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The Observer's David Rose hears the Tipton Three give a harrowing account of their captivity in Cuba
Sunday March 14, 2004
The Observer
Three British prisoners released last week from Guantanamo Bay have revealed the full extent of British government involvement in the American detention camp condemned by law lords and the Court of Appeal as a 'legal black hole'.
Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, the so-called 'Tipton Three', speaking for the first time since their release at a secret location in southern England, have disclosed to The Observer the fullest picture yet of life inside the camp on Cuba where America continues to hold 650 detainees.
After more than 200 interrogation sessions each, with the CIA, FBI, Defence Intelligence Agency, MI5 and MI6, America has been forced to admit its claims that the three were terrorists who supported al-Qaeda had no foundation.
But fearful of reprisals - the extreme right wing BNP has a stronghold in their hometown of Tipton in the West Midlands, and their families have warned them they may not be safe back at home - they all declined to be photographed, and are choosing a new location in which to rebuild their lives.
During an extraordinary 12-hour interview with The Observer last Friday, two days after their release from Paddington Green police station where they were held after being flown home from Cuba, the three men revealed that they were interrogated by MI5 almost immediately after first arriving at Guantanamo Bay - in the cases of Iqbal and Rasul, on 15 January 2002, and in Ahmed's case three weeks later.
The British Government has repeatedly claimed it has been trying to use diplomatic pressure to introduce more legal process at Guantanamo, including an opportunity for detainees to show that imprisonment is unjustified.
But the picture painted by the three released prisoners is of a Security Service which saw them as mere 'interrogation fodder', and questioned them repeatedly throughout their 26-month stay.
Among other disclosures, the three men revealed:
· How early in their ordeal they survived a massacre perpetrated by Afghanistan's Northern Alliance troops who herded hundreds of prisoners into lorry containers and locked them in, so that people started to suffocate. Iqbal described how only 20 of 300 prisoners in each container lived, and then only because someone made holes in its side with a machine gun - an action which killed yet more prisoners;
· The existence of a secret super-maximum security facility outside the main part of Guantanamo's Camp Delta known as Camp Echo, where prisoners are held in tiny cells in solitary confinement 24-hours a day, with a military police officer permanently stationed outside each cell door. The handful of inmates of Camp Echo include two of the four remaining British detainees, Moazzem Begg and Feroz Abbasi, and the Australian, David Hicks;
· That they endured three months of solitary confinement in Camp Delta's isolation block last summer after they were wrongly identified by the Americans as having been pictured in a video tape of a meeting in Afghanistan between Osama bin Laden and the leader of the 11 September hijackers Mohamed Atta. Ignoring their protests that they were in Britain at the time, the Americans interrogated them so relentlessly that eventually all three falsely confessed. They were finally saved - at least on this occasion - by MI5, which came up with documentary evidence to show they had not left the UK;
...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1169147,00.html
Sunday March 14, 2004
The Observer
Three British prisoners released last week from Guantanamo Bay have revealed the full extent of British government involvement in the American detention camp condemned by law lords and the Court of Appeal as a 'legal black hole'.
Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, the so-called 'Tipton Three', speaking for the first time since their release at a secret location in southern England, have disclosed to The Observer the fullest picture yet of life inside the camp on Cuba where America continues to hold 650 detainees.
After more than 200 interrogation sessions each, with the CIA, FBI, Defence Intelligence Agency, MI5 and MI6, America has been forced to admit its claims that the three were terrorists who supported al-Qaeda had no foundation.
But fearful of reprisals - the extreme right wing BNP has a stronghold in their hometown of Tipton in the West Midlands, and their families have warned them they may not be safe back at home - they all declined to be photographed, and are choosing a new location in which to rebuild their lives.
During an extraordinary 12-hour interview with The Observer last Friday, two days after their release from Paddington Green police station where they were held after being flown home from Cuba, the three men revealed that they were interrogated by MI5 almost immediately after first arriving at Guantanamo Bay - in the cases of Iqbal and Rasul, on 15 January 2002, and in Ahmed's case three weeks later.
The British Government has repeatedly claimed it has been trying to use diplomatic pressure to introduce more legal process at Guantanamo, including an opportunity for detainees to show that imprisonment is unjustified.
But the picture painted by the three released prisoners is of a Security Service which saw them as mere 'interrogation fodder', and questioned them repeatedly throughout their 26-month stay.
Among other disclosures, the three men revealed:
· How early in their ordeal they survived a massacre perpetrated by Afghanistan's Northern Alliance troops who herded hundreds of prisoners into lorry containers and locked them in, so that people started to suffocate. Iqbal described how only 20 of 300 prisoners in each container lived, and then only because someone made holes in its side with a machine gun - an action which killed yet more prisoners;
· The existence of a secret super-maximum security facility outside the main part of Guantanamo's Camp Delta known as Camp Echo, where prisoners are held in tiny cells in solitary confinement 24-hours a day, with a military police officer permanently stationed outside each cell door. The handful of inmates of Camp Echo include two of the four remaining British detainees, Moazzem Begg and Feroz Abbasi, and the Australian, David Hicks;
· That they endured three months of solitary confinement in Camp Delta's isolation block last summer after they were wrongly identified by the Americans as having been pictured in a video tape of a meeting in Afghanistan between Osama bin Laden and the leader of the 11 September hijackers Mohamed Atta. Ignoring their protests that they were in Britain at the time, the Americans interrogated them so relentlessly that eventually all three falsely confessed. They were finally saved - at least on this occasion - by MI5, which came up with documentary evidence to show they had not left the UK;
...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1169147,00.html
:banghead: 
