at least to the extent that the
government told the Moroccans information that they would then
use against him in the torture sessions.” The Moroccans knew
about his personal fitness trainer, what grades he got at
school, where he studied and where he lived.
Until now, it has never been alleged that British intelligence
aided and abetted torture by passing information to
interrogators, which was then used to question suspects. Lying
in his cell, al-Habashi says in his statement: “I was not of
this world. I did not believe this was real, that this was
happening to me. It never, never crossed my mind that I’d end up
being hauled half-way across the world by the Americans to face
torture in a place I had never been – Morocco.”
One guard told him how the torture would happen, saying:
“They’ll come in wearing masks and beat you up. They’ll beat you
with sticks. They’ll rape you first, then they’ll take a glass
bottle, they break the top off and they make you sit on it.”
When he was hit with questions that could only have come from
British intelligence, he told his interrogators that the British
should ask him the questions themselves. The lead interrogator
then said: “Why do you think the Brits sold you out to us so
cheaply? Why do you think they sent you here?” An interrogator
added: “We have been working with the British, and we have
photos of people given to us by MI5”. He was later shown
pictures of people suspected by the British of being in al-Qaeda
and questioned about them.
Al-Habashi’s statement says: “I realised that the British were
sending questions to the Moroccans ... I sought asylum in
Britain rather than America because it’s known as one country
that has laws that it follows. To say that I was disappointed at
this moment would be an understatement.”
Later, the men in masks arrived. First, they just beat him until
he vomited. “I awoke on the floor,” he wrote. “I’d pissed on
myself.” He was refused access to the lavatory and his food was
stopped. The beatings became regular.
One day, he was taken into a room with meat hooks hanging from
the ceiling. He was shackled and tied up and beaten again. When
he awoke from unconsciousness he could hear screams in the rooms
nearby. Soon he worked out why his neighbouring prisoners were
crying out.
During his next torture session he was tied up again. His
clothes were cut off with a scalpel and he was left naked in
front of his captors. His torturer-in-chief told one of the
guards: “Show him who’s a man.” The interrogator then began to
slice his own chest with the scalpel.
“One of them,” al-Habashi’s statement says, “took my penis in
his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood
still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony,
crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was
screaming ... They must have done this 20 or 30 times in maybe
two hours. There was blood all over ... They cut all over my
private parts. One of them said it would be better to just cut
it off as I would only breed terrorists … there were even worse
things. Too horrible to rem ember, let alone talk about.”
In total, al-Habashi spent 18 months in Moroccan detention. He
was tortured with the scalpel once a month. He once asked a
guard why they were doing this to him and was told: “It’s just
to degrade you, so when you leave here you’ll have these scars
and you’ll never forget. So you’ll always fear doing anything
but what the US wants.”
It didn’t take long for al-Habashi to start confessing to
anything his torturers accused him of: that he’d met Osama bin
Laden six times; that he’d suggested targets to bin Laden; that
he was close to 25 leading al-Qaeda figures; that he was the
al-Qaeda “ideas man”.
The other forms of torture he was subjected to included
prolonged sleep deprivation; being drugged; forced to listen to
music by Meatloaf and Aerosmith non-stop; being made to watch
pornographic films; having naked women paraded in front of him.
He says thinking of Jesus and the prophet Mohammed kept him
going.
In January 2004, his guards told him he was going home. He was
handed over to the Americans and one female soldier was
horrified at his physical state. She took pictures of him, she
said, in order “to show Washington it’s healing”.
He wasn’t going home, though. He was off to a US-controlled
holding centre in Kabul, Afghanistan. There, he was beaten by
the Americans and dumped in a cell with a bucket for a lavatory.
Urine and excrement were all over his bedding. The cell was
pitch black most of the time.
He was hung up from a pole and allowed to sleep only every
second day. His legs swelled and his hands became numb. Again he
was exposed to loud music, this time Eminem and Dr Dre, and
horror-movie soundtracks were also played to him 24 hours a day
for two full weeks.
“The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night,” he
says. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking
their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their
heads off.” Al-Habashi says he met a fellow prisoner in
Guantanamo Bay who was in the same Kabul jail and has now
“totally lost his head”.
Initially, al-Habashi was threatened with torture, but he just
asked the Americans to tell him what they wanted to know. “From
then on,” he wrote, “they would give me the name and the story
behind each picture [of a suspect].”
They then coached him in how to make a statement against himself
and Jose Padilla, the “dirty bomber”.
“They said ‘this is the story that Washington wants’. It was
about a ‘dirty bomb’. I was meant to steal the parts and build
it with Padilla in New York. I didn’t even know what a dirty
bomb was ... I could not understand and got it wrong. They hung
me up for 10 days, almost non-stop.”
He was transferred after about four months to the US prison at
Bagram air base in Afghanistan. While the prisoners showered,
GIs talked about which of them “was worth penetrating”. In May
2004, he was finally shown to the International Committee of the
Red Cross.
The Americans then helped him compose his confession. “The story
was like this,” al-Habashi says. “First, Jose Padilla and I were
meant to have good connections because we both spoke English. We
were meant to have been hanging out together. Second, I was
meant to have come to Afghanistan with him ... third, I was
meant to say that he and I were going to go to the US to explode
a dirty bomb … By then, I just did what they told me.”
In September 2004 he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay. There he
was threatened with rape by soldiers. Stafford Smith is now to
sue the British government for its part in al-Habashi torture.
“I never thought the British government would allow me to be
slashed with a razor blade for a year,” al-Habashi wrote in his
statement. “I never thought they would let me be hauled to Kabul
for further abuse before my trip to Guantanamo. I want out of
this hellish cell [in Guantanamo] and back to my home on the
Goldborne Road in London.”
©2005 newsquest (sunday herald) limited
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