Bad Men [Paperback]

This excellent book by the lawyer Clive Stafford Smith is a chilling exposé of the revolting crimes committed by the US state at Guantanamo Bay. It was written under US military censorship rules, so he has been forced to conceal worse horrors than he reveals. Since January 2002, 759 people have been imprisoned there, including 64 children. After five years, fewer than half the prisoners have even met a lawyer, but most have met a torturer.

The US state uses the `ticking bomb' rationale to try to justify torturing prisoners. But there has never been a single case where torture saved lives by yielding information that prevented the explosion of a ticking bomb.

The US state has also used this rationale to encourage, assist and exploit torture by its allies. Torture in Egypt led to the false confession of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qa'ida, a claim used to try to try to get us to support attacking Iraq. Torture in Morocco led to the US state's allegation of a plot to explode a dirty bomb in New York. The people that US Attorney-General Ashcroft named as responsible were never charged with the plot because, as officials said, that "could open up charges from defence lawyers that their earlier statements were a result of torture." This was to admit that the charges were true.

Under the US military commission's procedures for trying just ten of Guantanamo Bay's prisoners, even if the defendant were acquitted, he could still be held forever because all prisoners are supposedly "enemy combatants that we captured on the battlefield" (administration lawyer); "these are people picked up off the battlefield in Afghanistan" (Bush).

But in the real world, 55% of the prisoners are not even alleged ever to have taken part in hostilities. 95% of them were not captured by US troops; they were turned over to the USA by Pakistan or Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, for payment equivalent to seven years' salaries. 92% have not even been accused of being Al Qa'ida fighters.

Stafford Smith recounts the commission hearing of Binyam Mohamed in December 2005. The senior prosecutor allegedly said, "the military panel will be hand-picked and will not acquit these detainees." Lord Justice Steyn called these commissions kangaroo courts, where judges bound straight from charges to verdicts. In June 2006 the Supreme Court ruled that the commissions were illegal. In October, Congress reinstated them by passing Bush's Military Commissions Act.

Stafford Smith estimates that the US state is holding another 14,000 prisoners in other camps and prisons across the world, including on Britain's colony of Diego Garcia. Even Goering was given a fair trial - how many of these 14,000 people will ever get a fair trial? The Labour government has connived at and participated in these disgusting crimes that strengthen only Al Qa'ida.

A statue named Freedom stands on the summit of the dome of the Capitol building in Washington DC, where it is supposed to symbolise the highest ideal of the American nation. On the evidence of this book, it is an ideal horribly betrayed by the Bush Administration during the years of its War on Terror.

In April 2002 Binyam Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan. A British resident originally from Ethiopa, Binyam had the misfortune to have his passport stolen. He was arrested on his way home attempting to use a friend's passport and, a suspect in the War on Terror, was savagely tortured. American and British agents questioned him during this time. He was then "rendered" by American agents to Morocco where, for 18 months, he was subjected to violent beatings and a variety of horrendous tortures at the hands of a Moroccan torture team, while interrogations by Americans continued. The tortures included cutting with razors. During one two-hour session twenty or thirty cuts were made to his penis. Later, "even worse" things were done to him. He was forced to make false confessions. He was drugged with narcotics by intravenous drip and tortured with noise through headphones. He was finally sent to Guantánamo Bay where he is still imprisoned. He is innocent of all the imaginary offences and al-Qaeda liaisons of which he has been accused by the US. The Bush administration will still not allow him to go free.

Binyam Mohamed's story is only one of many. The US has incarcerated 773 men and boys in Guantánamo Bay. Around 385 are still there, suffering brutally harsh conditions. Some of them are held in long-term solitary confinement. Clive Stafford Smith is a lawyer who currently represents 50 of these "enemy combatants" (sadly, many of the other prisoners have not obtained any legal representation). In this important book Mr Stafford Smith, who has both British and American nationality, relates the circumstances of some of his clients and describes the realities of life as it is lived at Guantánamo - within the limits set by the military censorship with which he is bound to comply.

It emerges that a considerable number of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were at the time of their capture, and of course still are, totally innocent, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time were sold into captivity by locals greedy for the bounty offered by the US. Amnesty International has published a finding that "hundreds of people" were arbitrarily detained, after the US offered cash payments, in leaflets dropped by American aircraft, for information on Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. This "rewards programme" resulted in a frenetic market in abductees. It is the reason for the false imprisonment of uncounted men and boys in American secret prisons, in secret locations around the world, and at Guantánamo Bay. In an earlier article [in Index on Censorship, "The Archipelago of Gulags," February 2006] Stafford Smith wrote: "The majority of prisoners I represent were not seized in Afghanistan, but purchased in Pakistan for the bounties offered by the US - starting at $5,000." In Pakistan, the per capita annual income is $720.

Torture by US proxies, the book shows, was carried out to obtain confirmation of the alleged status of these purchased captives as terrorists or enemy combatants. Another victim of rendition was the 16-years-old Hassan bin Attash, who was rendered to Jordan "for sixteen months of torture" because the US government wanted information about his older brother. He is still imprisoned at Guantánamo.

On the basis of the evidence in this book, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denied, in December 2005, that the US had sent so-called enemy combatants to countries where they would be interrogated under torture, she was lying - a lie to which Prime Minister Tony Blair and the British Foreign Secretary of the day repeatedly lent their support at the time.

Until I read Clive Stafford Smith's book about Guantanamo, I was of the opinion that Henry Kissinger was the world's most wicked man, mainly because of his part in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile, but also for his totally amoral attitude towards the benefit to his country of its actions, right or wrong.
This book has convinced me that Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the senior mambers of the George W Bush administration (not Dubbya himself - he's too stupid to carry blame, only scorn) have taken over that accolade.
Mr Stafford Smith's book makes grim, but utterly compelling, reading. He has been lawyer to several of the Guantanamo prisoners and he highlights both the cruelty and utter incompetence of the facility and of those who controlled it in the Bush years. The disgraceful subterfuge of 'rendering' (awful word) prisoners to allied countries prepared to use fearful torture, thus absolving the USA administration from actual involvement in this, is also highlighted.
It's a well-written book, filled with righteous indignation, which every reader without a personal agenda on the issue of terror should share on reading it.
Mr Stafford Smith is to be congratulated on his bravery in writing this important book.
Clearly, Barack Obama shares this view of Guantanamo (though he's too diplomatic to say so in as many words). His vow to close the prison seems to me his best act, among many good acts, of his first 100 days.