"Keith Willshaw" wrote in message
...

A less than credible story I fear.




Well then, if they are guilty: why let the Guantanamo Britons go ??? Isn't
it odd, that after their two year illegal "detention"(?), torture and other
human rights abuses, the U.S. government still hasn't got a clue about their
guilt, involvement or responsibility ???
What kind of a democracy is this anyway ???

11-M: 'Las guerras son vuestras. Los muertos son nuestros'.
- In pace, Iustitia omnibus.


---
Sunday March 14, 2004
The Observer newspaper, London

Revealed: the full story of the Guantanamo Britons

The Observer's David Rose hears the Tipton Three give a harrowing account of
their captivity in Cuba

Three British prisoners released last week from Guantanamo Bay have revealed
the full extent of British government involvement in the American detention
camp condemned by law lords and the Court of Appeal as a 'legal black hole'.

Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, the so-called 'Tipton Three',
speaking for the first time since their release at a secret location in
southern England, have disclosed to The Observer the fullest picture yet of
life inside the camp on Cuba where America continues to hold 650 detainees.

After more than 200 interrogation sessions each, with the CIA, FBI, Defence
Intelligence Agency, MI5 and MI6, America has been forced to admit its
claims that the three were terrorists who supported al-Qaeda had no
foundation.

But fearful of reprisals - the extreme right wing BNP has a stronghold in
their hometown of Tipton in the West Midlands, and their families have
warned them they may not be safe back at home - they all declined to be
photographed, and are choosing a new location in which to rebuild their
lives.

During an extraordinary 12-hour interview with The Observer last Friday, two
days after their release from Paddington Green police station where they
were held after being flown home from Cuba, the three men revealed that they
were interrogated by MI5 almost immediately after first arriving at
Guantanamo Bay - in the cases of Iqbal and Rasul, on 15 January 2002, and in
Ahmed's case three weeks later.

The British Government has repeatedly claimed it has been trying to use
diplomatic pressure to introduce more legal process at Guantanamo, including
an opportunity for detainees to show that imprisonment is unjustified.

But the picture painted by the three released prisoners is of a Security
Service which saw them as mere 'interrogation fodder', and questioned them
repeatedly throughout their 26-month stay.

Among other disclosures, the three men revealed:

· How early in their ordeal they survived a massacre perpetrated by
Afghanistan's Northern Alliance troops who herded hundreds of prisoners into
lorry containers and locked them in, so that people started to suffocate.
Iqbal described how only 20 of 300 prisoners in each container lived, and
then only because someone made holes in its side with a machine gun - an
action which killed yet more prisoners;

· The existence of a secret super-maximum security facility outside the main
part of Guantanamo's Camp Delta known as Camp Echo, where prisoners are held
in tiny cells in solitary confinement 24-hours a day, with a military police
officer permanently stationed outside each cell door. The handful of inmates
of Camp Echo include two of the four remaining British detainees, Moazzem
Begg and Feroz Abbasi, and the Australian, David Hicks;

· That they endured three months of solitary confinement in Camp Delta's
isolation block last summer after they were wrongly identified by the
Americans as having been pictured in a video tape of a meeting in
Afghanistan between Osama bin Laden and the leader of the 11 September
hijackers Mohamed Atta. Ignoring their protests that they were in Britain at
the time, the Americans interrogated them so relentlessly that eventually
all three falsely confessed. They were finally saved - at least on this
occasion - by MI5, which came up with documentary evidence to show they had
not left the UK;

· That their first interrogations by British investigators - from both MI5
and the SAS - took place in December 2001 and January 2002 when they were
still being held at a detention camp in Afghanistan. Guns were held to their
heads during their questioning in Afghanistan by American soldiers, and
physical abuse and beatings were rife. At this point, after weeks of near
starvation as prisoners of the Northern Alliance, all three men were close
to death.

The Court of Appeal criticised the absence of any legal due process at
Guantanamo as a 'legal black hole' in a case brought on behalf of Abbasi
last year, while the laws lord, Lord Steyn, has described the camp in a
speech as a 'monstrous failure of justice'.

In public, the British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has spoken of his
constant pressure on America to improve both physical and legal conditions,
urging them not to deny terror suspects a fair trial.

But the released prisoners told The Observer how MI5 interrogators, in
sessions lasting many hours, tried repeatedly to extract information they
did not have about Islamic groups in Britain and their supposed links with
al-Qaeda.

Ahmed described an interrogation session which took place before he left
Afghanistan by an officer of MI5 and another official who said he was from
the Foreign Office: 'All the time I was kneeling with a guy standing on the
backs of my legs and another holding a gun to my head.

'The MI5 says: "I'm from the UK, I'm from MI5, I've got some questions for
you," he told me: "We've got your name, we've got your passport, we know
you've been funded by an extremist group and we know you've been to this
mosque in Birmingham. We've got photos of you."' In fact, none of these
claims was true.

The three men said that as far as they could see, there were few if any
genuine terrorists at Guantanamo Bay: perhaps at worst, a few mullahs who
had been loyal to the Taliban.

They voiced grave fears for the future of Begg and Abbasi, who are due to
face trials by American military commissions, saying that their own
experience of the Guantanamo interrogation and intelligence gathering
process was 'almost a recipe' for other miscarriages of justice.

Last night, a Foreign Office spokesman said he could not comment on the
men's claims to have been interrogated by British officials while they were
still in Afghanistan, saying he could not get access to the relevant files.

Whitehall security sources confirmed that MI5 has had regular access to
prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: 'I can say that the purpose of our being given
access to detainees in US custody is to gather information relevant to
British national security,' said one source.


---

How we survived jail hell

For two years the Tipton Three have been silent prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
Now, in this remarkable interview with David Rose, they describe for the
first time the extraordinary story of their journey from the West Midlands
to Camp Delta

Sunday March 14, 2004
The Observer

'When I woke up I didn't know where I was. I'd lost consciousness at the
side of the container, but when I woke up I was in the middle - lying on top
of dead bodies, breathing the stench of their blood and urine.

'They'd herded maybe 300 of us into each container, the type you get on
ordinary lorries, packed in so tightly our knees were against our chests,
and almost immediately we started to suffocate. We lived because someone
made holes with a machine gun, though they were shooting low and still more
died from the bullets. When we got out, about 20 in each container were
still alive.'

In a safe house in southern England at the weekend, Asif Iqbal was
describing his survival, together with his friends Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq
Rasul, after a massacre by US-backed Northern Alliance forces in
Afghanistan - the start of a 26-month nightmare which ended last week with
their release from the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

Their faces gaunt with accumulated stress and exhaustion, they spoke softly,
still stunned by the change in their circumstances: 'I just can't believe
we're sitting here,' Ahmed says. 'This time last week, we were in the cages
at Guantanamo.'

The horror of their story needs no embellishment. One day, perhaps, there
will be an inquiry into Guantanamo. Until then, some of their allegations -
which, it can be assumed, America is likely to deny - cannot be
corroborated. However, many of the experiences they describe, including
gunpoint interrogations in Afghanistan and random brutality both there and
in Guantanamo, have been related in identical terms by other freed
detainees. Last October I spent four days at Guantanamo. Much of what the
three men say about the regime and the camp's physical conditions I either
saw or heard from US officials.

Having escaped the truck container massacre, they endured near-starvation in
a jail run by the Afghan warlord, General Dostum. When the Red Cross
appeared and promised to make contact with the British Embassy in Islamabad
they thought they were going home. Instead, with the apparent agreement of
British officials, they were handed over to the Americans, first for weeks
of physical abuse at a detention camp in Kandahar, followed by more than two
years in the desolation of Guantanamo.

Month after month they were interrogated, for 12 hours or more at a time, by
American security agencies and, repeatedly, by MI5 - in all, they say, they
endured 200 sessions each. But when they re-emerged to freedom on Wednesday
after two final days of questioning at Paddington Green police station,
every apparent shred of evidence had melted away. Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed,
together with the other early arrivals at Guantanamo, had been described by
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as 'the hardest of the hard core',
lethal terrorists 'involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans'.
Even last week the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was claiming
America had been justified in holding them.

Yet despite the denial of legal rights or due process, the authorities on
both sides of the Atlantic have been forced to accept what the three men
said all along - that they were never members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda or
any other militant group. The Americans had justified their detention by
claiming they were 'enemy combatants', but they were never armed and did not
fight.

'They formally told us we were going home last Sunday [several weeks after
this news was relayed to the media],' Rasul said. 'We had a final meeting
with the FBI, and they tried to get us to sign a piece of paper which said
something like I was admitting I'd had links with terrorism, and that if I
ever did anything like this again the US could arrest me.' Like the other
two detainees freed last week, Tarek Dergoul and Jamal al-Harith, they
refused.

'They took us to the airport in chains,' said Rasul, 'and when we got there
this huge plane was surrounded by armed men. As we walked towards the steps
they had guns trained on us. This military police guy hands us over to the
British, takes off our shackles and tells the Brit he can put on the
handcuffs. But the British policemen say, "no, no, there's no need for
handcuffs". We walk up the steps and they're not even touching me.

'For the first time in two years I'm walking somewhere without being
frogmarched. We get to the door and someone says: "Good morning. Welcome
aboard." '

Capture
Rasul, 26, Ahmed, 22, and Iqbal, 22, were boyhood friends from the Midlands
town of Tipton. In Septem ber 2001 they travelled to Pakistan ahead of the
marriage Iqbal's parents had arranged for him to a woman in Faisalabad.
Ahmed was to be best man; Rasul hoped to do a computer course after the
wedding.

The three were in no sense fundamentalists: their brand of Islam, they say,
was never that of the Taliban. But like many young Muslims in Pakistan they
crossed the border into Afghanistan in October 2001, as it became clear
that, in the wake of the 11 September attacks on America, one of the poorest
countries in the world was about to be attacked. They had no intention of
joining the fighting, they insist, but only of giving humanitarian aid. In
England, none of them was rich, but in Asia, the little money they had could
go a long way. For a short time they used the savings accumulated for their
trip to buy food and medical supplies for Afghan villagers.

But in Taliban-led Afghanistan one aspect of their appearance made them
dangerously visible - they had no beards. Travelling through a bombed
landscape, they tried to escape in a taxi. But instead of reaching safety
they were driven further into danger - to the city of Kunduz, which was
promptly surrounded and bombarded by Dostum's troops. Aware that a bloodbath
was imminent, they tried to leave on a convoy of trucks but their own
vehicle was shelled, killing almost everyone on board. 'We were trapped,'
says Iqbal. 'There was nothing we could do but give ourselves up. They took
our money, our shoes, all our warm clothes, and put us in lines.'

They were part of a vast column of prisoners, around 35,000, says Rasul:
'You'd look down the slope and there were lines and lines of people, as far
as the eye could see. We went through the mountains and the open desert.
There were these massive ditches full of bodies. We thought this was the
end. We thought they were going to kill us all.' Many of the prisoners were
wounded and died by the wayside.

After two days they ended up outside Shebargan prison and crammed into the
containers - it was night, says Iqbal, and the massacre began under the
glare of spotlights which the three men claim were operated by American
special forces. 'The last thing I remember is that it got really hot, and
everyone started screaming and banging. It was like someone had lit a fire
beneath the containers. You could feel the moisture running off your body,
and people were ripping off their clothes.'

When he came to, Iqbal had not drunk for more than two days. Maddened by
thirst, he wiped the stream ing walls with a cloth, and sucked out the
moisture, until he realised he was drinking the bodily fluids of the
massacred prisoners. 'We were like zombies,' Iqbal says. 'We stank, we were
covered in blood and the smell of death.'

Freed from the trucks which had become mass graves, they were taken into
Shebargan prison, where they were held in appalling conditions for the next
month. Much was open to the elements, and to make room inside its bare
communal cells the prisoners lay down in four-hour shifts. They were fed a
quarter of a naan bread a day, with a small cup of water: sometimes, says
Rasul, there were fights over the rations. Often snow blew into the
buildings.

Rasul says: 'There were people with horrific injuries - limbs that had been
shot off and nothing was done. I'll never forget one Arab who was missing
half his jaw. For 10 days until his death he was screaming and crying
continuously, begging to be killed.'

A few days earlier Taliban prisoners had organised the uprising against
their captors at Qala-i-Jhangi Fort at Mazar-e-Sharif, and western reporters
paid a visit to Shebargan. They seemed blind to the misery there, Rasul
says. 'All they seemed to be interested in was if any of us knew the
American Taliban John Walker Lindh.'

After 10 days the Red Cross arrived, bringing some improvement and an
increase in the water supply. But by now all three were malnourished and
suffering from amoebic dysentery. Ahmed says: 'We were covered with lice.
All day long you were scratching, scratching. I was bleeding from my chest,
my head.' Iqbal adds: 'We lost so much weight that if I stood up I could
carry water in the gap between my collar bones and my flesh.'

Prisoners died daily: of the 35,000 originally marched through the desert,
only 4,500 were still alive, the three men estimate. All this time they
could see American troops 50 metres from their prison wing on the other side
of the gates.

Beatings
After a month of this living hell, on 27 or 28 December, the Red Cross spoke
to the three and promised they would contact the British Embassy in
Islamabad and ask them to intervene on their behalf and notify their
families that they were alive. Rasul's brother, Habib, says he had contacted
the Foreign Office at the end of November and asked for help in tracing his
missing brother.

In fact, very soon, the three would meet British officials. But Habib would
be told nothing until February 8 - three weeks after his brother's arrival
in Guantanamo.

Two days after the three talked to the Red Cross, Dostum's troops put them
in chains, marched them through the main gate and handed them over to
American special forces. Ahmed says: 'They put something like a sandbag over
my head so you could see nothing. Then we got thrown on to a truck. They
taped the sacks at the bottom of our necks, making it difficult to breathe.'

The Americans took them to Shebargan airport, where they were beaten, then
loaded on a plane. 'I wanted to use the toilet,' Rasul says. 'Someone
smacked me on the back of my head with his gun. I started peeing myself.'

Trussed like chickens, their chains replaced by plastic ties, they were
flown to the US detention centre at Kandahar. The weather was freezing.
Wearing only thin salwar kameez, with no socks or shoes, they were tied
together with a rope and led into the camp, where they waited to be
processed.

In the very different setting of a sitting room in suburban England, Iqbal
demonstrates how they were made to kneel bent double, with their foreheads
touching the ground: 'If your head wasn't touching the floor or you let it
rise up a little they put their boots on the back of your neck and forced it
down. We were kept like that for two or three hours.'

Rasul adds: 'I lifted up my head slightly because I was really in pain. The
sergeant came up behind me, kicked my legs from underneath me, then knelt on
my back. They took me outside and searched me while one man was sitting on
me, kicking and punching.'

All this time they were still wearing their hoods. Then one soldier took a
Stanley knife and cut off their clothes. Naked and freezing, they were made
to squat while the soldiers searched their bodily cavities and photographed
them. At last, they say, they were frog-marched through a barbed wire maze
and put into a half-open tent where they were told to dress in blue prison
overalls.

They had not washed since the container massacre a month earlier. There,
Iqbal had sustained a ricochet wound to the elbow. Displaying an ugly purple
scar, he explains that by the time he reached Kandahar, it had become
infected. It was late at night by the time they had been processed, but next
morning, they say, they were taken straight to their first interrogation.
Rasul says: 'A special forces guy sat there holding a gun to my temple, a
9mm pistol. He said if I made any movement he'd blow my head off.'

Each endured several such sessions at Kandahar: each time, they say, they
were questioned on their knees, in chains, always at gunpoint. Often they
were kicked or beaten. (Other released detainees have described Kandahar in
similar terms.)

Not all their interrogators were American. Iqbal and Rasul also describe an
English officer in a maroon beret who said he was a member of the SAS. 'He
had a posh English accent,' Rasul says. 'He mentioned the names of British
prisons like Belmarsh and said we'd end up there.' Iqbal says the SAS
officer told him: 'Don't worry, you won't be beaten today because you're
with me.'

Ahmed says he was also questioned by an officer from MI5 and another
Englishman who said he was from the British Embassy. 'All the time I was
kneeling with a guy standing on the backs of my legs and another holding a
gun to my head. The MI5 man says: "I'm from the UK, I'm from MI5, and I've
got some questions for you." He says he was called Dave. He told me: "We've
got your names, we've got your passports, we know you've been funded by an
extremist group and we know you've been to this mosque in Birmingham. We've
got photos of you." None of this was true.

'The second occasion was on the morning I left - they said I was going home.
In fact I was on my way to Cuba.'

As Muslims, they were shocked when in repeated 'shakedown' searches of the
sleeping tents, copies of the Koran would be trampled on by soldiers and, on
one occasion, thrown into a toilet bucket. Throughout their stay at Kandahar
the guards carried out head-counts every hour at night to keep the prisoners
awake.

Rasul says: 'You'd just be dozing off and then you were made to get up, and
that's the way it was all the way to morning.'

To Cuba
At 3AM on 13 January 2002, Rasul was moved to a new tent with Iqbal. Next
morning their numbers were called out and they were made to sit while
soldiers chained them tightly, sat them in a tent and attached another chain
to a hook on the floor. 'These guys came in with clippers,' Rasul says,
'they shaved my hair and my beard; they cut all my clothes off and threw
this medication over me, to kill the lice. Then they unlocked me from the
floor and led me into another tent naked where they forced me to squat again
and did another intimate cavity search.'

Instead of the blue overalls they were dressed in orange jumpsuits, chained
and cuffed and made to wear thick gloves taped to their sleeves. Then, says
Rasul: 'They made us sit outside on the gravel while they processed
everyone. We had no water all day, but towards the end they gave us an MRE
[a ready-to-eat US army meal] but no spoon. I had to try and trough it like
an animal.'

The restraint device they were now forced to wear would become extremely
familiar for the next 26 months - the 'three-piece suit', a body belt with a
metal chain leading down to leg-irons with hand-shackles attached to it.
Rasul says: 'I told the guard they'd put it on much too tight and he said:
"You'll live." '

Before boarding a military aircraft they were dressed in earmuffs, goggles
and surgical masks. Inside, they were chained to the floor with no
backrests, and even when they requested the toilet, they were not released
from their chains. 'Basically people wet their pants. You were ****ing all
over your legs.'

'The only thing that relieved the sensory deprivation and occupied me for
the 22-hour flight was that I was in serious pain,' Rasul says. 'The guards
told me to go to sleep but the belt was digging into me - when I finally got
to Cuba I was bleeding. I lost feeling in my hands for the next six months.'

Rasul and Iqbal were on the second flight to the new Camp X-ray - the first
had been three days earlier. (The Australian David Hicks and another British
prisoner, Feroz Abbasi, were on that first flight.) Ahmed followed on 10
February on the fifth flight from Kandahar to Guantanamo Bay. 'When I got
there,' he says, 'I was half dead. We had a two-hour stopover somewhere in
Turkey. As we were being frog-marched from one plane to another, one of the
guards stamped on the metal body bar of my three-piece suit so the leg-irons
bit deeply into the flesh of my ankles.'

But Ahmed, at least, had been told where he was going. When Rasul and Iqbal
landed they had no idea where they we 'All I knew was that I was
somewhere with intense heat,' Rasul says. 'An American voice shouted: "I am
Sergeant so-and-so, US Marine Corps, you are arriving at your final
destination." '

The Guantanamo airstrip lies a three-mile ferry journey across the bay from
the detention facilities, a journey the prisoners made in a school bus.
Iqbal says: 'The boat was moving in the swell, making the bus rock and the
American guy says: "Stop moving." I couldn't stop, so he hit me.' Rasul made
the mistake of telling a guard he was English. 'Traitor,' he yelled. Later,
when Ahmed took the ferry, he heard a guard whispering: "This mother****er
speaks English." Repeatedly the guard kicked his leg: 'I couldn't move it
for days, it was so badly bruised.'

At last they arrived at Camp X-ray, and became part of the group of
orange-jumpsuited prisoners kneeling in the dust, still shackled and
blindfolded, whose images went round the world. Rasul says: 'They made us
kneel in that awkward way, and every time you moved, someone would kick you.

'The sun was beating down and the sweat was pouring into my eyes. I shouted
for a doctor, someone poured water into my eyes and then I heard it again:
"Traitor, traitor." ' Rasul was the last one processed, and by the time he
got to his cage it was dark. First he was stripped naked and, still wearing
his goggles and chains, he was given a piece of soap and told to shower for
the first time since his capture. 'I looked around and I thought what the
hell is this place?'

Iqbal recalls the moment his goggles were finally removed: 'I look up and I
see all these other people who hadn't yet been processed in orange suits and
goggles and I think I'm hallucinating.' Two days after arriving in
Guantanamo Bay, with his family still desperate for information as to his
whereabouts, Rasul was taken in his three-piece metal suit to an
interrogation tent. 'I walk in and this guy says: "I'm from the Foreign
Office, I've come from the British Embassy in America, and here is one of my
colleagues who's from the embassy as well." Later he added his colleague was
actually from MI5.'

Rasul asked where he was and the British officials replied: 'We can't
disclose that information.' His family heard nothing for another three
weeks. It would be many months before the British Government - which, in
public, was voicing deep concerns about the lack of legal process at
Guantanamo, and claiming it was trying to exert diplomatic pressure - would
confirm that its own Security Service had connived from the outset.

Camp X-ray
In the early days at Camp X-ray, the conditions of detention were extreme.

The detainees were forbidden from talking to the person in the next cell
and, Rasul recalls, fed tiny portions of food: 'They'd give you this big
plate with a tiny pile of rice and a few beans. It was nouvelle cuisine,
American-style. You were given less than 10 minutes to eat and if you hadn't
finished the Marines would just take your plate away.' After a few more days
Rasul was questioned again by MI5. The officer asked how he was. 'I started
crying, saying I can't believe I'm here. He says: "I don't want to know how
you are emotionally, I'm only interested in your physical state." '

After about a week the prisoners were allowed to speak to detainees in
adjacent cells, and a few weeks later still were given copies of the Koran,
a prayer mat, blankets and towels. Yet all witnessed or experienced
brutality, especially from Guantanamo's own riot squad, the Extreme Reaction
Force. Its acronym has led to a new verb peculiar to Guantanamo detainees:
'ERF-ing.' To be ERFed, says Rasul, means to be slammed on the floor by a
soldier wielding a riot shield, pinned to the ground and assaulted.

Iqbal and Rasul were at opposite ends of the same block and were forbidden
from talking to each other. There was almost nothing to do. 'Time speeds
up,' Rasul says. 'You just stare and the hours go clicking by. You'd look at
people and see they'd lost it. There was nothing in their eyes any more.
They didn't talk.'

As the weeks of detention became months they would sometimes see
psychiatrists. The response to any complaint was always the same: an offer
to administer Prozac. (On my visit to Guantanamo, the camp medical staff
told me that at least a fifth of the detainees were taking
anti-depressants.)

It was almost impossible to master the rules and know how to avoid
punishment. There was only one rule that mattered, Rasul says: 'You have to
obey whatever US government personnel tell you to do.'

In mid-2002 the prisoners were moved from the open cages with mesh walls at
Camp X-ray to the pre-fabri cated metal cellblocks of Camp Delta. There, the
standard punishment was transfer to solitary confinement in the sensory
deprivation isolation wing. Once, Ahmed says, he was given isolation for
writing 'Have a nice day' on a polystyrene cup. This was deemed 'malicious
damage to US government property'. On another occasion, he was punished for
singing.

The cells were about the size of a king-size mattress, made of mesh and
metal, exposed to the relentless tropical heat, with no air conditioning.
They contained a hole in the floor for a toilet, a tap producing yellow
water which was so low they had to kneel to use it, and a narrow metal cot.
Apart from interrogation, the only break in this confined monotony were
showers and 20 minutes' exercise, two or three times a week. 'When we were
on a block with English speakers, we'd go over the conversations again and
again,' Ahmed says. 'Often they'd start by someone asking if you remembered
a particular kind of food. Soon you'd exhaust the possibilities, repeat the
same stories four or five times.'

Even this, however, was better than the isolation punishment block, or the
fate which Iqbal endured for five months in 2002 - being placed in a wing
where all the other prisoners spoke only Chinese.

The three Britons were visited at least six times by MI5 and Foreign Office
staff, Rasul says: 'Every time the Foreign Office came we asked about what
was going on, and whether we had solicitors. His reply was "I don't know,
all I know is what's been on TV. Your case hasn't been on TV." '

In fact, their families had engaged lawyers in Britain and America soon
after learning of their whereabouts in February 2002, and a federal lawsuit
was launched in their name which, had they not been released, would have
been argued before the Supreme Court next month. They were told of this by a
guard a few weeks ago, almost two years after the suit was first filed.

In September 2003 Rasul was visited on consecutive days, first by the man
from the Foreign Office, then by an MI5 officer. He asked the Foreign Office
man about his legal status and was told: 'You should ask the MI5 guy who's
coming tomorrow.' When he did so next day, the MI5 agent said: 'You should
have asked Martin from the Foreign Office yesterday.' How long had they
thought they would be at Guantanamo? I asked the three men. They reply in
unison: 'Forever!'