[Mb-civic] 'One Huge US Jail' By Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark The Guardian UK

[Michael Butler]

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    'One Huge US Jail'
    By Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark
    The Guardian UK

    Saturday 19 March 2005

    Afghanistan is the hub of a global network of detention centres, the
frontline in America's 'war on terror', where arrest can be random and
allegations of torture commonplace. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark
investigate on the ground and talk to former prisoners.

    Kabul was a grim, monastic place in the days of the Taliban; today it's
a chaotic gathering point for every kind of prospector and carpetbagger.
Foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of telecoms, irrigation and
construction contracts have sparked a property boom that has forced up
rental prices in the Afghan capital to match those in London, Tokyo and
Manhattan. Four years ago, the Ministry of Vice and Virtue in Kabul was a
tool of the Taliban inquisition, a drab office building where heretics were
locked up for such crimes as humming a popular love song. Now it's owned by
an American entrepreneur who hopes its bitter associations won't scare away
his new friends. Outside Kabul, Afghanistan is bleaker, its provinces more
inaccessible and lawless, than it was under the Taliban. If anyone leaves
town, they do so in convoys. Afghanistan is a place where it is easy for
people to disappear and perilous for anyone to investigate their fate. Even
a seasoned aid agency such as Médécins Sans Frontières was forced to quit
after five staff members were murdered last June. Only the 17,000-strong US
forces, with their all-terrain Humvees and Apache attack helicopters, have
the run of the land, and they have used the haze of fear and uncertainty
that has engulfed the country to advance a draconian phase in the war
against terror. Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay.

    Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue
regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and
Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at
the hub of a global system of detention centres where prisoners are held
incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture. The secrecy surrounding
them prevents any real independent investigation of the allegations. "The
detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms,
but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we
are only now beginning to understand," Michael Posner, director of the US
legal watchdog Human Rights First, told us.

    When we landed in Kabul, Afghanistan was blue with a bruising cold. We
were heading for the former al-Qaida strongholds in the south-east that were
rumoured to be the focus of the new US network. How should we prepare, we
asked local UN staff. "Don't go," they said. None the less, we were able to
find a driver, a Pashtun translator and a boxful of clementines, and set off
on a five-and-a-half-hour trip south through the snow to Gardez, a market
town dominated by two rapidly expanding US military bases.

    There we met Dr. Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan
Independent Human Rights Commission, established in 2003 with funding from
the US Congress to investigate abuses committed by local warlords and to
ensure that women's and children's rights were protected. He was delighted
to see foreigners in town. At his office in central Gardez, Bidar showed us
a wall of files. "All I do nowadays is chart complaints against the US
military," he said. "Many thousands of people have been rounded up and
detained by them. Those who have been freed say that they were held
alongside foreign detainees who've been brought to this country to be
processed. No one is charged. No one is identified. No international
monitors are allowed into the US jails." He pulled out a handful of files:
"People who have been arrested say they've been brutalised - the tactics
used are beyond belief." The jails are closed to outside observers, making
it impossible to test the truth of the claims.

    Last November, a man from Gardez died of hypothermia in a US military
jail. When his family were called to collect the body, they were given a
$100 note for the taxi ride and no explanation. In scores more cases, people
have simply disappeared.

    Prisoner transports crisscross the country between a proliferating
network of detention facilities. In addition to the camps in Gardez, there
are thought to be US holding facilities in the cities of Khost, Asadabad and
Jalalabad, as well as an official US detention centre in Kandahar, where the
tough regime has been nicknamed "Camp Slappy" by former prisoners. There are
20 more facilities in outlying US compounds and fire bases that complement a
major "collection centre" at Bagram air force base. The CIA has one facility
at Bagram and another, known as the "Salt Pit", in an abandoned brick
factory north of Kabul. More than 1,500 prisoners from Afghanistan and many
other countries are thought to be held in such jails, although no one knows
for sure because the US military declines to comment.

    Anyone who has got in the way of the prison transports has been met with
brutal force. Bidar directed us to a small Shia neighbourhood on the edge of
town where a multiple killing was still under investigation. Inside a frozen
courtyard, a former policeman, Said Sardar, 25, was sat beside his crutches.
On May 1 2004, he was manning a checkpoint when a car careened through.
"Inside were men dressed like Arabs, but they were western men," he said.
"They had prisoners in the car." Sardar fired a warning shot for the car to
stop. "The western men returned fire and within minutes two US attack
helicopters hovered above us. They fired three rockets at the police
station. One screamed past me. I saw its fiery tail and blacked out."

    He was taken to Bagram, where US military doctors had to amputate his
leg. Afterwards, he said, "an American woman appeared. She said the US was
sorry. It was a mistake. The men in the car were Special Forces or CIA on a
mission. She gave me $500." Sardar showed us into another room in his
compound where a circle of children stared glumly at us; their fathers, all
policemen, were killed in the same incident. "Five dead. Four in hospital.
To protect covert US prisoner transports," he says. Later, US helicopters
were deployed in two similar incidents that left nine dead.

    In his builders' merchant's shop, Mohammed Timouri describes how he lost
his son. "Ismail was a part-time taxi driver, waiting to go to college," he
says, handing us a photograph of a beardless, short-haired 19-year-old held
aloft in a coffin at his funeral last March. "A convoy delivering prisoners
from a facility in Jalalabad to one in Kabul became snarled up in traffic. A
US soldier jumped down and lifted a woman out of the way. She screamed.
Ismail stepped forward to explain she was a conservative person, wearing a
burka. The soldier dropped the woman and shot Ismail in front of a crowd of
20 people."

    Mohammed received a letter from the Afghan police: "We apologise to
you," the police chief wrote. "An innocent was killed by Americans." The US
army declined to comment on Ismail's death or on a second fatal shooting by
another prison transport at the same crossroads later that month. It also
refused to comment on an incident outside Kabul when a prison patrol
reportedly cleared a crowd of children by throwing a grenade into their
midst. However, we have since heard that the CIA's inspector general is
investigating at least eight serious incidents, including two deaths in
custody, following complaints by agents about the activities of their
military colleagues.

    There are insurgents active in the Gardez area, as there are throughout
the south of Afghanistan, remnants of the old order and the newly
disaffected. Every morning it takes Afghan police several hours to pick
along the highway unearthing explosives concealed overnight. And so it was
mid-morning before we were able to leave town, crawling over the
Gardez-Khost pass, some 10,000ft high. No one saw us slipping on to the
fertile Khost plain, where Osama bin Laden once had his training camps - the
camps were destroyed by US cruise missiles in August 1998. Today a shrine to
Taliban loyalists still greets travellers to the city, although no one here
would say they preferred the old life.

    US Camp Salerno, the largest base outside Kabul, dominates the area
around Khost. Inside the city, Kamal Sadat, a local stringer for BBC World
Service, told how he was detained last September and found himself locked up
in a prison filled with suspects from many countries. "Even though I showed
my press accreditation, I was hooded, driven to Salerno and then flown to
another US base. I had no idea where I was or why I had been detained." He
was held in a small wooden cell, and soldiers combed through his notebooks,
copying down names and phone numbers. "Every time I was moved within the
base, I was hooded again. Every prisoner has to maintain absolute silence. I
could hear helicopters whirring above me. Prisoners were arriving and
leaving all the time. There were also cells beneath me, under the ground."
After three days, Sadat was flown back to Khost and freed without
explanation. "It was only later I learned that I had been held in Bagram. If
the BBC had not intervened, I fear I would not have got out." After his
release, the US military said it had all been a misunderstanding, and
apologised.

    Camp Salerno, which houses the 1,200 troops of US Combined Taskforce
Thunder, was being expanded when we arrived. Army tents were being replaced
with concrete dormitories. The detention facility, concealed behind a
perimeter of opaque green webbing, was being modernised and enlarged.
Ensconced in a Soviet-era staff building was the camp's commanding officer,
Colonel Gary Cheeks. He listened calmly as we asked about the allegations of
torture, deaths and disappearances at US detention facilities including
Salerno. We read to him from a complaint made by a UN official in Kabul that
accused the US military of using "cowboy-like excessive force". He eased
forward in his chair: "There have been some tragic accidents for which we
have apologised. Some people have been paid compensation."

    We put to him the specific case of Mohammed Khan, from a village near
the Pakistan border, who died in custody at Camp Salerno: his relatives say
his body showed signs of torture. "You could go on for ages with a 'he said,
she said'. You have to take my word for it," said Cheeks. He remembered
Khan's death: "He was bitten by a snake and died in his cell." He added, "We
are building new holding cells here to make life better for detainees. We
are systematising our prison programme across the country."

    For what reason? "So all guards and interrogators behave by the same
code of behaviour," the colonel said. Is it not the case that an
ever-increasing number of prisoners have vanished, while others are being
shuttled between jails to keep their families in the dark? Cheeks moved
towards his office door: "There are many things that are distorted. No one
has vanished here ... Look, the war against the Taliban is one small part. I
want the Afghan people with us. They are the key to ending conflict. If they
fear us or we do wrong by them, then we have lost."

    However, many Afghans who celebrated the fall of the Taliban have long
lost faith in the US military. In Kabul, Nader Nadery, of the Human Rights
Commission, told us, "Afghanistan is being transformed into an enormous US
jail. What we have here is a military strategy that has spawned serious
human rights abuses, a system of which Afghanistan is but one part." In the
past 18 months, the commission has logged more than 800 allegations of human
rights abuses committed by US troops.

    The Afghan government privately shares Nadery's fears. One minister, who
asked not to be named, said, "Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world
as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us
down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be
administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability."

    What has been glimpsed in Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace
Guantánamo Bay. When that detention centre was set up in January 2002, it
was essentially an offshore gulag - beyond the reach of the US constitution
and even the Geneva conventions. That all changed in July 2004. The US
supreme court ruled that the federal court in Washington had jurisdiction to
hear a case that would decide if the Cuban detentions were in violation of
the US constitution, its laws or treaties. The military commissions, which
had been intended to dispense justice to the prisoners, were in disarray,
too. No prosecution cases had been prepared and no defence cases would be
readily offered as the US National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers
had described the commissions as unethical, a decision backed by a federal
judge who ruled in January that they were "illegal". Guantánamo was suddenly
bogged down in domestic lawsuits. It had lost its practicality. So a global
prison network built up over the previous three years, beyond the reach of
American and European judicial process, immediately began to pick up the
slack. The process became explicit last week when the Pentagon announced
that half of the 540 or so inmates at Guantánamo are to be transferred to
prisons in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

    Since September 11 2001, one of the US's chief strategies in its "war on
terror" has been to imprison anyone considered a suspect on whatever
grounds. To that end it commandeered foreign jails, built cellblocks at US
military bases and established covert CIA facilities that can be located
almost anywhere, from an apartment block to a shipping container. The
network has no visible infrastructure - no prison rolls, visitor rosters,
staff lists or complaints procedures. Terror suspects are being processed in
Afghanistan and in dozens of facilities in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan,
Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the British island of Diego Garcia
in the southern Indian Ocean. Those detained are held incommunicado, without
charge or trial, and frequently shuttled between jails in covert air
transports, giving rise to the recently coined US military expression "ghost
detainees".

    Most of the countries hosting these invisible prisons are already
partners in the US coalition. Others, notably Syria, are pragmatic
associates, which work privately alongside the CIA and US Special Forces,
despite bellicose public statements from President Bush (he has condemned
Syria for harbouring terrorism, for aiding the remnants of the Saddam
Hussein regime, and most recently has demanded that Syrian troops quit
Lebanon).

    All the host countries are renowned for their poor human rights records,
enabling interrogators (US soldiers, contractors and their local partners)
to operate. We have obtained prisoner letters, declassified FBI files, legal
depositions, witness statements and testimony from US and UK officials,
which document the alleged methods deployed in Afghanistan - shackles,
hoods, electrocution, whips, mock executions, sexual humiliation and
starvation - and suggest they are practised across the network. Sir Nigel
Rodley, a former UN special rapporteur on torture, said, "The more hidden
detention practices there are, the more likely that all legal and moral
constraints on official behaviour will be removed."

    The only "ghost detainees" to have been identified by Washington are a
handful of high-profile al-Qaida operatives such as Abu Zubayda, Bin Laden's
lieutenant, who vanished after being picked up by Pakistani authorities in
Faisalabad in March 2002. In June of that year, US defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld said Zubayda was "under US control". He did not say where, although
sources in the Pakistani government said Zubayda was being held at a CIA
facility in their country.

    In May 2003, Bush clarified the fate of Waleed Muhammad bin Attash, an
alleged conspirator in the USS Cole bombing, who disappeared after being
arrested by police in Pakistan in April 2003. Bush described Attash as "a
killer ... one less person that people who love freedom have to worry
about"; he is also one more person who has never appeared on a US prison
roll.

    In June 2004, a senior counterterrorism official in Britain confirmed
that Hambali (a nom de guerre) - accused of organising the October 2002 Bali
bombings and unseen since Thai police seized him in August 2003 - was
"singing like a bird", apparently at the US base on Diego Garcia.

    Evidence we have collected, however, shows that many more of those swept
up in the network have few provable connections to any outlawed
organisation; experts in the field describe their value in the war against
terror as "negligible". Former prisoners claim they were released only after
naming names, coerced into making false confessions that led to the arrests
of more people unconnected to terrorism, in a system of justice that owes
more to Stanley Milgram's Six Degrees Of Separation - where anyone can be
linked to everyone else in the world in as many stages - than to analytical
jurisprudence.

    The floating population of "ghost detainees", according to US and UK
military officials, now exceeds 10,000.

    The roots of the prison network can be traced to the legal wrangles that
began as soon as the first terror suspects were rounded up just weeks after
the September 11 attacks. As CIA agents and US forces began to capture
suspected al-Qaida fighters in the war in Afghanistan, Alberto Gonzales,
White House counsel, looked for ways to "dispense justice swiftly, close to
where our forces may be fighting, without years of pre-trial proceedings or
post-trial appeals".

    On November 13 2001, George Bush signed an order to establish military
commissions to try "enemy belligerents" who commit war crimes. At such a
commission, a foreign war criminal would have no choice over his defence
counsel, no right to know the evidence against him, no way of obtaining any
evidence in his favour and no right of attorney-client confidentiality.
Defending the commissions, Gonzales (now promoted to US attorney general)
insisted, "The suggestion that [they] will afford only sham justice like
that dispensed in dictatorial nations is an insult to our military justice
system."

    When the first prisoners arrived at Guantánamo Bay in January 2002,
Donald Rumsfeld announced that they were all Taliban or al-Qaida fighters,
and as such were designated "unlawful combatants". The US administration
argued that al-Qaida and the Taliban were not the official army of
Afghanistan, but a criminal force that did not wear uniforms, could not be
distinguished from civilians and practised war crimes; on this basis, the
administration claimed, it was entitled to sidestep the Geneva conventions
and normal legal constraints.

    From there, it was only a small moral step for the Bush administration
to overlook the use of torture by regimes previously condemned by the US
state department, so long as they, too, signed up to the war against terror.
"Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and even
Syria were all asked to make their detention facilities and expert
interrogators available to the US," one former counterterrorism agent told
us.

    In the UK, a similar process began unfolding. In December 2001, the then
home secretary David Blunkett withdrew Britain from its obligation under the
European human rights treaty not to detain anyone without trial; on December
18, the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act was passed, extending the
government's powers of arrest and detention. Within 24 hours, 10 men were
seized in dawn raids on their homes and taken to Belmarsh and Woodhill
prisons (some of them will have been among those released in the past week).

    Subsequently the Foreign Office subtly modified internal guidance to
diplomats, enabling them to use intelligence obtained through torture. A
letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office directorate sent to Sir
Michael Jay, head of the diplomatic service, and Mathew Kidd of Whitehall
liaison, a euphemism for MI6, suggested in March 2003 that although such
intelligence was inadmissible as evidence in a UK court, it could still be
received and acted upon by the British government. The government's attitude
was spelt out to the Intelligence and Security Committee of MPs and peers by
foreign secretary Jack Straw who, while acknowledging that torture was
"completely unacceptable" and that information obtained under torture is
more likely to be embellished, concluded, "you cannot ignore it if the price
of ignoring it is 3,000 people dead" [a reference to the September 11
attacks].

    One former ambassador told us, "This was new ground for the FCO. As long
as we didn't do it, we're OK. But by taking advantage of this intelligence,
we're encouraging the use of torture and, in my opinion, are in
contravention of the UN Convention Against Torture. What worried me most was
that information obtained under torture, given credence by some gung-ho
Whitehall warrior, could be used to keep another poor soul locked up without
trial or charge."

    Although the true extent of the US extra-legal network is only now
becoming apparent, people began to disappear as early as 2001 when the US
asked its allies in Europe and the Middle East to examine their refugee
communities in search of possible terror cells, such as that run by Mohammed
Atta in Hamburg which had planned and executed the September 11 attacks.
Among the first to vanish was Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian asylum seeker who had
been living in Sweden with his wife and children for three years. Hanan,
Agiza's wife, told us how on December 18 2001 her husband failed to return
home from his language class.

    "The phone rang at 5pm. It was Ahmed. He said he'd been arrested and
then the line went dead. The next day our lawyer told me that Ahmed was
being sent back to Egypt. It would be better if he was dead." Agiza and his
family had fled Egypt in 1991, after years of persecution, and in absentia
he had been sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court. Hanan said,
"I called my mother-in-law in Egypt. Finally, in April, she was allowed to
see Ahmed in Mazrah Torah prison, in Cairo, when he revealed what had
happened."

    On December 18 2001, Agiza and a second Egyptian refugee, Mohammed
Al-Zery, had been arrested by Swedish intelligence acting upon a request
from the US. They were driven, shackled and blindfolded, to Stockholm's
Bromma airport, where they were cuffed and cut from their clothes.
Suppositories were inserted into both men's anuses, they were wrapped in
plastic nappies, dressed in jumpsuits and handed over to an American aircrew
who flew them out of Sweden on a private executive jet.

    Agiza and Al-Zery landed in Cairo at 3am the next morning and were taken
to the state security investigation office, where they were held in solitary
confinement in underground cells. Mohammed Zarai, former director of the
Cairo-based Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners, told us
that Agiza was repeatedly electrocuted, hung upside down, whipped with an
electrical flex and hospitalised after being made to lick his cell floor
clean. Hanan, who was granted asylum in Sweden in 2004, said, "I can't sleep
at night without expecting someone to knock on the door and send us away on
a plane to a place that scares me more than anything else. What can Ahmed
do?" Her husband is still incarcerated in Cairo, while Al-Zery is under
house arrest there. There have been calls for an international independent
investigation into the roles of the Swedish, US and Egyptian authorities.

    We were able to chart the toing and froing of the private executive jet
used at Bromma partly through the observations of plane-spotters posted on
the web and partly through a senior source in the Pakistan Inter Services
Intelligence agency (ISI). It was a Gulfstream V Turbo, tailfin number
N379P; its flight plans always began at an airstrip in Smithfield, North
Carolina, and ended in some of the world's hot spots. It was owned by
Premier Executive Transport Services, incorporated in Delaware, a brass
plaque company with nonexistent directors, hired by American agents to
revive an old CIA tactic from the 1970s, when agency men had kidnapped South
American criminals and flown them back to their own countries to face trial
so that justice could be rendered. Now "rendering" was being used by the
Bush administration to evade justice.

    Robert Baer, a CIA case officer in the Middle East until 1997, told us
how it works. "We pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our partner
countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on civilian transport to a
third country where, let's make no bones about it, they use torture. If you
want a good interrogation, you send someone to Jordan. If you want them to
be killed, you send them to Egypt or Syria. Either way, the US cannot be
blamed as it is not doing the heavy work."

    The Agiza and Al-Zery cases were not the first in which the Gulfstream
was used. On October 23 2001, at 2.40am at Karachi airport, it picked up
Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiologist who had been arrested by
Pakistan's ISI and was wanted in connection with the USS Cole attack. On
January 10 2002, the jet was used again, taking off from Halim airport in
Jakarta with a hooded and shackled Mohammed Saeed Iqbal Madni on board, an
Egyptian accused of being an accomplice of British shoe bomber Richard Reid.
Madni was flown to Cairo where, according to the Human Rights Centre for the
Assistance of Prisoners, he died during interrogation.

    Since then, the jet has been used at least 72 times, including a flight
in June 2002 when it landed in Morocco to pick up German national Mohammed
Zamar, who was "rendered" to Syria, his country of origin, before
disappearing.

    It was in December 2001 that the US began to commandeer foreign jails so
that its own interrogators could work on prisoners within them. Among the
first were Haripur and Kohat, no-frills prisons in the lawless North West
Frontier Province of Pakistan which now hold nearly as many detainees as
Guantánamo. In January, we attempted to visit Kohat jail, but as we drove
towards the security perimeter our vehicle was turned back by ISI agents and
we were escorted back to the nearby city of Peshawar. We eventually located
several former detainees, including Mohammed, a university student who
described how he was arrested and then initially interrogated in one of many
covert ISI holding centres that are being jointly run with the CIA. Mohammed
said, "I was questioned for four weeks in a windowless room by plain-clothed
US agents. I didn't know if it was day or night. They said they could make
me disappear." One day he was bundled into a vehicle. "I arrived in Kohat
jail. There were 100 prisoners from all over the Middle East. Later I was
moved to Haripur where there were even more."

    Adil, another detainee who was held for three years in Haripur after
illegally crossing into Pakistan from Afghanistan, where he had escaped from
the Taliban, says, "US interrogators came and went as they pleased." Both
Mohammed and Adil said they were often taken from the hot cell and doused
with ice-cold water. Adil says, "American women ordered us to get undressed.
They'd touch us and taunt us. They made us lie naked on top of each other
and simulate acts."

    Mohammed and Adil were released without charge in November 2004 but,
according to legal depositions, there are still 400 prisoners detained in
the jails at the request of the US. Among them are many who it is extremely
unlikely took part in the Afghan war: they are too young or too old to have
been combatants. Some have taken legal action against the Pakistani
authorities for breach of human rights.

    A military intelligence official in Washington told us that no one in
the US administration seemed concerned about the impact of the coercive
tactics practised by the growing global network on the quality of
intelligence obtained, although there was plenty of evidence it was
unreliable. On September 26 2002, Maher Arar, a 34-year-old Canadian
computer scientist, was arrested at New York's JFK airport as a result of a
paper-thin evidential chain. Syrian-born Arar told us, "I was pulled aside
by US immigration at 2pm. I told them I had a connecting flight to Montreal
where I had a job interview." However, Arar was "rendered" in a private jet,
via Washington, Portland and Rome, landing in Amman, Jordan, where he was
held at what a Jordanian source described as a US-run interrogation centre.
>From there, he was handed over to Syria, the country he had left as a
17-year-old boy. He says he spent the next 12 months being tortured and in
solitary confinement, unaware that someone he barely knew had named him as a
terrorist.

    The chain of events that led to Arar's arrest, or kidnapping, began in
November 2001, when another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, from Montreal,
was arrested at Damascus airport. He was accused of being a terrorist and
asked to identify his al-Qaida connections. By the time he'd endured two
years of torture, El-Maati had reeled off the names of everyone he knew in
Montreal, including Abdullah Almalki, an electrical engineer. Almalki was
arrested as he flew into Damascus airport to join his parents on holiday in
May 2002, and would spend the next two years being tortured in a Syrian
detention facility.

    Almalki knew Arward Al-Bousha, also from Ottawa, who in July 2002, upon
arriving in Damascus to visit his dying father, was also arrested. El-Maati,
Almalki and Al-Bousha all knew Maher Arar by sight through Muslim community
events in Ottawa. After his release from jail in Syria, uncharged, in
January 2004, El-Maati admitted that he had erroneously named Maher Arar as
a terrorist to "stop the vicious torture". Arar, who was eventually released
in October 2003 after a Syrian court threw out a coerced confession in which
he said he had been trained by al-Qaida, told us, "I am not a terrorist. I
don't know anyone who is. But the tolerant Muslim community I come from here
in Canada has become vitriolic and demoralised." Arar's case is now the
subject of a judicial inquiry in Canada, but since his release and that of
Al-Bousha and Almalki, another five men from Ottawa have been detained in
Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

    Five days after the US supreme court ruled in July 2004 that federal
courts had jurisdiction over Guantánamo, Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old
computer programmer from Karachi, disappeared during a business trip to
Lahore. He was not taken to Guantánamo. His father Hayat told us that he
learned of his son's fate after a neighbour called on August 2 to say that
US newspapers were running a story about "the capture of a figure from
al-Qaida in Pakistan" who had led "the CIA to a rich lode of information".
An unnamed US intelligence official claimed Naeem Noor Khan operated
websites and email addresses for al-Qaida. The following day Pakistan's
information minister trumpeted the ISI's seizure of Naeem Noor Khan on
behalf of the US on July 13. The prisoner had "confessed to receiving 25
days of military training from an al-Qaida camp in June 1998". No
corroborative evidence was offered.

    Babar Awan, one of Pakistan's leading advocates, representing the
family, said he had learned from a contact in the Pakistani government that
Naeem Noor Khan was wanted by the US, having been named by one of a group of
Malaysian students who had been detained incommunicado and threatened with
torture in Pakistan in September 2003. Awan said, "The student was
subsequently freed uncharged and described how he was threatened until he
offered the names of anyone he had met in Pakistan. There is no evidence
against Naeem Noor Khan except for this coerced statement, and even worse he
has now vanished and so there is no prison to petition for his release."

    Khan had been swallowed up by a catch-all system that gathers up anyone
connected by even a thread to terror. Unable to distinguish its friends from
its enemies, the US suspects both.

    Dawn broke on the festival of Eid and four US army vehicles gunned their
engines in preparation for a "hearts and minds" operation in Khost city,
Afghanistan. A roll call of marines, each with their blood group scrawled on
their boots, was ticked off and we were added to the muster. The convoy
hurtled towards the city. Men and boys began to run alongside. First a
handful and then a dozen. The crowd was heading for a vast prayer ground,
and soon there were thousands of devotees in brand newEid caps and starched
shalwas marching out to pray. The US Humvees pulled over. The armoured
personnel carriers, too. A dozen US marines stepped down, eyes obscured by
goggles, faces by balaclavas.

    They fell into formation and stomped into the crowd while a group of
Afghan police looked on incredulously. "Keep tight. Keep tight. Keep looking
all around us," a US marines captain shouted. More than 10,000 Pashtun men
were now on their knees praying as a line of khaki pushed between them.

    An egg flew. Then another. "One more, sir, and the guy who did it is
going down," a young sergeant mumbled, as the disturbed crowd rose to its
feet. Bearded men with Kalashnikovs emerged from behind a stone wall and
edged towards us, cutting off our path. The line of khaki began to panic,
and jostled the children. "Back away, back away now," shouted the sergeant.
Suddenly an armoured personnel carrier roared to meet us. "Jump up, people,"
the captain shouted, and the convoy sped back to Camp Salerno.

    And perhaps this event above all others - of a nervous phalanx of US
marines forcing its way across a prayer ground on one of the holiest, most
joyous days in the Islamic calendar, an itching trigger away from a
Somalian-style dogfight of their own making - is the one that encapsulates
everything that has gone wrong with the global war against terror. The US
army came to Afghanistan as liberators and now are feared as governors,
judges and jailers. How many US marines know what James Madison, an
architect of the US constitution, wrote in 1788? Reflecting on the War of
Independence in which Americans were arbitrarily arrested and detained
without trial by British forces, Madison concluded that the "accumulation of
all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands may
justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny"