July 19, 2003
Nusaba Begg was barely a year old when the twin towers in New York were attacked on September 11 2001: a little girl from Birmingham on a big adventure in Afghanistan with her family. She is nearly three now and back home, but her father, Moazzam Begg, is in Camp Delta, held by the Americans as part of their war on terror. Eighteen months ago, Pakistani security forces seized the 35-year-old, bundling him into a car boot, and handed him over to US authorities. He was taken to an airbase in Bagram, Afghanistan, where he was held for a year in a cell deprived of natural light. Now he is a prisoner of the US at Guantanamo Bay.
Nusaba cannot remember what her father looks like. "When she sees a man with a beard about the same age as her father, she points and says, 'He's my dad,' " says her grandfather, Azmat Begg. "When the man walks away, she gets sad."
The Beggs are one of 11 families up and down Britain who, for up to 18 months, have been waiting for any news of the men held as "unlawful enemy combatants" in the military camp at Guantanamo Bay. All the prisoners have been held without charge, trial or promise of eventual release; without access to lawyers; without contact with anyone but their guards, secret service interrogators and - occasionally - visiting British officials.
There are nine Britons and two British residents among the 680 detainees at Guantanamo: more than from any other western country. The youngest of the Britons are 20; the eldest 36. Two of the men, Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi, a 23-year-old former computer studies student from Croydon, are among the first six detainees selected to face trial before a military tribunal. In the system devised by the Americans, military officers are judge and jury, with defence counsel handpicked by Washington. Conversations between lawyer and client are monitored by the military. The accused could face the death penalty. The US says they are either terrorists or linked to terrorism, although it will not elaborate on its suspicions, let alone the charges. Critics argue that the courts are loaded to ensure convictions. In the unlikely event of acquittal, the prisoners could still be detained indefinitely.
The planned trials have provoked outrage around the world, not just from human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Fair Trials Abroad, but from usually steadfast supporters of America such as the former Tory ministers Douglas Hogg and Nicholas Soames. More than 200 MPs signed a Commons motion last week calling for the men to be given a fair trial. The mounting pressure has forced the government at least to be seen to be making serious efforts to have the Britons sent home to face any trial. This in turn has provoked scepticism, not least because of the unlikelihood of securing a conviction. The evidence the Americans have against Begg and Abbasi is probably too flimsy and circumstantial to satisfy a British criminal court, even if an appropriate charge could be decided upon.
Azmat Begg says that the best option would be for his son to face trial in Britain. "At least he will be relieved by seeing his wife and children, and he'll get a fair trial." But relief is clouded by worry. "The uncertainty is causing more pain to the whole family. He's been one and a half years in prison and he will say anything they want him to say."
Moazzam Begg - or detainee JJEEH#00558 to his captors - is described by his family as a deeply religious man and devoted father, though his sole contact with his children is now through letters he sends home via the Red Cross. In one, he urges them to work on their English spelling. In another, he asks his family to video his youngest child, born a few months after he was seized and whom he has never seen. Replying to a message from his nephews - who know only that he is "away" - he wrote gently, "I don't know when I am coming home and am afraid 'souvenirs' will be quite hard to bring back."
His family say that Moazzam used to run an Islamic book and video store in Birmingham. In the spring of 2001, he and his family left for Afghanistan, where Moazzam worked on a literacy project and another scheme to provide villages with a water supply. When, after the September 11 attacks, the US bombed Afghanistan in early October, Begg took his wife and three children to Islamabad in Pakistan for safety. It was there in February 2002 that he was picked up by Pakistani security forces. In the car driving him away, locked inside the boot, he was able to make a brief mobile phone call to his father telling him of his arrest.
Azmat Begg, a retired bank manager and member of the Liberal Democrats, does not recognise the US description of his son as a fundamentalist terrorist; he says Moazzam went to a Jewish school, and still has Jewish friends. Furthermore, it is unlikely that someone intending to be an al-Qaida operative would take a family of small children with him.
Guantanamo Bay, located on the south-eastern tip of Cuba, is reachable only by a US military flight: its remoteness adds to its security. With its white sand and turquoise sea, it would make an ideal holiday resort. Instead, it is home to the prison with the tightest security in the world. The 45-mile territory, held by the US under a lease signed in 1934 and still used as a naval base, is uniquely useful to Washington. The US courts have ruled that it is not American soil, which means that they have no jurisdiction over how the detainees are treated. But nor does Cuba. The prisoners here are in a legal black hole. The base's motto, emblazoned on a sign at the airport, reads: "Honour Bound To Defend Freedom."
In the face of international criticism, the US now permits reporters a restricted visit to Camp Delta. Here, the officials talk carefully of "detainees"; never, ever, of "prisoners". In his office, General Geoffrey Miller, who heads the mission, brushes off questions about three-year-old Nusaba's pain. Each of the 680 men held - the largest proportion of them Afghans and Pakistanis - is a dangerous terrorist, he says: "Everyone here, as they came in, was a great threat. We've gone through a very thorough screening process before any enemy combatants came to Guantanamo, [to ensure] that they both have intelligence value to help us win the global war on terrorism, and that they pose a threat to the US or our allies."
Other officials, however, have been less keen to support US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's initial boast that the prisoners were "very tough, hardcore, well-trained terrorists"; off the record, some have privately admitted that detainees included those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Among the 40 or so men so far released from the camp are several pensioners.
Although the Guardian tour was tightly managed, there were cracks in the image that the US has strived so hard to construct. Those in daily contact with the prisoners - their guards - contradict the official line; they do not talk of trapping dangerous terrorists, but primarily of holding people to pump them for intelligence. "These people may not be criminally orientated; they might be having information we might want to know," says Sergeant David Keefer. "I don't view any one of them as terrorists - that's not my job to decide - but neither am I a bleeding heart. I treat each one as a pertinent information giver. The mindset of dealing with a criminal is different from dealing with an Afghan farmer," he adds, ambiguously.
Officially, the US will give no information about the British detainees - whether they are being held together, or whether any of them are ill. However, Sgt Keefer did concede: "I'd say they fare better in this environment because the connection is easier for us with them [because of the shared language], and for us to facilitate their needs," adding that they are "helpful, if they are in a good mood", acting as unofficial interpreters; the guards speak no Arabic or Urdu and many inmates speak no English. "They want to talk about football, or soccer, they want to know the scores, what club is strong or about the cup."
Another guard, Private Jennifer Bartlett, says that the Britons are suffering. "Some get angry and do not want anything to do with anyone; some sit there and talk about their family, tell you about their kids - it helps them cope with it," she says. Their apparently endless detention depresses them, she admits. "It's just the duration of the time they have spent here, not knowing what's going to happen, when they are going home. They will sit and read a letter from their family, and they are frustrated, sometimes they get down. Sometimes they cry after reading their letters." When they receive them, that is.
Three of the Britons, who, to the bewilderment of their families, are believed to have become caught up in the war in Afghanistan, come from Tipton, a small town in the West Midlands. They played football together each week, and two of them - Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, both 20 - were classmates at Alexandra high school. They, and their team-mate, Shafiq Rasul, all flew to Pakistan, separately but within a week or so of each other - between the end of September 2001 and the start of thewar against the Taliban on October 7. A fourth man from Tipton, Munir Ali, who was in the year above Asif and Rhuhel at school, also flew to Pakistan in October, telling his family he was meeting mates for a holiday. He has not been seen or heard of since.
It was at his family's suggestion that Asif Iqbal went to Pakistan, and his father, Mohammed, accompanied him; his parents believed it was time for him to get married and settle down. Asif met his prospective bride during his first week in Faisalabad, but told his father that he wanted some time to think. He would visit a friend in Karachi for a break and give his decision on his return. "I told him: careful," says Mohammed. "Karachi is a big city, a dangerous city. When he got there, he phoned and said, 'Dad, I'm fine, don't worry about me.' He said he would be back in two weeks' time. That was nearly two years ago."
Mohammed pulls on the first of a chain of Benson & Hedges. He has dark circles under his eyes and shuffles a little when he walks; the stress has exacerbated his heart condition. "I am 70. I wanted him to get married and be happy. I made a mistake and am sorry about that. Now my missus wakes up in the morning crying, 'When is my Asif coming back? When will my Asif come back?'"
Asif Iqbal, whose school photographs show a slight boy with candid eyes and a shy but engaging smile, was devoted to his family, often returning from long factory night-shifts and beginning to cook and clean at once, so that his invalid mother could rest.
On October 4, shortly after Asif left, Rhuhel Ahmed announced to his family that he was flying to Pakistan to help with his friend's wedding. On January 26 2002, they learned that he was being held at Guantanamo Bay. "He is a kid, straight out of school. How could he be a terrorist? Out of here, and then at end of one month he was stopped," says his father Riasoth, pondering Rhuhel's journey to the prison camp.
Rhuhel was 19 when he left; a college student and keen kickboxer who had trained from the age of 14 and who rarely came home from a contest empty-handed. A handful of chrome trophies still line the walls of his parents' pebble-dashed terraced house on a shabby estate. "We go to bed every day and, passing his room, his bed seems very empty," says Riasoth as his wife Salaha Begum keens on the sofa. "My wife, sometimes she cries, sometimes she shouts. Last week she could not sleep. You sleep two minutes and wake for five hours. She is making herself ill. It's very lonely. Of the six kids, he is the most friendly, the most active. He was full of life, joking and laughing. He talked too much. Trying to make you happy. Lovely."
But in the weeks before Rhuhel flew to Pakistan, he became depressed after discovering that problems with his eyesight appeared much more serious than he had initially suspected. "Everything in his life had been for boxing purposes. Then he said his eyes were wrong. The doctor said he couldn't see from there to there," says Riasoth, gesturing across the room. "Rhuhel said, 'If I don't see anyone in front of me, how can I fight?'"
Shafiq Rasul, at 25, is older than the others. His older brother Habib admits that he was concerned when he saw Shafiq preparing for his departure to Pakistan in late September 2001. "He was wearing a [Ralph Lauren] Polo cap with the Stars and Stripes on and a Polo T-shirt, Armani jeans," says Habib, 30, a compact man with a Black Country twang and the intensity of an easy-going man stretched taut by circumstance. "War was coming in Afghanistan and I knew there were marches in Pakistan and I said, 'I wouldn't wear that there - any suggestion that you are British or American won't go down well.'"
The trip had been Habib's suggestion. A successful IT consultant, he had hoped to set up a business with Shafiq, who was at a loose end after finishing college. Habib knew that computer training in Lahore cost a tenth of its price in the UK and proposed that Shafiq should gain new skills while exploring his family's roots; the younger man's previous trips abroad had been to Benidorm and Tenerife on an 18-30 holiday.
Shafiq is 6ft 2in, but "baby-faced", says his brother, and cheeky; a passionate Liverpool fan who dreamed of fast cars. "A very young lad, in a world of his own - a kid, really," says Habib, who slips into the past tense unwittingly when speaking of his brother. "He was more westernised than anyone. Most of his friends were into clubbing and drinking; he'd go out all the time. Our first language is Punjabi, and he couldn't even speak that, not very well. He was into designer clothes; he'd spend £280 on a pair of trousers. He didn't lose his identity, but it was very rare to see him in the mosque."
Shafiq's girlfriend, like most of his friends, was white; he insisted that he would make a love match. To the Rasuls, Shafiq's detention is as baffling as it is disturbing. He took most of his designer wardrobe with him - hardly an indication that he planned to fight on the frontline - and they spoke to him shortly before he was apparently picked up by the Northern Alliance. "They are saying that he had gone to the border, learned to speak the language and how to fire a weapon in one week," says Habib. "The summer before this happened, we went camping together in Wales. About 2am, we heard rustling and he said, 'I'm going to sleep in the car.' He was scared of a squirrel running around in the night and they think he was involved with the worst terrorists in the world?"
If it appears implausible that three young friends should all end up in the hands of US forces by chance, it seems still more unlikely that they could be described as hardened al-Qaida terrorists and Taliban fighters. It is impossible to tell whether they had a particular plan in mind when they left the UK, but it seems more probable that, if they did hatch a plan to fight for the Taliban, they did so impulsively, possibly following their arrival in Pakistan. And it seems equally likely that they did not go to fight at all - that at most they went in search of excitement, naive young men caught up in the moment, wondering what the war meant, how it would be, perhaps wanting simply to witness a world event.
Iqbal and Ahmed had convictions for violent disorder and actual bodily harm respectively, following what Midlands police describe as a minor gangfight a few years earlier. But despite extensive inquiries, there is no evidence that they had links to fundamentalist groups. Other young Asians in Tipton say that all three were friendly and good-humoured to newcomers, and "looked out" for younger, more vulnerable boys. All had reached potential turning points in their lives - but there was nothing to suggest that they were set on a path of extremism.
Plenty of people have speculated as to what happened in the very few weeks between the boys' arrival in Pakistan and their capture; but firm information is scarce. Unconfirmed reports have suggested that Rasul, Iqbal and Ahmed were detained in northern Afghanistan by Northern Alliance troops; a Red Cross worker told their local newspaper that he had seen them in Shibergan prison in December that year, observing that they did not seem to be "battle-hardened" and that they had told him they were not terrorists. Their families doubt whether they were ever in Afghanistan at all, and suggest they may have been picked up from the Pakistan side of the border by overzealous Alliance troops who may have hoped for rewards from the US authorities. Riasoth Ahmed, father of Rhuhel, expresses the bafflement of them all: "How he got there and why he went there, God knows. Honest to God, I do not know."
All that is known for certain is that, by the time they arrived in Cuba, Rasul was "very, very lucky to be alive", according to the Red Cross - his weight had plummeted from 12 and a half stone to seven stone.
Back home in Tipton, Nasreen Iqbal leafs through brief messages from her younger brother Asif. "We treasure them as if they were gold," she says. "They are the only form of reassurance we have. We sit here every morning, waiting for the postman, thinking, 'Has it come today?' But it doesn't, and we have been waiting since January."
What little does get through makes disturbing reading, as much for what it omits as for what it contains. Whole sections are blacked out - one postcard was censored so brutally that it now reads only: "Dear Pops how are you, I'm fine [censored] lots of luv, Asif." On another, a lengthy blacked-out section ends, "but other than that, everything is fine". At one point, Asif writes that he "may lose my mentality"; at another, "Have you ever eaten [censored] or sometimes [censored]? Ha ha. People have started killing mice for entertainment." Nasreen shakes her head. "There's obviously something not right with him psychologically." Like other relatives, she fears that her brother will return a broken, even unrecognisable, man.
There have been at least 28 suicide attempts at Camp X-Ray - the original Guantanamo prison camp, now abandoned - and its replacement, Camp Delta. Some prisoners have found enough material in their sparse cells to fashion ligatures with which to hang themselves; others have tried to dash their heads against hard surfaces. Azmat Begg has begun to fear, from some of his son Moazzam's letters, that he may be contemplating suicide.
A specialist mental-health unit, Delta block, opened in March this year - eight months after the first suicide attempt. Captain Al Shimkus, who runs the prison hospital, says that the detainees have the same quality of care as the soldiers. However, unlike their guards, the prisoners are strapped to their hospital beds.
General Miller blames the suicide attempts on factors such as pre-existing mental illness, rather than the stress of incarceration. But the Red Cross, which is allowed access to inmates, is uncharacteristically forthright about the regime's effects: "The uncertainty these internees face as regards their legal status and their future does have a very adverse impact on their physical and mental wellbeing," says spokeswoman Antonella Notari. "A lot of them are pushed to despair. It is a clear indication that these people are under extreme stress and anxiety."
Their diet hasn't helped, either. James Kluck, the man in charge of catering, says that from this month detainees will get three hot meals a day. Until now, their lunch had been a special military meal, called a "meal ready to eat", or MRE, which has "impacted on their health", says Kluck. "It's a polite way of saying it makes some of them ill." The MRE is designed for troops in the field, providing enough calories and nutrients for a strenuous day with heavy equipment. Camp Delta's prisoners are locked up for a minimum 23-and-a-half hours a day, and the lack of fibre and excess calories caused by prison meals has played havoc with their systems, causing some to develop high blood pressure. "With hindsight, it could have been thought about earlier," admits Kluck.
Reel after reel of concertinaed razor wire surrounds Camp Delta. Countless soldiers patrol the boundary and the many gates; floodlights around the camp are kept on all night. Our guide, Captain Adolph McQueen, the camp commandant, tells us that the row of portable cabins just inside the entrance are for "admin". In fact, they are where the interrogations take place. Both Begg and Abbasi have been questioned here, by the British secret service as well as by US agents.
Further inside the compound is a series of huts, each with 48 cells, where a network of blowers battles to cool the merciless heat, 110F today. Each small cell is surrounded by solid green mesh, to ensure that inmates can be seen at all times; lights burn into them all through the night. One of the bright orange jumpsuits worn by inmates - polyester mix, despite the crushing heat - is lain out for media inspection. On the floor, a painted white arrow points to Mecca, 12,793km away.
A 25ft by 35ft exercise area, also enmeshed, is draped with a net for shade. The prisoners can exercise two at a time, for half an hour, between three and seven times a week - depending on how well they comply with orders. Some, however, prefer the small acts of rebellion available to them; one in 10 inmates is deemed "non-compliant". The most serious offence was throwing water on the guards; others have stuffed the wrappers from their cereal bars down the toilets, to block them.
Those who show "positive behaviour", says Capt McQueen, move to the "medium-security" fourth camp, where 125 white-clad inmates are allowed to lunch outside, behind high wire fences, and associate with each other. The other three interconnected camps are all high security.
Guantanamo's newest and most notorious addition is Camp Iguana, which holds children whom the US regards as enemy combatants. It is less formidable than the adult version: the wire fence is just 12ft high and the all-night floodlights are softer. A 20ft long rectangle has been cut from the green canvas surrounding the camp, so that the children can see the Caribbean sea. "It adds a certain tranquillity to the environment," says Dave Wodushek, who runs Camp Iguana. He is saddened that people so young are held here: the four children, believed to be Afghans, are as young as 13. He blames those countries which use children as soldiers.
The boys incarcerated here live two to a flat, where they spend at least 21 hours a day. With permission from their guards, they can cross the black tape line in front of the fridge - inside are pretzels, peanut butter, fruit, and a packet of beef jerky that is probably not halal. In the freezer lies a half-eaten Hershey chocolate bar. The regime is strict, and formal education lasts two hours a day, with group therapy sessions provided once a week. Board games and half-completed jigsaws lie on a table in the living area. At other times, intelligence agents come to their flats to interrogate them. Wodushek says that the children are respectful and compliant, but sometimes cry: "They ask when they are going home," he says.
The stridency of US foreign policy unleashed by September 11 is evident all around the base. In the base shop, a T-shirt sports a rat in Afghan clothing, with the slogan "Taliban bowl" and below it "JTF [Joint Task Force] Guantanamo Bay". Another has a cartoon of Saddam Hussein fleeing Baghdad - for France. Elsewhere on the base, a poster warning soldiers not to send sensitive information in emails has a picture of the fireball bursting from one of the twin towers. In New York and Washington, there are, as yet, no official monuments to those who died that day. Instead, Camp Delta serves as a memorial, not to America's sorrow, but to its anger.
"Americans cry about freedom of speech, democracy and liberty, but what are they doing themselves?" asks Habib Rasul, whose 25-year-old brother Shafiq was one of the first Britons taken to Guantanamo Bay.
For Maxine Fiddler, older sister of Jamal Udeen, another of the Britons held in Cuba, there is a double sense of injustice - she had initially heard from the authorities that her brother was safe and in good hands, only to have hope dashed. And now she has learned from the Red Cross that none of the scores of letters sent to him at Camp Delta in more than a year has reached him. Udeen, who is 36, left for Pakistan around the same time as the men from Tipton. He had been away from home for only three weeks when the Americans stumbled across him in a prison in Kandahar. He told them he had paid a lorry driver to take him from northern Pakistan to Iran as part of a backpacking trip, but was stopped near the Afghan border by Taliban soldiers who saw his British passport and jailed him, fearing he was a spy.
Maxine says that at that time he described the Americans as "his saviours". The British Foreign Office told her that he would be back home as soon as they had got him a passport. Weeks later, the family discovered from the media that he had been taken to Guantanamo Bay. The US appeared to believe that he had joined the Taliban only for them to turn on him, perhaps fearing he was a spy; one Foreign Office source described his travel itinerary as "weird". But his family say he was retracing a journey he had made a decade earlier, following the Footsteps To Pakistan guidebook.
Born Ronald Fiddler to devout church-going Jamaican parents, Jamal converted to Islam in his 20s. His sister believes he found peace there after years of emotional trauma; their mother left the family home when he was just two. Maxine describes her "baby brother" as a gentle, quiet man with a dry and occasionally silly sense of humour: "a very smart, a very serious person".
He rarely spoke of his faith unless asked, and after four years learning Arabic and teaching English at Khartoum University in Sudan, seemed happy enough to return home, marrying and setting up a computer business with his wife. He was a devoted father to their three children and was devastated when the marriage broke down, moving back to Manchester, where he worked as an administrator in a Muslim school. His trip was supposed to be part of that fresh start.
Two of the other British detainees flew out to Pakistan at some point in summer 2001, telling their families they wanted to study Arabic. Tarek Dergoul, 25, is of Moroccan origin and a lifelong Muslim; he grew up in Bethnal Green, London, and was a care worker for the elderly. His whereabouts were a mystery for many months, until, in May 2002, his family learned that he was held in Cuba. He had allegedly been captured in the Tora Bora mountain complex, where retreating al-Qaida forces fled, and had apparently had an arm amputated.
Richard Belmar, 24, was raised as a Catholic by his devout parents, but went off the rails a little in his adolescence and was expelled from his secondary school. His conversion to Islam in his late teens, following in the path of his elder brother Andrew, appeared to steady him and he grew into a polite, respectful man. He worshipped at Regent's Park Mosque, a mainstream mosque with no history of radicalism, close to his home in Maida Vale, London.
The ninth Briton, Martin Mubanga, was raised as a Catholic on a council estate in London, and turned to Islam later in life. The 29-year-old motorcycle courier was of dual nationality, the son of a Zambian government official who moved to Wembley in the 1970s. His brother and sisters still live in the area, but refuse to discuss his case. Neighbours said he moved out of his last flat, on a new-build estate in Neasden, at least two years ago, and there are rumours, unsubstantiated, that he had attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. All that is known is that he appears to have fled the war zone for Zambia, only to be picked up by the authorities and returned to the Americans in spring 2002.
For 18 months, there has been very little public outcry about the Britons held in Cuba. Only now, when the military tribunals have been mooted, have a substantial body of politicians found their voice and begun lobbying for a fair trial. If America's treatment of its prisoners angers their families, the British government's failure to press the case of its citizens is the bitterest betrayal. "The Foreign Office are basically a bunch of jokers," says Habib. "Talk to them? I may as well go in a corner and talk to the wall." The families' only real support has come from campaigning lawyers such as the solicitor Louise Christian, who is acting for several of the families, and a handful of sympathetic MPs.
The problems may have been exacerbated by the families' inability to act en masse. Although several are in touch with each other, there is no single campaign for the rights of those imprisoned in Cuba. Some families have simply kept their heads down, fearing that anything they say could be distorted and used against their loved ones. But there is also the problem that many of the accusations made about the detainees rest on little more than guilt by association. Despite thorough investigations by police and secret services, there is no evidence that the Tipton men, for example, associated with fundamentalist groups - merely a rash of unsubstantiated and often contradictory claims. Unsurprisingly, this has left the families reluctant to associate their men with others who they fear might have more substantive links to extremists.
Until the announcement of the military tribunals, ministers had refused even to meet relatives of the detainees. The news brought the government's most outspoken comments yet - Foreign Office minister Chris Mullin told the Commons that it had "strong reservations" about them - but Tony Blair initially promised only to make "active representations" to the US to ensure a fair trial. Not enough, say the families, who have lost faith in the government that is supposed to represent them. They are convinced that the detainees' religion and race - all are black or Asian - are to blame. It is as if the men are "not really" British because they are Muslim, and because they are not white.
"We can shout and scream as much as we like - they aren't going to listen to us," says Habib. "Being British doesn't mean anything now. I always thought being British was something to be proud of. I've been all over the world, and if you say you're from Britain they respect you. Now it just means you have a passport."
"We have gone everywhere and no one can help," says Riasoth Ahmed. "I cannot say anything to Tony Blair. He doesn't listen to me. I cannot say anything to Bush; he doesn't listen to me. These are big people. They are not interested. I'm very happy in this country. The last 25 years I have been here have been good for the government as well as for me. Now my boy is taken, the government say nothing to help. Nobody understands why these boys are there. But nobody bothers."
