The Guantanamo Airlift: how Europe helped transport the prisoners

By Stephen Grey / additional research Natalia Viana.

For more information, including breakdown of Guantanamo prisoner flights, see www.ghostplane.net / and www.ghostplane.pbwiki.com



THE secret flight plans of American military planes have revealed for the first time how European countries helped send prisoners, including British citizens, to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Despite widespread criticism of alleged human rights abuses and torture at the US base in Cuba, a Sunday Times investigation has shown that at least five European countries gave the United States permission to fly nearly 700 terrorist suspects across their territory.

Three years ago, The Sunday Times published flight logs of CIA civilian jets in Europe, setting off a controversy over the whether countries across the continent have been secretly involved in America's rendition of terrorist suspects to countries that carry out torture.

The row is now set to be reignited. Inquiries by Ana Gomes, a Portuguese member of the European parliament, have uncovered not only more CIA flight logs but also more sensitive military flight plans, which until now have remained a closely guarded secret.

The logs show how most prisoners changed planes at a Turkish military airbase and flew across Greek, Italian and Portuguese airspace. Others reached Cuba after touching down in Spain, whose governing socialist party once expressed indignation at conditions in Guantanamo.

The flight logs show that three Britons — Shafiq Rasul, Jamal Udeen and Asif Iqbal — were flown across Europe to Cuba on January 14, 2002. Moazzam Begg, another Briton, was taken by the same route to Guantanamo on February 2, 2003; and Binyam Mohamed, a British resident whose release the British government is now trying to negotiate, arrived in Cuba after crossing Europe in a special flight in September 2004.

According to the flight plans, the first 23 prisoners to arrive at Guantanamo — including another British citizen, Feroz Abbasi, then 21, and an Australian, David Hicks — had arrived at the American naval base in Cuba after flying from the Moron airbase in Spain.

Abbasi has claimed in a statement that prisoners were abused within hours of arriving. "We were made to sit on our heels, one foot over the other, supported by one foot's toes alone, for hours. Some of us were old, weak, fatigued, and injured — they were the ones to drop first in the searing Caribbean heat."

Described by the Pentagon as the "worst of the worst" from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the images of prisoners such as Abbasi dressed in orange jumpsuits, their heads shaved and shackled by their wrists and ankles, shocked the world. Within a day, Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, announced that the Geneva conventions would not apply to what were now called "enemy combatants".

Last week, Europe's leading watchdog on human rights alleged that European countries had breached the international convention against torture by giving the US secret permission to use its airspace.

Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, said: "What happened at Guantanamo was torture and it is illegal to provide facilities or anything to make this torture possible. Under the law, European governments should have intervened and should not have given permission to let these flights happen."

Gomes added: "It's clear to me that Guantanamo could not have been created without the involvement of European countries."

Methods used at Guantanamo Bay, condemned by Britain's Court of Appeal as a legal "black hole" and as a "monstrous failure of justice" by one law lord, have included the prolonged use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and use of stress positions. "These are methods that have been declared as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights," Hammarberg said.

The military flight plans show that all key flights arriving in Guantanamo had come across European airspace either through Spain or the Incirlik airbase in southeastern Turkey. The Sunday Times compared the military flight plans against a database compiled by Reprieve, the British-based charity that represents Guantanamo prisoners, of when prisoners first weighed in at the camp.

The investigation, cross-checked against other Pentagon documents, shows for the first time which prisoner arrived on which flight at Guantanamo, and by what route. At least 170 other prisoners flew over Spanish territory, more than 700 crossed Portuguese space, and more than 680 were transshipped at Incirlik. Most flights also crossed Greek and Italian airspace, according to a source in European air traffic control.

On February 7 2003, for example, a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster plane took off from Incirlik with 27 prisoners on board for Cuba. The same day, prisoner number 558 weighed in at 136lb (62kg) at the camp. He can be named as Moazzam Begg, now 39, from Birmingham, who was released in January 2005, and has never been charged with a crime.

Interviewed by phone last week, Begg recalled: "Inside the plane there was a chain around our waist, and it connected to cuffs around my wrists, which were tied in the back, and to my ankles. We were seated but it was so painful not being able to speak, to hear, to breathe properly, to look, to turn left or right, to move your hands, stretch your legs, or anything." At the time flights were landing in Spain and crossing Spanish airspace, socialist leaders there were expressing "indignation" over conditions in Guantanamo. Now the socialists are in government after winning an election in March 2004 just after the Madrid train bombings and they are being asked to defend Spain's continued collaboration with American operations. Under international law, government and military planes can cross another country's territory only with diplomatic permission.

In a statement to the European parliament on the visits of CIA planes to Spain, the foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has testified: "Our territory may have been used not to commit crimes on it, but as a stopover on the way to committing crime in another country."

Spain, it has now emerged, had a specific agreement with the US to allow flights and visits to Spanish airbases for American planes.

In Portugal, the foreign minister Luis Amado has said flights across his country's airspace took place "under the aegis of the UN and Nato and that Portugal naturally follows the principle of good faith in the relations with its allies". Nato's role in Guantanamo stems from a secret agreement made in Brussels on October 4 2001 by all Nato members, including Britain. Although never made public, Lord Robertson, the former British defence secretary who was later Nato's secretary-general, explained that day that Nato had agreed to provide "blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other allies' aircraft for military flights related to operations against terrorism".

Today, Nato is more coy about its role in helping send prisoners to Guantanamo.

In a letter to Gomes, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the current secretary-general, said no Nato planes had "flown to or from Guantanamo Bay" and that Nato "as an organisation has no involvement or co-ordinating role in providing clearance or overflight rights for other flights". Turkey, meanwhile, has declared that its agencies had "reached no findings regarding any unacknowledged deprivation of liberty conducted by foreign agencies within the territory of the republic of Turkey or any transport by aircraft or otherwise of the persons deprived of their liberty".

In London, Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve, said, with America threatening that Guantanamo prisoners faced the death penalty, European governments had made "pious statements" that they would never send prisoners to the US without obtaining assurances they would not be executed.

Stafford Smith added: "Some European governments, it's now clear, systematically assisted in clandestine flights and illegal prisoner transfers to Guantanamo Bay. We need a full investigation and Europeans need to face their responsibility for these crimes."

See flight logs and complete list of prisoners at www.ghostplane.net

Additional reporting: Natalia Viana

Mint tea with the terrorists

Monday 11th April 2005

Under US law, it is an offence to give any "aid or counsel" to groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah. But some westerners say it's time to talk to even the most militant Islamists. By Stephen Grey

Osama Hamdan wears an ordinary business suit and hands out an ordinary business card with his e-mail address and telephone number. But he never carries his own mobile - just in case Mossad tries to put explosives inside it again.

Hamdan is in the downstairs bar of an elegant Beirut hotel, talking to me and to Bobby Muller, an American Vietnam veterans leader and a joint winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

It's not an ordinary conversation. Behind Hamdan lurk three burly and bearded bodyguards. Occasionally, one steps forward with the mobile phone. In the meantime, Muller, whose spine was severed by a bullet when he led a combat assault in Vietnam, discusses the impact of Hamas's decision to stand in the Palestinian assembly elections in July, thus apparently joining the "Arab Spring" of democracy so lauded by President George W Bush.

If Hamas wins enough votes to join the Palestinian government, Bush will be in a dilemma, explains Muller. The president has promised hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority - but US law forbids him from giving money to terrorist groups. The law is so tight that Muller himself, by taking part in this conversation, and by giving Hamdan an anti-war DVD, might be giving "aid or counsel" to a banned terrorist. That, too, is a violation of US law. Even buying a cup of mint tea for a Hamas leader could be considered a form of "aid". Just telling a terrorist group to turn to peace could be an offence.

Last month, however, in Beirut, Muller joined a private meeting of former intelligence officers and diplomats, some with very high connections in Washington, who were prepared to talk to declared terrorists. Those present included not only Musa Abu Marzuq, deputy leader of Hamas, and two of his senior colleagues, but also leaders of Lebanon's Hezbollah, another group banned by the US. It was the first time in at least ten years that Hamas or Hezbollah had talked to a high-level American delegation. Representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan's Jamaat-e-Islami party were also there.

The Israeli government condemned the talks, arguing that it simply gave the terrorists credibility. But as we all know, there are always talks with terrorists - whether with the IRA, the African National Congress, or Iran during the Lebanese hostage crisis.

Some argue that the lack of dialogue between America and militant Islam is the most dangerous aspect of the current conflict. Those who take this view include Alastair Crooke, a former officer with MI6 who, for more than five years, was the European Union's secret and not-so-secret mediator with Palestinian militant groups. "While the stakes are getting higher and higher," says Crooke, "there is a widening gulf of understanding between the west and militant Islam. There has been an enormous retreat from the level of contact that there was a few years ago, whether academic, diplomatic, or otherwise."

Crooke was withdrawn from the West Bank in 2003 by Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, ostensibly for his own safety, but amid protests by Israel that he was getting too close to Hamas. He retired from government service soon afterwards. Now he is on a mission to continue privately what he can no longer do officially, and the Beirut talks are part of that. But he wants to widen the contacts to radical Islam in general.

For nearly three decades, Crooke was secretly one of Britain's leading intermediaries with militant groups - in Ireland, Nami-bia, Colombia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Working for the EU in Palestine, he was called "brave to the point of madness" by one Israeli newspaper after his exposure as a former MI6 man. Criss-crossing the West Bank by local taxi, always unarmed, he negotiated a series of ceasefires and agreements. At times, he was the only outsider maintaining contact with groups such as Hamas.

Milton Bearden, a station chief for the CIA in Islamabad in the mid-1980s, remembers Crooke as "a natural on the frontier" and as "a British agent straight out of the Great Game". At that time, Crooke was helping to co-ordinate British assistance to the mujahedin rebels in Afghanistan. It was then that he got to know some of the militants who would become leaders of al-Qaeda.

Bearden, now retired, supports Crooke's efforts to establish a dialogue with radical Islamists through a new organisation called the Conflicts Forum - and described by Crooke as an "action tank, not a think-tank". Yet Hamas is known in the west for detonating suicide bombs in crowded buses and cafes in Jerusalem. Invited to dinner with the participants in the Beirut talks, and sharing jokes with the Hamas men over tiger prawns, avocado, pasta and cherry tomatoes, I wondered privately how one would explain all this intimacy to the mother of a child killed by a suicide bomber. As the Israeli spokesman did not fail to ask, how did the former CIA men who were present feel about chatting to members of Hezbollah, the same group accused of organising the kidnap, torture and execution in 1985 of William F Buckley, the former CIA station chief in Beirut?

But as one American at the talks said: "Most of the terrorism accusations against Hezbollah, such as hostage executions, relate to events more than 20 years ago. The key question is whether they can be transformed from a private army into a normal political party." Crooke argued that we have to get beyond a debate over good and evil. Islamist violence is a matter of politics, and it has to be dealt with politically. The Beirut talks, he said, were not a negotiation, but rather an exercise in listening. Just as in a hostage negotiation, where two apparently irreconcilable sets of demands must be matched, the first and most important step is to remove false expectations and correct misunderstandings.

Muller, who founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, likens the Crooke initiative to his own private mission to Vietnam in the early 1980s, which led to the first postwar return of US combat veterans and became the precursor to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Washington and Hanoi. The biggest failure of the Vietnam war, says Muller - and to illustrate the point, he gives Hamdan a DVD copy of The Fog of War, Errol Morris's documentary about Robert McNamara, US defence secretary during that time - was the total American ignorance of the Vietnamese and their culture. That failure is being repeated. "People in America have absolutely no idea of the history of the Middle East, its geography and its experience of resisting occupation," says Muller.



And what is the greatest single misunderstanding? According to Hamdan, it is that Palestinians and many other Islamist resistance groups are not part of some global struggle against America. They are engaged simply in a struggle against occupation. Hamas rejects attacks on western targets; its violence is concentrated within home territory and exclusively against Israel or Israelis.

"We are not targeting by our resistance even the Israelis outside Palestine," says Hamdan. Nor does the terrorist violence necessarily imply a rejection of democratic politics. Hamas and Hezbollah insist their military tactics are never to be used for gaining political power - only to resist Israeli aggression.

While such statements are yet to be tested, it is true that many of the groups that the US has declared to be terrorist organisations are greater supporters of democratic elections and an open society than the US-supported dictators in the region. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, which is widely accused of influencing the ideas of al-Qaeda, is now the principal champion of democracy and reform in Egypt. Its leaders, though banned from the Beirut talks, have been encouraging militant groups across the region to engage in the democratic process.

Knowing now that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and no strong links with any terrorist groups - least of all the 9/11 hijackers - the Bush administration has gradually changed its justifications for the Iraq war. Increasingly, we are told that it was about promoting liberty. But asks Hamdan: "Can America accept the results of what it is calling for? It is talking about democracy and reform - and we are doing it."

Muller believes that, one way or another, Washington will have to find a way to open up an official dialogue with Islamist militants. America's commitment in Iraq is becoming so demanding that it will require a new military draft - a draft that will be a wake-up call to the entire United States. And there will be no way out of Iraq for the US unless it starts looking hard at its whole policy for the Middle East. "Our exit strategy from Iraq is going to be engaging a whole lot of issues on a regional basis," he says.

Crooke, for his part, argues that radical Islamists are not seeking a dialogue with the west to establish legitimacy or gain publicity. "They enjoy very high credibility already in their own societies." And by regarding all such groups as enemies, the west is stoking up trouble. As he puts it: "By isolating and demonising, we make the situation more violent. We cannot close off all avenues to protest that are not pro-west and pro-secular and pro-capitalist."

.This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.

Let’s talk: ex-MI6 man plans terror summit

(First published in the Sunday Times, Dec 12, 2004).
by Stephen Grey

A FORMER senior MI6 officer whose career brought him face to face with extremists from Ireland to Afghanistan is to convene talks with militant Islamic groups in an initiative aimed at changing the course of the war on terror.
Alistair Crooke, 55, who spent nearly 30 years with MI6, says he hopes to
persuade leading policymakers from Europe and America to participate.
He wants them to break a taboo on "talking to terrorists" by meeting
representatives of Hamas, the Palestinian group, and Hezbollah, based in
Lebanon. Political organisations such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and
Jamiat-i-Islami, from Pakistan, could also be involved.
Crooke’s initiative will be run through a new organisation, the Conflicts
Forum, which he describes as an "action tank, not a think tank". It is
backed by former government, military and intelligence officials in Europe
and the United States who reject many of the methods of the "war on terror".
It is funded from private donations but has the tacit support of some Arab
governments. However, Crooke’s plans are controversial as both Hamas and
Hezbollah are classed as banned terrorist groups by America. Some of their
members have directed suicide bombings.
Lord Janner of Braunstone, a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress,
said that Crooke was wrong to set up contacts with banned organisations.
"These people have not renounced terror and until they do it is totally
inappropriate to involve them in this way, especially at a time when there
is at last a chance for peace," he said.
Crooke, whose colourful career has included stints in Israel, South Africa
and Colombia, believes that like many guerrilla wars in the past, the
growing conflict between militant Islamists and the West will ultimately be
solved only by negotiation.
"Most of my career has been spent in conflict zones," he said. "I have met
many of those who are labelled terrorists and I’m convinced we can’t make
progress until we start to listen and understand what’s really going on."
Crooke, who retired from government service last year, was made a Companion
of the Order of St Michael and St George in the new year’s honours for
services to peace in the Middle East. He is not a critic of MI6 and refuses
to discuss secret operations.
Interviewed last week, however, he called for more political analysis of
militant Islamic groups. "This is not a struggle between good and evil; it’s
about politics," he said.
Crooke was first named as an MI6 officer by the Israeli press in 2002 when
he was attached to the European Union, working as a mediator with groups
such as Hamas. Renowned for lone missions in the West Bank, he was described
by one newspaper as "brave to the point of madness".
According to former colleagues, his unassuming presence helped him to gain
access to the homes and campfires of some of the world’s most frightening
militant leaders.
Born in Ireland in 1949, Crooke was brought up in Africa, mainly on a farm
near Harare in what was then Rhodesia, where his father farmed tobacco. He
was educated in Switzerland and at St Andrews University.
His elder brother Ian joined the army and became a lieutenant-colonel in the
SAS. Crooke worked briefly in the City before being recruited by MI6.
His posting to Ireland in 1975 led to his first role as a British
negotiator — with the IRA. Three years later he moved to South Africa where
as "first secretary and press officer" he joined mediation with Swapo rebels
in Namibia.
It was during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when he was stationed
for three years in neighbouring Pakistan, that Crooke first met militant
Islamists. The mid-1980s were a wild time on the Afghan frontier, with
American money and weapons pouring in to support those fighting the Soviet
army.
"He was an MI6 man of the old school — a romantic British agent straight out
of the ‘great game’ who was completely in his element," recalled Milton
Bearden, a former associate from the CIA.
Crooke, who was said to return from wanderings by the frontier with the
latest piece of captured Soviet technology in the boot of his car, claimed
that the Kremlin’s failure to crush the rebels showed that guerrilla warfare
could not be defeated with conventional tactics.
"Military people complained that the mujaheddin could not fire their weapons
well or were poorly trained," he said. "But I used to say, ‘What matters is
what’s in their belly. Have they got more fire and steel than their Russian
counterparts?’ It was about keeping the psychological advantage."
Crooke believes that America has not learnt the lessons: "There is not
enough emphasis on winning consent, no emphasis on winning that crucial
psychological edge."
It was in Afghanistan that Crooke first encountered Arab Islamists who went
on to form the nucleus of Al-Qaeda. Most of their extreme ideas were deeply
unpopular with the Afghan resistance, he said.
Even now, despite the September 11 attacks on America in 2001, he believes
that there may be some people within Al-Qaeda who could be worth talking to.
"It’s only by talking to people that you isolate out those who reject any
kind of solution and those who might be prepared to reach some
accommodation," he said.
Crooke said the West misunderstood what happened in training camps in
Afghanistan, Yemen and Lebanon: 99% of training for would-be fighters was in
guerrilla fighting, not in terrorist actions. "It is a guerrilla warfare, a
classic insurgency, that the West is facing," he said. "Acts of political
violence, terrorism, are only one small part of their armoury."
From Afghanistan Crooke went on to Latin America, setting up contacts with
the Marxist National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia’s second largest
guerrilla group.
Shortly after Labour won power in 1997 he was detached from MI6 to join the
European Union’s efforts to restart the stalled Middle East peace process.
His role was not only to work with Yasser Arafat’s movement but also to
reach out to more militant groups which represented a constituency of young,
disaffected Palestinians.
After the beginning of the intifada in 2000, Crooke criss-crossed the West
Bank and Gaza, organising dozens of meetings with the militants, sometimes
acting as their only contact with outsiders.
His style was unorthodox. He often worked from a simple hotel room and
shunned the armoured cars favoured by diplomats and CIA agents. Despite the
risk, he travelled unarmed and alone.
"When I had meetings I had to be extremely careful," he said. "I took no
phone with me so there could be no accusation that I was being tracked. I
was usually met by some boy and then was taken from one place to another."
One stand-off after another brought Crooke’s involvement, from the siege of
the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to that of Arafat’s compound in
Ramallah.
His most dangerous moments were in the early part of the intifada. Twice
Israeli tanks advanced on Beit Jalla, on the outskirts of Bethlehem. At the
behest of Arafat, Crooke was sent across no man’s land to try to negotiate a
resolution.
Standing on the front lines by tanks trading fire with Palestinian fighters,
Crooke had to plead with Israeli paratroopers to call off their assault, at
least for a few moments. "In the end, I just walked right across no man’s
land until the Palestinian mujaheddin came into sight. I remember them
shouting move this way and that, and eventually I was inside their
position."
By the summer of 2002 Crooke appeared to be close to his greatest
achievement: negotiating a full ceasefire by Hamas. The deal was called off
on July 23 when the Israelis bombed the Gaza home of a Hamas commander and
killed 14 others.
A year later Crooke was withdrawn on the orders of Jack Straw, the foreign
secretary. He said he was never given a reason, but some speculated that it
was because the Israelis had accused him of becoming too close to the
Palestinians.
Crooke’s private efforts to resume contacts with militant groups are
unlikely to endear him to Israeli officials. But Bearden, now retired as a
regional director of the CIA’s covert operations, said that his objectives
were correct.
"We can all go on and on killing terrorists, but sooner or later someone is
going to have to sit down quietly and start talking with some of these
different quarters of the Islamic world," he said

Follow the Mullahs

The Atlantic Monthly November 2004

With theologians at the center of terrorist strategy, "forensic theology" is rapidly becoming a valuable intelligence tool

by Stephen Grey
.....
Inside the Green Zone in Baghdad last winter I watched a coalition adviser study a 4,200-word communiqué purported to be from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian suspected of links to al-Qaeda, whose network has claimed responsibility for the recent spate of beheadings and is the United States' most wanted enemy in Iraq. The essence of the screed had already been broadcast by the media: the author promised to draw the Iraqi people "into the furnace of battle," in order that "a real war will break out, God willing." The analyst, however, had little interest in the political content of the communiqué. An Arabist and a scholar of Islam, he was scrutinizing the language and religious references in the text in an effort to determine whether it was in fact written by al-Zarqawi. Many commentators believed that it had been put together by others—perhaps an intelligence agency or the Iraqi National Congress—in order to give credence to U.S. accusations of foreign involvement in terrorist actions within Iraq.
The analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, disagreed. "This definitely fits Zarqawi's profile," he told me. "He is a highly educated man. This is real scholarship." He pointed to references to Ibn Taymiyya (1268—1328), a Syrian religious leader who declared jihad on the Mongols—who had taken much of the Middle East from the Arabs—even though the Mongols were by then Muslims themselves. In doing so Taymiyya had invoked a philosophy used by militants today to justify attacks on fellow Muslims. "It's just the sort of person that I expect Zarqawi is reading," the analyst said. "Taymiyya was also perniciously anti-Shiite."
... (extract)

Full text: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200411/grey (subscription required).