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      Guantanamo Bay

      A “war on terror” was declared by President George Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the United States. The US bombing of Afghanistan, the fall of the Taliban government, a chaotic exodus of refugees into Pakistan, and a world-wide hunt by the US for Osama Bin Laden and his associates, led thousands of muslims to prisons, interrogation centres, and torture chambers in many countries.

      On January 11 2002, Muslim prisoners from Afghanistan began being deported by the US to Guantanamo Bay, a prison camp in Cuba where the US retained sovereignty and a military base. Guantanamo was termed a place where the US constitution did not apply.

      For four years even the names of most of the prisoners were kept secret.

      The 774 prisoners were designated “enemy combatants,” and the Geneva Conventions were declared not to apply to them. Many dozens of men were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” to countries such as Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and Syria where they were interrogated under torture. Another 94 were held in secret prisons run by the CIA in countries such as Afghanistan, Poland and Romania for several years. Twenty eight of these were designated as “high value detainees” and 14 of them were transferred to Guantanamo Bay in September 2006.

      Many of the prisoners were handed over to the US in exchange for “bounties” of $5,000 offered for foreigners, particularly Arabs. A study by Seton Hall Law School in the US found that 86% of detainees were not picked up on the battlefields, but captured by Pakistani authorities or the Afghan Northern Alliance. Others were picked up by the Americans in countries as far afield as Bosnia, Gambia, Zambia, often in cooperation with British Intelligence, and flown to prisons in Kandahar and Bagram before ending in Guantanamo Bay.

      In June 2004, after prolonged legal battles by US lawyers, the US Supreme Court ruled that men held in Guantanamo had the right to have their cases heard in federal courts. By April 2010 rulings on the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions had been made by US judges in 46 cases. In 34 of these, the judges ruled that the government had failed to demonstrate that the men had any connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Nevertheless, the vast majority of those still held had no idea when, if ever, they would get out. President Obama’s promise to close the camp within a year of taking office was broken, and no new deadline set.

      In July 2010, 181 prisoners were still in Guantanamo Bay.

      In July 2010, the new coalition goverment in Britain announced that an inquiry was to be set up under Sir Peter Gibson — a former appeal court judge — into the involvement of the British government and security services in the torture and abuse of terror suspects held in other countries.