The disappeared
If there's one thing worse than being sent to Guantánamo, it's not being sent to Guantánamo.
Moazzam Begg
I attracted more than a few looks of disbelief when I told an audience at a community meeting recently that I was actually looking forward to going to Guantánamo Bay. Their reaction was predictable but I wanted to explain why I would make such a bizarre statement. Although Guantánamo Bay contains the world's most notorious prison, it is by no means the world's worst.
All of the men incarcerated at Guantánamo have had to pass through a process that the CIA terms its "extraordinary renditions programme" which includes abduction, torture and false imprisonment in "ghost" detention sites and "dark prisons" dotted around Asia, Africa and Europe. But some of the men at these places never made it to Guantánamo. Some of them have disappeared altogether.
A report issued today by six leading human rights organisations - including Amnesty International, CagePrisoners, Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights - entitled Off the Record: US Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the War on Terror documents the cases of 39 individuals who have been "disappeared". It even names relatives of suspects who were themselves detained in secret prisons, including children as young as seven years old. Some of these individuals have been in custody for nearly six years, despite claims by the US administration that there are no longer any people being held in their "high-value detainee" programme at undisclosed locations.
One of those highlighted in the report is Ali Abdul-Hamid al-Fakhiri, aka Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan dissident whose arrest in Pakistan during November 2001 was hailed by the Bush administration at the time as the "capture of the highest ranking member of al-Qaida". Many in the Bush administration now would like the name of Ibn al-Shaykh to vanish - as indeed he has - but it's one name people on all sides of the political spectrum cannot afford to forget. Not because of what he did, but because of what he said and why he said it.
I first heard about Ibn al-Shaykh when I was held by US forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan. One detainee there told me how he had been taken away by the Americans, alive, in a perforated "taboot" (Arabic for coffin). But that wasn't the last I heard of Ibn al-Shaykh. In spring 2002, I was moved to the US Bagram Airbase detention centre. The CIA warned me here about what had happened to him and what could happen to me. I was told he'd been seated in the very chair I was being interrogated in and his failure to cooperate earned him a one-way trip to Egypt where, they told me, he told his whole story within hours. If I did not "confess" my crimes, they said, I too would be joining him. This period was by far the most frightening for me during my three years of captivity, not least because of Egypt's infamous reputation for human rights violations. Thankfully I was spared this fate, but others were not.
Ibn al-Shaykh may have been a prize catch for the CIA, but what he confessed to, according to them, would become one of the most significant justifications used by the US-led coalition to launch a war even more devastating than the one during in which he was captured: the invasion of Iraq. Whether by severe torture or coercion, it is known Ibn al-Shaykh "confessed" that al-Qaida operatives received training from Saddam Hussein's regime in the acquisition and use of weapons of mass destruction. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, the secretary of state at the time, and other US officials repeatedly cited Mr Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training al-Qaida members.
The paper confirms that Ibn al-Shaykh was regularly whisked off to various secret detention sites including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Poland and even a warship, the USS Bataan. However, in January 2004, Ibn al-Shaykh recanted the information he had provided and his recantation was confirmed soon enough even by US intelligence: no WMD in Iraq and no al-Qaida link to it. But the invasion of Iraq was already in its second year. Tens of thousands of people had been killed and al-Qaida, unbeknownst to Ibn al-Shaykh, had finally arrived in Iraq - because of the invasion.
On July 19, 2006, Ibn al-Shaykh was included in the "Terrorists No Longer a Threat" list as part of the US congressional record. A few months later, several alleged "high-ranking al-Qaida operatives" were sent from undisclosed locations - the existence of which the US administration had hitherto denied - to Guantánamo Bay, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Since that time some of these men have been given limited access to legal representatives and their stories are beginning to come out. But Ibn al-Shaykh is not one of them.
So what became of Ibn al-Shaykh? The paper states: "At least one US official has acknowledged US involvement in elements of his treatment, including questioning and transferring to a third country for interrogation". Reports mention that he has tuberculosis and may be close to death in his solitary confinement cell after being returned to his place of origin: Gadafy's Libya. I expect Ibn al-Shaykh will never be able to tell his story now, something that might have emerged had he made it to Guantánamo.