Begg, Moazzam - Interview master file
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Transcript
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Interviewer | Just for the viewers, but that's... | 0:07 |
Okay, we're ready? | 0:10 | |
Okay. | 0:11 | |
Good afternoon. | 0:12 | |
- | Good afternoon. | |
Interviewer | We're very grateful to you | 0:14 |
for coming to participate | 0:16 | |
in a Witness to Guantanamo Project. | 0:18 | |
We invite you to speak | 0:21 | |
of your experiences at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. | 0:22 | |
We're hoping to collect your story | 0:26 | |
and the stories of other men, who have been there | 0:28 | |
and been brought to Guantanamo. | 0:31 | |
- | You're welcome. | 0:33 |
Interviewer | We are creating an archive of these stories | 0:34 |
so that people in America and in the world | 0:37 | |
will have a better understanding | 0:39 | |
of what you and others have endured. | 0:40 | |
Future generations must know what happened | 0:44 | |
and by you telling your story, | 0:47 | |
you're contributing to history. | 0:49 | |
We appreciate your courage | 0:51 | |
and your willingness to be with us. | 0:53 | |
- | Okay. | 0:55 |
Interviewer | If at any time you'd like to take a break, | 0:56 |
please let us know, and we'll stop. | 0:58 | |
And if you say something you'd like to remove, | 1:01 | |
tell us that we'll be glad to do that. | 1:03 | |
- | Okay. | 1:05 |
Interviewer | And we'd like to begin | 1:06 |
with just some basic information just for everyone. | 1:07 | |
Your name. | 1:12 | |
- | My name is Moazzam Begg. | 1:13 |
Interviewer | And your country of origin? | 1:15 |
- | I'm British. | 1:17 |
Interviewer | And your hometown? | 1:18 |
- | Birmingham. | 1:20 |
Interviewer | And your birth date? | 1:21 |
- | July 1968. | 1:24 |
Interviewer | And age? | 1:25 |
- | 41. | 1:26 |
Interviewer | And nationality? | 1:27 |
- | British. | 1:29 |
Interviewer | And languages? | 1:30 |
- | English, Urdu and Arabic. | 1:32 |
Interviewer | And religion? | 1:35 |
- | Muslim. | 1:36 |
Interviewer | Marital status? | 1:38 |
- | Married. | 1:40 |
Interviewer | And children? | 1:41 |
- | Four children. | 1:42 |
Interviewer | Okay. | 1:43 |
And your highest degree of education? | 1:44 | |
or anything (indistinct) | 1:46 | |
- | Law, a law degree. | 1:48 |
Interviewer | Place of residence before detention? | 1:51 |
- | Pakistan, Islamabad. | 1:53 |
Interviewer | And the current place of residence is? | 1:55 |
- | Birmingham, UK. | 1:57 |
Interviewer | And then the date of arrival | 1:59 |
to Guantanamo, and your departure date? | 2:00 | |
- | My date of capture was, | 2:03 |
the 31st of January, 2002, | 2:07 | |
and release was the 25th of January, 2005. | 2:11 | |
Interviewer | Okay, so we'd like to begin, | 2:15 |
if you wouldn't mind describing all the details | 2:18 | |
you remember of how, when you were captured | 2:21 | |
and what happened from that moment | 2:23 | |
up to the time you were brought to Guantanamo. | 2:26 | |
- | Yes, I had evacuated with my wife and children to Pakistan | 2:29 |
in late 2001 | 2:33 | |
from Afghanistan. | 2:39 | |
We'd been living in Kabul, | 2:40 | |
working on a project to build a school for girls, | 2:41 | |
and the water pump wells for the drought stricken regions. | 2:43 | |
And when the US attacked, we were vacated to Pakistan | 2:47 | |
and resettled there, hoping to return some point | 2:52 | |
to continue the project. | 2:55 | |
So on the night of the 31st of January, 2002, | 2:56 | |
there was a knock on my door, | 2:59 | |
I opened the door to be faced by several people. | 3:01 | |
None of them uniformed, none of them identified. | 3:04 | |
One of them put a gun to my head, | 3:06 | |
pushed me to the forecourt of my house, | 3:08 | |
pushed me to the ground. | 3:12 | |
I saw electric stun guns, crackling in the background. | 3:13 | |
And then my hands were shackled behind my back. | 3:16 | |
My legs were shackled. | 3:19 | |
I was thrown into the prone position | 3:21 | |
and hooded, and then I was carried off | 3:24 | |
into the back of a vehicle and driven to a secret location. | 3:28 | |
What was clear was that Americans | 3:34 | |
were present, as well as local Pakistanis. | 3:38 | |
And I know this from one of the people present | 3:41 | |
lifting of my hood and taking photographs, | 3:45 | |
and then speaking and asking me questions | 3:48 | |
with evidently American accent, | 3:50 | |
saying that, | 3:55 | |
a pair of handcuffs that he had in his hand | 3:59 | |
had been given to him by one of the wives of the victims | 4:01 | |
of September 11th attacks, to catch the perpetrators. | 4:04 | |
And then he cuffed my already cuffed hands, | 4:08 | |
I think, as a symbol to perhaps go back | 4:12 | |
and tell this poor woman, that he'd caught | 4:16 | |
one of the people who had done it. | 4:18 | |
And they also threatened me, | 4:22 | |
that I can either answer their questions there in Pakistan | 4:23 | |
or in Kandahar and Guantanamo. | 4:27 | |
And by this time, of course, | 4:29 | |
Guantanamo was already instituted. | 4:30 | |
It was already been beamed over | 4:32 | |
across on pictures, on the television. | 4:35 | |
So, I was well aware of what that meant. | 4:37 | |
And then I was taken to the secret location, | 4:40 | |
interrogated several times, over a period | 4:45 | |
of two and a half weeks by Americans, | 4:47 | |
FBI agents, and CIA agents and British intelligence, | 4:53 | |
and then eventually moved | 4:56 | |
or flown over to the Kandahar Detention Facility. | 4:58 | |
Interviewer | How did you know they were CIA | 5:03 |
and FBI agents? | 5:04 | |
- | The FBI identified themselves | 5:06 |
and the CIA did also without actually giving their names. | 5:08 | |
Interviewer | Did they tell you | 5:13 |
why they were holding you? | 5:14 | |
- | Yes, the terminology that they used | 5:15 |
was that you have been neutralized, and neutralized means | 5:18 | |
from what I understood of what they said | 5:21 | |
is that you fit a profile, and that profile | 5:24 | |
is enough for us to warranty your seizure, capture | 5:28 | |
whatever term they wanna use, and take you off | 5:32 | |
any potential | 5:36 | |
hostile situation you may be in. | 5:40 | |
So, as far as they were concerned | 5:42 | |
you haven't committed a crime | 5:44 | |
and they didn't say that I'd committed a crime, | 5:45 | |
but they're preempted any, | 5:47 | |
that they feel that I may have been able to do. | 5:49 | |
Interviewer | Was there any mistreatment | 5:53 |
during those two and a half weeks? | 5:54 | |
- | Yes. | 5:56 |
I remember, of course. | 6:00 | |
I mean, from the very first point | 6:02 | |
having a gun put to your head, being kidnapped, | 6:04 | |
being dragged off in the middle | 6:07 | |
of the night in front of your family | 6:08 | |
is in itself some of the worst, | 6:10 | |
mistreatment you can possibly imagine. | 6:13 | |
It's terrifying, it's a tactic of terror. | 6:14 | |
I can't describe it any other way. | 6:16 | |
And witnessing other people being beaten, | 6:21 | |
tortured, that happened several times. | 6:23 | |
I saw people right in front of me | 6:26 | |
being punched and kicked and beaten. | 6:27 | |
One person was kicked in the groin | 6:29 | |
over 15 times in front of me, | 6:31 | |
and then slapped continuously. | 6:33 | |
During the night. | 6:36 | |
I used to hear the sounds of what I thought | 6:37 | |
in my naivety were workers, | 6:39 | |
one or two o'clock in the morning | 6:42 | |
sort of a thud sound, | 6:44 | |
which I thought was simply a banging. | 6:49 | |
And then I realized the person who was in my cell, | 6:51 | |
when he was being taken out | 6:55 | |
it was being administered to him. | 6:57 | |
He was being beaten with a rubber pipe. | 6:58 | |
He was a local Pakistani. | 7:03 | |
And when he'd returned to my cell, | 7:07 | |
docs would come along and, and see him. | 7:10 | |
So they would treat his wounds, | 7:12 | |
and then have him beaten again. | 7:15 | |
And this was done, I believe quite purposefully to make sure | 7:17 | |
that I'm aware that this could happen to me, | 7:23 | |
If I don't cooperate, | 7:25 | |
if I don't answer the questions and so forth. | 7:26 | |
And I believe that as the Pakistanis told me | 7:28 | |
that they had no reason to hold me at all, | 7:32 | |
the Pakistanis were quite clear about this. | 7:35 | |
They didn't know who I was, | 7:38 | |
there was no reason for them to put me in custody | 7:39 | |
other than at the behest of the Americans. | 7:43 | |
And they said that if we don't respond | 7:45 | |
to what the Americans do, then we'll be struck so hard, | 7:47 | |
we'll not be able to recover, | 7:50 | |
which coincides completely | 7:52 | |
with the statement that was made available many years later | 7:55 | |
that Musharraf said that if he didn't cooperate, | 8:00 | |
he'd be bombed back into the stone age. | 8:02 | |
So, that was simply the beginning | 8:07 | |
but this was in Pakistani custody, | 8:09 | |
it wasn't in US custody. | 8:11 | |
So although I did witness these things happening, | 8:14 | |
I wasn't physically beaten and tortured. | 8:17 | |
And that only happened when I was in US custody, | 8:19 | |
which is the irony because I knew that Pakistan | 8:21 | |
as a developing third world country is very capable | 8:25 | |
of doing all those things. | 8:28 | |
So, I felt that once they were handing me over to US custody | 8:31 | |
that all my fears will be allayed, and I was wrong. | 8:36 | |
Interviewer | And US happened at Kandahar is that? | 8:40 |
- | US custody happened in Islamabad, | 8:43 |
so I was taken, I was driven from that hidden location | 8:45 | |
which was in Pakistan to an airport. | 8:50 | |
And I assumed that it was a military airport. | 8:54 | |
And there, the handover to place. | 9:02 | |
So from being in Pakistani handcuffs in a hood | 9:04 | |
it was when I was handed over to US military custody. | 9:07 | |
You could clearly see despite the hood | 9:10 | |
the camouflage boots, the camouflage trousers | 9:15 | |
and the military boots underneath the hood. | 9:18 | |
And then the handling, the Pakistanis when they handled me | 9:23 | |
simply put a hand on my shoulder, | 9:26 | |
the Americans it was a hand underneath the shoulder, | 9:28 | |
pushed to the ground, so that you're in a, | 9:31 | |
almost in a bowing position and in an arm lock. | 9:33 | |
Clothes taken off, hood over the head, | 9:38 | |
knee in the small of the back | 9:41 | |
and another, in the head | 9:42 | |
and then pushed on to the airplane. | 9:44 | |
It was difficult, it was difficult association | 9:48 | |
making the association of American sounding accents | 9:50 | |
and voices with this treatment. | 9:56 | |
I could make the association with the Pakistanis | 9:58 | |
but they didn't do it. | 10:00 | |
It was hard to make that association, | 10:02 | |
but nonetheless, it happened. | 10:05 | |
And it happened | 10:06 | |
in a way that that completely shocked me | 10:10 | |
The screams, the shouts, the swearing, photographs. | 10:14 | |
You could make out the photographs despite the hood | 10:18 | |
because of the camera flashes, | 10:21 | |
and these constant camera flashes told me | 10:23 | |
that these aren't identification pictures, | 10:27 | |
these are trophy pictures. | 10:29 | |
And, | 10:33 | |
it continued this way | 10:36 | |
from Islamabad all the way to Kandahar. | 10:40 | |
And then that's when the real brutality began. | 10:42 | |
Interviewer | If you were purchased | 10:46 |
by the Americans during that time or subsequently, | 10:48 | |
did you ever hear about that? | 10:51 | |
- | I have learned since, and another great irony, | 10:55 |
when I returned, I wrote a book. | 10:58 | |
My publishers also published the book | 11:01 | |
of Prison or Sheriffs autobiography, | 11:03 | |
which is in the Light of Fire. | 11:06 | |
And he says in his book that Pakistan received bounties | 11:07 | |
of millions of dollars from the Americans | 11:12 | |
for people to be handed over. | 11:13 | |
So, I can safely assume | 11:15 | |
that I was one of those people for whom a bounty was given. | 11:17 | |
Was that the primary reason? | 11:20 | |
I don't know, | 11:21 | |
but that certainly was one of the incentives | 11:22 | |
for me being handed over as a foreign captive. | 11:26 | |
I think that, | 11:31 | |
clearly when I asked the Pakistanis and the British, | 11:35 | |
who would that president | 11:39 | |
of British Intelligence Services | 11:39 | |
against who now I have a case for complicity | 11:40 | |
in false imprisonment and torture. | 11:43 | |
When I asked them for a concierge access for legal access | 11:46 | |
and more importantly than anything else, | 11:49 | |
some reassurance that my family are okay, | 11:53 | |
there was no response. | 11:56 | |
And they said, "We're not social workers, | 11:57 | |
"that's not our job." | 11:59 | |
Interviewer | This is at the moment | 12:01 |
of transfer to Kandahar? | 12:02 | |
- | Yeah, and before. | 12:04 |
At the moment and before. | 12:05 | |
So by the time that the transfer had taken place | 12:09 | |
I had no knowledge of what happened to my family. | 12:13 | |
I knew that men had stormed into my house | 12:15 | |
armed, uniformed and identified, | 12:17 | |
and taken me. | 12:21 | |
And that my wife who was pregnant at the time | 12:23 | |
with my youngest child, | 12:25 | |
and my three young children were left at their disposal. | 12:27 | |
And they knew this. | 12:33 | |
And more importantly, the Americans knew this | 12:34 | |
because that was the claim | 12:36 | |
to the interrogations to great deal, much later on. | 12:37 | |
Interviewer | How long was it before you finally | 12:42 |
made contact with your wife | 12:44 | |
to find out what happened to her and she did? | 12:46 | |
- | I don't think I had any contact with her | 12:49 |
from that point until another 10 months. | 12:51 | |
Although I did learn through family | 12:57 | |
who sent the message through the Red Cross eventually, | 12:59 | |
five to six months later, | 13:01 | |
that they had arrived in the UK and they're safe. | 13:03 | |
Interviewer | Can you describe what happened | 13:08 |
when you arrived in Canada? | 13:09 | |
- | Yes. | 13:12 |
Over the sounds of the screams of the engines, | 13:15 | |
the screams of the prisoners, screams of the soldiers, | 13:20 | |
and they were in various languages; | 13:25 | |
in Urdu, in Arabic and in Turkish, in Farsi, | 13:27 | |
in Uighur and American English accents. | 13:29 | |
You could hear the sounds of the dogs barking. | 13:36 | |
So there was already an apprehension there | 13:38 | |
that you're moving slowly towards a point | 13:41 | |
where they're dogs. | 13:44 | |
But because you can't see them, | 13:45 | |
the fear of the unknown is even more terrifying. | 13:47 | |
And, | 13:52 | |
the manner in which I was moved, | 13:54 | |
and I know that there were other people around me as well | 13:57 | |
'cause I heard their screams and mourns and so forth, | 14:00 | |
was quite brutal because I didn't see any need | 14:04 | |
for us or for myself to be pushed into a bowing position. | 14:07 | |
When my legs are already shackled, | 14:11 | |
my hands are tied behind my back, | 14:13 | |
and the pain of trying to walk | 14:15 | |
when you're in a bowing position. | 14:18 | |
I think people should try to do that and see, | 14:19 | |
try tying your hands behind your back, | 14:21 | |
or just putting them behind your back, | 14:23 | |
get into a bowing position | 14:24 | |
and walk and see how far you can do that. | 14:26 | |
Now, imagine doing that, for the next 15 to 20 minutes | 14:27 | |
and then being thrown onto the ground, | 14:30 | |
and then being sworn up and spat at, | 14:32 | |
and feeling the apprehension of those dogs | 14:33 | |
with these trophy pictures flashing all around you. | 14:38 | |
That's what the flavor was. | 14:41 | |
And then I was thrown onto the ground, | 14:44 | |
dragged in the mud. | 14:47 | |
It was freezing, I know it was Kandahar. | 14:48 | |
And then it's Afghanistan's a desert land, | 14:50 | |
but it was freezing cold. | 14:53 | |
And it became even colder | 14:55 | |
when they ripped off my clothes with a knife. | 14:56 | |
You could feel the steel, the cold steel of that blade | 15:01 | |
as it glided against your skin, taking off your clothing. | 15:05 | |
And you have no idea what they're going to do to you next, | 15:11 | |
but all of those fears and inhibitions that you have, | 15:15 | |
you start to materialize in your mind, | 15:19 | |
you start imagining and the imagination works over time. | 15:20 | |
And then if that wasn't bad enough | 15:24 | |
you hear and see other people in that situation. | 15:27 | |
And I just thought, | 15:30 | |
that I remember when somebody told me | 15:31 | |
that when, | 15:33 | |
sheep are slaughtered | 15:36 | |
before they're taken to the butchers, | 15:38 | |
one thing you would never do | 15:42 | |
is to slaughter a sheep in front of another sheep. | 15:44 | |
And that's what it reminded me of, | 15:46 | |
is that they are doing this to human beings | 15:48 | |
in front of other human beings in order to terrify them. | 15:50 | |
And I think that's... | 15:54 | |
If you have to ask the US interrogation service | 15:55 | |
and the military policemen, what was the purpose of this? | 15:59 | |
Was this by design, | 16:03 | |
or it just happened this way? | 16:04 | |
I think they would say it was by design. | 16:06 | |
It was meant to happen. | 16:08 | |
It was shock and awe, as they call it. | 16:09 | |
Again, back to the sheep being sheered like an animal, | 16:15 | |
the hair on your face, | 16:20 | |
the hair on your head being taken off. | 16:20 | |
And then on top of the derogatory remarks against Muslims | 16:23 | |
against the color of our skin, against our language, | 16:27 | |
against how we behaved, against what we were wearing, | 16:29 | |
it was more than a simply military exercise. | 16:34 | |
It was more than an intelligence gathering exercise | 16:38 | |
or an exercise to protect human life. | 16:41 | |
This was more than vengeance, this was cruelty. | 16:44 | |
Interviewer | The fact that you were British, | 16:48 |
did that come into play at all? | 16:50 | |
Did people seem to... | 16:51 | |
I know this sounds odd, | 16:54 | |
but perhaps more respectful that you spoke English? | 16:55 | |
- | Well, you see this initially | 16:58 |
because people make the assumption, you're dark skinned. | 16:59 | |
You have a beard, | 17:04 | |
you're local. | 17:06 | |
When somebody thinks of British | 17:08 | |
they don't necessarily in their mind. | 17:09 | |
I think of me. | 17:10 | |
So the average American soldier | 17:12 | |
who hadn't left his county, let alone his state, | 17:14 | |
would have thought, well, it's just one of those. | 17:18 | |
And there are all sorts of terms that I can use, | 17:21 | |
but it's just one of them. | 17:23 | |
Which was in a sense, very telling | 17:27 | |
because they would say things | 17:30 | |
that they would not have said normally | 17:31 | |
had they known I spoke English. | 17:33 | |
And that's what gave it away, | 17:37 | |
that they would make these remarks thinking | 17:38 | |
that I'm an Afghan villager or whatever. | 17:40 | |
It's only afterwards that they really started realizing. | 17:42 | |
And then that element of respect did come along, | 17:44 | |
at least in that, "Don't say too much in front of this guy, | 17:48 | |
"'cause he understands English better than most of us." | 17:51 | |
Interviewer | Can you describe the first interrogation | 17:56 |
you had when you reached Kandahar, | 17:58 | |
or who was there and what that was about? | 18:00 | |
- | Yeah, well, the first interrogation actually was naked. | 18:03 |
It was, once I had all my clothes removed | 18:05 | |
and being put on the floor | 18:14 | |
with a circle of American soldiers around, | 18:14 | |
punching, kicking, spitting and bringing dogs, shackled. | 18:18 | |
Then I was shackled, again, | 18:22 | |
and taken naked into an interrogation tent | 18:24 | |
where there were two FBI agents who were in FBI caps, | 18:27 | |
who I saw several times later on | 18:32 | |
during my period in detention. | 18:34 | |
And they were asking questions of everybody, | 18:36 | |
it was like a conveyor belt of questions. | 18:39 | |
I don't think they were even waiting for the answer. | 18:44 | |
But they were asking people, | 18:46 | |
"When was the last time you saw Osama Bin Ladin? | 18:47 | |
"When was the last time you saw Mullar Omar?" | 18:48 | |
And, | 18:51 | |
I remember one of them asked me, where am I from? | 18:54 | |
I said, I'm from England. | 18:57 | |
And he was shocked. | 19:01 | |
He said, "England!" | 19:03 | |
I said, yes. | 19:05 | |
And, | 19:06 | |
he said, "Where?" | 19:09 | |
I said, I'm from Birmingham. | 19:10 | |
He said, "Isn't that close to Stratford-upon-Avon? | 19:10 | |
I said, yes, that's home to Shakespeare's, so. | 19:13 | |
And I couldn't believe I'm having a discussion here | 19:18 | |
standing with no clothes on, | 19:19 | |
with an FBI interrogator in the middle of Afghanistan | 19:21 | |
in this tent, with my hands shackled | 19:24 | |
talking about Shakespeare. | 19:25 | |
And there it was. | 19:27 | |
And then I said, I was moved across. | 19:30 | |
Unshackled again, thrown onto the floor, | 19:34 | |
dressed in a blue jumpsuit, not orange, orange came later. | 19:37 | |
Re-shackled dragged all around. | 19:41 | |
This time I was, | 19:43 | |
I described it as a reverse strappado position. | 19:45 | |
I'm not very tall, | 19:48 | |
and a lot of the American soldiers were. | 19:49 | |
And I couldn't keep up with the speed | 19:51 | |
of their frog marching with the shackles tied | 19:53 | |
so tightly to my feet, they were cutting into them. | 19:56 | |
So with my hands behind my back | 19:58 | |
they physically lifted me up from my arms behind my back. | 20:02 | |
So that I was suspended in the air, | 20:06 | |
and they carried me in this way, screaming, | 20:07 | |
to the cell where I was going to be held | 20:13 | |
for the next few weeks. | 20:14 | |
Interviewer | And were you interrogated subsequently | 20:16 |
while you were there? | 20:18 | |
- | More times that I can remember. | 20:20 |
Interviewer | And did it ever change | 20:22 |
or was it always the same question? | 20:22 | |
- | Depending on which alphabet agency | 20:25 |
was doing the interrogations, | 20:27 | |
what I learned early on | 20:28 | |
is that everybody wants it their own. | 20:29 | |
And they were rather like a, I guess like journalists, | 20:31 | |
everybody wants their own exclusive interview, | 20:37 | |
rather like this. | 20:40 | |
You can say the same thing again and again | 20:42 | |
to a whole group of different people. | 20:46 | |
And that's how it played out. | 20:48 | |
You felt that you'd answered the questions already | 20:51 | |
but then somebody else came along | 20:53 | |
and asked it in a different way, the same thing. | 20:55 | |
But sometimes clearly it was for disorientation purposes. | 20:59 | |
So sometimes in the middle of the night, | 21:01 | |
two, three o'clock in the morning, | 21:03 | |
somebody screams out your name, or your number rather, | 21:04 | |
tells you to assume the position. | 21:08 | |
And the position is that you get onto the floor | 21:09 | |
in the prone position, hands behind your back, | 21:12 | |
head to the side, soldiers rushing to the cell. | 21:14 | |
One has a hand gun pointed towards you. | 21:19 | |
There's another guy outside on the overwatch with an M16, | 21:21 | |
three of them come and shackle you up, | 21:25 | |
push you into the bowing position, | 21:27 | |
carry you off, hold you, | 21:28 | |
put you into the interrogation room on your knees, | 21:32 | |
gun pointed towards you, and ask you your name. | 21:34 | |
And then back again to the cell. | 21:39 | |
So it's just designed to disorient you, | 21:42 | |
it's designed to make you fearful, | 21:44 | |
and not have any idea of how long you can sleep for. | 21:49 | |
Interviewer | Did you meet with the MI5 | 21:53 |
during this period too? | 21:55 | |
- | Yes. | 21:57 |
Interviewer | Did they give you any information | 21:58 |
about why you were there or did they? | 22:00 | |
- | As far as the MI5 were concerned, | 22:02 |
they were there from the get-go, right from the beginning, | 22:03 | |
the second day of my interrogation, they were there. | 22:07 | |
And the first things that they said to me was that, | 22:08 | |
"We can't offer you any help. | 22:10 | |
"The only thing we can suggest to you | 22:13 | |
"is you cooperate with the Americans. | 22:14 | |
"That's it, | 22:15 | |
"and that's the only way you can get out from here." | 22:17 | |
And I said, I have been cooperating. | 22:19 | |
"Well, this is not our show." | 22:22 | |
But clearly they were. | 22:24 | |
And as time went on, | 22:25 | |
my attitude towards them started changing | 22:27 | |
from one of hope to one of pessimism and dejection. | 22:29 | |
So the MI5 were their present. | 22:33 | |
They saw me in this state. | 22:38 | |
One of them was visibly shaken, I think, or visibly upset | 22:40 | |
by seeing, the way in which this was happening. | 22:44 | |
And he said, "Is all this necessary?" | 22:48 | |
And they said, "Yes." | 22:51 | |
And he just remained silent. | 22:52 | |
So I think that he was disturbed slightly | 22:54 | |
but it didn't stop him from utilizing the situation. | 22:58 | |
Interviewer | And did you know you were gonna go | 23:01 |
to Guantanamo at that point? | 23:04 | |
- | They said it a couple of times now. | 23:06 |
So at first instance | 23:07 | |
it was the American intelligence agent | 23:10 | |
who produced the pair of handcuffs, | 23:14 | |
said that, "You can either answer a questions here | 23:16 | |
"or in Guantanamo." | 23:17 | |
So that was the first. | 23:18 | |
The second was in Pakistan. | 23:19 | |
Again, when an FBI agent said, | 23:22 | |
that, "We have another for Kandahar." | 23:24 | |
So the decisions were already being made | 23:27 | |
by people I didn't even know. | 23:30 | |
And then as I learned within Kandahar itself | 23:32 | |
that people are being sent to Guantanamo. | 23:35 | |
It's a reality. | 23:39 | |
It's not a threat. | 23:40 | |
It's not a pretense. | 23:41 | |
People are being sent to Guantanamo Bay. | 23:44 | |
And the indicator for that | 23:47 | |
was that people were being dressed in orange suits. | 23:49 | |
So those of us who were in blue, | 23:52 | |
the moment we heard of people being dressed in orange, | 23:54 | |
they knew, and we knew they're going to Guantanamo. | 23:56 | |
But with me, it didn't happen immediately. | 23:59 | |
I was sent to Bagram. | 24:03 | |
Interviewer | And do you know why | 24:06 |
you were sent to Bragam first? | 24:07 | |
- | I'm not sure. | 24:09 |
Although I've learned a little bit since, | 24:10 | |
is that there was a tussle between different US departments, | 24:13 | |
the British government and others | 24:18 | |
as to what they wanted to do with me. | 24:21 | |
I think they felt that with somebody like me | 24:22 | |
they had a really good catch. | 24:24 | |
I.e, somebody who's multilingual, | 24:26 | |
somebody who is co-operative... | 24:28 | |
(interviewer speaking off mic) | 24:32 | |
Comparatively, | 24:33 | |
to the others, yeah. | 24:35 | |
So I think everybody wanted a piece of me to be honest. | 24:38 | |
And I look back at it and think now that it was probably one | 24:43 | |
of my biggest mistakes being co-operative | 24:45 | |
because every time that I tried to explain something, | 24:48 | |
it made it worse. | 24:52 | |
Because I wasn't talking to ordinary intelligent people. | 24:53 | |
I wasn't talking to people who are trying to get | 24:56 | |
to the bottom of what's happening. | 24:59 | |
I was talking to people who've made conclusions | 25:00 | |
based upon ignorance, and were not looking | 25:02 | |
at the differences between | 25:05 | |
what I regard as legitimate resistance | 25:08 | |
and fighting and so forth, | 25:11 | |
like in Bosnia and Chechnya and things, | 25:12 | |
that I had supported in the past | 25:13 | |
where people had been occupied, and terrorism, | 25:15 | |
which I completely condemned. | 25:18 | |
And I think that the mindset there was clear. | 25:20 | |
If you were to ask the majority of people in Guantanamo | 25:23 | |
I believe most of them would condemn terrorism. | 25:25 | |
Most of them would condemn | 25:26 | |
attacking civilians and so forth. | 25:28 | |
But the attitude here just did not want to differentiate. | 25:32 | |
Interviewer | What would you have done instead, | 25:36 |
if you said maybe made a mistake in speaking to them, | 25:37 | |
would you have been silent? | 25:42 | |
- | I think in hindsight, | 25:42 |
if I had been in that situation again, | 25:44 | |
then I would have just refused to cooperate, refuse to talk. | 25:46 | |
I think they knew. | 25:50 | |
From the numbers of interrogations I was told I had, | 25:51 | |
and they exceeded 300, | 25:54 | |
it was clear that everybody in them wanted to speak | 25:58 | |
to this guy who speaks English and speak. | 26:00 | |
And not only that, | 26:02 | |
history and religion are my favorite subjects, | 26:04 | |
and politics now. | 26:06 | |
And I'm mindful of sometimes useless information | 26:08 | |
which people found | 26:12 | |
useful for them. | 26:15 | |
So I suppose. | 26:16 | |
Interviewer | So was it any different | 26:18 |
at Bagram from Kandahar? | 26:19 | |
- | Yeah, Bagram was more insidious, | 26:21 |
whereas Kandahar felt very physically brutal | 26:26 | |
and in your face. | 26:30 | |
Bagram was, | 26:32 | |
in closed rooms. | 26:36 | |
So the brutality that took place wasn't in front | 26:38 | |
of everybody necessarily, | 26:40 | |
although it did happen on a couple of occasions. | 26:41 | |
It was in closed rooms, closed interrogation rooms. | 26:43 | |
And, | 26:46 | |
the fear, I think, | 26:48 | |
the fear of being punched and kicked and beaten | 26:50 | |
is nowhere near as bad as the fear | 26:52 | |
of being rendered to a country like Egypt or Syria | 26:56 | |
which is what they threatened to do many times. | 26:58 | |
And I believe that they did do in at least in one case. | 27:00 | |
The types of things that are featured | 27:08 | |
in Taxi to the Dark Side that led | 27:10 | |
to people's deaths that was worse in Bagram. | 27:12 | |
Interviewer | Do you believe | 27:18 |
that they might send you to Egypt? | 27:19 | |
Did they... | 27:21 | |
- | Yeah. | 27:21 |
- | They made it? | |
- | They were very, very clear about it, | 27:23 |
and I didn't doubt them. | 27:25 | |
I don't think they were threatening. | 27:25 | |
Perhaps at the time there may have been | 27:29 | |
some element of this is a bluff. | 27:30 | |
But since my release | 27:33 | |
I've learnt that people were sent to Egypt. | 27:34 | |
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi is one of them. | 27:38 | |
The CIA, when they interrogated me, | 27:39 | |
they told me that he was sitting in the same seat as I was. | 27:41 | |
And that if I would cooperate, I will be meeting his fate. | 27:44 | |
And his fate was at that time, that I'd learned from them, | 27:46 | |
that he was sent in a box, in a coffin almost to Egypt | 27:49 | |
where they told me, he told his story within days. | 27:56 | |
But I did not at the time that his story was | 27:58 | |
that he was working with Saddam Hussein | 27:59 | |
on getting WMD. | 28:01 | |
But nonetheless, I heard it from the agents | 28:02 | |
who told me they interrogated him. | 28:05 | |
Interviewer | What were you thinking at that moment? | 28:06 |
Did you think you might still go to Guantanamo? | 28:09 | |
- | In all honesty, by the time I'd gone | 28:13 |
through the whole process, | 28:14 | |
and this was about 11 months in Bagram, | 28:15 | |
I was looking forward to Guantanamo. | 28:18 | |
I was hoping that they send me to Guantanamo | 28:19 | |
because I couldn't bear any more of this | 28:21 | |
no access to sunlight, no meaningful communications | 28:23 | |
with my family, no knowledge of what's going to happen. | 28:26 | |
Interviewer | Why do you think Guantanamo | 28:29 |
was gonna be better? | 28:30 | |
- | Because at least I could be able to talk to people. | 28:32 |
Here in Bagram if you spoke to anybody, | 28:33 | |
and you were caught speaking | 28:35 | |
you were taken to the front of the cell. | 28:36 | |
Your hands were tied above your head to the top of the cell, | 28:38 | |
so, a front door, | 28:41 | |
and you're left there suspended | 28:43 | |
with a hood over your head for hours sometimes on end. | 28:44 | |
And I knew that in Guantanamo | 28:49 | |
there were cages that I had seen on television. | 28:51 | |
And at least through those cages people could speak. | 28:53 | |
Here the person sitting to the right to the left of you, | 28:56 | |
if they even looked like they were speaking, | 29:00 | |
they were punished. | 29:02 | |
Interviewer | How long were you in Bagram? | 29:05 |
- | 11 months. | 29:07 |
Interviewer | And you were interrogated | 29:09 |
over and over again, during that time? | 29:10 | |
- | Yes. | 29:12 |
Interviewer | Anything changed during that time? | 29:13 |
- | Again, it was CIA, FBI, MI5 and military intelligence. | 29:14 |
It was those four main and several others, | 29:18 | |
I don't even know. | 29:20 | |
but those are the four that I remember. | 29:22 | |
And it varied. | 29:25 | |
And as I said before, | 29:27 | |
they knew what my fears were. | 29:32 | |
They knew what my apprehensions were, | 29:33 | |
and what I asked for most, and that was my family. | 29:34 | |
And they'd taken note of this, | 29:38 | |
even through the Red Cross messages that I wrote. | 29:40 | |
Evidently, any message that went in or out | 29:42 | |
had to go through US censorship. | 29:45 | |
And they knew exactly what my fears and concerns were. | 29:46 | |
And interrogations when they occurred, | 29:50 | |
they'd asked me about my family. | 29:53 | |
Now, often they've said the FBI tried to distance itself | 29:56 | |
from all of the torture and so forth, | 29:59 | |
but the FBI were there and they were present | 30:01 | |
and they were benefiting from and using that situation. | 30:03 | |
During one interrogation, | 30:07 | |
with the sounds of a woman's screaming next door, | 30:10 | |
that I was, | 30:13 | |
it suggested that my wife was next door being tortured. | 30:15 | |
Pictures of my children and family | 30:21 | |
were waved in front of me, a phone in one hand, | 30:24 | |
the FBI agents had the picture in the other, | 30:28 | |
"They're only a phone call away. | 30:30 | |
"Where do you think they are? | 30:33 | |
"What do you think happened to them the night we took you? | 30:34 | |
"Do you think you will see your kids again? | 30:37 | |
"Where do you think your wife is?" | 30:39 | |
Interviewer | The Red Cross wouldn't reveal to you | 30:41 |
what was really true about your family? | 30:43 | |
- | The Red Cross at that point, I had no access to them. | 30:46 |
It was only afterwards when I spoke to Red Cross. | 30:48 | |
Interviewer | You never met the Red Cross in Bagram? | 30:50 |
- | I did, but it was after these interrogations occurred. | 30:52 |
And even then the Red Cross couldn't say | 30:56 | |
what happened to my family, | 30:57 | |
until a letter came from my family | 30:58 | |
which said that they're okay. | 31:02 | |
Interviewer | Did you ever see doctors | 31:06 |
while you were in Bagram? | 31:07 | |
- | Yes. | 31:08 |
There were doctors in Bagram, | 31:09 | |
or at least medics or Coleman as they call them. | 31:11 | |
Yeah, they were, administered. | 31:14 | |
I had an asthma attack once | 31:17 | |
and I was taken to the hospital and put on a nebulizer. | 31:19 | |
But again, it was completely shackled, completely hooded | 31:24 | |
until the point you're taken into this tiny small cubicle | 31:29 | |
and that you can only see the curtains around you. | 31:34 | |
Interviewer | Did you ever see how other people | 31:39 |
were treated while you were in Bagram? | 31:41 | |
- | Yeah, more times than I can remember. | 31:44 |
I don't know where to start with that | 31:47 | |
because I've always said I think that despite all the things | 31:48 | |
I've described that I had it better than many. | 31:51 | |
Language and communication was one of those things | 31:56 | |
that obviously people found difficult | 31:58 | |
from the US intelligence and the soldiers | 31:59 | |
so that when they scream something at somebody | 32:06 | |
a few decibels higher than normal, | 32:08 | |
they thought that they become more intelligible, | 32:10 | |
but it won't. | 32:12 | |
They just got more angry. | 32:12 | |
The fact is that ignorance ruled what was taking place. | 32:16 | |
One of the examples of that ignorance is | 32:21 | |
I remember they bought in one Afghany village | 32:23 | |
with a swastika tattooed on his forearm. | 32:26 | |
And the immediate reaction of the interrogators | 32:30 | |
and the soldiers, was to start calling him Nazis scumbag, | 32:32 | |
which I thought was so ridiculous | 32:37 | |
because I asked them, | 32:38 | |
"Where do you think the Iranians came from? | 32:40 | |
"Did they come from Germany or from Alabama? | 32:42 | |
"The Iranians come from this region, that's who they are." | 32:46 | |
The national lines of Afghanistan are called Iriana. | 32:49 | |
The word Iran comes from the Iranians, | 32:52 | |
that's who these people are. | 32:54 | |
This guy knows as much about the Nazis and Hitler | 32:55 | |
as you do about probably Prince Charlie. | 32:58 | |
And they get stunned at their stupidity | 33:00 | |
but their stupidity sometimes would, | 33:04 | |
could cost people's lives. | 33:06 | |
And it did, in one occasion in the death | 33:07 | |
of the taxi driver, Dilawar. | 33:09 | |
Where simply because a man was saying, | 33:14 | |
Allah, Allah every time they kicked him, | 33:19 | |
they found it amusing. | 33:21 | |
They kicked him over 100 times and killed him. | 33:22 | |
And I remember I was in his cell with his back towards me, | 33:25 | |
and I remember his number 421, | 33:29 | |
facing me, his hands tied above his head | 33:33 | |
a hood placed over it. | 33:35 | |
And they put him there for no apparent reason | 33:36 | |
other than he's been bought in, | 33:38 | |
and this is the new policy. | 33:41 | |
New policy is that if somebody comes in, | 33:42 | |
he's going to be put on sleep deprivation, | 33:46 | |
until he cooperates. | 33:48 | |
And they left him there to the point that he, | 33:50 | |
I think he lost consciousness, his body slumped. | 33:55 | |
And I can tell you, once your hands are tied and shackled | 33:58 | |
the pain that exists into the wrists | 34:01 | |
if that no longer matters, | 34:03 | |
then you can't be in a state of consciousness. | 34:06 | |
And they undid the shackles. | 34:09 | |
But before they did that, started punching him | 34:10 | |
to see if he was putting it on, | 34:12 | |
and then threw him to the ground and punched him more, | 34:13 | |
and kicked him more. | 34:15 | |
And then they took him off to one of the isolation rooms, | 34:17 | |
gave him some more of that, treatment until they killed him. | 34:20 | |
(coughs) I remember, | 34:25 | |
there was, I think he was a, it was Becky or a Uighur | 34:30 | |
that they brought in once. | 34:34 | |
And evidently they thought that this guy | 34:36 | |
was dangerous or whatever it was, | 34:37 | |
but I've never seen a human being treated like this. | 34:40 | |
I couldn't believe it. | 34:43 | |
I thought this is the sort of thing this happens | 34:45 | |
in some of the third world countries. | 34:46 | |
They brought in this guy, | 34:49 | |
and put him in a cell by himself, | 34:50 | |
and these are communal cells. | 34:52 | |
And, | 34:54 | |
it was about 10 to each cell. | 34:57 | |
But in this cell, there was nobody except for this guy. | 34:58 | |
And they chained him, | 35:00 | |
they put a physical thick, huge chain around his waist. | 35:01 | |
And, | 35:07 | |
like an animal on a leash, | 35:09 | |
they gave him enough room to walk | 35:11 | |
around sort of a little bit of an arch | 35:13 | |
because what they'd done is carried them this huge pipe | 35:15 | |
bracket in, which took three soldiers to carry. | 35:20 | |
They carried it into the cell. | 35:22 | |
And then they threaded this chain around this bracket | 35:24 | |
so that he couldn't move any further than the arc | 35:29 | |
that would allow that movement, | 35:31 | |
with what was left of the chain. | 35:34 | |
And he remained there, that's it | 35:36 | |
he was tied to this chain. | 35:37 | |
And so he wasn't able to go to the toilet at the back | 35:38 | |
which was simply a bucket, or barrel that was cut in half. | 35:40 | |
And I saw him urinate and defecate | 35:46 | |
in that area on the floor | 35:50 | |
because they wouldn't allow him enough slack | 35:52 | |
to move over to where the toilet was. | 35:54 | |
And he remained there for weeks. | 35:55 | |
I remember speaking to some of the soldiers | 35:58 | |
asking that, why are you doing this to this guy? | 36:00 | |
"Oh, he's really dangerous. | 36:02 | |
"We can't tell you, and so forth." | 36:03 | |
At least give him enough slack so he can use the toilet. | 36:05 | |
Eventually he was moved | 36:09 | |
and I don't know what became of him, but. | 36:10 | |
Interviewer | You could not talk to him during that time? | 36:13 |
- | No, no. | 36:14 |
I mean, talking, I couldn't talk to the people | 36:15 | |
that were on either side of me, if I did, | 36:17 | |
I'd risk being taken to the cell | 36:19 | |
and being tied up myself. | 36:22 | |
We did nonetheless, whisper to one another | 36:24 | |
ventriloquist stuff. | 36:27 | |
But other than that, | 36:30 | |
we weren't allowed to pray in congregation. | 36:31 | |
We weren't allowed to read the Quran out loud. | 36:33 | |
We weren't allowed to call the call to pray. | 36:35 | |
We weren't allowed to do any of those things, | 36:38 | |
any normal thing that we could do | 36:39 | |
that we could do in Guantanamo, | 36:41 | |
we weren't allowed do at all. | 36:42 | |
And I never understood the reasons behind that. | 36:45 | |
Interviewer | When you were taken to Guantanamo | 36:48 |
do you know that was gonna happen ahead of time | 36:50 | |
or they just one morning woke you up and all? | 36:52 | |
- | I think I had, again my knowledge | 36:55 |
was a little bit more than some of the others. | 36:57 | |
And primarily that was because | 36:58 | |
I could overhear conversations. | 37:00 | |
Soldiers generally would be more talkative to me, | 37:02 | |
because they also felt isolated | 37:04 | |
and intrigued at speaking somebody who's different. | 37:07 | |
This is the first time | 37:11 | |
that a lot of these soldiers are meeting somebody | 37:12 | |
from outside their state and let alone | 37:13 | |
an English speaker in Afghanistan. | 37:16 | |
So I would pick up little bits of information | 37:18 | |
from some of them. | 37:21 | |
And some of them were decent people | 37:22 | |
some of the soldiers were decent | 37:23 | |
and they didn't like what was happening | 37:24 | |
and they registered their complaints. | 37:26 | |
But, so that gave me an advantage. | 37:28 | |
So I was, I think about a week before | 37:32 | |
I was sent to Guantanamo, aware that I was going to be sent | 37:34 | |
to Guantanamo, and I was looking forward to it. | 37:36 | |
I don't know how to describe it any other way. | 37:39 | |
I had not seen the sun | 37:42 | |
or the moon or been outside for 11 months. | 37:43 | |
Interviewer | How do you know it was 11 months, | 37:48 |
how can you keep track of time? | 37:49 | |
- | I had an idea again from soldiers as to what the time was | 37:54 |
or at least the time of months, the time of, the dates were. | 37:57 | |
Interviewer | Did soldiers ever give you extra food | 38:02 |
or do anything like that in Kandahar? | 38:04 | |
- | No, no, no. | 38:08 |
- | And Bagram? | |
- | In Bagram, there were occasions | 38:10 |
where they took me out of the cell, shackled | 38:12 | |
to go and do what they call the food sorting | 38:17 | |
with other prisoners. | 38:19 | |
So sometimes myself. | 38:20 | |
On these occasions, I could sit down | 38:22 | |
with one or two other prisoners like, Almohada, | 38:24 | |
who also was bought in during that time. | 38:28 | |
And he was terribly abused as well in front of me. | 38:29 | |
So we could talk then, under the supervision of soldiers. | 38:34 | |
And because this happened at the night shift | 38:38 | |
there was a little less stringent application of the rules. | 38:42 | |
Interviewer | Did you ever see a doctor treat Omar? | 38:47 |
- | I saw, what they call Coleman, | 38:53 |
administering some drugs to him through the cage | 38:56 | |
but I didn't see a doctor treat him, no. | 38:59 | |
Interviewer | Could you describe | 39:03 |
your flight to Guantanamo? | 39:04 | |
- | Yeah, | 39:07 |
again, it was after all of these months | 39:12 | |
of these people knowing what I'm like | 39:15 | |
and seeing me, | 39:18 | |
I'd expected that there was gonna be | 39:21 | |
some sort of humanity, | 39:23 | |
some humane behavior, but it reverted, | 39:25 | |
it reverted to how it was before. | 39:27 | |
So this time round, it meant being starved for the day | 39:29 | |
before the flight, because they didn't want to have | 39:35 | |
to go through the difficulty | 39:38 | |
of taking any of us to the toilet, | 39:39 | |
in the way that they were going to shackle us. | 39:42 | |
And the way that we were shackled | 39:44 | |
was this I think they call it three piece suit, by this time | 39:45 | |
so the hands weren't shackled | 39:48 | |
behind the back, it was in front, | 39:49 | |
with a chain going around the waist and that attached | 39:51 | |
to the handcuffs and another chain off to the ankles. | 39:54 | |
But then on top of that ear muffs, very tight, | 39:57 | |
so you couldn't hear anything. | 40:01 | |
Facemasks, so you couldn't bite anything, | 40:02 | |
and goggles so you couldn't see anything. | 40:05 | |
And then a hood on top, for extra measure. | 40:08 | |
And then shackled to a chair, | 40:15 | |
and then being flown over. | 40:20 | |
I think that the flight was, I was told was 36 hour flight | 40:23 | |
or I assumed that it was a 36 hour flight. | 40:25 | |
So, I remember they'd put an apple in my hand. | 40:29 | |
(laughing) | 40:35 | |
How do you eat the Apple? | 40:36 | |
How do you eat the apple with a face mask on? | 40:37 | |
And your hands, it was ridiculous. | 40:39 | |
And then I remember as a soldier came along | 40:44 | |
and stuck the apple in my mouth, | 40:46 | |
and how was I supposed to eat that and fill? | 40:49 | |
And then again, over the shouts and screams | 40:52 | |
of soldiers and prisoners and the den of the engines, | 40:55 | |
I said, please, can you can you just knock me out | 40:58 | |
of this journey? | 41:01 | |
This is excruciating painful. | 41:02 | |
I can't bear it, I cannot bear it. | 41:04 | |
So, eventually somebody came over | 41:06 | |
and stuck something in, and I woke up in Guantanamo. | 41:07 | |
Interviewer | Did you ever use the bathroom | 41:12 |
while you were in the plane? | 41:13 | |
- | I don't remember. | 41:15 |
Interviewer | And do you remember if the plane stopped | 41:17 |
before you went to Guantanamo? | 41:18 | |
- | I don't know, | 41:21 |
I don't remember. | 41:22 | |
- | You were knocked- | |
- | Because I was completely knocked out, yeah. | 41:24 |
My next memory after that point was | 41:25 | |
the baked brown stones | 41:33 | |
and the tropical heat of Guantanamo. | 41:37 | |
Interviewer | Can you describe how that was? | 41:40 |
What happened when you first? | 41:42 | |
- | I have a vague memory of being pushed into a shower, | 41:45 |
of sticks with sponges at the end of them | 41:50 | |
being pushed against my body. | 41:55 | |
Then being shackled again | 41:59 | |
and then not being able to see very much | 42:00 | |
because of the hood and just brown baked stones | 42:03 | |
underneath my feet that shuffled along | 42:08 | |
walking into this room in which there was a cell, | 42:12 | |
the cell was a converted shipping container. | 42:17 | |
And that's it, being locked in there | 42:23 | |
for the next two years. | 42:24 | |
Interviewer | By yourself? | 42:26 |
- | Alone, yes. | 42:28 |
Interviewer | And you stayed in that cell for two years? | 42:29 |
- | Yeah, pretty much, other than the last couple of months | 42:32 |
before I was released, yeah. | 42:35 | |
Interviewer | I had heard that many people moved around. | 42:37 |
You would never moved around? | 42:40 | |
- | No, they call that there Frequent Flyer Program. | 42:41 |
That was mostly for people who were on the blocks. | 42:44 | |
I was put in Camp Echo, | 42:46 | |
which is a maximum security isolation, solitary confinement. | 42:47 | |
So, there's no need to move me around | 42:50 | |
because I'm isolated. | 42:52 | |
Interviewer | You've been in isolation for almost a year. | 42:53 |
So, did you have any contacts | 42:55 | |
with other prisoners at all? | 42:57 | |
- | No, not, not until almost two years had passed. | 42:58 |
And that was near the end of my time at Guantanamo. | 43:02 | |
Interviewer | Where did you know | 43:06 |
where the other prisons were nearby? | 43:07 | |
- | Yeah, I had, I knew that there was, | 43:10 |
when they take me out into what they call recreation. | 43:13 | |
Initially, there was only two cells | 43:15 | |
in Camp Echo in Guantanamo. | 43:18 | |
So there were two buildings, | 43:19 | |
in two separate buildings, one cell each. | 43:21 | |
And I learnt that there was another British man | 43:25 | |
in the other cell in Camp Echo. | 43:28 | |
As I was there, they were building, they were expanding. | 43:31 | |
So, I learned over time that there are another five or six. | 43:33 | |
They included David Hicks, Salim Hamdan, | 43:39 | |
Bahlul and some others. | 43:42 | |
Interviewer | Did you have any opportunity | 43:45 |
at all to communicate with? | 43:47 | |
- | No, no, not until I was moved into the blocks | 43:48 |
which is almost two years later. | 43:51 | |
And then we were put on the same block, | 43:53 | |
and then I was able to communicate with them. | 43:54 | |
Interviewer | How did you manage living | 43:55 |
in such isolation for sounds to me what 18, 20 months? | 43:58 | |
- | Well, there's no simple answer to that, really. | 44:04 |
I think my faith played an important role. | 44:08 | |
It was severely tested of course. | 44:15 | |
Thoughts of what I plan to do, | 44:20 | |
even the word when, if I get released. | 44:25 | |
I tried to memorize as much of the Quran as possible | 44:29 | |
as an Arabic speaker. | 44:31 | |
I tried to contemplate more on its meanings | 44:32 | |
than I had ever done before. | 44:35 | |
I wrote lists with the little pen that they gave me, | 44:39 | |
a pen which was about two inches long, | 44:41 | |
because anything longer would have been | 44:43 | |
a potential security hazard. | 44:45 | |
List of words that I remember from every language | 44:47 | |
I've ever studied, including Hebrew and Greek and Latin | 44:49 | |
and French, lists of countries in the capital cities. | 44:52 | |
Anything that I could possibly think of | 44:59 | |
just to keep my mind awake. | 45:02 | |
Poetry, I wrote a lot of poetry in Guantanamo, | 45:04 | |
and | 45:07 | |
letters, through the Red Cross. | 45:10 | |
The Red Cross didn't see me there | 45:12 | |
until around April May, 2002. | 45:13 | |
That's because I was regarded up until that point, | 45:19 | |
a high value detainee. | 45:22 | |
And according to those rules | 45:25 | |
they could deny me access to the Red Cross, | 45:28 | |
but eventually I was given access. | 45:31 | |
Interviewer | How did you know that, | 45:34 |
if you were a high value detainee, | 45:36 | |
you could not see the Red Cross. | 45:37 | |
- | I've learned that since. | 45:39 |
I've read about what the rules state | 45:40 | |
and I was surprised to realize that that could happen. | 45:43 | |
An interesting type of thing did happen though, | 45:46 | |
is this was at the time of General Miller, | 45:48 | |
and I'd never spoken to or seen or heard of General Miller | 45:51 | |
other than once when he came in to my cell | 45:55 | |
and he reprimanded one of the soldiers | 45:57 | |
for something or the other. | 46:00 | |
And he said, "This is a really high value, | 46:01 | |
"dangerous detainee, we have here, | 46:04 | |
"son, you're on the front line, defending our nation, | 46:06 | |
"keep vigilant." | 46:09 | |
Which I thought, this guy's an idiot. | 46:13 | |
I learned later of course this the General Miller. | 46:17 | |
And I wanted to give him a few choice words, | 46:21 | |
but I wasn't sure whether he'd understand them. | 46:23 | |
That was it, that was my encounter with Miller. | 46:27 | |
Interviewer | So, you get to talk | 46:32 |
to guards at all during this time? | 46:34 | |
- | Yeah, the guards made a big difference to be honest. | 46:37 |
That's the other thing that helped me in many ways. | 46:39 | |
There were, at that point | 46:42 | |
there were no cameras in the cells. | 46:43 | |
So there was a constant rotor of guards coming in, | 46:45 | |
usually around 6:00, every day, every two hours or so. | 46:49 | |
And prior to that, it was I think, | 46:54 | |
they were running shifts, six hour shifts. | 46:55 | |
So the initial shifts was six hours. | 46:58 | |
So, for six hours you'd have a particular guard there. | 47:00 | |
And for the first few weeks, it was very difficult | 47:03 | |
because you're in a close proximity to people. | 47:06 | |
I mean, you have to use the toilet | 47:08 | |
and they're there in front of you. | 47:09 | |
It's utterly humiliating, | 47:10 | |
and | 47:13 | |
very difficult to know how to do things | 47:16 | |
and keep your dignity, | 47:19 | |
because, no matter how however they have perceived you | 47:21 | |
or wish you to be, you're a human who has dignity | 47:26 | |
despite what they've made you into, or try to. | 47:30 | |
And I think this was probably the first time | 47:37 | |
that there was such close proximity | 47:40 | |
between me and some of the soldiers. | 47:42 | |
And over time, they started learning that, | 47:44 | |
I'm just an ordinary person. | 47:49 | |
Initially, when they take me out to recreation. | 47:51 | |
And this is where you could tell | 47:54 | |
where all the apprehension was, | 47:55 | |
where all the fear was, | 47:57 | |
where all the scare mongering, manifested itself | 47:57 | |
into these soldiers reaction. | 48:01 | |
Recreation was for 15 minutes, twice a week, | 48:03 | |
and that was in a room or in a caged area, | 48:06 | |
no bigger than this room, | 48:10 | |
about 15 foot by 15 or slightly less. | 48:12 | |
And for me to be taken out into recreation | 48:15 | |
involved the calling of infantry units, | 48:19 | |
on Humvees had to patrol the area where I was in | 48:23 | |
with fixed machine guns on, soldiers, walking around. | 48:26 | |
Something that I found really funny called the MWD, | 48:30 | |
which was the Military Working Dog | 48:33 | |
which made me wanna ask them, | 48:34 | |
does the dog get holidays and so forth? | 48:37 | |
And a dog handler. | 48:39 | |
And before I was taken out of the cell again, | 48:41 | |
two soldiers making sure that I'm completely shackled, | 48:43 | |
before I'm out of the cell | 48:46 | |
and one behind me with a handgun | 48:47 | |
and I'm taken out to the cell for 15 minutes. | 48:49 | |
And it was unbelievable. | 48:54 | |
I don't think that here in the United Kingdom, | 48:58 | |
that some of the most dangerous gangland members | 49:02 | |
would be given this level of security. | 49:06 | |
I thought, my goodness, this is unbelievable! | 49:08 | |
And in a sense it made me feel, | 49:13 | |
my goodness, there's a lot of power I have here, | 49:14 | |
but at the same time, I felt, I wish people could see this. | 49:18 | |
I really wish people could see this. | 49:24 | |
But that slowly over a period of time | 49:29 | |
started debating a little bit. | 49:33 | |
And I was very conscious | 49:34 | |
of anything that I did in that recreation area. | 49:35 | |
In the beginning, I started doing press-ups | 49:38 | |
and I became a press-up expert as a lot of people do. | 49:39 | |
And they started noting it down. | 49:44 | |
They started noting those things down, | 49:46 | |
"He's doing press-ups." | 49:48 | |
So I stopped doing them | 49:50 | |
because I thought this was making it worse. | 49:51 | |
Anything that I do, that makes it look | 49:53 | |
that I'm, trying to make myself better or stronger | 49:56 | |
they're going to use against me. | 50:00 | |
Interviewer | Did you say | 50:06 |
that you think the guards feared you at first? | 50:07 | |
- | I think they were told to, yes, clearly they were, | 50:09 |
they were clearly told. | 50:11 | |
A lot of these guards were national guardsmen reservists, | 50:13 | |
part-time soldiers and young at that, | 50:17 | |
most of them were very young. | 50:21 | |
So it's very, very easy to frighten them. | 50:22 | |
They probably had been briefed beforehand. | 50:24 | |
This is a very special mission, | 50:27 | |
this is not on the main blocks, this is Camp Echo. | 50:28 | |
Only a very small amount of people | 50:31 | |
deal with high-value detainees. | 50:33 | |
So if somebody is high value, he's gotta be dangerous. | 50:34 | |
And these guys are bought up on Hollywood movies, | 50:37 | |
not on the real world. | 50:39 | |
And as far as they were concerned, | 50:41 | |
they told me afterwards as time went on, | 50:44 | |
over months and months and months, you get to know people. | 50:46 | |
And they realized that they bought the hype | 50:48 | |
and it was rubbish. | 50:51 | |
But they start telling you, | 50:52 | |
so one of them told me I was expecting you | 50:54 | |
to be like Dr. Lecter. | 50:56 | |
No, seriously. | 50:58 | |
"I was told not to engage in any conversation with you | 50:59 | |
"because you're a manipulator | 51:02 | |
"and you can twist people's minds | 51:04 | |
"into getting them to do things for you. | 51:05 | |
"That you may be small, but you're really powerful. | 51:10 | |
"That you're really strong, you're a martial arts expert. | 51:13 | |
"You're a language expert." | 51:15 | |
Everything that I'd ever done in my life, | 51:17 | |
they had made into an expert. | 51:18 | |
'Cause I've done an O-level in Arabic, | 51:21 | |
I'm an Arabic expert | 51:23 | |
because I did TaeKwonDo and got to a green belt, | 51:24 | |
I'm a TaeKwonDo expert. | 51:27 | |
And everything is inflated and exaggerated | 51:29 | |
to the point of creating this antihero. | 51:32 | |
Interviewer | Did you say that there were no cameras | 51:37 |
in your cell at the beginning? | 51:39 | |
- | Not at the beginning. | 51:40 |
I think it was close to about 18 months later. | 51:41 | |
They put in cameras. | 51:44 | |
Interviewer | Isn't that odd, | 51:45 |
because I thought there were always cameras in all these. | 51:46 | |
- | If there were cameras, they were concealed | 51:49 |
but these are visible cameras | 51:51 | |
that monitor your every movement, | 51:53 | |
and you know that they're monitoring your movements, yeah. | 51:54 | |
Interviewer | Was the light on all day night | 51:58 |
or did you have? | 52:00 | |
- | Yes, it was on | |
all day and night, yeah. | 52:01 | |
They turn it down slightly at night | 52:02 | |
but it was on all day and night. | 52:03 | |
Interviewer | Can you describe how a day went? | 52:05 |
It sounds like not much happened | 52:08 | |
but I just would like to do that. | 52:09 | |
- | The cell is about eight foot by six foot. | 52:12 |
It's impossible to take | 52:14 | |
more than three steps in either direction. | 52:15 | |
If you wanna take a walk, it's up and down | 52:18 | |
and up and down and up and down, that's it. | 52:20 | |
That's what taking a walk is, | 52:21 | |
which is what I did very often. | 52:22 | |
I do that sometimes now, subconsciously | 52:24 | |
without realizing that I'm only taking three steps. | 52:26 | |
The day begins with, | 52:31 | |
for me as a Muslim, the prayer, the morning prayer. | 52:33 | |
It's followed shortly after | 52:39 | |
with breakfast, which is something quite nasty usually, | 52:42 | |
but you either eat or you're don't, | 52:50 | |
that's the choice that you have. | 52:51 | |
And then not much else. | 52:54 | |
There's a recreation period. | 52:55 | |
It began with 15 minutes, twice a week. | 52:57 | |
It increased then to half an hour, a day as time went on, | 52:59 | |
as we have to look forward | 53:02 | |
to that either in the evening or the afternoon | 53:03 | |
or the morning | 53:05 | |
and not much else. | 53:09 | |
I read the Quran, try to memorize as much as possible | 53:11 | |
and look forward to certain soldiers coming in. | 53:16 | |
I mean, that was probably the extent | 53:19 | |
of it, is so-and-so going to come in today | 53:21 | |
so that I can have some human contact, get some empathy. | 53:24 | |
And even a little bit of news | 53:31 | |
of what's happening in the outside world? | 53:33 | |
Because I wasn't allowed any information. | 53:34 | |
And some of them would tell me what's going on. | 53:37 | |
Interviewer | And what happened at the interrogations | 53:40 |
during this time? | 53:42 | |
- | The interrogations became less adversarial, | 53:44 |
but only because, | 53:48 | |
the same two FBI agents who had threatened me with Egypt, | 53:51 | |
who had threatened my family and so forth. | 53:55 | |
They came to Guantanamo, I think a day or two late, | 53:58 | |
a day or two later after I'd arrived. | 54:01 | |
So I was still recovering | 54:03 | |
from the sedatives that I had taken, and they'd arrived. | 54:07 | |
And when I saw them again I was frightened | 54:09 | |
because I felt that these guys were, | 54:11 | |
they were pushing for something. | 54:15 | |
They wanted me to agree to become a witness | 54:16 | |
against anything they wanted. | 54:21 | |
So, they said that, "You become the witness | 54:23 | |
"you become a cooperating witness with us and you'll be free | 54:25 | |
"or you'll be put into a Witness Protection Program." | 54:30 | |
I said, well, surely I have to have had done something | 54:33 | |
or been involved in something or have knowledge | 54:37 | |
of something, for me to be put into that. | 54:39 | |
And they said, "No, we just want you | 54:42 | |
"to be a cooperating witness in anything that we say." | 54:43 | |
And, | 54:47 | |
they brought over a statement that they had prepared. | 54:50 | |
And this was in Camp Echo, there was nobody around. | 54:56 | |
They asked the guards to leave the room and they said, | 54:57 | |
"We'd like you to look at this and sign it." | 55:00 | |
And I looked at it | 55:03 | |
and there were all sorts of things in there. | 55:04 | |
And every little paragraph had Al-Qaeda in it. | 55:07 | |
It was, | 55:11 | |
"You have a car | 55:13 | |
"and your car is, | 55:15 | |
"an Audi 80, Al-Qaeda." | 55:18 | |
It was that ridiculous that they had, | 55:21 | |
it was almost we have to put the word Al-Qaeda in there, | 55:23 | |
the repetition of the lie, how often it is | 55:26 | |
it'll make it believable | 55:28 | |
that there was that Maxine that they were using. | 55:30 | |
So I crossed that out many times, | 55:33 | |
and I guess that they must have some sort | 55:36 | |
of printer or something in the car, that they came in | 55:37 | |
because there was none of the buildings around there. | 55:40 | |
So they went out, reprinted out again | 55:42 | |
bought it back, slightly amended. | 55:44 | |
And then I said, I need to do something, | 55:49 | |
because they said, "If you don't cooperate with us, | 55:51 | |
"you'll be here for decades on end. | 55:54 | |
"And there is an execution chamber here. | 55:57 | |
"And we have seen it, and you could be executed." | 55:59 | |
And these are the same guys that made the threats to me, | 56:05 | |
I knew they weren't empty. | 56:08 | |
And I said, okay, if I go, if I cooperate with you, | 56:11 | |
if I agree, will I go to court? | 56:14 | |
And they said, "Yeah, you'll go to court." | 56:17 | |
And I thought to myself, | 56:19 | |
well, surely any route to court has to be a good one | 56:20 | |
in this circumstance. | 56:22 | |
So I said, okay, I need to pray, I need to make a prayer | 56:24 | |
which is in Arabic called istikhara | 56:26 | |
which is asking for the good, wherever it is. | 56:28 | |
And I made this prayer, | 56:31 | |
and then I came back and I said, okay, I'll sign it. | 56:32 | |
And I signed it, in the hope and knowledge | 56:33 | |
that these confessions will get me to court, | 56:38 | |
and in court, it's going to be thrown out. | 56:41 | |
And then from that point onwards | 56:46 | |
things became less adversarial, | 56:48 | |
there was less interrogation. | 56:49 | |
But that was. | 56:55 | |
Interviewer | Did they ever ask you | 56:57 |
to actually spy on other people? | 56:58 | |
- | The CIA did once, yes. | 57:02 |
Yeah, they did. | 57:03 | |
Interviewer | In Kandahar or in Bagram? | 57:04 |
- | In Bagram they said that, "If you become a spy for us | 57:06 |
"we will stage your breakout." | 57:15 | |
I mean, they actually said, that. | 57:16 | |
"We'll stage your breakout from Bagram, | 57:17 | |
"you will report to XYZ. | 57:21 | |
"You'll have a handler." | 57:24 | |
And God knows what else. | 57:25 | |
It sounded to me like something out of a movie, | 57:27 | |
but they also said, if you run, there's no corner on earth | 57:29 | |
that we will never be able to find you. | 57:31 | |
And I was seriously thinking you know what, | 57:34 | |
Iran, North Korea, Cuba? | 57:38 | |
But yeah, they said all these things to me, | 57:42 | |
and eventually it didn't transpire, it didn't happen. | 57:44 | |
I think they didn't trust me. | 57:47 | |
And I'm glad because, I don't think that's a route | 57:48 | |
that I wanted to take. | 57:50 | |
I think I bought a spike. | 57:52 | |
Interviewer | And as things eased up | 57:56 |
from the interrogators in Guantanamo, | 57:58 | |
were you permitted to see the Red Cross | 58:00 | |
more frequently or you had (indistinct)? | 58:04 | |
- | No, the Red Cross visits were fixed. | 58:05 |
So they would come up at a certain time. | 58:08 | |
And when they came, I'd be asked or told | 58:11 | |
the Red Cross is here | 58:13 | |
I don't think I ever refused to see them. | 58:14 | |
Interviewer | Did they assist you? | 58:15 |
- | The Red Cross, I told them that you are | 58:18 |
the only thing that you do in my life, | 58:20 | |
is that you 're a glorified postman, | 58:21 | |
that's all that you can do. | 58:23 | |
You've not done anything else that I can see | 58:24 | |
to change the situation here. | 58:28 | |
And they said that, "We are doing work behind the scenes." | 58:29 | |
And so forth, and they'd bring biscuits | 58:32 | |
or cookies as you call them sometimes. | 58:35 | |
And a drink, that's it. | 58:39 | |
But the thing that I wanted from the mostly | 58:42 | |
was communication with my family, | 58:44 | |
which even that they were unable to control properly, | 58:47 | |
because they had to pass it through the census. | 58:50 | |
And the census would heavily redact letters | 58:55 | |
even from a child, from a six-year-old. | 58:59 | |
I remember when there was one letter she'd written, | 59:02 | |
my daughter, in response to something that I had said. | 59:06 | |
I'd written one, two, three, four, five | 59:09 | |
once I caught a fish alive. | 59:10 | |
So she responded six to eight months later, | 59:12 | |
it comes back, through that system, | 59:14 | |
six, seven, eight, nine, 10. | 59:16 | |
Then I let it go again. | 59:17 | |
But I couldn't see that, because they'd blacked it out. | 59:18 | |
And the reason why they blacked it out | 59:21 | |
because some, | 59:22 | |
jobs worth probably looked at these words | 59:25 | |
and letters and thoughts, all the words, | 59:27 | |
"Then I let it go again." | 59:29 | |
She's giving him some secret code about how to get out. | 59:30 | |
And only when I returned and show the letters | 59:34 | |
asked her, is that what you wrote? | 59:36 | |
She said, yeah. | 59:38 | |
Interviewer | And did the British delegation | 59:40 |
come to see you while you were in Guantanamo? | 59:41 | |
- | Yeah, eventually the British came, | 59:43 |
again, the British intelligence came over a period of time | 59:46 | |
but also British foreign office officials came | 59:50 | |
with the intelligence. | 59:52 | |
They had initially told me, although they deny this now, | 59:54 | |
but they showed me in writing | 59:57 | |
that the British government had agreed | 59:58 | |
to the military commissions process. | 1:00:00 | |
And had agreed that I would be one of the first people | 1:00:02 | |
to be prosecuted through it. | 1:00:04 | |
So now the British government won't actually say that, | 1:00:06 | |
they won't accept that we were part of something | 1:00:08 | |
that the government has recognized as illegal. | 1:00:11 | |
But at the time they have said | 1:00:15 | |
due to based upon negotiations between the UK | 1:00:17 | |
and the US government, that my prosecution | 1:00:20 | |
through that process was going to be accepted. | 1:00:23 | |
Interviewer | Did they give you any comfort otherwise? | 1:00:26 |
- | Well, they put in a magazine or two, | 1:00:32 |
but no, no no. | 1:00:35 | |
Interviewer | They basically said | 1:00:40 |
you're gonna be prosecuted, that's pretty much. | 1:00:41 | |
- | Initially, yeah. | 1:00:42 |
Initially they did, yeah. | 1:00:43 | |
It changed after a period of time. | 1:00:45 | |
And afterwards they said that we've asked | 1:00:46 | |
for either a fair trial or that you'd be repatriated. | 1:00:47 | |
That changed that. | 1:00:51 | |
But initially, that's what they said clearly. | 1:00:52 | |
I think I was one of the first people, first six | 1:00:56 | |
to be designated for trial by military Commission. | 1:01:00 | |
That's the reason why I was in solitary confinement | 1:01:02 | |
and kept away from other people. | 1:01:09 | |
Interviewer | And do you think the others around there | 1:01:11 |
who you identified who were also there | 1:01:12 | |
they were the other four or five | 1:01:15 | |
that were gonna be | 1:01:16 | |
repatriated? | 1:01:17 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, | |
I think that was the common factor. | 1:01:18 | |
Interviewer | And did you ever have access | 1:01:20 |
to a lawyer while you were there? | 1:01:21 | |
- | At the end of my time after the Supreme court decision | 1:01:25 |
in Russell vs Bush in 2004, | 1:01:28 | |
August, September | 1:01:33 | |
then first it was Gita Gutierrez, | 1:01:35 | |
who works for the Center for Constitutional Rights. | 1:01:37 | |
She was the first non-military lawyer who was given access | 1:01:39 | |
to Guantanamo, and she came to me, | 1:01:42 | |
and after her it was Clive Stafford Smith. | 1:01:44 | |
Interviewer | And did she know you | 1:01:49 |
were gonna be prosecuted in a military tribunal? | 1:01:50 | |
- | Yes. | 1:01:52 |
Although by that time the discussions were taking place | 1:01:54 | |
and it started taking a different route altogether | 1:01:56 | |
that the likelihood of my prosecution | 1:01:59 | |
was not going to manifest itself. | 1:02:00 | |
Interviewer | Because? | 1:02:03 |
- | I think because the pressure that had been mounted | 1:02:06 |
on the British government, | 1:02:08 | |
by my father mounting a campaign with Amnesty International | 1:02:10 | |
with many other organizations, individuals, | 1:02:13 | |
that this was going to be a kangaroo court. | 1:02:15 | |
No one's going to accept this. | 1:02:19 | |
You can't accept this as a mode of prosecution | 1:02:20 | |
for British citizens, | 1:02:23 | |
a place where there's going to be hearsay | 1:02:26 | |
where there's no witnesses, where there's no jury, | 1:02:28 | |
where there's, everything's stacked against you. | 1:02:31 | |
And it's simply unfair. | 1:02:34 | |
Interviewer | Wait, were you Gita's first client? | 1:02:39 |
Which was that when she first came to Guantanamo? | 1:02:41 | |
- | I believe I was Gita's first client, yes. | 1:02:43 |
Interviewer | And how does she know about you? | 1:02:45 |
How did it happen that she could represent you? | 1:02:47 | |
- | Well, this was really interesting because I remember, | 1:02:49 |
when the Supreme court decision was passed | 1:02:51 | |
there was no official information given to us | 1:02:54 | |
about this case, which said that we had rights, | 1:02:56 | |
we had legal rights | 1:02:59 | |
or at least the right of having a lawyer, | 1:03:01 | |
who can argue, for habeas rights in the US. | 1:03:04 | |
And eventually what I was told, | 1:03:10 | |
I was told that, | 1:03:13 | |
"You need to try to get access to a lawyer." | 1:03:14 | |
I said, well, how the hell do I do that here? | 1:03:18 | |
Where, I don't have to have a phone, | 1:03:19 | |
phone call privileges. | 1:03:22 | |
And they said, "Well that's something | 1:03:23 | |
"your family would have to do." | 1:03:25 | |
Well, what if my family don't know now? | 1:03:26 | |
Thankfully, my family are British, | 1:03:28 | |
so the communication system was easy | 1:03:29 | |
but what about an Afghan villager or Mauritanian or Yemeni? | 1:03:32 | |
So clearly it was, who you happen to be, | 1:03:36 | |
where you happened to be from was an advantage. | 1:03:40 | |
Eventually I think my family and my wife | 1:03:43 | |
did a next friend application for habeas, | 1:03:45 | |
for the lawyers to come in, | 1:03:48 | |
and then for me to say, okay I agree with you, | 1:03:49 | |
to act on my behalf. | 1:03:52 | |
And then they began that process. | 1:03:56 | |
They weren't going to the courts. | 1:03:58 | |
Court was not going to happen. | 1:03:59 | |
It was going to be the court of public opinion, | 1:04:01 | |
and that's where they. | 1:04:02 | |
Interviewer | Did you have a CSRT hearing? | 1:04:03 |
- | I did have a CSRT hearing, but I didn't attend it. | 1:04:06 |
I wrote a rebuttal to what was known | 1:04:10 | |
as the unfair classified portion | 1:04:13 | |
of the CSRT, the allegations. | 1:04:16 | |
But by the time the CSRT hearing was gonna take place, | 1:04:20 | |
I refused to go because I didn't realize | 1:04:23 | |
that this is just another justification method | 1:04:26 | |
to keep you incarcerated. | 1:04:30 | |
Interviewer | Did you ever see doctors while you were | 1:04:35 |
in that two-year of isolation? | 1:04:37 | |
- | Yeah, I saw doctors for the first couple of months, | 1:04:39 |
almost every couple of days. | 1:04:42 | |
It was bizarre, it was bizarre, | 1:04:44 | |
particularly in Guantanamo Bay | 1:04:47 | |
or from the day that I arrived, | 1:04:48 | |
until I think the first either Red Cross visits | 1:04:50 | |
or the first British Consular visits. | 1:04:55 | |
I don't understand why they were seeing me every day, | 1:05:00 | |
but, | 1:05:02 | |
they certainly were. | 1:05:07 | |
Interviewer | What were they doing? | 1:05:08 |
- | Examining me, regularly. | 1:05:09 |
Checking my blood, checking my pulse, | 1:05:12 | |
doing general medical checks. | 1:05:19 | |
And I couldn't understand what the reason for it was, | 1:05:19 | |
I still don't understand. | 1:05:21 | |
Other than, | 1:05:23 | |
and they'd given me different types of medications, | 1:05:26 | |
I had no clue what they were injected me several times | 1:05:28 | |
with something or the other. | 1:05:30 | |
And they said they were hepatitis B | 1:05:31 | |
and tetanus injections and so forth. | 1:05:35 | |
But I have no idea what they were, | 1:05:36 | |
there was no consent forms or there was nothing | 1:05:38 | |
Interviewer | They gave you oral pills as well? | 1:05:41 |
- | Yeah, several times, yeah. | 1:05:44 |
They gave me pills, I remember, I hallucinated | 1:05:45 | |
from some of them, | 1:05:49 | |
serious hallucinations that I've never had. | 1:05:51 | |
I've never had those sorts of things. | 1:05:53 | |
Interviewer | And they said Malaria pills? | 1:05:54 |
- | No, no, no. | 1:05:56 |
Interviewer | They said, when you asked them, | 1:06:00 |
they would not acknowledge what kind of medication | 1:06:01 | |
you were getting. | 1:06:04 | |
Interviewer | They would know, they'd say | 1:06:05 |
that this is, for example, as I said, hepatitis and so for, | 1:06:06 | |
they would say that that's what it's for. | 1:06:09 | |
But I have no way of knowing it, | 1:06:10 | |
there was no way for me to know it. | 1:06:12 | |
And as I said, there were no consent forms, | 1:06:14 | |
you were simply gonna have it. | 1:06:17 | |
If you don't have it, you'll be forced to have it. | 1:06:18 | |
Interviewer | Did they consider about your reactions | 1:06:20 |
when you were hallucinating, were they concerned about that? | 1:06:22 | |
- | No, I don't think so, I don't think they were, | 1:06:25 |
I think, well the soldiers that were there, | 1:06:29 | |
who were in charge of the monitoring of staff | 1:06:32 | |
found it humorous, | 1:06:33 | |
but I don't know who else was monitoring it. | 1:06:36 | |
But the strangest thing, as I said, | 1:06:41 | |
was the regular attendance of doctors. | 1:06:42 | |
I couldn't figure out how they could spare doctors | 1:06:44 | |
so much to come over to see me, out of hundreds of people | 1:06:49 | |
so regularly, I didn't understand that. | 1:06:52 | |
Interviewer | With different doctors every time? | 1:06:55 |
- | No, no, there were two or three fixed doctors. | 1:06:57 |
Interviewer | And did you ever ask to see a doctor | 1:07:04 |
for some purpose and did they respond then? | 1:07:07 | |
- | They did, yes, they did when it happened, | 1:07:10 |
I mean it was rear that I did so. | 1:07:12 | |
I don't know, on the occasion | 1:07:16 | |
that I didn't ask for a doctor, and this was a psychiatrist, | 1:07:17 | |
I asked for human contact with other people, | 1:07:20 | |
they sent me a psychiatrist, | 1:07:23 | |
and this was on a couple occasions | 1:07:24 | |
when I'd lost my mind, | 1:07:26 | |
banged my head against the wall, | 1:07:33 | |
kicked and screamed just because of the being incarcerated | 1:07:33 | |
for so long, and not knowing | 1:07:36 | |
when I'm gonna get out of this place, | 1:07:37 | |
and everything building up. | 1:07:39 | |
I think it was an anxiety attack, more than anything else. | 1:07:43 | |
And they sent in psychiatrists. | 1:07:46 | |
And I remember the first psychiatrist, | 1:07:49 | |
not the one that I've mentioned earlier on, | 1:07:52 | |
the one who who said that she was very upset | 1:07:53 | |
about Guantanamo, but this one in particular came along | 1:07:57 | |
and she sat on the opposite side of my cell, | 1:07:59 | |
and she said, "Have you thought about hurting yourself?" | 1:08:01 | |
I said, no, | 1:08:04 | |
not in the way that you're suggesting. | 1:08:08 | |
And then she said, "Have you thought | 1:08:12 | |
"about removing your trousers, | 1:08:13 | |
"threading your trousers with a sheet | 1:08:16 | |
"putting the crotch part around your neck | 1:08:19 | |
"so you can make a strong noose | 1:08:21 | |
"and then tying it to the top corner of your cell | 1:08:23 | |
"and jumping off to commit suicide?" | 1:08:25 | |
I said, no, not until you put that thought in my mind. | 1:08:30 | |
And I couldn't understand why she told me that. | 1:08:35 | |
But what I have learned since that time was that five people | 1:08:38 | |
in Guantanamo have died almost identically from that method. | 1:08:40 | |
Interviewer | What year did she tell you this? | 1:08:45 |
- | 2004. | 1:08:47 |
Interviewer | Did you see her more than once? | 1:08:50 |
- | No, I never saw her again. | 1:08:52 |
Interviewer | Did she prescribe any medication for you? | 1:08:54 |
- | I think she may have, yeah, the same medication I told you | 1:08:56 |
that I hallucinated with. | 1:08:59 | |
Interviewer | There's something called the mental block, | 1:09:02 |
in Guantanamo, did you know about that? | 1:09:04 | |
And were you ever send there? | 1:09:06 | |
- | Yeah, the MSU, I think they call it. | 1:09:07 |
No, I wasn't sent there, but I was told about people there, | 1:09:10 | |
and this other psychiatrist who I thought was more decent | 1:09:13 | |
told me that she'd seen people, who lost their minds | 1:09:18 | |
or lost touch with reality in these blocks. | 1:09:21 | |
Interviewer | The other psychiatrist who you met, | 1:09:26 |
can you tell us how that happened? | 1:09:28 | |
- | Yeah, I think she just came along. | 1:09:30 |
I think what happened by this time | 1:09:32 | |
I had made so many requests for human contact | 1:09:34 | |
with other people, I had asked to see the prison chaplain, | 1:09:37 | |
at the time it would have been somebody called Jamesy, | 1:09:43 | |
who I've met since my return, | 1:09:46 | |
but I hadn't met him over there | 1:09:48 | |
because he wasn't allowed to come to see me, | 1:09:49 | |
even though he had asked and I've since spoken to him. | 1:09:51 | |
He wasn't allowed to come to see me. | 1:09:54 | |
I think there are all sorts of things taking place | 1:09:57 | |
in the UK at the time, about my psychiatric state of mind, | 1:09:59 | |
my psychological state of mind. | 1:10:04 | |
And I think to preempt that, | 1:10:05 | |
because of all what was being said in the media, | 1:10:09 | |
they decided that I would have regular consultation sessions | 1:10:12 | |
with a psychiatrist, | 1:10:15 | |
which didn't, it was just somebody to talk to | 1:10:18 | |
but I wanted to be put in the blocks with other prisoners. | 1:10:20 | |
Interviewer | Why didn't they let you see | 1:10:24 |
the Jamesy or any? | 1:10:26 | |
- | I think my access to anybody | 1:10:29 |
outside of the interrogation process, | 1:10:33 | |
and the people designed to guard me | 1:10:37 | |
was severely limited, because of three reasons. | 1:10:40 | |
One is, I was designated for trial by military commission, | 1:10:42 | |
and that, that meant no contact with other people. | 1:10:45 | |
Two, is I had witnessed what I believe | 1:10:49 | |
was two murders in Bagram. | 1:10:51 | |
One was an escape attempt | 1:10:54 | |
where somebody was physically beaten, | 1:10:56 | |
and I believe he was beaten to death. | 1:10:57 | |
And the other is Dilawar the taxi driver. | 1:10:59 | |
And I had made it known to the US authorities | 1:11:01 | |
in Bagram, when I'd asked for pen and paper, | 1:11:06 | |
I wrote down that I witnessed two deaths | 1:11:08 | |
and that I will hold the US accounted for this. | 1:11:10 | |
And I will never forget. | 1:11:13 | |
And I believe they didn't want me to | 1:11:15 | |
give this information to other prisoners. | 1:11:20 | |
And the third thing I think is because I'm multi-lingual | 1:11:21 | |
that they would have felt | 1:11:23 | |
that it's best to keep this guy away from other people | 1:11:24 | |
because he can disseminate information and so forth. | 1:11:28 | |
- | Did they ever say to you during the interrogations | 1:11:31 |
that they knew, they reminded you | 1:11:34 | |
that you had written that, | 1:11:36 | |
saying that you would hold them accountable | 1:11:37 | |
for those two deaths? | 1:11:39 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, they did. | 1:11:40 |
Yes, they did. | 1:11:41 | |
And I made it known to the British, | 1:11:42 | |
I made it known to everybody that I'd seen this. | 1:11:44 | |
And there was just either refusal to comment | 1:11:46 | |
or denial or both, which is strange now, | 1:11:49 | |
because everybody accepts that those deaths took place. | 1:11:52 | |
Everybody knows they happened. | 1:11:55 | |
And I remember in Camp Echo | 1:12:00 | |
the only interrogation I ever had | 1:12:03 | |
which wasn't about me per se, was when they bought in. | 1:12:05 | |
I think there were people from the what they call the CID, | 1:12:10 | |
Criminal Investigation Department. | 1:12:13 | |
They brought in photographs of people, | 1:12:15 | |
of American soldiers. | 1:12:18 | |
- | To you? | 1:12:20 |
- | To me, yeah. | |
- | And photographs of Dilawar, his body | 1:12:22 |
before and after he died. | 1:12:26 | |
And they asked me to describe the circumstances | 1:12:29 | |
in which I'd seen him beaten. | 1:12:31 | |
And they are the ones who informed me about his death. | 1:12:35 | |
Because up until this point | 1:12:36 | |
I didn't know whether he was dead. | 1:12:37 | |
I had assumed and heard rumors | 1:12:39 | |
but they are the ones who showed me | 1:12:40 | |
with the picture that he was dead, | 1:12:42 | |
and asked me to point out the soldiers | 1:12:44 | |
who I think are responsible and present, which I did. | 1:12:46 | |
Interviewer | Do you know what happened to those soldiers? | 1:12:49 |
- | I've seen what happened to them | 1:12:53 |
on the Taxi to the Dark Side film, | 1:12:54 | |
and there's Willie Brand and some of the other guys, | 1:12:55 | |
nothing much happened to them, really. | 1:13:00 | |
Some of them had a dishonorable discharge. | 1:13:01 | |
Interviewer | And when you asked for human contact | 1:13:07 |
how did the different people respond? | 1:13:08 | |
All the different kinds of people you spoke to? | 1:13:11 | |
- | I think the common response was, | 1:13:14 |
"Send him a psychiatrist." | 1:13:16 | |
Which I found really ridiculous. | 1:13:20 | |
Somebody's asking for human contact, we are human beings. | 1:13:22 | |
You send him a psychiatrist. | 1:13:26 | |
But I wanted to be put onto the blocks. | 1:13:28 | |
I didn't want to be in an isolation cell. | 1:13:30 | |
And somebody come along | 1:13:33 | |
and I am a normal, ordinary human being. | 1:13:35 | |
I've never required to see a psychiatrist now. | 1:13:38 | |
So why do I have to see one now | 1:13:40 | |
and the military one at that, who regards me as the enemy? | 1:13:43 | |
I wanna see other people that you regard as the enemy | 1:13:46 | |
because at least we have that in common. | 1:13:48 | |
Interviewer | Did you ever go on a hunger strike? | 1:13:52 |
- | I did in Bagram, yeah, but not in Guantanamo. | 1:13:54 |
Interviewer | Was there a reason why you didn't? | 1:13:57 |
- | I don't know. | 1:14:03 |
I guess it never occurred to me that it was happening. | 1:14:04 | |
I think that's maybe another reason- | 1:14:06 | |
Interviewer | You didn't know other people. | 1:14:07 |
- | No, I didn't know about the hunger strikes. | 1:14:08 |
I don't think anybody in Camp Echo | 1:14:09 | |
knew about the hunger strikes, | 1:14:11 | |
If they had been there from the beginning, | 1:14:12 | |
if there were people who bought there subsequently | 1:14:14 | |
then perhaps yes, but I did in Bagram, | 1:14:16 | |
And that was because | 1:14:20 | |
of their refusal to give us ample drinking water. | 1:14:21 | |
It was, one, 500 milliliter bottle a day. | 1:14:25 | |
And I said, well, if that's the case, | 1:14:32 | |
I'm not going to eat anything. | 1:14:32 | |
They isolated me in a cell for a couple of days, that's it. | 1:14:34 | |
Interviewer | When I ask people what the worst experience | 1:14:41 |
they had in Guantanamo, with you | 1:14:43 | |
it was just pretty much one experience, | 1:14:44 | |
the isolation for all that time. | 1:14:46 | |
Is that how you would describe it or? | 1:14:48 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, of course. | 1:14:50 |
And I compare it to Bagram, you see | 1:14:52 | |
because if I'd been taken directly to Guantanamo, | 1:14:54 | |
I'm sure my experiences would have been different. | 1:14:57 | |
But the Bagram experience | 1:14:59 | |
was enough as I said before, for me to look forward | 1:15:06 | |
to going to Guantanamo. | 1:15:09 | |
So my recollection and my experience of Guantanamo | 1:15:10 | |
is relatively tame in comparison | 1:15:13 | |
to Bagram and Kandahar. | 1:15:16 | |
Interviewer | If you hadn't seen those two men killed, | 1:15:20 |
do you think you still would've been put in isolation? | 1:15:22 | |
- | I don't know. | 1:15:26 |
I mean, I suppose the logical answer is that, | 1:15:27 | |
yes, I probably would have been | 1:15:29 | |
because there was still the issue of designation | 1:15:31 | |
of trial by military commission, | 1:15:35 | |
and the other people who were in isolation, | 1:15:37 | |
were also, | 1:15:39 | |
I don't think they had seen deaths | 1:15:41 | |
but they were still in isolation. | 1:15:42 | |
Interviewer | Did you ever see a dentist | 1:15:45 |
while you were in Guantanamo? | 1:15:46 | |
- | Yeah, I did actually. | 1:15:48 |
The first time in my life, I've seen a dentist. | 1:15:51 | |
I've never been to a dentist before ever, | 1:15:52 | |
except in Guantanamo, it was the first time. | 1:15:55 | |
Interviewer | Why did you see a dentist in Guantanamo? | 1:15:57 |
- | 'Cause the pain I had in my teeth, | 1:16:00 |
it's funny because I still, I need to go see a dentist now. | 1:16:03 | |
But I have two fillings in my teeth. | 1:16:07 | |
Both of which from Guantanamo. | 1:16:09 | |
Interviewer | You had cavities there | 1:16:14 |
and they filled them in. | 1:16:16 | |
How was that treatment? | 1:16:19 | |
- | It was surreal, because when I was taken down | 1:16:22 |
to the hospital detaining hospital, | 1:16:25 | |
at any given time, I was shackled to the cot, | 1:16:28 | |
legs and arms shackled to it. | 1:16:32 | |
And when I was taken into the dentist chair, | 1:16:33 | |
I was shackled to the dentist chair | 1:16:40 | |
and then, with a dentist coming along with a drill | 1:16:43 | |
and all those, you can imagine what comes in your mind, | 1:16:45 | |
is it safe? | 1:16:48 | |
But yeah, it was, | 1:16:53 | |
the fact that they performed these things | 1:16:57 | |
while I'm shackled to a chair, tied to it | 1:17:00 | |
and carrying on businesses as if it's normal, | 1:17:04 | |
was unbelievable. | 1:17:06 | |
Interviewer | Were you able to observe anything | 1:17:08 |
while you were there? | 1:17:09 | |
Talk to other people, at least in the medical clinic? | 1:17:11 | |
- | A little bit, a little bit. | 1:17:15 |
I think people were surprised. | 1:17:16 | |
They were surprised to hear my accent. | 1:17:17 | |
They were surprised to hear what I had to say. | 1:17:21 | |
Just in passing. | 1:17:24 | |
I mean, there was no detail. | 1:17:25 | |
There wasn't any detail that we'd speak about | 1:17:26 | |
but I think they were surprised, very surprised, | 1:17:28 | |
but their response would be pretty, | 1:17:32 | |
pretty communicative, | 1:17:37 | |
if I did speak to them. | 1:17:39 | |
Interviewer | I mean, it sounds like many people | 1:17:42 |
in Guantanamo didn't know you existed. | 1:17:45 | |
You were just hidden away, am I correct in saying that? | 1:17:47 | |
- | Yeah, to the point that many former prisoners | 1:17:51 |
don't know that I was, | 1:17:53 | |
or if they do, they'd heard of me only. | 1:17:54 | |
They didn't know who I was, have not seen me. | 1:17:56 | |
It's funny because recently now, | 1:17:58 | |
the guys who were sent, | 1:18:00 | |
the Uighers who were sent to Bermuda called me a few times. | 1:18:01 | |
They know the work that I'm doing and so forth | 1:18:04 | |
but they don't know who I am. | 1:18:06 | |
They have no idea who I am, other than I was in Guantanamo, | 1:18:08 | |
and was in isolation, and several people like that. | 1:18:11 | |
Interviewer | Could you describe what happened | 1:18:16 |
when you finally got a little relief and you said things, | 1:18:17 | |
started opening up a little bit for you? | 1:18:21 | |
You said you were moved to another sub block | 1:18:24 | |
or what happened? | 1:18:27 | |
- | Yeah, well, the lawyers came | 1:18:28 |
eventually Gita came in and Clive Stafford Smith | 1:18:30 | |
and I was put onto the blocks | 1:18:34 | |
and in the blocks I was next to on one side, | 1:18:37 | |
Salim Hamdan. | 1:18:41 | |
- | Which block, which camp? | 1:18:43 |
- | This was Camp Delta, | |
it was Camp three, Papa block. | 1:18:47 | |
Feroz Abbassi, the other British prisoner, | 1:18:50 | |
Ali Hamza Bahlul, the self-declared Al-Qaida guy, | 1:18:55 | |
David Hicks and another Sudanese man. | 1:18:59 | |
Interviewer | All of you were that close together? | 1:19:04 |
- | Yeah, we were all pretty close. | 1:19:06 |
About two or three cells away from one another. | 1:19:07 | |
Interviewer | In what month and year was that? | 1:19:09 |
- | I think this was around October, 2004. | 1:19:11 |
It was a couple of a few months before I was released. | 1:19:16 | |
Interviewer | And how was that for you? | 1:19:19 |
A huge relief, an immense relief. | 1:19:21 | |
I remember my first reaction was that these cells | 1:19:26 | |
are smaller than myself only by an inch or two, | 1:19:28 | |
but you can work out that difference. | 1:19:32 | |
But the very fact that they had recreation yards here | 1:19:36 | |
that were bigger. | 1:19:39 | |
You could talk to other people, you could feel the wind | 1:19:41 | |
you could see the sun, you can see animals | 1:19:46 | |
you can see insects, even if they're frightening insects | 1:19:47 | |
at least there are other creatures. | 1:19:50 | |
You can hear the call to prayer | 1:19:54 | |
being called by other people. | 1:19:57 | |
You can hear the sounds of the razor wire | 1:20:00 | |
rubbing against the bulb wire, | 1:20:03 | |
which sounds like a wind chime. | 1:20:05 | |
You can feel the sea, | 1:20:10 | |
you can feel freedom almost. | 1:20:13 | |
And it's really bizarre, | 1:20:15 | |
because at least you can feel that wind. | 1:20:16 | |
So it was good, and it was the month of Ramadan | 1:20:19 | |
and Ramadan for us, I had spent three Ramadans | 1:20:21 | |
prior to this in solitary confinement, | 1:20:26 | |
in one way or another or in Bagram. | 1:20:29 | |
So this time being amongst people was amazing, | 1:20:33 | |
because then the prayers | 1:20:36 | |
even though we couldn't physically be in congregation | 1:20:37 | |
we were benefiting from one another's recitation | 1:20:39 | |
of the Quran, from exaltations | 1:20:43 | |
to be kind to one another, to pass the salaam, | 1:20:49 | |
to say Bon Appetit at the time of dinner | 1:20:51 | |
and all those sorts of things | 1:20:54 | |
that are part of Muslim culture and custom, | 1:20:55 | |
which I had almost forgotten to be honest. | 1:20:58 | |
So that was extremely, it was a great moral boost. | 1:21:03 | |
Interviewer | And there were no restrictions | 1:21:07 |
on your talking to other people in your cells? | 1:21:09 | |
- | I think they couldn't stop us even if they wanted to, | 1:21:11 |
and we weren't allowed to shout across from block to block. | 1:21:14 | |
They couldn't stop us, we don't really care. | 1:21:16 | |
I did see on occasion the right squad as they call them, | 1:21:20 | |
the earth team, the Immediate Reaction Force teams. | 1:21:25 | |
And their riot gear, | 1:21:28 | |
and then storming into other people's cells | 1:21:29 | |
and spraying them, they didn't do it to me. | 1:21:31 | |
But it happened to other people. | 1:21:34 | |
Interviewer | Could you describe one incidence you saw? | 1:21:36 |
- | Yeah people, the soldiers dressed into riot gear, | 1:21:38 |
I think the way they marched down in unison, | 1:21:43 | |
bank stamping their feet onto the metal with the shield, | 1:21:48 | |
touching one another, a hand on a shoulder, | 1:21:54 | |
to give themselves sort of, | 1:21:58 | |
some sort of confidence, showed how afraid they were | 1:22:01 | |
of a myth that they'd created. | 1:22:06 | |
I mean, you're gonna march into this cell | 1:22:09 | |
and you're gonna put down this guy. | 1:22:10 | |
Most of the American soldiers are bigger than all of us, | 1:22:13 | |
and spray him with pepper spray. | 1:22:17 | |
And that's what they did with one of these guys. | 1:22:22 | |
Interviewer | You know what the cause is? | 1:22:25 |
- | Refusal to hand back soap, | 1:22:27 |
a refusal to hand back a bar of soap, | 1:22:30 | |
that was about that big, | 1:22:32 | |
because a person hadn't had the privilege. | 1:22:34 | |
He didn't have the privilege status | 1:22:37 | |
of having soap or toilet paper in his cell. | 1:22:39 | |
It has to be administered to him and returned after usage. | 1:22:43 | |
That's why. | 1:22:47 | |
Interviewer | And were you able to communicate | 1:22:49 |
with people who were apart from close to the cell | 1:22:50 | |
where you were? | 1:22:54 | |
Were there other ways to communicate with anyone? | 1:22:56 | |
- | The only ways we would communicate | 1:22:58 |
is to shout across the blocks | 1:22:59 | |
and the shouting across the block. | 1:23:00 | |
Sometimes, it was really amazing, | 1:23:01 | |
because I didn't know who these people. | 1:23:03 | |
Some them I'd heard of them | 1:23:04 | |
or some of them had come across in Bagram, | 1:23:05 | |
for the most part, I didn't know. | 1:23:08 | |
And normally it would begin in the morning | 1:23:09 | |
somebody would shout across, a Muslim Salaam-Alaikum | 1:23:12 | |
and it could be in a Turkish accent | 1:23:15 | |
or a Uighur accent or a South London accent, | 1:23:18 | |
depending where it was coming from. | 1:23:22 | |
And at dinner times, as I said, in the Arabic | 1:23:24 | |
you say (speaks in foreign language) | 1:23:26 | |
which means, it means Bon Appetit. | 1:23:27 | |
And people would shout this across one by one. | 1:23:31 | |
And that was really, really beautiful | 1:23:34 | |
because you didn't know who those people were. | 1:23:36 | |
They just got to know you that so-and-so, | 1:23:37 | |
"Who's in that block with you?" | 1:23:40 | |
"Oh, these people are in this block. | 1:23:41 | |
"Send them my greetings." | 1:23:44 | |
Interviewer | Did you feel | 1:23:46 |
that there was a community spirit? | 1:23:46 | |
Did you get that? | 1:23:50 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, definitely. | 1:23:50 |
Definitely. | 1:23:51 | |
I remember on the day of Idd, | 1:23:52 | |
which the festival, | 1:23:53 | |
people broke out into song, | 1:23:57 | |
in their different languages | 1:23:58 | |
and various languages | 1:24:00 | |
and poetry. | 1:24:01 | |
And I recited my poetry too, | 1:24:03 | |
and nobody understood it except me. | 1:24:05 | |
And one of the other British guys and David Hicks, | 1:24:07 | |
but yeah, those sorts of things happened | 1:24:10 | |
and I'd missed all of that in solitary confinement. | 1:24:12 | |
Interviewer | And the guys never tried to stop that, | 1:24:15 |
when it's a song or a poetry. | 1:24:18 | |
- | I think we used to see the look on some of the guys, | 1:24:22 |
those faces, and they'd say, "Hold on, | 1:24:24 | |
"we're sad in this place, how can you guys be happy?" | 1:24:28 | |
And we'd say to them that this is part of our belief, | 1:24:32 | |
and we believe in destiny. | 1:24:36 | |
And we believe also, that this is part of our test | 1:24:37 | |
and in solitary confinement was a very difficult | 1:24:42 | |
to explain that, but here amongst other people, | 1:24:45 | |
we could give each other strength | 1:24:48 | |
and that's what clearly was happening. | 1:24:51 | |
Interviewer | Did you see any resistance going on | 1:24:54 |
if somebody like in that earth situation | 1:24:57 | |
did other people respond to that? | 1:25:00 | |
Did you see? | 1:25:02 | |
- | Yeah, that happened. | 1:25:03 |
I mean, for this small amount of time | 1:25:04 | |
that I saw it happened a lot. | 1:25:04 | |
It happened in Bagram, it happened in Kandahar, | 1:25:06 | |
and it happened constantly. | 1:25:08 | |
I think it's still happening to be honest. | 1:25:10 | |
I'd hear of other people who've been taken off | 1:25:12 | |
to what you call the MSU blocks, the Maximum Security Units | 1:25:14 | |
people being carried off, stormed upon in their cells. | 1:25:18 | |
I saw a prisoner striking out, | 1:25:26 | |
whilst they were being shackled | 1:25:29 | |
trying to strike a soldier or striking them sometimes. | 1:25:30 | |
And vice versa. | 1:25:34 | |
Yeah, it happened a lot. | 1:25:37 | |
Interviewer | Did you see ever a community of spirit | 1:25:38 |
where if one person was being- | 1:25:40 | |
- | Yeah. | 1:25:44 |
- | Can you describe? | |
- | Yeah, this happened in one of the blocks | 1:25:45 |
that was adjacent to me | 1:25:50 | |
so I didn't see it happen, but I heard it happened. | 1:25:51 | |
And again, they were forcibly extracting somebody | 1:25:53 | |
from a cell to take him to interrogation. | 1:25:55 | |
They'd sprayed him with pepper spray | 1:25:57 | |
and the whole cell block erupted into screams and shouts. | 1:26:00 | |
And somebody, I remember was giving me a running commentary | 1:26:05 | |
of what's taking place, and his voice began to falter | 1:26:10 | |
because they'd sprayed him also. | 1:26:13 | |
And while he was telling me that this is happening | 1:26:17 | |
they've charged him to cell | 1:26:19 | |
they're smashed him against the floor. | 1:26:20 | |
He's bleeding, they've removed this clothes | 1:26:22 | |
except the shorts and the carrying him off now. | 1:26:26 | |
And then his voice started choking. | 1:26:28 | |
And then there are all sorts of things, being said. | 1:26:32 | |
It was really bizarre because you'd hear some of these guys | 1:26:35 | |
from rural Yemen, Afghanistan, Mauritanian, Sudan | 1:26:38 | |
uttering curses that they never knew before | 1:26:43 | |
they were in American custody, | 1:26:45 | |
and they'd learned them from the American soldiers. | 1:26:47 | |
And I tried to say to them don't stoop to their level. | 1:26:49 | |
If you want to curse them, | 1:26:52 | |
if you wanna say things to them | 1:26:53 | |
then let me teach you something a little bit more witty | 1:26:55 | |
and cutting, than just crude. | 1:26:58 | |
And it was funny to listen to some of that | 1:27:01 | |
Interviewer | Were guards who were friendly to you | 1:27:05 |
once you were back in other detainees | 1:27:06 | |
as when you were isolated? | 1:27:10 | |
- | No, no, no | 1:27:11 |
Interviewer | Guards weren't friendly to you? | 1:27:13 |
- | No, they couldn't be, and I couldn't be either. | 1:27:14 |
I think that the situation changed, | 1:27:16 | |
it was clearly an us and them situation in the blocks. | 1:27:19 | |
There's peer pressure, | 1:27:23 | |
there's how people perceive you. | 1:27:24 | |
If you communicate with them that way, | 1:27:26 | |
there's how they are perceived also. | 1:27:28 | |
And they made this known. | 1:27:31 | |
So it was clear that the units that were guiding me in Echo | 1:27:33 | |
were then moved to Camp Papa, | 1:27:36 | |
and you saw the individuals change. | 1:27:38 | |
And you could see the difficulty | 1:27:44 | |
that some of them were having with this. | 1:27:46 | |
They realized it was hypocritical to behave like this, | 1:27:48 | |
but also I realized the same thing | 1:27:51 | |
that you can be with one person | 1:27:53 | |
in the isolation of your room, | 1:27:58 | |
you can talk about anything, | 1:28:01 | |
here now everybody's listening, it's a different matter. | 1:28:02 | |
Interviewer | So the same guys who were with you in Echo, | 1:28:07 |
they transferred to? | 1:28:10 | |
- | They did, yes. | 1:28:11 |
Yeah, they did. | 1:28:12 | |
Interviewer | Do you think that's ironic? | 1:28:13 |
Is that normal? | 1:28:14 | |
- | I think that was a decision they had made, | 1:28:16 |
because these, we were still regarded | 1:28:18 | |
as the people for the military commissions process. | 1:28:20 | |
But also it had been, I think in Hamdan's case, | 1:28:23 | |
it was because he'd been in isolation so long | 1:28:27 | |
even though I'd been in isolation longer. | 1:28:30 | |
But because he was going | 1:28:32 | |
through the military commissions process | 1:28:33 | |
he's actually gone to the military commissions. | 1:28:35 | |
His lawyers had successfully argued | 1:28:38 | |
that the isolation was taking its toll on him. | 1:28:40 | |
So what went for him went for us. | 1:28:41 | |
Interviewer | So those of you together | 1:28:44 |
with all the same people who are going to be first? | 1:28:46 | |
- | Yeah, some people have already been charged | 1:28:48 |
and others were waiting, yeah. | 1:28:50 | |
- | Did you talk about your cases together? | 1:28:53 |
And did you? | 1:28:55 | |
- | Yes we did. | |
Yeah, we all did, we all did. | 1:28:56 | |
I spoke with Salim, I spoke with Ali Hamza, | 1:29:00 | |
who's very, very clear | 1:29:03 | |
about what he believed in with, Feroz Abbassi, | 1:29:05 | |
with David Hicks and everybody was completely different. | 1:29:10 | |
They were all different in what they believed in, | 1:29:13 | |
and what they wanted, in what they hoped for, | 1:29:17 | |
some had resigned themselves to the fact, | 1:29:22 | |
others had hope, | 1:29:23 | |
people were completely different, | 1:29:28 | |
but there was no doubt, | 1:29:29 | |
there was a unity and a solidarity that existed, | 1:29:31 | |
and the knowledge that we were all in this same situation. | 1:29:35 | |
Interviewer | Did they all agree like you | 1:29:37 |
that this is what you described as a kangaroo court, | 1:29:38 | |
did they have the same sense of that? | 1:29:41 | |
- | Yeah, definitely. | 1:29:43 |
I mean, a lot of these guys, like I said, I've studied law, | 1:29:45 | |
so I understand the law to a degree. | 1:29:49 | |
And I know that, American law takes its precedent | 1:29:51 | |
from British law, and English law. | 1:29:56 | |
But somebody from Sudan and Yemen | 1:29:59 | |
this was their first experience of law in the West | 1:30:02 | |
and their perception of it, that there is a kangaroo court, | 1:30:09 | |
knowing that they're coming from countries | 1:30:14 | |
where there are kangaroo courts, | 1:30:15 | |
and this is going to be their experience | 1:30:18 | |
of the United States legal system. | 1:30:21 | |
And that must be such an embarrassment | 1:30:24 | |
for the legal profession in United States of America | 1:30:27 | |
for lawmakers, | 1:30:30 | |
so much so that Ali Hamza said, | 1:30:34 | |
"I don't want American lawyers, I want a Yemeni lawyer." | 1:30:35 | |
And he was serious about that. | 1:30:39 | |
He said, "Either I represent myself or have a Yemeni lawyer. | 1:30:40 | |
"I don't want an American lawyer | 1:30:43 | |
"because in American lawyer, | 1:30:45 | |
"the ones that are going to appoint for me, | 1:30:46 | |
"the military commissions process | 1:30:48 | |
"is part of the machinery that says that I am the enemy. | 1:30:50 | |
"So how can my enemy defend me?" | 1:30:54 | |
And the logic makes sense. | 1:30:57 | |
Interviewer | You trusted your American lawyers. | 1:30:59 |
- | But his was a military lawyer, | 1:31:01 |
anybody who's gone through | 1:31:04 | |
the military commissions process, | 1:31:04 | |
was appointed a military lawyer. | 1:31:05 | |
And they had no choice in who that person was going to be. | 1:31:07 | |
With the civilians, I saw a little bit of difference | 1:31:11 | |
but some of them said, "It's all the same. | 1:31:13 | |
"They're all the same." | 1:31:15 | |
But I wasn't going to, | 1:31:17 | |
I thought that I didn't think they were all the same. | 1:31:19 | |
Interviewer | Do you think America was changing | 1:31:22 |
when the Russell decision was released by the Supreme court? | 1:31:24 | |
Were you were hopeful because you studied law | 1:31:29 | |
and you saw what happened? | 1:31:31 | |
Interviewer | No, no. | 1:31:34 |
I had pretty much in my mind believed that the law | 1:31:38 | |
simply was not gonna apply. | 1:31:40 | |
The law cannot work here. | 1:31:42 | |
Interviewer | Why do you think that is? | 1:31:43 |
- | Because, if something goes to the Supreme court | 1:31:45 |
it's the highest legal authority in the land. | 1:31:49 | |
If a decision is passed there and still nothing happens | 1:31:51 | |
then the law doesn't work. | 1:31:55 | |
There is no other way to describe it, | 1:31:56 | |
you don't get higher than the Supreme court decision. | 1:31:58 | |
There were several decisions | 1:32:00 | |
even after I was released passed, and every single time | 1:32:02 | |
the United States government and the Bush said, | 1:32:05 | |
"Well no, we can't have this because of national security." | 1:32:07 | |
So it doesn't mean anything, | 1:32:10 | |
The law is an ass, when it comes to, | 1:32:11 | |
the application of it in Guantanamo Bay. | 1:32:16 | |
The ridiculous arguments that we had forth | 1:32:18 | |
every single time was that, "These are enemy combatants. | 1:32:20 | |
"They are not on US soil, we are in Cuba." | 1:32:24 | |
Cuba of all places, | 1:32:27 | |
where this is not sovereign US territory. | 1:32:30 | |
There's semantic arguments. | 1:32:35 | |
Everybody knew that the law works here. | 1:32:36 | |
If any US soldier or civilian commits a crime | 1:32:38 | |
they are subjected to the law, | 1:32:41 | |
not to the law of Guantanamo commissions | 1:32:43 | |
but to US law, military law, | 1:32:45 | |
the uniformed code administer justice | 1:32:47 | |
and ordinary | 1:32:50 | |
prisoners from other countries understood this concept. | 1:32:54 | |
And when we started learning that the iguana | 1:32:57 | |
is protected under the law, and we're not, that was enough. | 1:32:59 | |
Interviewer | Did you and the other prisoners | 1:33:06 |
talk about applying to the Geneva Conventions | 1:33:08 | |
as applying to the Guantanamo before the Hamdan decision? | 1:33:09 | |
- | Yeah, yeah. | 1:33:14 |
I discussed that with Hamdan a lot | 1:33:15 | |
and it was strange because, | 1:33:17 | |
Salim is that, he is a villager, | 1:33:18 | |
he's a villager who went to Afghanistan | 1:33:20 | |
worked for Osama bin Laden as a driver | 1:33:22 | |
getting $200 a month. | 1:33:25 | |
And he doesn't understand world affairs, | 1:33:27 | |
and neither does he wish to. | 1:33:30 | |
But he understood what the Geneva conventions | 1:33:33 | |
were after this, that he should have had | 1:33:36 | |
an Article 5 hearing, | 1:33:38 | |
that he should have been judged immediately or soon after | 1:33:39 | |
as to what he was going to be. | 1:33:45 | |
But, and what was really sort of indicative | 1:33:46 | |
of this for me, what I'll never forget | 1:33:49 | |
but it's been so conveniently hidden | 1:33:51 | |
is that when you first take it into Kandahar | 1:33:54 | |
we were all issued EPW cards, Enemy Prison War cards | 1:33:55 | |
by the US military. | 1:33:59 | |
And there's are US military official cards, | 1:34:01 | |
each of us had on it, our country of origin, | 1:34:02 | |
our number, our nationalities, our names and so forth. | 1:34:05 | |
And this must have been standard procedure, | 1:34:10 | |
this is what you do with prisoners. | 1:34:13 | |
You give them the status of any enemy prisoners of war, | 1:34:15 | |
and that's whatever comes with that. | 1:34:19 | |
Somebody realized then that now | 1:34:21 | |
that means these guys have rights. | 1:34:25 | |
So they remove these cards from us forcibly, | 1:34:27 | |
and just simply gave us a card with numbers on. | 1:34:30 | |
And they've never discussed it since then. | 1:34:32 | |
Never have they ever mentioned | 1:34:33 | |
that, "We initially believed them to have a status." | 1:34:36 | |
Interviewer | I've never heard that before, | 1:34:39 |
you received that in Bagram or in Kandahar? | 1:34:42 | |
- | In Kandahar, yeah. | 1:34:44 |
Interviewer | And they took it away from you where? | 1:34:45 |
- | In Kandahar, yeah. | 1:34:47 |
Several weeks later, I think two weeks later. | 1:34:48 | |
Interviewer | And there's no access to it, | 1:34:51 |
you couldn't get that back out. | 1:34:54 | |
- | No, I couldn't get it back now, | 1:34:55 |
but I've noted it several times, even in documents | 1:34:56 | |
I wrote to the lawyers to the US military, | 1:35:00 | |
even at the SRT tribunal rebuttal that I wrote. | 1:35:05 | |
This demonstrates how confused you are | 1:35:10 | |
about your own system. | 1:35:11 | |
And then of course, somebody came up with the terminology | 1:35:13 | |
of enemy combatants, enemy belligerents, | 1:35:15 | |
and all that stuff, that we don't have any rights. | 1:35:17 | |
Interviewer | Can you describe how you found out | 1:35:21 |
that you will be living Guantanamo or how that happened? | 1:35:24 | |
- | Yeah, my lawyer Clive Stafford Smith at the time, | 1:35:28 |
who'd seen me a couple of times was already convinced | 1:35:31 | |
that it's over, that I'm going back home. | 1:35:34 | |
I required more convincing than he did | 1:35:38 | |
but he was already talking about, | 1:35:41 | |
what can we do to help other people | 1:35:42 | |
and would I be willing to act as next friend | 1:35:44 | |
for some of the other guys, | 1:35:47 | |
and get some of the names of the other people | 1:35:48 | |
who wanted legal representation? | 1:35:51 | |
So I did that shouting across the blocks, | 1:35:53 | |
writing people's names down. | 1:35:55 | |
So I had him telling me that this is going to happen. | 1:35:59 | |
And then some of the soldiers | 1:36:01 | |
who I trusted more told me also. | 1:36:03 | |
I remember the day that they took me back | 1:36:06 | |
from Camp Delta to Camp Echo, back to the cells. | 1:36:08 | |
So, it was really difficult. | 1:36:12 | |
I had to wait there for another couple of weeks | 1:36:14 | |
until somebody came along, | 1:36:16 | |
and said that you are going to be released also. | 1:36:18 | |
I think some Major | 1:36:20 | |
who came along I'd never seen before, stood there and said, | 1:36:23 | |
"We have decided to release you | 1:36:26 | |
"to the British authorities, | 1:36:28 | |
"any and all charges against you are being dropped." | 1:36:30 | |
Not that they were, I'd seen them to begin with. | 1:36:34 | |
And that's it. | 1:36:39 | |
Interviewer | Did you know, you were brought back to Echo | 1:36:40 |
because that was the precursor to being released? | 1:36:42 | |
- | Not initially, no, but I did learn that. | 1:36:46 |
Interviewer | And were you able to recruit other people | 1:36:49 |
in cells to get lawyers, when you? | 1:36:52 | |
- | Yeah, I did, I did yeah, yeah, I did. | 1:36:54 |
I got a few, a Tunisian, a Russian, a Saudi, | 1:36:56 | |
quite a few guys, yeah. | 1:36:59 | |
Interviewer | And how was it | 1:37:03 |
when you released what happened that day? | 1:37:04 | |
- | Well, it wasn't immediate release. | 1:37:08 |
It was a really bizarre process. | 1:37:10 | |
It was in the night, I think. | 1:37:13 | |
Yeah, it was in the night. | 1:37:15 | |
I was taken from place to place. | 1:37:18 | |
The FBI came along at some point, took fingerprints | 1:37:19 | |
and swabs that they'd done several times before. | 1:37:23 | |
Interviewer | From your mouth? | 1:37:27 |
- | Yeah, yeah. | 1:37:28 |
And I think they wanted me to sign something. | 1:37:29 | |
I refused to sign anything, | 1:37:32 | |
any document at all that suggested. | 1:37:33 | |
I think they still wanted me to cooperate with them. | 1:37:38 | |
They still wanted me to be a, | 1:37:40 | |
and I said that's it, I've had it. | 1:37:44 | |
By this time, there are several interrogation | 1:37:44 | |
that taken place, and bit, by bit, by bit. | 1:37:47 | |
I'd come to the point where I'm not talking to them anymore. | 1:37:50 | |
I refused to speak to them, | 1:37:52 | |
refused to answer their questions. | 1:37:53 | |
I'm sick death of them. | 1:37:54 | |
And when I had interrogations with them | 1:37:56 | |
I was just being sarcastic, as much as possible, | 1:37:59 | |
and made them know that I'm not afraid of them anymore. | 1:38:02 | |
The fear that I used to have in Bagram has gone out. | 1:38:07 | |
And now you can do whatever you like, | 1:38:09 | |
and I'm just going to laugh in your face. | 1:38:11 | |
I actually like it here now. | 1:38:13 | |
I didn't like it, but I would say that I like it here. | 1:38:14 | |
So I think they were just clasping last straws. | 1:38:21 | |
I could have left that place with maybe not a respect | 1:38:24 | |
for the United States of America | 1:38:27 | |
but an understanding of why they behave this way. | 1:38:29 | |
But now you're having me leave as an adversary. | 1:38:31 | |
Now I'm leaving, | 1:38:34 | |
and I will expose everything that you have done. | 1:38:36 | |
Not just for what you've done to me, | 1:38:39 | |
I'm ready to forgive anybody who asked for forgiveness, | 1:38:41 | |
but what you've done to other people and continue to do. | 1:38:43 | |
So now I'm leaving this place as an adversary | 1:38:45 | |
for your Bush administration of what you've done. | 1:38:48 | |
And then that process put me onto a bus, | 1:38:54 | |
with blackened out windows | 1:38:59 | |
and three other British detainees, | 1:39:01 | |
all of whom would be described as African, | 1:39:02 | |
as Afro-Caribbean. | 1:39:05 | |
So they're all black except for me. | 1:39:07 | |
Interviewer | Were they going back to Britain? | 1:39:11 |
- | They were all coming back to Britain with me, yeah. | 1:39:12 |
They were all dressed in orange. | 1:39:14 | |
We were all shackled up completely in a three-piece suits. | 1:39:15 | |
And I think there were about 10 military policemen | 1:39:19 | |
for every one of us, | 1:39:21 | |
so they're about 45 of us on this coach or bus. | 1:39:23 | |
And it was really funny | 1:39:26 | |
because I was talking to some of the other guys, | 1:39:27 | |
we're not supposed to talk, what are they gonna do to us? | 1:39:30 | |
What are they gonna do? | 1:39:32 | |
We're going home. | 1:39:33 | |
Feroz Abbasi I'd seen before, | 1:39:37 | |
Martin Mubanga I'd never seen him before, | 1:39:40 | |
I'd heard of him. | 1:39:42 | |
He's a very well-built South London, Jamaican, | 1:39:43 | |
he has these huge dreadlocks. | 1:39:52 | |
And he started speaking to me in Arabic, broken Arabic | 1:39:54 | |
which he'd learnt over in Guantanamo. | 1:39:57 | |
I couldn't really understand what he's saying | 1:40:00 | |
but I pretended that I did. | 1:40:01 | |
So they sent over an interpreter to sit between us. | 1:40:03 | |
And then he switched to South London, Cockney Street slang | 1:40:08 | |
which he didn't understand at all, | 1:40:14 | |
What I find so funny because here's this interpreter, | 1:40:15 | |
and I said where are you gonna find an interpreter for this? | 1:40:18 | |
So they just sat there completely useless. | 1:40:22 | |
We eventually arrived completely shackled to the other side. | 1:40:25 | |
Woman | One second, | 1:40:28 |
it's okay, it's all right. | 1:40:32 | |
- | We eventually arrived to the other side of the island | 1:40:34 |
after taking this very ride to where the airport is. | 1:40:35 | |
And we'd been joking across on the way. | 1:40:41 | |
Did they think we're going to escape on our way to freedom? | 1:40:47 | |
Is that why they've shackled us up? | 1:40:49 | |
And we were all laughing about that. | 1:40:51 | |
And then the British came on board, | 1:40:54 | |
the same British foreign office representatives | 1:40:57 | |
that had seen me over my time in Guantanamo. | 1:40:59 | |
They'd said, we're here now. | 1:41:01 | |
And we're gonna take custody of you. | 1:41:03 | |
And somebody had forgotten the keys | 1:41:07 | |
for the padlocks and the shackles. | 1:41:09 | |
They were back on the other side of the island. | 1:41:11 | |
And the soldiers started cursing and swearing | 1:41:13 | |
at one another, which I found fantastic | 1:41:15 | |
and great end of my time in Guantanamo. | 1:41:18 | |
And symbolically and practically | 1:41:22 | |
they had to bring over a pair of huge wire cutters | 1:41:24 | |
and snapped off the padlocks, of all of us. | 1:41:28 | |
And we broke free from the shackles in that way | 1:41:32 | |
and walked over into British custody | 1:41:36 | |
where there were no handcuffs. | 1:41:39 | |
There was no manhandling, there was no frog marching, | 1:41:40 | |
no shackles, there's no shouting or screaming. | 1:41:43 | |
There's no fear. | 1:41:46 | |
And I sat down in a British military transport plane | 1:41:48 | |
was told there's a liaison officer, | 1:41:52 | |
a cultural liaison officer who was a Muslim. | 1:41:55 | |
There're prayer mats here. | 1:41:58 | |
There are chocolates and sweets | 1:41:59 | |
and soft drinks and newspapers, clothes. | 1:42:00 | |
One of the policemen said that, | 1:42:05 | |
"I'm conscious that you'd probably | 1:42:07 | |
"wanna get out of American clothes." | 1:42:08 | |
He used that term. | 1:42:09 | |
So there was still an apprehension | 1:42:13 | |
as to what's gonna happen | 1:42:14 | |
when we're gonna go back to the UK. | 1:42:15 | |
I didn't know whether it's going to be | 1:42:16 | |
from one type of prison to another, | 1:42:18 | |
but the treatment wasn't as if I'm an animal. | 1:42:21 | |
Interviewer | Did you think that you think | 1:42:26 |
you might be held by the British when you were? | 1:42:27 | |
- | Yeah, because I was told that there was a process | 1:42:31 |
because five other Britains had already returned | 1:42:34 | |
several months before I had, and I was the last group. | 1:42:36 | |
That, "You will probably get questioned in a police station, | 1:42:40 | |
"but then released, | 1:42:43 | |
and I was still apprehensive. | 1:42:45 | |
I was still worried that I'm gonna go to prison | 1:42:46 | |
because I'd been told over the years | 1:42:48 | |
that you will be spending the next couple of decades | 1:42:49 | |
or three or four decades, at least of your life in prison. | 1:42:54 | |
Whether that's in Pakistan, whether that's in America | 1:42:57 | |
or Guantanamo or Britain, it's prison for you. | 1:43:00 | |
And that I've been told constantly. | 1:43:03 | |
My lawyer said that's rubbish, | 1:43:07 | |
it's not going to happen. | 1:43:09 | |
Interviewer | So when you were on the plane to England | 1:43:11 |
you had freedom to go to the toilet | 1:43:15 | |
or anything else in the plane? | 1:43:17 | |
- | Yeah, yeah, yeah. | 1:43:18 |
Interviewer | Were you totally under British control? | 1:43:19 |
- | Or the Americans? | 1:43:20 |
- | Entirely yeah, | |
entirely yeah. | 1:43:21 | |
I mean there were policemen sitting around | 1:43:23 | |
and these policeman seem very, very curious. | 1:43:25 | |
One of the policemen said it's really strange | 1:43:26 | |
to hear a Liverpudlian accent after all these years. | 1:43:29 | |
And he said, "So did they to you talk to you like?" | 1:43:33 | |
(both laughing) | 1:43:37 | |
(indistinct) where do you want me to start from? | 1:43:39 | |
But yeah. | 1:43:44 | |
Interviewer | And when you got off the plane, | 1:43:45 |
there were British police waiting for you or? | 1:43:47 | |
- | No, I didn't get off the plane, not initially anyway. | 1:43:50 |
It was strange, as I arrived in the UK, into UK air space | 1:43:54 | |
and landed at RAF Northolt. | 1:43:59 | |
Two really straight, very elaborately dressed ladies. | 1:44:02 | |
I think one was wearing a mink coat, it was really strange, | 1:44:09 | |
a heavily made up, comes and sit next to me. | 1:44:13 | |
And she said, "Can I just confirm if you're British?" | 1:44:15 | |
She was from immigration as well. | 1:44:20 | |
I said, yes, I'm British. | 1:44:22 | |
And then somebody else came along, | 1:44:24 | |
and because of the roar of the engines, | 1:44:25 | |
he almost whispered in my ear, | 1:44:27 | |
"You are under arrest | 1:44:28 | |
"under the prevention of Terrorism Act." | 1:44:30 | |
I said what! | 1:44:33 | |
What the hell is this? | 1:44:34 | |
And then I was handcuffed. | 1:44:36 | |
I thought, oh my goodness, it's starting, | 1:44:39 | |
it's starting again. | 1:44:41 | |
These people are stupid. | 1:44:43 | |
Do you know where I've come from just now? | 1:44:45 | |
And they driven a police vehicle onto the plane | 1:44:47 | |
because it was a military transport plane. | 1:44:51 | |
And they took me and Feroz Abbassi | 1:44:54 | |
into the back of this police vehicle. | 1:44:55 | |
And the space inside there was really tight. | 1:44:58 | |
They locked me into the back of this tiny little room | 1:45:02 | |
which was about one and a half foot by one and a half foot. | 1:45:04 | |
You can't stretch your legs there. | 1:45:08 | |
And I was locked into this little room, | 1:45:10 | |
this little cell in the back of this vehicle. | 1:45:12 | |
And then this vehicle drove off, | 1:45:14 | |
we drove for the next two hours | 1:45:16 | |
to Paddington Green Police Station. | 1:45:19 | |
And I was taken out, | 1:45:22 | |
then taken to the cell. | 1:45:25 | |
And it was really weird being back into UK. | 1:45:30 | |
I was taken to speak to I think | 1:45:33 | |
what they call it the Duty Sergeant at the police station. | 1:45:34 | |
He asked me about any items and belongings I had. | 1:45:38 | |
And if there's any phone calls I wanted to make. | 1:45:43 | |
"So who do you want me to call?" | 1:45:49 | |
I don't even remember anybody's telephone number. | 1:45:52 | |
And I'd resolved, | 1:45:56 | |
I said, even if I did know telephone numbers | 1:45:57 | |
I wouldn't be phoning my family from a cell. | 1:45:59 | |
I will only phone them as a free man, | 1:46:02 | |
or talking to them directly. | 1:46:05 | |
And I was put into a cell. | 1:46:06 | |
And this police cell was about five times | 1:46:09 | |
the size of my Guantanamo cell. | 1:46:13 | |
So there's plenty of walking space. | 1:46:14 | |
And then that evening, Gareth Peirce who was my lawyer, | 1:46:17 | |
who I'd known from before, came along. | 1:46:21 | |
And she was the first friendly face | 1:46:25 | |
I saw after all this time. | 1:46:26 | |
Interviewer | Then you could go home, or? | 1:46:28 |
- | Yeah, yeah. | 1:46:30 |
Straight after that there was an interrogation | 1:46:32 | |
with the British police. | 1:46:34 | |
And that was really silly, | 1:46:36 | |
because they said, "Mr. Begg, | 1:46:37 | |
"we would like to ask you about the whereabouts of XYZ." | 1:46:39 | |
And I said, really? | 1:46:43 | |
I started laughing, just laughing, | 1:46:45 | |
and they realized the stupidity of their question. | 1:46:47 | |
But they apologized afterwards. | 1:46:50 | |
Then they sent in police officers | 1:46:53 | |
who they said will take me to any place I wanna go to, | 1:46:56 | |
who'll put me up in hotels and stuff. | 1:47:00 | |
And I said, no I think my family | 1:47:02 | |
should be waiting somewhere. | 1:47:03 | |
And then that's how I met them, at my lawyer's house. | 1:47:04 | |
Interviewer | You had said that you could have understood | 1:47:09 |
what happened in Guantanamo had they, | 1:47:13 | |
I assume what you're saying had they treated you well? | 1:47:15 | |
So did your opinion of America change over time then? | 1:47:19 | |
- | Yeah, absolutely. | 1:47:23 |
Absolutely. | 1:47:25 | |
Interviewer | And do you mind telling us how it have? | 1:47:26 |
- | Well, I've never used the word oxymoron | 1:47:30 |
very much in my language before, | 1:47:31 | |
but I learned that word in Guantanamo strangely enough. | 1:47:33 | |
And I learned from American soldiers | 1:47:35 | |
'cause they used to say the military intelligence | 1:47:36 | |
is an oxymoron. | 1:47:38 | |
Well, is American justice, for anybody who's in Guantanamo. | 1:47:38 | |
I have never been to America in my life ever. | 1:47:46 | |
And I had no desire to go there, | 1:47:49 | |
but America came to me and it showed me something | 1:47:51 | |
that I didn't know existed. | 1:47:54 | |
So I knew America had the capacity for great brutality. | 1:47:55 | |
I've always known this, from looking at the Vietnam war, | 1:47:58 | |
from the use of atomic weapons, | 1:48:01 | |
from whatever wars that have taken place. | 1:48:03 | |
I now understand the brutality exists, | 1:48:05 | |
but I also understand that there has been a great deal | 1:48:06 | |
of good in America. | 1:48:10 | |
But it's not anything that affected my life directly. | 1:48:12 | |
At the same time, I see America as an extension of Britain. | 1:48:17 | |
I've always seen it as that, | 1:48:23 | |
through culture, through pop culture, | 1:48:24 | |
through art literature, whatever it is, | 1:48:27 | |
The two nations are cousins. | 1:48:30 | |
So it was a shock to the system | 1:48:34 | |
to see them behave in this way. | 1:48:35 | |
And one of the things that I concluded | 1:48:39 | |
from this, is that the US administration, | 1:48:42 | |
and I have to say a great deal of the US, | 1:48:45 | |
the people in the United States of America | 1:48:47 | |
have a hatred for Islam | 1:48:51 | |
that I didn't understand existed before. | 1:48:54 | |
And that mostly is based upon ignorance. | 1:48:57 | |
I accept that it's based upon ignorance, | 1:48:58 | |
but nonetheless that's manifested itself | 1:49:01 | |
into several wars in Muslim countries, | 1:49:03 | |
well before September 11th. | 1:49:06 | |
And people often say, | 1:49:13 | |
well this happened because of September 11th. | 1:49:14 | |
It's because of an evil ideology | 1:49:18 | |
that emanates from Islam itself, | 1:49:19 | |
so that's why the hatred comes. | 1:49:21 | |
And I'm like my answer is, | 1:49:22 | |
muslims didn't invade the United States of America. | 1:49:25 | |
September the 11th happened, I accept that, | 1:49:29 | |
and I accept that it was terrible | 1:49:31 | |
and it was wrong that it happened. | 1:49:32 | |
But you need to look at American foreign policy | 1:49:35 | |
also to recognize, that there is just simply | 1:49:36 | |
a complete disregard for other people's lives. | 1:49:41 | |
And one of the examples that I have, | 1:49:43 | |
I remember speaking to some soldiers who'd been in Somalia. | 1:49:44 | |
And I remember seeing the film before I was in Guantanamo. | 1:49:48 | |
And I remember noting that, | 1:49:52 | |
this film's about 19 American soldiers who get killed. | 1:49:55 | |
And there's a footnote at the end of the film | 1:49:57 | |
it says a thousands Somalis died, | 1:49:59 | |
Somalis died this day, in their own homes. | 1:50:00 | |
Did the Somalis come to America? | 1:50:03 | |
So it's this sort of disregard for life. | 1:50:05 | |
And there are so many examples of it. | 1:50:06 | |
You can look at the Iranian Airbus | 1:50:08 | |
that was shot down, 300 people get killed there, | 1:50:09 | |
and it's a mistake. | 1:50:12 | |
But had that happened to an American by the Iranians, | 1:50:13 | |
what would have been the reaction? | 1:50:16 | |
So it is a double standard, | 1:50:17 | |
and that has produced the hatred that exists. | 1:50:19 | |
But there was one thing. | 1:50:25 | |
There was one thing that I felt | 1:50:26 | |
that the United States was supposed | 1:50:27 | |
to be the best in the world, | 1:50:29 | |
and that it is laws and its rules and regulations. | 1:50:31 | |
I thought that it was equality. | 1:50:33 | |
And that's something I really believed the United States had | 1:50:35 | |
even over and above Britain. | 1:50:38 | |
I thought it had a better system and I was wrong. | 1:50:40 | |
Interviewer | What about the American lawyers | 1:50:44 |
who tried to help the detainees? | 1:50:45 | |
- | I think for the most part they were good decent people. | 1:50:49 |
They were, especially the ones | 1:50:52 | |
who went out on a limb in the beginning. | 1:50:54 | |
People like Gita, Clive and Michael Ratner, | 1:50:57 | |
and many of the others who I don't know of. | 1:51:00 | |
There are many unsung heroes | 1:51:04 | |
I'm sure who'd been working behind the scenes | 1:51:05 | |
who don't have their names in the papers and stuff, | 1:51:07 | |
but they'd be working. | 1:51:09 | |
One of the difficulties I had with with trying to convince | 1:51:12 | |
some of the other prisoners when I was trying | 1:51:14 | |
to get legal representation for some of them | 1:51:16 | |
was to tell them that everybody don't do | 1:51:20 | |
what they're doing to us. | 1:51:24 | |
Don't paint them all with the same brush. | 1:51:26 | |
You can't say all Americans are the same. | 1:51:28 | |
You can't do that, | 1:51:30 | |
because that's what they're doing to us. | 1:51:31 | |
But the arguments on the response was strong. | 1:51:35 | |
They said, "America will tap itself on the back | 1:51:37 | |
"and say, look, we offered these guys lawyers. | 1:51:39 | |
"We gave them a legal process." | 1:51:41 | |
But I said that there are people | 1:51:47 | |
who're trying to fight that system, | 1:51:49 | |
from amongst the Americans. | 1:51:50 | |
And I think also that it would be wrong | 1:51:53 | |
Islamically and otherwise. | 1:51:58 | |
There's a verse in the Quran that resonates with me a lot. | 1:51:58 | |
And that is that, | 1:52:02 | |
"Oh, you who believe stand up as witnesses | 1:52:03 | |
"for God and witnesses for justice. | 1:52:05 | |
"And do not cause your animosity and hatred of a people | 1:52:09 | |
"to make you do them an injustice." | 1:52:13 | |
And I thought that was really, really important | 1:52:15 | |
because you don't let you oppressor become your teacher. | 1:52:16 | |
Interviewer | Do you think any differently | 1:52:23 |
about the British government from before (indistinct)? | 1:52:24 | |
- | Yeah, I wished, I suppose I'm a little bit conceited | 1:52:32 |
when it comes to my Britishness. | 1:52:35 | |
I've always felt that we're a step ahead of everybody else, | 1:52:36 | |
but that's nonsense. | 1:52:41 | |
We're a step behind the United States of America, | 1:52:42 | |
and always, that always seems to be the case. | 1:52:44 | |
I wished that the British had been a little bit | 1:52:48 | |
more sensible about their foreign policy | 1:52:52 | |
and how they'd entered the wars. | 1:52:54 | |
And even now, when I see the British soldiers | 1:52:58 | |
dying every single day in Afghanistan | 1:53:01 | |
because of an American foreign policy. | 1:53:04 | |
Here's the question I'll ask the British, | 1:53:07 | |
if you are so convinced about your policy in Afghanistan | 1:53:09 | |
and Iraq and so forth, | 1:53:14 | |
if the Americans were to walk out tomorrow, | 1:53:15 | |
what would you do? | 1:53:17 | |
Would you stay there and fight the good fight? | 1:53:18 | |
And so, it just clear to me that the British | 1:53:21 | |
are not thinking of themselves first | 1:53:27 | |
in the way that they should be. | 1:53:30 | |
And that's very disappointing for me. | 1:53:31 | |
Interviewer | This is a tough question for you I know, | 1:53:36 |
but I've been asking it for other people. | 1:53:38 | |
And that is, | 1:53:40 | |
what negative impact had Guantanamo | 1:53:44 | |
in your life, in changing your life? | 1:53:46 | |
And this question, the other side of that | 1:53:50 | |
is there anything positive impact on your life at all | 1:53:53 | |
that came out of Guantanamo? | 1:53:56 | |
- | When I look at it more philosophically | 1:53:59 |
than people might expect, | 1:54:02 | |
but I think it's the correct Muslim way to look at it. | 1:54:04 | |
I think it isn't the right thing to complain | 1:54:06 | |
and say that they did all this to me and so forth. | 1:54:10 | |
I look at it in a way that had it not been for Guantanamo, | 1:54:13 | |
then I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you, | 1:54:15 | |
and people wouldn't have heard my voice | 1:54:17 | |
in the way that they do now. | 1:54:18 | |
And I couldn't have been the advocate | 1:54:19 | |
for the prisoners that I am now. | 1:54:21 | |
So, they may not have wanted this to happen, | 1:54:23 | |
but this is what I told them would happened. | 1:54:27 | |
I told them that I will become your adversary | 1:54:30 | |
for what you've done. | 1:54:33 | |
And I won't need to exaggerate the reality. | 1:54:35 | |
I will be as just as possible, and that will be enough. | 1:54:37 | |
The truth will be enough to highlight what took place. | 1:54:39 | |
There've been personal issues | 1:54:45 | |
in terms of family re-adjusting to a family, | 1:54:46 | |
to seeing a child I'd never seen before, | 1:54:49 | |
children who didn't know what it was like to have a father | 1:54:54 | |
during the formative years, trying to re-adjust all of that. | 1:54:57 | |
But, time is a healer | 1:55:00 | |
and on a personal level I don't have a huge amount | 1:55:02 | |
of bitterness towards ordinary Americans at all. | 1:55:07 | |
In fact, I think so many of them, | 1:55:10 | |
had it not been for this experience, | 1:55:12 | |
I wouldn't have known how decent some Americans were, | 1:55:13 | |
because of this. | 1:55:15 | |
'Cause I had very little experience with Americans. | 1:55:16 | |
But at the same time, I'm an eyewitness to the history | 1:55:21 | |
of the brutality that some of the Americans are capable of. | 1:55:24 | |
And I think that reminder needs to be made to everybody. | 1:55:30 | |
People need to know that, | 1:55:35 | |
the rhetoric of it, | 1:55:38 | |
and I see it all the time. | 1:55:40 | |
The bad guys, we're not the bad guys. | 1:55:43 | |
Be with the good guys. | 1:55:45 | |
And please don't give me this nonsense. | 1:55:47 | |
I can tell people that your good guys as they were, | 1:55:50 | |
are capable of some of the most brutal horrific acts | 1:55:54 | |
that you can imagine. | 1:55:56 | |
And don't be blinkered vision to this. | 1:55:57 | |
The difference between bad guys on your side | 1:56:01 | |
and bad guys on the other side | 1:56:05 | |
is that they've never claimed on the other side | 1:56:06 | |
to be the bastions of freedom, democracy, and liberty, | 1:56:08 | |
whereas you have. | 1:56:11 | |
But I've noticed also, | 1:56:15 | |
since my return that I've done hundreds of lectures | 1:56:16 | |
in universities and colleges and places. | 1:56:20 | |
So often it's been that an American | 1:56:24 | |
will come up normally at the end, after everybody's gone | 1:56:25 | |
and say sorry for what my government did. | 1:56:28 | |
And I say, it's okay, as long as you didn't work for Bush. | 1:56:32 | |
But I think this experience is also important for me, | 1:56:39 | |
just in terms of trying to find a solution. | 1:56:43 | |
I've always been known for talking | 1:56:48 | |
which you probably gathered that by now, | 1:56:50 | |
but that talk means dialogue with people, | 1:56:54 | |
trying to understand the other side. | 1:56:56 | |
And I think that's really important. | 1:56:58 | |
That's been missing out a lot | 1:57:01 | |
because in the atmosphere of ignorance and hatred, | 1:57:02 | |
it's very easy to lose sight of reason. | 1:57:06 | |
Interviewer | I haven't asked this of everybody, | 1:57:12 |
but I would like to ask it of you, | 1:57:14 | |
what do you see going forward with Guantanamo | 1:57:15 | |
and with your future, and perhaps with America and Britain? | 1:57:20 | |
- | Well, for the moment and for the foreseeable future | 1:57:29 |
the war on terror is going to last for quite as long time. | 1:57:31 | |
If Guantanamo closes tomorrow, there's still Bagram. | 1:57:34 | |
And we've always maintained that Bagram | 1:57:38 | |
is worse than Guantanamo. | 1:57:39 | |
There are the secret detention processes, there's rendition | 1:57:41 | |
and Obama hasn't spoken about anything | 1:57:44 | |
to do with the Military Detention Program. | 1:57:47 | |
And that has to be highlighted, has to be focused on. | 1:57:52 | |
And people have to be embarrassed | 1:57:55 | |
about what's taking place there. | 1:57:56 | |
It's simply not good enough to say, | 1:57:59 | |
in the statement of Malcolm X, | 1:58:03 | |
he said, "You don't take a knife, put it in the man's back, | 1:58:04 | |
"nine inches deep pull it back, five inches, | 1:58:06 | |
"and say, haven't we made progress?" | 1:58:08 | |
That's what's happening with Guantanamo. | 1:58:10 | |
It was wrong to begin with, | 1:58:11 | |
to close it down now saying we're doing a good thing, | 1:58:12 | |
aren't we really good? | 1:58:15 | |
Is not good enough. | 1:58:16 | |
Let's talk about the other places. | 1:58:17 | |
Let's talk about the whole program | 1:58:18 | |
and the idea of can you detain people | 1:58:20 | |
without charge or trial? | 1:58:22 | |
Can you do this as a nation | 1:58:24 | |
that believes in habeas corpus. | 1:58:26 | |
Until that's over then, | 1:58:30 | |
my role's cut out, sadly. | 1:58:33 | |
To be honest with you, I'm tired of it. | 1:58:36 | |
I'm tired of my role, I wanna do something else. | 1:58:38 | |
I wanna go into teaching. | 1:58:39 | |
I wanna do things that removes me | 1:58:41 | |
from the last few years of detention | 1:58:45 | |
and incarceration and torture, | 1:58:48 | |
because, | 1:58:49 | |
there has to be a point to move on. | 1:58:54 | |
But I don't know if that's gonna happen anytime soon. | 1:58:57 | |
Interviewer | Is there something I didn't ask you | 1:59:00 |
that you would like to tell us? | 1:59:01 | |
- | I think I've already said it (laughs) | 1:59:05 |
Woman | I have a couple of questions. | 1:59:07 |
- | Okay. | 1:59:08 |
- | On my mind. | |
I actually wanted to go back to that, | 1:59:10 | |
you said they gave you some pills, was it? | 1:59:11 | |
That resulted in hallucinations? | 1:59:15 | |
- | Mm-hmm (affirmative) | 1:59:17 |
Woman | Did they interrogate you | 1:59:18 |
during that period of hallucinations? | 1:59:20 | |
- | I think probably they did. | 1:59:23 |
(woman speaks off mic) | 1:59:26 | |
But I'm not sure. | 1:59:27 | |
I don't think the hallucinations lasted | 1:59:30 | |
for more than sort of 12 hours or so. | 1:59:32 | |
And the pills they gave me were at night usually, | 1:59:35 | |
and interrogations by that time were happening | 1:59:40 | |
in the day and not at night. | 1:59:42 | |
Woman | How many times did they give you these pills? | 1:59:44 |
- | For a few weeks, | 1:59:48 |
I think initially they were prescribed, | 1:59:50 | |
as I said, by the psychologist, | 1:59:52 | |
as some sort of a sedative or something | 1:59:58 | |
because of the anxiety attacks that I'd had. | 2:00:05 | |
But I don't know what they were. | 2:00:07 | |
Woman | I've only been here for a few interviews, | 2:00:14 |
but already I've heard about the interrogation methods | 2:00:15 | |
that were used with stress positions, | 2:00:18 | |
and dogs and loud music. | 2:00:20 | |
What were some of the interrogation methods used with you | 2:00:23 | |
and what were the most severe interrogation methods, | 2:00:28 | |
if you're comfortable talking about it? | 2:00:32 | |
- | I think the most severe were in Kandahar and Bagram, | 2:00:34 |
there's no doubt about that for me. | 2:00:36 | |
Other than the initial ones in Guantanamo, | 2:00:38 | |
which it wasn't so much a physical thing | 2:00:40 | |
as when somebody threatens you with execution, | 2:00:44 | |
or decades in prison without charge. | 2:00:48 | |
The most brutal were in Bagram and Kandahar, for sure. | 2:00:52 | |
That was being shackled | 2:00:55 | |
with hands behind my back to my legs, | 2:00:56 | |
interrogated with pictures of my wife | 2:01:01 | |
and children being shown to me, | 2:01:03 | |
being asked where do I think they are, | 2:01:05 | |
a gun being put to my head more times | 2:01:08 | |
than I can remember, to be honest. | 2:01:10 | |
Sometimes hearing that sound ch-ch, | 2:01:12 | |
with a round being chambered, | 2:01:15 | |
all of those sorts of things. | 2:01:19 | |
I think they were designed to terrify. | 2:01:22 | |
They are tactics of terror. | 2:01:24 | |
This is the war on terror, but sometimes for us, | 2:01:27 | |
it was the war of terror. | 2:01:30 | |
And probably for me, the worst thing, | 2:01:34 | |
as I said before and I can't say this enough, | 2:01:38 | |
was the fear and the allusions of threat towards my family. | 2:01:41 | |
Several times it happened. | 2:01:46 | |
I think the last time that it happened, | 2:01:51 | |
the last time they mentioned my family, | 2:01:52 | |
again was the FBI. | 2:01:54 | |
They mentioned that if I don't cooperate, | 2:01:55 | |
they know where my family are. | 2:01:59 | |
And it's the only time I ever threatened anybody. | 2:02:02 | |
I said, don't you ever mention my family again? | 2:02:04 | |
And it's a reaction, it's an angry reaction, | 2:02:08 | |
because if you can get to me, I can get to you. | 2:02:12 | |
That was my answer to him. | 2:02:13 | |
If you can get to me, I can get to you. | 2:02:15 | |
I can't get to him, I don't know who that is, | 2:02:17 | |
but that's the most frightening thing | 2:02:19 | |
that somebody can say to you. | 2:02:22 | |
The most disturbing thing that anybody can say to you | 2:02:23 | |
is that they're going to harm your family, your children. | 2:02:28 | |
And I know that they were capable of it. | 2:02:33 | |
I know that they were capable of bringing children | 2:02:34 | |
into custody because I saw children in custody. | 2:02:36 | |
So that was probably the worst for me. | 2:02:39 | |
Woman | And the cooperation they were seeking | 2:02:40 |
was giving them names, places, things of that nature? | 2:02:43 | |
- | No, much more than that. | 2:02:47 |
The corporation they were seeking was that | 2:02:47 | |
as far as the FBI were concerned that I'd become a witness. | 2:02:51 | |
What's the right word? | 2:02:57 | |
A witness for prosecutions that they wanted. | 2:02:58 | |
And as far as the CIA were concerned, | 2:03:01 | |
that I become an asset. | 2:03:03 | |
That I become somebody who will | 2:03:05 | |
respond to their beck and call. | 2:03:10 | |
Woman | And they outlined that for you? | 2:03:15 |
- | Very clearly, yeah. | 2:03:16 |
Woman | Any question? | 2:03:22 |
Woman | Do you believe you're under surveillance now, | 2:03:23 |
you and other released detainees, | 2:03:25 | |
and what evidence do you have about that? | 2:03:27 | |
- | Yeah, of course I am, you've got the camera on. | 2:03:29 |
(all laughing) | 2:03:31 | |
Woman | American surveillance? | 2:03:33 |
- | I don't know, I have no way of knowing. | 2:03:36 |
I'm sure that that must be the case. | 2:03:41 | |
I'm sure that there's not the sort of surveillance | 2:03:43 | |
where I'm being followed 24 hours a day, | 2:03:47 | |
or there are cameras on my back. | 2:03:49 | |
But I think, if I intend to travel anywhere | 2:03:51 | |
or go somewhere outside the United Kingdom, | 2:03:55 | |
then yeah, people will be alerted. | 2:03:59 | |
Yeah, | 2:04:02 | |
clearly. | 2:04:04 | |
Interviewer | There's so much I'd, | 2:04:08 |
I know how busy you are, so thank you. | 2:04:10 | |
- | No, no, no, that's all right, that's fine. | 2:04:12 |
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