UK: The Dog of War

The worst kind of secrets

Britain is going down the US road in its treatment of Arab refugee prisoners, and the home secretary should be ashamed of this.

Victoria Brittain : The Guardian : UK
The Bush administration has now successfully brought Congress into line so that men held in Guantánamo Bay will be denied the right to habeas corpus. If they are tried at all, it will be before military commissions and the prisoners will not know what evidence is given against them. In addition, evidence will be accepted that is hearsay or obtained by torture. And, the US president can now arbitrarily detain anyone, anywhere, who he deems an enemy combatant, and they can no longer count on the legal process to protect them. This is the most serious perversion of the US constitution, and a green light to regimes around the world who prefer to "disappear" people rather than try them - practices that were notorious and condemned worldwide under military regimes in Latin America and Africa a generation ago.

Before this latest twist in the White House saga of keeping Guantánamo outside the law, the most senior of British law officials, Lords Faulkner and Lord Goldsmith, had at last gone on the record with stinging critiques of Guantánamo as "shaming, a symbol of injustice, and a recruiting agent for terrorists". So, how can it be that the UK is going down the US road in the treatment of Arab refugee prisoners such Detainee 00, a wheelchair-bound, diabetic grandfather with high blood pressure, heart disease and renal failure, now held in the hospital wing at Belmarsh after a brain haemorrhage?

Mr 00 is not allowed to be named - under a contempt of court order from the controversial Special Immigration Appeals Court (Siac) established in 2001 to hear cases of foreign nationals detained or facing deportation on grounds of national security. This secretive court was set up after the government lost a case in the European court of human rights in 1996 when it ruled that it was unfair that detainees and their lawyers were not allowed to see all the government evidence against them. Now that evidence is seen by a special advocate given extensive security vetting, but that lawyer can not reveal it either to the detainee or to his lawyers.

In 1991 Mr 00, then in his mid-30s, came to Britain and was given refugee status on the basis of Red Cross evidence of severe torture in prison in Jordan over several months which had left him partly paralysed. Tension during the first Gulf war saw a wave of political arrests in Jordan. Mr 00 was a well-known Imam and teacher, and a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He was a man who travelled a lot and he had visas in his passport for Saudi Arabia, Pakistan (where he had done medical studies and lived for six years), and the UK. His wife, five daughters and one son joined him in Britain in 1997. All are British citizens.

The family lived quietly in a flat in central London and all the daughters got married, giving Mr 00 12 grandchildren. His own training as a physiotherapist meant he managed his own complex medical problems with diet, exercise, massage. His GP was a diabetes specialist. Mr 00 rarely went out, because of his health problems, but in his sitting room, lined floor to ceiling with Arabic books, many people came to see him: some students, some from the Muslim obligation to visit the sick, and not all because they agreed with his teaching. In the complex currents of Muslim life in Britain, Mr 00 and his students were well known to be in open contradiction with the flamboyant extremism fashionable in the Finsbury Park mosque and its like.

"He is a very calm person, everyone knows his views, he is against violence, he condemned 9/11, and 7/7, everyone knows what he stands for," one young visitor said. But in January this year the scholarly family world fell apart when Mr 00 was arrested and taken to Belmarsh. His own GP and the doctor who has treated him for strokes signalled extreme concern, and an immediate application for bail was made. The Home Office evidence to Siac was in secret and he was refused bail or even house arrest as, "assessed to be a member of an Islamist extremist group linked to extremist activity in the UK and overseas".

His wife puzzles over and over the words, wondering what lies behind them. "This is beyond my imagination, we came here for freedom and human rights, but we find no justice or objectivity ... how can it be worse here than Jordan where at least they tell you why you are arrested - even if it's a lie?" Mr 00's oldest daughter, Hiba, describes, "the two worst humiliations: first, being asked to leave the court while they closed it to consider secret evidence against my father, and second, when I saw him chained in his hospital bed, and with guards standing there even when he had a tracheotomy."

Her father was expected to die by the doctors treating him after the brain haemorrhage, but he miraculously pulled back. However it has left him extremely weak and confused. He has no other prisoner to talk to in his infirmary room, and he struggles with the Belmarsh feeding. At home the family has used all the routes to power in a democracy, such as letters to his MP, Karen Buck, to the prison authorities, asking at least to let him be cared for at home. He so clearly could not abscond, and at home with his family could work through the current confusion and pull his mind back from living in the past. His lawyers, Birnberg Peirce, have described his as, "the cruellest case in a catalogue of cruelty".

Twice a day Mr 00 phones his wife, but with his hearing aid not working properly, it is not so much a conversation as an assurance that he is still alive. Twice a week one of her son-in-laws drives her the two hours or more to Belmarsh to visit her husband. At least one of her married daughters stays in the house with her. The youngest child, her son, Issa, is studying for his A levels. He looks older than 17, racked by watching his mother. "Two people are suffering, mother as much as dad. Mum left her country. She left her family. She couldn't be there when her own mother died."

This family came here as refugees and successfully remade a life which could have been broken by their father's torture. The home secretary's decision to allow his detention on the basis of secret evidence has taken away the future they had built. "Before, I had hope, now, we have no place to go, what place is there for us?" says Mr 00's wife.

Original article posted here.