Stephen Grey

The UK Comprehensive Approach in Afghanistan: a parody of reality?

2009-07-05T15:13:00.011+01:00

I gave evidence to the UK House of Commons Defence Select Committee on 30th June, 2009. Extracts based on uncorrected transcript:

"...we owe it to all those that are sacrificing themselves in Helmand, to be brutally frank about what is going on there and what is going wrong, because it is only with that frankness that I think certain things can be put right. From the perspective of those on the ground, I think the Comprehensive Approach has largely been a parody of reality. In some ways the failure to get that right has done as much to stir up conflict and cause what is happening as it has to bring peace to Afghanistan, which surely is the ultimate objective there."

...

"...the impression you get from very senior people within the military is that they are confronted with other departments who have no genuine belief in the value of this conflict; there is a sense in which they are not sure there is a real will to win."

Attached here is a copy of the full uncorrected transcript of my part of the evidence in full.

A lack of cover

2009-06-17T16:28:00.001+01:00

from the Guardian: 15 June 2009

The deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan are not being given prominence in the press because the MoD is restricting access to conflict zones, making truth a casualty of war, says frontline correspondent Stephen Grey

Stephen Grey
The Guardian, Monday 15 June 2009

New York Times photographer Tomas Munita at work in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, on a mission with US troops. Photograph: Scott Peterson/Getty Images

Thirteen British soldiers died last month in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Their deaths were reported, for the most part, in small paragraphs on the inside pages of newspapers. Why? Because journalists find it almost impossible to reach and report from the frontline of the conflict. When the Royal Marines launched a fierce hand-to-hand battle last Christmas in the muddy poppy fields of central Helmand, four soldiers died - but the only news that escaped was a press release from the Ministry of Defence.

As in so many wars, truth seems to be the first casualty of this conflict. There has been a devastating breakdown of relations between many defence correspondents and officialdom, journalists say. "Dealing with the Ministry of Defence is genuinely more stressful than coming under fire," says the Telegraph's defence correspondent, Thomas Harding. "We have been lied to and we have been censored."

Manipulated access

Despite the risk of being blacklisted and refused access to report from the frontline, journalists are speaking out about what they say is the government's attempt to control the news. It is "lamentable", says one Fleet Street foreign editor; the Times correspondent Anthony Loyd describes it as "outrageous"; Christina Lamb of the Sunday Times calls it "indefensible"; it is "redolent of Comical Ali", says the Sun's defence editor, Tom Newton Dunn.

Almost all journalists travelling with British forces are ordered to email their copy to the military's press officers in Helmand before publication. Many fear that negative coverage could mean trips back to the frontline are cancelled or delayed.

At the root of tensions between media and the MoD is the nature of the conflict in southern Afghanistan. The war in Helmand is so intense, so dangerous and so rural that covering it independently is almost impossible for any white western journalist. Most reporters travel as "embeds" (there are only four or five slots available a month for national newspaper journalists); the way these trips are allocated, and the conditions imposed, contribute to fraught relations.

"They manipulate the parcelling-out of embeds to suit their own ends," says Harding. "They use it as a form of punishment to journalists who are off-message or critical of strategy or tactics."

Earlier this year, a trip of Harding's to Helmand was cancelled, he said, because of "helicopter shortages". He later heard privately from a press officer that it had more to do with his campaign against the army's continued use of the Snatch Land Rover, and his tough questions to the chief of joint operations. Another reporter had a trip blocked after writing a critical feature about conditions for army soldiers.

The Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and Cabinet Office - who all have members sitting on a committee called the Media Management Group, which regulates who gets what trips out to the battlegrounds - all "want coverage of (non-existent) reconstruction and tree-hugging", according to Newton Dunn. "Downing Street and the Foreign Office are incredibly restrictive about what comes out of Afghanistan," he adds.

Nick Gurr, the MoD's director of media and communications, denies there are penalties on journalists who write anything critical. "You only have to look at who we bring out to see how determined we are to engage with everyone," he says. And he does have something of a point - critics of army tactics including Harding, Loyd and even myself do get asked back. Al-Jazeera is offered occasional embeds.

But when a journalist manages to reach the war zone, many describe their frustration at the low priority given to getting them out to the frontline, as well as sometimes relentless control by "minders".

Lamb was one of the first to report close-up on fighting in Helmand, when she was caught in an ambush in the summer of 2006. She was "effectively blacked" for two years, only returning in September 2008. The new slot she was given meant she saw no frontline action. "I was told quite candidly the main priority was Tom Newton Dunn of the Sun, not me."

The Guardian's James Meek, embedded in Helmand in 2006, says he was allowed to speak freely, and had no problems with minders. However, he was sent to a relatively quiet zone, and his requests to visit bases where soldiers were engaged in combat were refused. "I was told quite candidly that the priority was the tabloids and television because it was important for recruitment," he says.

Vetoed copy

The government's media strategy seems to be based mainly around "the Sun and an EastEnders actor", says the Fleet Street foreign editor I interviewed, referring to Ross Kemp, who made two TV series in Helmand. Newton Dunn, however, says he is equally frustrated: "I can get out only once a year, and only through kicking and screaming."

If reporters do get a story, they are still controlled by the MoD, thanks to the Green Book - a contract drawn up jointly by the ministry and media organisations' editors designed to give maximum press freedom while preserving operational security ("Opsec"). Its application, however, angers some reporters. In practice, they say, the Green Book is sometimes used to pressure them into removing facts that are merely embarrassing or politically inconvenient.

In Helmand, journalists say embeds are required to email their copy to the ministry's press information centre before sending it on to their own newsdesks, though Gurr insists there is no Green Book requirement that copy be sent to the centre; it could also, he says, be vetted by people in charge on the frontline. "There are no hard and fast rules here," Gurr adds.

Loyd describes filing a piece from the town of Musa Qala, describing British reaction to the appointment of a new police commander - a man known for profiting from the drugs trade and beating a local person to death. Loyd quoted a British officer saying they did not want the commander appointed, but Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, had insisted. The press information centre told Loyd they did not approve of the quote. "They told me I had got to remove what the officer had said," Loyd says. "Later, they admitted it was a Foreign Office press officer who had seen the copy and did not approve, for political reasons. It was outrageous."

Newton Dunn says he was asked on one occasion to remove details of how a soldier died - not for security reasons, but so as not to upset the family. "I described how a soldier died a hero, died fighting. It wasn't graphic. And it turned out no one in the family had actually been asked if they objected."

Gurr insists there are many times when serious Opsec "breaches" have put people in danger - for example, the publication of photographs showing the faces of interpreters, or the publication of the date of British troops' handover of control in Basra. "You have to realise, the strongest advocate for allocating more access is the Ministry of Defence," he says.

But when I was filing an article from Helmand about a failed poppy-eradication programme last year, I was told that "the Foreign Office objects to your story". This seemed like a straightforward abuse of a system designed to avoid the accidental publication of details that could put soldiers in greater danger.

Kim Sengupta, defence correspondent for the Independent, is one of the few journalists who reports little untoward about his treatment from the MoD. He says he has no experience of attempts to interfere with his writing. "If you embed, you accept the obvious situation that you are with the forces," he says. "You are not going to get the full picture."

At the MoD, press officers are aware of many journalists' frustrations. One says they spend "most of our time trying to persuade the military to grant more access". Journalists, however, say army units are eager to host them, and it is "London" keeping the media away.

The vast number of media outlets mean national newspaper journalists and television reporters are not the only ones trying to visit the war zone, says Gurr. In the year to April, 112 journalists were sent to Afghanistan (including 48 from national newspapers) and 134 to Iraq.

MoD officials and soldiers on the ground have their own complaints about reporters - mainly about those who are unfit for the rigours of frontline action. In Helmand, marines told me of a celebrated TV cameraman who was so out of shape that he needed help carrying his own camera. One journalist nearly died last year after collapsing on patrol in the mid-summer heat; the military argued he had been unfit and ill-prepared. US soldiers had to risk mines and booby-trapped bombs in driving across an uncleared area to rescue the reporter.

But beyond the gripes of both sides about access and suitability, the key point, say journalists, is that the MoD is controlling them in order to convey what senior officers refer to as the "official narrative" of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the absence of sufficient independent access to Helmand, news organisations are often willing to use interviews with soldiers gathered by army press officers, or video shot by the MoD's Combat Camera Team.

The result, says Harding, is clear. "We have constantly been told that everything is fluffy and good - and we, and the public, have been lied to."

Gurr, however, says the military should not conduct internal debates in public during a war. "I don't think commanders should be saying it's all shit and it's all getting worse ... We have to sustain the morale of people on operations."

Newton Dunn emphasises the honesty of soldiers and commanders on the ground. It is the ministries, he says, who should lighten up: for all their efforts, they will never be able to stop bad news getting out. "Once the MoD realise they can't control the message, they will have a chance of success."

• Stephen Grey is the author of Operation Snakebite, an investigation into the war in Helmand, Afghanistan

Libya says missing CIA prisoner "committed suicide"

2009-05-12T10:05:00.003+01:00

By Stephen Grey

ONE of the most important members of the Al Qaeda captured by the CIA in the months after 9/11 has been found dead in an alleged “suicide” in a jail in Libya, according to the country’s news media.
Ibn Al Sheikh al Libi, a former Al Qaeda camp commander, was controversially sent by the CIA to Egypt as part of the agency’s “extra-ordinary rendition” program and was allegedly subject to extreme torture, returned back into CIA custody, and then transferred onwards to Libya.
Described by former CIA director George Tenet in his 2006 autobiography as "the highest ranking al-Qa'ida member in U.S. custody" just after 9/11, al Libi was captured by the CIA before the agency had established its own secret prison program. And he was one of a handful of the most senior Al Qaeda leaders in US custody that were sent for interrogation at the hands of foreign countries.
According to agency insiders he was subject to far worse torture than techniques like waterboarding used against prisoners like Khalid Sheikh Mohamed inside the CIA’s own jails.
Al Libi’s testimony – albeit extracted under alleged torture – was probably more important than that of any prisoner captur after 9/11. According to a secret CIA cable, after being effectively buried alive – held for 17 hours in Egypt in a wooden box – he provided evidence linking the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda.
After first denying the Saddam-bin Laden connection, the torture persuaded al Libi to acknowledge the link. This ‘intelligence’ was later used by former secretary of state Colin Powell before the United Nations when he gave evidence justifying the invasion of Iraq.
Picked up crossing the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan in early January 2002, al Libi was first held in FBI custody. Former counter-terrorism FBI agents Dan Coleman and Jack Cloonan revealed how, despite hopes that al Libi would be peruaded to testify against other members of Al Qaeda, al Libi was snatched from FBI hands into the CIA’s custody and transferred “ in a box” to Egypt.
Ever since he was transferred by the CIA to Egypt, Al Libi’s whereabouts have remained a mystery. Tenet’s autobiography confirmed his destination was Egypt and other former CIA prisoners suggested he was transferred back into US custody in Afghanistan. But when all other CIA high value prisoners, including KSM, were transferred to Guantanamo, al LIbi was missing from the list and no information was released by the US Government about his detention.
Last month, al Libi was finally tracked down by Human Rights Watch to a jail in Libya. Seen by researchers at 6pm on April 26, at the Abu Salem prison in Tripoli, al Libi refused to speak, angrily demanding

“where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons.”

The organisation's statement is here.

Now the full story of his detention may never be known after the discovery of his dead body, announced in the Libyan state newspaper OEA.
Last night, British human rights group, Reprieve, alleged there was reason to doubt al Libi had committed suicide. “Reprieve has good reason to believe that he may have died from untreated tuberculosis that developed during his years in US custody.”

Jonno the Brave

2009-04-09T12:44:00.003+01:00

AN EXTRACT FROM OPERATION SNAKEBITE

More than 150 British service personnel have died in Afghanistan. Like many of them, Sergeant Lee Johnson was just a name until Stephen Grey – who witnessed his death – uncovered his profoundly moving story

B Company of 2nd Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment (Green Howards) was formed up and ready for action. The officer commanding approached and reviewed his men. “Permission to have a go, sir?” asked Corporal Carl Peterson.
“I don’t think so, lads,” said the OC. “Not tonight.”
They were, after all, in Blackpool.
Major Jason Alexis Little, 36, had a twinkle in his eyes. He had known some of these men for nearly 16 years. He had grown up with them. They all addressed him formally as “sir”, but for the seniors among them he was simply Jake and he was one of them.
He probably knew Sergeant Lee “Jonno” Johnson the best. Jonno was the reason they were all standing outside the Walkabout club in Queen Street, Blackpool, in early September 2007. The bouncers had just evicted him for being drunk, not to mention for wearing flip-flops. Jake had gone out to remonstrate. If Jonno was a little drunk, as most were that night, then he was a happy drunk and no cause for worry.
The rest of the company had followed Jake out and that was why they were lined up for action. Jonno was something of a legend in the regiment and not always for the best of reasons. As a boxer and army judo champion, his nicknames varied from “Judo Johnson” to “Mad Dog Johnson”. Every man with something to prove wanted to take on Jonno and it invariably ended up in big trouble.
When Jake had joined B Company as a green young subaltern, Jonno had seen himself as his protector. If they were in a club and someone started to pick a fight with Jake, he would come steaming to the rescue. Although they were poles apart in many ways, everyone remembered them as very close.
While Jake had been steadily promoted, Jonno had moved up the ranks and been busted down again more times than anyone could remember. It had taken him until he was 33 to realise he was a good soldier, a born leader. Everyone in the regiment was proud of what he had become. But even as he achieved self-belief he became convinced that he was about to die.
THE trip to Blackpool was a last fling before a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, where B Company became mentors to a 400-man battalion of the Afghan national army (ANA). This meant fighting alongside and often leading the Afghans, work that in other conflicts was done by elite special forces. In early December they were ordered to take part in the biggest manoeuvre by the British Army in Afghanistan since the days of the British empire. Its purpose was to support an attack on Musa Qala, a town from which the British had withdrawn in 2006 and which was now infamous as a rebel stronghold.
Jonno was sitting in the ANA camp outside Camp Bastion, the huge Nato military base in Helmand, waiting to go on R&R (rest and recreation) when the news came in of the Musa Qala op. It was hard to turn his back on a battle.
He knew where to go for advice.
His young brother Don was also there — in C Company. Although four years older, Jonno was always asking Don for advice. As kids they had hardly known each other. Being together in the army had brought them close and for the first time in their lives they had said they loved each other. “What do you think I should do?” asked Jonno.
“It’s up to you,” Don replied. “This is the biggest battle the battalion has ever had and if you missed out on it you would kick yourself for ever and ever . . . If you do go and you get hurt, you’re probably going to regret it for the rest of your life . . . You can’t ask me what I think; I only tell you what you need to hear.”
Jonno said: “Yeah. Musa Qala. I need to take Musa Qala.”
“I know you do; you just wanted to ask me.”
“I’m going.”
“You need to be sure you want to go.”
“Yeah, I’m going.”
Jonno’s team were surprised to find he hadn’t gone on his R&R. They also learnt that he had started going to church. Someone said he hadn’t been for 17 years. “Things change,” said Jonno.
But he began to get spooked. Don began receiving electronic messages from him saying “I think I’ve made a really bad decision” and “I don’t think I should go” and “I’ve got a bad feeling”. But Don told him: “It will be all right. We will be laughing in a few months’ time in the pub.”
It was Don who was in immediate danger. Deployed to the Kajaki dam, an exposed outpost, he was caught in a deadly incident in a minefield.
In the middle of the night, his mentoring team and their ANA patrol were moving fast down a dry river bed for an operation with the Royal Marines. Don stopped suddenly because a battery alarm in his day sack was ringing. “Right, go firm,” he said, and he and his men got down on one knee. And then “for some strange, random reason” an interpreter behind him ran past and stepped on a mine about three yards in front of him. Don knew it should have been his own head that was blown off.
Next day, the eve of the Musa Qala operation, Jonno tried to fit Kevlar armour plates to the seat of his Vector armoured vehicle. But once they were in place he couldn’t get in with his helmet and kit on. Everyone hated the design of the Vectors. They had a crucial design flaw that made the driver or front passenger (usually the vehicle commander) particularly vulnerable to being killed if the vehicle struck a mine. “It’s an absolute death trap. I don’t feel safe in this,” said Jonno.
“You’ve just to get on with it,” he was told. Everyone knew the problem all too well.
That night Jonno went to visit Fran Myatt, the 2 Yorks chaplain, and asked for his own copy of the Bible. He placed it beneath his combat armour. Then he sat down and wrote an e-mail, sent at 18.00, to his fiancée, Lisa.

FROM: Lee Johnson
TO: Lisa McIntosh
SENT: Weds Dec 5 2007
SUBJECT:
RE:“Well angel, I’m going at 2 in the morning. You might see me on the telly
soon or in the Times paper as I have got a film crew with me. This is the
biggest thing since D-Day and I am not lying. I am worried . . .
“You must
understand this could be my last message to you. So I am going to say a few
things. You know I love you with all my heart and always will. And I am sorry
truly for all the things I have done . . .I want you to put the money on the
sale of my house and split it . . .
“I know this is a bit upsetting but I
need to let you know about this. I really love you and will try my hardest to
come home safely. I would like you to play one song for me if it happens and
this is Killers and ‘really wish I could be somewhere else’. And I want my
photos played at wherever the wake is which are all on the DVD marked up
‘Kajaki’ and the footage I got from there which is on my camcorder which you
will receive in my box. Thanks. Please do this because I want people to
understand how things were over here and why I love the army so much and the
buzz.
“I want you to get on with your life and live it to the full . . . I
only ask your forgiveness in my wrongdoing. The thought of not holding you in my
arms again is awful and gets me down but your photos are close to my heart and
will be with me forever. I love you. Tell my daughter and son I love them. Love
you Lisa my angel for ever and a day.”

As Lisa would later point out, “really want to be somewhere else” is actually by Razorlight, but Killers is what he wrote.
THE convoy set off in the pre-dawn darkness on December 6 and began to stretch out into a 12-mile long column in the desert, throwing up a cloud of dust that Taliban scouts could not miss.
After dark that evening, Jonno sat down with his platoon contemplating the days ahead. He started talking about his daughter Lilly, passing round her photo and saying her birthday was soon. The atmosphere was almost cheerful. Then Jonno turned serious.
He steeled his men: “I’ve been here before, guys, and you can trust me. Trust me, you know. Just work hard — obviously work hard — but you’ll be okay.”
The battle plan called for a diversionary attack by the Afghans and B Company together with American special forces before US paratroopers led the main thrust from another direction. The Green Howards broke camp in the morning of December 7 as AC/DC’s Back in Black blared from the loudspeakers of an American anti-tank platoon. With Nick Cornish, the photographer, I was embedded with them.
The convoy moved 12 miles north across the desert before B Company broke off and led its Afghan battalion towards Musa Qala. As we passed through a village we came under attack. Pummelled by gunfire, many of the Afghans refused to fight. Jonno got them up and pushed them forward, leaving behind a dead Taliban fighter.
We camped out again that night on a ridge southwest of Musa Qala. Lieutenant Andy Breach had the pre-dawn sentry shift alongside Jonno. Normally, in the British Army, officers do not do sentry duty but in the mentoring teams many traditions were ignored.
Jonno talked about how he loved what he was doing and how happy he had been to lead men forward under fire in the village. “If anything happens to me,” he said, “I want to die outright. Lisa would kill me if I came back in bits.”
He told Breach he was going to church. “I know something will happen,” he said. But he didn’t seem scared or deterred.
They moved out again soon after dawn and by mid-morning everyone was hot, hungry and thirsty. Toiling slowly along a dry river bed, Jonno was at the back of the convoy.
Lee Bellingham, his machinegunner, later recalled: “It was that sort of day where you’re hungry, you’re tired, you just want to get back to the camp, get a hot shower, get a beer and stuff like that. And Jonno just turned around and said, ‘No, I don’t like today; something’s going to happen’, and, you know, for him it did.”
The track out of the wadi was blocked by a broken-down Afghan ammo truck, but Jonno thought he could drive past. He shouted to his men to get down in the back in case he rolled going up the slope.
Halfway up the engine struggled. The Vector was getting bogged down: its wheels were spinning and it was digging down into the sand. That must have been how it struck the anti-tank mine, probably one left behind by Soviet troops. Other vehicles had probably loosened things up.
Bellingham did not hear the blast, but suddenly he was in a strange, silent world inside the Vector and events were moving weirdly slowly.
He must have been knocked out. When his mind started working, he saw smoke everywhere. He felt a thud as the back of the Vector hit something. He popped his head up out of the hatch and saw his machinegun was in bits, cut in half. A piece of the engine was on top of the vehicle.
Bellingham saw the driver, Lance-Corporal Christopher Fletcher. He was halfway up the hill with blood on his face and his arms were badly cut. He put his hand up and his lips were moving, as though he was shouting for help, but Bellingham couldn’t hear him at all.
He jumped down and managed to get Jonno’s door open, clearing away the rubble and dirt inside. “The first thing I noticed, there’s no steering wheel; it was just black inside. It was like something went through and just left the outer shell, ripping it to shreds inside.”
He crawled towards Jonno, but when he saw him his heart almost stopped. There was no life left. Both Jonno’s legs had been amputated in the blast. No one could survive that. He must have died instantaneously. He had felt no pain.
AT the Kajaki dam, Don Johnson and his men had had a couple of days off since the mine strike that killed the interpreter. It was a bit of a luxury. He was playing his guitar outside the ops room that morning when someone came out and gave him a phone message: “You need to be on the helipad, right now.”
Don said it was a mistake. Others were due out on R&R on a helicopter that was supposed to have gone 10 minutes ago. The messenger insisted.
“I don’t think so,” said Don.
He went into the ops room. Confirmation came in again from the 2 Yorks HQ.
“Put me on to the ops officer, because I think you’ve made a mistake.”
The ops officer came on the line: “Look, I don’t know what it is, but you need to make your way back as fast as you can.”
Don put the phone down. He knew now; he just knew. Then Sergeant Andrew Morrison came in crying his eyes out. He was a big bloke; no one would expect him to cry. “Look, I’m sorry. Your kid’s dead.” He gave Don a cuddle.
The Chinook taking him back to base was also carrying a Taliban fighter who had been badly injured handling a bomb that went off early. The chopper was taking him for medical treatment.
Don took a look at the wounded man covered in burns and it made him furious. The back door of the helicopter was open “and I honestly really just wanted to kick him out the back”. A marine officer grabbed Don’s leg, as if for reassurance.
Don was saying to him: “Can we just throw him off?”
The officer just held him and said: “It’s going to be all right; it’s going to be all right.” Don buried his face in his arm.
By 5pm on the ridgeline southwest of Musa Qala it was getting close to darkness. Jonno’s body was still in the Vector more than six hours after his death. A promised helicopter had still not come with explosive experts to clear the site around it of possible mines. In the end, Jake Little decided: “We’ll do it ourselves.”
Lance-Corporal John Dickens, an engineer, got out his metal detector and scanned the ground around the Vector. He came back up in a sweat, but gave the all-clear.
Jake took down the men he thought would cope best. As they prepared to bring Jonno up the hill they found his Bible beneath his body armour.
At 6pm a message came that a helicopter would be there in five minutes to take the body out. An hour and half later a message came that it was too dark.
Jake knew he had to try to restore his men’s spirits, even though his own were at an all-time low. Under the stars he gathered the company in a huddle. His face was weary and he spoke softly.
“I’m shit at this,” he confessed. He spoke of the gap Jonno would leave behind and how he had died doing what he loved. He explained that tonight the lads would have to stand sentry on the ridge over Jonno’s body.
Emotions, he said, would have to be suppressed in the next few days. However hard, they needed to focus on the mission. There would be a time for mourning later: “We have to move on, but not forget.” It was a miserable night. Rain pelted down on the ponchos of those who could find sleep.
AT Camp Shorabak, base of the 2 Yorks battle group, Don Johnson had been through a worse trauma. When someone died or was seriously injured in Task Force Helmand, all communication between the soldiers and back home was cut off to stop the news reaching the families or the media before next-of-kin had been properly informed.
Under the rules Jonno’s parents and fiancée could not be informed until his death and identity were formally certified. That required a doctor, a military policeman and a member of his unit all to be there to record a statement of his death — which was impossible in Jonno’s case.
“I wasn’t allowed to phone anyone. I wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone because they hadn’t positively identified him,” Don remembered.
By 7pm he was getting quite distraught. He had known for about eight hours that his brother was dead. He said: “I need to tell someone.”
The reply was: “But we can’t yet because we haven’t positively identified him.”
It was pathetic, he thought: “It was like they have little rules in the army that sometimes might need to be broke.”
Someone came in at about 10pm and said: “We can’t bring him back. The Americans won’t bring him back and the British can’t fly . . . He’ll just have to stay out for the night.”
Don had dark visions of “dogs eating the dead in the middle of the night”.
At brigade headquarters in Lashkar Gah, Major Nick Haston, the deputy chief of staff, was trying to follow a rule book that, while well intentioned, had been written in what he thought of as a “sterile made-up environment” in the UK.
It had been his call to leave Jonno’s body on the hillside, “the most painful decision” he made in his tour in Afghanistan. Ultimately, he recalled, “we couldn’t find a bloody helicopter to pick up a body because we needed that helicopter to go elsewhere”.
Nine other casualties were dealt with that day by one medevac team. Hard as it sounded, “if someone is dead, that comes low down on the priority list”. Those who were dying or severely injured clearly got precedence.
Now Haston was in an argument with higher command, who were insisting that Don could not inform his family until Jonno was formally identified. Don was in agony. “It was killing me,” he said. And everyone could see that.
It was the padre who “convinced the battalion, or whoever it was, to let me phone home”. Normally such things are done in person by a special welfare team. Such a team were waiting round the corner from the Johnson household in Yorkshire. But Don wanted to do it himself. The padre was sitting next to him as he made the call. His mother answered.
“Mam, can you put dad on really fast?” said Don.
She must have known it was something bad. His father picked up the phone.
“Dad, there’s been an accident. Lee died.”
His father said: “Oh God, oh my God.”
Don could hear his father telling his mother: “Lee’s dead.”
Her screams were awful. Don would never want to hear such screams again. But then he asked: “Look, you need to be strong. Will you phone Lisa? I need you to go round and see Lisa.”
Don remembered: “I didn’t want them to just phone Lisa and tell her when she was sat at home with his little Lilly, by herself. Imagine her screaming in front of that kid; it wouldn’t be very nice.
“I said: look you need to; don’t tell no one; go round and speak to her straight away. And they went round and told her, which I think was the best way to do things. I couldn’t have done it anyway.”
The call to his parents “was probably the worst time I’ve ever had in my life, crying down the phone. It was horrible”.
ON Armistice Day, November 11, 2008, I took the train to Stockton-on-Tees to see Alan and Sandra Johnson. While I was there, Don rang to wish his dad happy birthday.
This reminded us of Lee’s phone calls home from Afghanistan. The first was to say he had decided to marry Lisa. The last time, a few days before he died, was to say he might not live. He wanted them to know he was doing what he loved and to make sure they told everyone that, if he died.
Alan said: “The strange thing is that, when he was alive, I hardly used to think about Lee. Now I think about him all the time.”
He still kicks himself a little that he was always hard on his son. He can’t remember ever praising him: “He came back and said he was made sergeant. I told him I would have made general!”
Lee had seemed strangely lonely in his last few months. “He had so many friends and I’m not sure any of them would realise.” He used to come back home frequently, but his mind was far away, as though he was trying to sort things out in his head. “I only wish he could have come back and sat down for an hour and told us what he wanted to make of his life.”
We talked about coping with his death. In the world wars the nation as a whole shared your grief. These days no one really knows about this conflict.
As General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the army, put it to me: “I think the army is at war; the nation is not at war.”
When I saw Lisa, with Lilly sitting nearby watching the television, we talked about the same thing.
“No one really understands the army or squaddies,” she said. “They don’t know what they are doing or the brave things they are doing. And the sad thing is they have to die before you find out.”
© Stephen Grey 2009

Dispatches - broadcast Monday April 6 2009

2009-04-06T15:20:00.002+01:00

More information

Officers attack 'MoD muddle'

2009-03-27T17:23:00.000Z

From The Sunday Times
March 22, 2009
by Tony Allen-Mills

SENIOR British Army commanders have denounced the government's strategy in Afghanistan as a "constant muddling through" that has resulted in a "failing" approach to defeating the Taliban after three years of bloody confrontation.
In a series of outspoken interviews, several high-ranking officers who commanded British troops in Helmand province express anger and frustration at what one brigadier described as "making it up as we go along".
Brigadier Andrew Mackay, who commanded Helmand's Nato forces for six months last winter, claimed a British failure to deliver economic development or reconstruction for ordinary Afghans meant that "one of the central tenets of counter-insurgency doctrine is failing".
Major Nick Haston, who was Mackay's deputy chief of staff, revealed he had resigned from the army in protest at bureaucratic incompetence. He said troops had been so short of vital equipment that his staff bought spares on the internet. "I would say that some of the people that procure (equipment) in our Ministry of Defence haven't a clue," said Haston.
The criticisms are contained in a new book, Operation Snakebite, by Stephen Grey, a Sunday Times journalist. Based on more than 200 interviews with British and US military personnel, the book uncovers profound flaws in Britain's preparation for the controversial Helmand deployment.
A senior Foreign Office official acknowledged to Grey that there had been an "absence of serious planning" before the deployment in 2006.
Eighteen months after British troops arrived in southern Afghanistan, a secret memo to Whitehall from Mackay described a "grave crisis" over equipment. Scimitar tanks could not go into reverse unless their engines were restarted and Vector armoured vehicles were out of action because "the wheels just kept falling off, literally".
According to General Sir David Richards, the overall Nato commander in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, the British expedition was plagued by "over-optimism, over-confidence and a misunderstanding of the intelligence picture".
The British criticisms will make alarming reading for military and foreign policy advisers to President Barack Obama, who is expected to announce the results of a major strategic review of the US presence in Afghanistan later this week.
Obama has already announced a sharp increase in the numbers of US troops and his review is expected to conclude than an Iraq-style "surge" of both military and civilian forces represents the best hope of ending a conflict that will become America's longest ground war next year.
Obama was reported last week to be considering increasing US forces to about 65,000 from 30,000, bringing the total Nato presence to around 100,000 troops.
He is being urged to launch a simultaneous civilian surge of aid and reconstruction experts whose main aim will be to strengthen the authority of village elders and other local leaders in the hope of isolating Taliban militants. The number of police in Afghanistan will also be sharply increased.
Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, acknowledged last week that "trying to come up with new approaches?that enhance our prospects for success is hard work, frankly".
General Sir Richard Dannatt, the current British chief of general staff, admitted to Grey that British troops were sent to Helmand in insufficient numbers with insubstantial equipment. Dannatt blamed a political calculation by Tony Blair, the then-prime minister, that "we'd be substantially out of Iraq by the time of the Helmand deployment".
Dannatt added: "We would never have knowingly engaged on two major operations to run simultaneously with an army organised to do one". There had also been too much wishful thinking that the local population would welcome Nato. Instead the reaction was "rather similar to prodding the lion who was otherwise kipping in the corner, minding his own business" and troops had ended up fighting local tribes as well as extremists.
"In the early days we probably wound up — maybe still are — killing lots of farmers," he said.
The general said he believed the British public had never fully understood the difficulties faced by its soldiers in Afghanistan. "I think the army is at war; the nation is not at war."
The book argues that a winning strategy is still possible provided the army's political masters commit to a coherent strategy. Before reaching Afghanistan, Mackay was briefed by a UK general who said British policy was condemned to "constant muddling through."
When he arrived he was told by a senior western diplomat that Nato troops were defending a government led by Hamid Karzai, who was "not the president we want nor need". Karzai was said to be isolated, erratic and surrounded by corrupt and venal ministers.
Lieutenant General Sir Nick Houghton, a former commander of joint operations who is due to be promoted to vice chief of the defence staff in May, complained of a political ambivalence that "infects national, international and Nato thinking" and makes it hard for commanders to justify casualties in Helmand.
"That is why I say for Christ's sake, give us political conviction, moral conviction about what we're doing in Afghanistan," Houghton said.

On the trail of torture

2009-02-24T12:24:00.003Z

UPDATE: Binyam Mohamed returned to the UK on February 23, 2009

(Published in the Sunday Times, Feb 8, 2009)
by Stephen Grey and David Leppard

Prisoner No 1458 at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, woke up each day last week in his solitary cell and waited for the inevitable: the arrival of a team of guards to take him down the corridor in shackles to be painfully force fed through a tube.
This was not another attempt to extract a confession, but an attempt to keep Binyam Mohamed alive. The 30-year-old former resident of Notting Hill, west London, was continuing his hunger strike against what he sees as failed promises to set him free. When he last saw his lawyer two weeks ago, his arms, she said, stuck out of his 6ft body “like little thin twigs”.
Although previously accused by US authorities of plotting a terrorist attack on American soil, Mohamed has not been charged with any crime. His former military prosecutor declared a month ago that he presented no threat to either America or Britain.
After losing almost 50lb in weight, and wasting further by the day, he was probably in no state to be told or even to care that two High Court judges in London last Wednesday were appealing for the public release of “powerful evidence” that might help prove his astonishing claims of mistreatment to be true. The issues at stake, said the British judges, were nothing short of the lofty interests of “law, free speech and democratic accountability”.
Involved shocking allegations of extreme mental and physical torture at the behest of America’s CIA, it is a case that has threatened to embarrass the new administration of President Barack Obama, whose inaugural speech included a pledge to halt such activities, as well as to shed an unwelcome spotlight on what exactly the British government knew and kept secret about potential crimes committed by its closest ally.
IT was about 10pm local time on July 21, 2002, when the men in black ski masks arrived to collect Mohamed from where he was being held at Islamabad airport. They began by stripping him naked. They put him in a nappy and a tracksuit, blindfolded him and taped a mask across his mouth, he recalled.
They were a CIA paramilitary team that had come to scoop him up and place him on an executive jet used by the US spy agency to “render” terrorist suspects to and from jail cells across the world. In Mohamed’s case, his destination, where he arrived at 3.43am the following day, was the Moroccan capital, Rabat.
Though never confirmed officially by the United States, evidence that verified this “rendition” to Morocco came from the flight logs of the now notorious Gulfstream jet involved. It matched the exact details of Mohamed’s testimony. It has always been much harder to assess the truth of his account of torture that he said occurred in Pakistan before his transfer and in Morocco soon after, even if there are many who report similar treatment.
After he was first arrested in Karachi in April 2002, Mohamed said that soon after the first questions from Americans, Pakistani interrogators followed up by hanging him by a leather strap round his wrist, beating him, and threatening him with a pistol to the head. Then, when this stopped, an agent from British intelligence came to hint to him that he should cooperate or face being sent to be tortured by Arabs. When he was flown to Morocco, he said, it got worse. He was beaten savagely and at one stage his genitals were cut with razor blades.
Again there was a British connection, he alleged. A book of photographs of people at a London mosque had been shown to him, as well as searching questions posed about his life in Notting Hill. The agents called their paperwork the “British file”.
In January 2004, Mohamed said he was rendered onwards by the Americans to Kabul (again confirmed by CIA flight records). This time he was held in a covert CIA “black site” known as the Dark Prison. Inmates here were held day and night without light while being bombarded with constant loud music.
Only after a journey of more than two years between secret prisons, did Mohamed, by his account, emerge from clandestine detention to the more open but still harsh world of US military detention. And in Guantanamo, he finally got to tell his story to the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith.
Born in 1978, Mohamed had moved to Washington DC with his family when he was young. He and his father, an Ethiopian Airlines official, then moved to London, where he lived from the age of 16 to 22.
Some time in the spring of 2001, Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan. According to later accusations (and it is not clear which, if any, charges US prosecutors still aim to pursue), he attended training at Al-Qaeda camps, went on the run after 9/11, and became a companion of a former street gangster from Chicago named Jose Padilla, or the “dirty bomber”. The pair were said to have associated with Al-Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and to have hatched plots to explode a devastating radioactive bomb in the US.
While Padilla was arrested in May 2002 as he returned to the US and later convicted of lesser charges, Mohamed was seized a month earlier in Karachi when trying to board a flight to Europe using a false passport. With American intelligence alerted, his journey through the system began.
During his detention, Mohamed made several confessions. He argued later that these were all forced out of him by torture. But with the US refusing to confirm even in court any aspect of its secret programme of rendition and detention, he, like most of its subjects, has struggled to find positive proof to document that physical abuse.
The twist in his tale came from lawsuits filed in London that in effect forced the British government, against its earlier wishes, to take up the cases of Guantanamo detainees such as Mohamed who, while legally resident in Britain, were not UK citizens. In turn, this forced the government in Mohamed’s case to reveal what evidence was held in secret British intelligence files that might be useful to prove his innocence.
After judgments last year exposed the fact that the UK was holding some secret evidence useful to Mohamed’s defence – mainly information shared with Britain by US intelligence – the US government let Mohamed’s defence team see those documents, provided that they remained secret.
Last week, however, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones, took matters further, arguing that while it was not for them to order public disclosure of US secret material, particularly in the face of clear and dire “threats” by the US government to reduce intelligence-sharing with Britain if they did, there was a pressing case for the information to be revealed in public.
In the House of Commons, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, denied there were such explicit threats. But he did confirm that releasing the documents despite strong US protests would result in “real and significant damage” to Britain’s national security.
One way or another, it was a court judgment that put Obama’s White House on the spot. Despite the new president’s condemnations of the Bush administration and its promise to break with the past on issues of rendition and torture: how far was Obama willing to go in exposing the secret trail of evidence that would document the most controversial aspects of the years since 9/11? Was he willing to publish material that could help set free terrorist suspects? Or material that could result in the prosecution of CIA officers or the officials who advised them? Or would he prefer to see the whole matter left buried in a dusty but well-guarded vault?
The 42 secret documents obtained by the High Court – summarised in just seven paragraphs censored from the public judgment – were said to refer only to one part of Mohamed’s treatment, his alleged torture in Pakistan. But establishing the principle of exposing such things, some US officials suggest, could open the floodgates to exposing the secrets of rendition and secret detention.
Even just this limited material, said the judges, gave rise to an “arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” in law. As “admissions” by US government officials about how Mohamed was treated, they could possibly be used as evidence in a criminal court.
At Thames House, the riverside headquarters of MI5, intelligence officials were understandably made jittery last week by all this attention drawn by the High Court’s judgment. It threatened to expose lingering tensions in the darker side of the agency’s “special relationship” with its American “cousins”.
While the pre-Obama CIA might have believed sleep deprivation and waterboarding were sometimes acceptable ways to interrogate prisoners, Whitehall officials were keen to point out that for Britain they were certainly not. British intelligence had a strict “no torture” policy.
However, for Mohamed’s legal team Britain’s alleged complicity in the case of their client is more subtle – but still significant.
After being told by the Americans of Mohamed’s arrest in 2002, MI5 had dispatched an officer to speak to him in Karachi, evidence in the High Court case confirmed.
Mohamed was said to have told the MI5 officer about his time in the UK. This included details of mosques he attended and how he was recruited to go to Afghanistan for terror training. He admitted he had seen a computer file in Lahore that apparently contained details of how to make a dirty bomb. But Mohamed told the MI5 officer – whom he knew as “John” – that he thought the whole thing was a joke.
“John” was clearly unimpressed. But his report back to Thames House may well come back to haunt him.
“I told [Mohamed] that he had an opportunity to help us and help himself. The US authorities will be deciding what to do with him and this would depend to a very large degree on his level of cooperation.
“I said that if he could persuade me he was telling the complete truth I would seek to use my influence to help him . . . I said it must be obvious to him that he would get more lenient treatment if he cooperated.” Shortly after the interview Mohamed disappeared into the CIA’s rendition programme.
This weekend, amid rumours in Westminster that the police might now be called in to investigate MI5, senior Whitehall officials admitted that “John’s” report could present MI5 with difficulties. Under the 1988 Criminal Justice Act it is illegal for British officials to commission or acquiesce in acts of torture anywhere in the world. The crime can be punished by life imprisonment.
Whether or not Mohamed was tortured, and whether or nor “John” was culpable, his case raises a far larger question. Despite Gordon Brown’s declarations suggesting otherwise, do the British security services use intelligence that has been obtained through torture?
In a little noticed debate in a House of Lords committee last Thursday, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, MI5’s director-general between 2002 and 2007, went further than any of her colleagues in explaining the moral dilemma.
“It is pretty well impractical always to check whether something has been derived from torture unless you have reason to suspect it at the beginning,” she said.
“Literally thousands of pieces of intelligence are shared daily between the UK, our allies and people who might not so reasonably be described as our allies. I hope the minister will be able to confirm my comment on the amount of material that is going round the place and the impracticality of checking each bit for torture.”
That amounts to an admission that MI5 knows it has almost certainly used torture-stained intelligence, despite claiming it does not condone it.
It also emerged last week that none of the 42 documents unearthed by the High Court hearing about the Mohamed case had been passed to a full-scale inquiry into the practice of rendition by parliament’s intelligence and security committee in 2007. The inquiry had cleared the UK government of complicity in the US programme. Britain, the report suggested, was never told by the CIA exactly where it was holding prisoners and what techniques were being used to extract intelligence.
The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Sir John Scarlett, had told the committee it had never “crossed my mind” that US intelligence was coming from torture. After all, he said: “We are talking about the Americans, our closest ally.”
In their ruling last week the judges said the MPs could now use the new documents to reopen their inquiries and ask witnesses from MI6 and MI5 some “searching and difficult questions”. The conclusions of the inquiry might be different, they suggested.
In Washington the questions may be even tougher. In a US federal court hearing on rendition in San Francisco tomorrow, lawyers for Mohamed and others will hope to hear whether Obama will abandon what has so far been a blanket defence that has sunk every court case lodged on torture and rendition in American courts – namely that any court hearings on the subject would simply violate “state secrets” and should be blocked.
For Mohamed himself, none of these endless hearings seem to move him a step closer to freedom. After 2,248 days in captivity, his last words to his military lawyer as she left were: “They don’t care if I live or die.”

Understanding the Taliban

2008-04-25T17:18:00.002+01:00

Stephen Grey
First published 24 April 2008 in the New Statesman

Rethinking the war in Helmand has made the British army revise some of its basic assumptions. Working with "reconciled" Taliban commanders is part of that new strategy

There is a popular slogan seen stencilled on American gun trucks: "We do bad things to bad people." Prince Harry had those words on the back of his cap. In the Afghanistan War, the difficulty is working out who those bad people are. An even tougher question is: which of them to kill, and which to put in positions of power and authority?
Winning the war here is not for the squeamish, and a long way from the "ethical foreign policy" of early new Labour. It all boils down to dealing with those bad men. Some of them are already our allies. Others, including men who are currently trying to kill our soldiers, will have a place as our future allies. As one intelligence officer said to me: "In this country, you get to power because, at one stage or another, you've done something really awful. You can't waste time looking for the good guys."
He was probably exaggerating. But you can still see the problem in Musa Qala, the former Taliban stronghold and opium bazaar, wrested back into coalition and government hands last December. I was present during that combat operation and watched as the Afghan flag was raised in the town centre. I have just returned from a trip back.
If you believe the chief of police of Helmand Province, Brigadier Moham mad Hussain Andiwal, the new district governor of Musa Qala is a "war cri m inal" who was invol ved in the slaughter of prisoners, and is a leading heroin dealer - although, given their past history, he may be overegging things a little. Andiwal is referring to Mullah Abdul Salaam, the Taliban com mander who switched sides and was appointed governor of the town in January by President Hamid Karzai, with British backing.
Karzai also sent back to Musa Qala its former police chief. Known to all as Commander "Coca", Andiwal is remembered by the British soldiers in the town two years ago chiefly for rumours that he and his men were kidnapping young boys from the streets.
Today - however unsavoury their pasts may be - both "Coca" and Mullah Salaam get cautious and qualified support from Britain. They get it because they are doing what the British need: establishing a presence for the Afghan government in a dangerous corner of Helmand, and helping to persuade both ordinary Afghan farmers and one-time enemy fighters that the smart move is to reject the Taliban.
Salaam, as a "reconciled" Taliban commander, has been in many ways a disappointment. When I was in Helmand last year, there was talk of his bringing over a large band of Taliban fighters to the government side. This never happened. But he has proved to be a persuader, travelling from village to village having outreach shuras (meetings) and telling people that the return of British and Afghan forces is the way ahead. He is doing so at great risk to his own life.
"I'm a marked man," he told me. "When you return to Musa Qala, I will most likely be dead."
I had tracked down Salaam while he was out of town, preparing to return to his governor's compound in liberated Musa Qala. The word was out that the Taliban were hoping to greet him or Coca with a suicide bomb.
With his great, bushy, black and silvery beard, flowing robes and curled slippers, Mullah Salaam cuts a striking figure. As his comments were being translated, he kept uttering a strange, rasping noise. He was in a gloomy mood, his head sinking steadily between his palms as he contemplated the gap between promises of redevelopment in Helmand and the grind of reality.
"I have promised the people so much," he said, "but we have delivered so little and people will turn on me. Everything comes so slowly." It wasn't foreigners such as the British he blamed, particularly. "The whole government here, they are all criminals," Mullah Salaam said. "They keep the money for themselves."
Situation report
It is very easy to be critical about British intervention in Afghanistan, particularly for the commentators who rest easy in their armchairs. If you looked at an honest situation report after two years of bloody fighting in Helmand, it would have to include some strong negatives: towns deserted due to fighting; an opium harvest so vast that some suggest only a lack of space prevents it getting any bigger; an enemy that still roams free in great swaths of the cultivated "green zone"; and an electricity supply to the towns which has got worse. Add to that an alliance with "friendly forces" which have proved to be deeply corrupt.
Where is the good news? It certainly does not come from winning the war. Soldiers will tell you that, despite some clear territorial gains, we are nowhere close to it. And yet, among the British, morale is pretty good. It comes not because there is an end in sight, but from a series of tactical successes and a sense that a strategy for a victory of sorts is at last evolving - and the resources to achieve this are gathering on the horizon. Above all, there is a feeling of relief that this is not Iraq.
As I reported in this magazine three years ago, it was hard to find a British officer in southern Iraq who believed the invasion had been a good idea. The aftermath was equally depressing: in Basra, soldiers complained of training Shia militiamen who were policemen by day and planted bombs to kill them at night; officers complained of supporting a Iraqi governor who was stealing oil revenues and in league with death squads. "In Afghanistan, the police may be just as corrupt," one senior officer told me, "but at least here they are on our side. They want to go and kill the Taliban."
For the soldiers, Afghanistan has, at least until now, provided an enemy that shows its face and which can be fought with the weapons soldiers have to hand, from SA80 rifles to artillery guns. At a higher level, however, commanders are less convinced by such logic. But they, too, learned bitter lessons in Iraq - and, after two years of sometimes pointless fighting in Helmand, there is a feeling that a road map of sorts is emerging which could ultimately lead British forces to some kind of success. Working with the likes of Mullah Salaam in Musa Qala is part of that new strategy.
Rethinking the war in Helmand has posed a challenge to some basic assumptions, among the greatest of which is our understanding of the enemy. After the 11 September 2001 attacks, when American and British forces first arrived in Afghanistan, a basic misunderstanding became the doctrine. Because the Taliban had sheltered al-Qaeda, the Taliban and al-Qaeda were wrongly labelled as a joint force.
More than six years later, the mistake is in continuing with those assumptions, imagining that the Taliban who fight British troops are merely proxies for Osama Bin Laden. Instead, as military intelligence officers will tell you, the new Taliban insurgency is a battle not for international jihad, but a struggle by tribes, factions and strongmen against an unpopular Afghan government that appeared to have abandoned the largely Pashtun south of the country.
While religious ideology, madrasas, training camps and volunteering for al-Qaeda have a role in creating the fanatics who come to Helmand to die in large numbers, Taliban commanders in the field, who send young Talibs into battle against the British, are often local men with local grievances, local pride and local ambitions, even if they take advice from the Taliban leadership in Pakistan. "You can't look at him and say that religion or ideology has anything to do with why he is fighting," said one British officer, talking of a prominent Taliban commander around Musa Qala. Tribal allegiance and the Pashtun code of honour, as well as the simple provocation that foreign troops represent, all play a part in motivating such men.
What this boils down to is a classic insurgency where some of our most ferocious enemies are potential allies. Few Afghans or Britons now believe that progress can be made without some form of reconciliation process taking place - or without working with those bad men. Most importantly in such an insurgency, as Mao Zedong said, "The people are like water and the army is like fish." Without the tacit support of the population of Helmand, the Taliban would flap around on dry land.
Imposing security
A T-shirt on sale at Kandahar Airport, and worn by some soldiers in Helmand, bears the words "Taliban Hunting Club". In Helmand, there has been plenty of killing. You can measure the rise in violence by the bullets and bombs. Each successive brigade in Helmand, except the last, has expended ammunition in ever greater quantities.
However, the grim truth, as soldiers in Helmand tell you, is that much of the bloodshed has been to no effect. Although a central zone of stability in the province has been gradually expanded, whole parts of the countryside have been "cleared" time and again, only for the Taliban to return. One former British commander bluntly called it "mowing the lawn". A scorecard would read simply: "Many Taliban dead; precious little territory gained."
And yet - as some commentators seem to have missed - the lesson is being learned. Last October, when a new British brigade took command in Helmand, its then commander, Brigadier Andrew MacKay, declared "a concept of operations" where the deaths of enemy soldiers were no longer a measure of success. "The population is the prize," wrote MacKay. A campaign based on counter-insurgency principles, he said, needed operations not so much designed for "kinetic effect" (inflicting physical damage on the enemy), but calibrated to "influence" the population: decreasing support for the enemy and increasing the standing of the Afghan government.
Defeating the Taliban was not the end goal of the campaign, he explained in an interview. Even if thoroughly beaten, they might linger on as a nuisance like the Real IRA "for a hundred years". The tactic was to disrupt them just enough for the Afghan government to be able to re-establish control - and to consolidate its hold with real gains for the local people.
Of course, such "hearts and minds" thinking was always part of the theory. The original British plan for Helmand, taking lessons from counter-insurgency in Malaya, spoke of "inkspots" of security, within which the population could see tangible development gains and in which solid support for the Afghan government could be established. These inkspots would, in theory, expand and then merge.
The reality was different. An understrength British force arriving in the summer of 2006 was spread thinly across the province. With little mobility, it became beleaguered in a series of encircled platoon houses, under constant Taliban attack. Even though the army successfully fought off the attacks, the towns became battlegrounds devastated by fighting. Development went backwards and support for the Taliban grew.
Since then, British objectives have been far more cautious. While UK troop strength has more than tripled (with more than 7,000 deployed to Helmand), MacKay's aim in the past six months was to get away from "mowing the lawn" and concentrate instead on consolidation: creating a lasting presence of British and Afghan forces that not only expands the so-called inkspots of security, but has a "civil effect", making life obviously better for ordinary people.
In practical terms, this has involved a big expansion of the chain of British forts - known as FOBs, or forward operating bases - as well as similar increases in patrol bases and checkpoints for the Afghan army and police, despite ongoing shortages in their numbers.
One example can be found around the market town of Sangin in northern Helmand, which was fought over and reduced to rubble during the first year of British intervention. A ring of new patrol bases has been positioned around the town. They have not halted the fighting, but they have brought a measure of relief to the town centre. The population has returned and some reconstruction has begun. A few bazaar traders even dare fly the Afghan national flag.
MacKay's philosophy of "population is the prize" had its greatest effect during December's military operation to retake Musa Qala, a town that in effect had been handed back to the Taliban just over a year earlier.
The deployment of thousands of British, American and Afghan troops around the target area achieved such an "overmatch" of forces, that, after some initial fierce fighting, the Taliban were forced to flee, allowing the recapture of the town with minimal destruction of property.
But key to the future was the arrival of a team of military development experts - a so-called "stabilisation team" - a day after the Afghan flag was raised. I watched as they unfolded precise blueprints for the construction of a new mosque, for the rebuilding and reopening of a school, and for roads and improvements to local water and power.
Three months later, when I returned, the impact of this strategy could be seen. The mosque project was still being held up by bureaucracy, but a small road had been built, the market had reopened, a health clinic was in operation, the school was up and running, with more than 800 pupils, and a cash-for-work scheme had been set up employing more than 300 people every day.
But if Musa Qala is the success story, it is still clear that fundamental problems remain. Even here - despite the concentration of British efforts - tangible gains for the population are slow in coming.
The most glaring problem is the limits to what the British soldiers themselves can do. While the strategy places "civil effect" centre stage, any kind of reconstruction requires an input from non-military sources, whether from the Foreign Office, from Afghan officials, or from civilian contractors. With the security situation still so unstable, their involvement is proving painfully slow in getting off the ground. "We have got to learn, and learn fast, to deliver aid and reconstruction not only when it's all quiet and peaceful, but under the noses of the enemy - while the mortars are still raining in," said one senior officer.
Yet the slow delivery of aid and reconstruction projects is not just down to security. It is also because British strategy relies on delivering most of its multimillion-pound aid budget by channelling it through the Afghan government in Kabul. For the soldiers on the ground - whose security depends on rapid action to win over the population - such a strategy can be hard to fathom. "All we can do in imposing security is buy time for the Afghan government to step up and do its job," said a British officer. "The problem is that we can't and won't stay here for ever; things have to move faster."
Meanwhile, the situation is getting more dangerous for the British. A softer, more end-focused approach will in all likelihood mean more bloodshed, not less. Getting the "hearts and minds" right means leaving the base and mixing with the population - and thereby facing a daily and increasing threat from suicide bombs, mines and roadside explosive devices.
Even as Helmand moves from blunt conventional war to a smarter counter-insurgency, don't expect a quick fix.

Secrets of Curveball - the spy behind a war

2008-04-02T04:27:00.003+01:00

BBC Newsnight broadcast a film by me with new revelations about the spy whose evidence, more than any other, provided the intelligence case for the Iraq war.
We find Rafid Alwan, aka Curveball, in a town in Germany; and discover just how many doubts existed about Curveball - before the war - among both US and British intelligence.

Watch the film

Battle for Musa Qala

2008-01-09T19:13:00.001Z

Newsnight has just posted the film I made on the Battle for Musa Qala in Helmand in Afghanistan at the end of December.

Click here to watch online

Band of brothers in vigil for fallen Lee 'Jonno' Johnson

2007-12-21T08:47:00.001Z

First published in Sunday Times.

THE men of B Company gathered in whispers on the hilltop, helmeted silhouettes against a tapestry of stars.

Tonight, until first light, they would take turns at sentry duty � “stag”, as they call it � protecting the body of their fallen comrade. He was lying in our armoured vehicle. No helicopter was available that night to fly him home.

Major Jake Little, 36, the officer commanding, knew that emotions were running high. That morning, in front of us all, Sergeant Lee “Jonno” Johnson, one of the company’s best-loved soldiers, had been killed by a mine. His death came only hours after an afternoon of fierce fighting with the Taliban. Many felt they had just cheated death.

Little, his stubbled face weary with emotion, dug deep to find the right words. “I’m s*** at this,” he confessed to the men. He spoke of the gap Jonno would leave behind and how he had died doing what he loved. “Jonno would have been proud of each and every one of you,” he said.

“It’s a hard thing to be spending the night here with Jonno,” one highly experienced soldier said. “The men are quite bitter that they couldn’t find a helicopter for him.”

The company was from the 2nd Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment (the Green Howards), a regiment that Jonno, 33, from Stockton, Teesside, had joined in his teens. For some, he was not only a comrade but also their best friend.

Important though it was to mourn for Jonno, Little knew the emotions would have to be suppressed for now. “We have to move on,” he said, “but not forget.”

As they stood their watch, the men could see a skyline lit by tracer, flares and the flashes of heavy bombardment. Within hours, they would move off towards this awesome battle for the Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala.

The night before he died, Jonno said he had waited 17 years in the army to join an operation like this. He had cancelled his leave so as not to miss out. Back home, after being told of his death, his fiancée Lisa said: “He told me his leave was cancelled earlier this month but I knew he had offered to stay and take part in this operation against the Taliban.”

Jonno, who represented the battalion at boxing and the army at judo, left a son, Ashley, and a daughter, Lilly Rose, who still thinks her daddy is coming home for her third birthday in February. He and Lisa planned to get married on August 1.

As we stood by his body, the photographer Nick Cornish and I worried that as journalists we were intruding into these men’s grief, but they asked us to stay. “So many times, deaths like this go unreported,” said Little.

The mine had exploded in a wadi, or dried-up watercourse, last weekend, just 25 yards away from us. Jonno and three others were travelling in a Vector, a new six-wheeled armoured vehicle. It was commanded by Captain Nick Mantell, 26, who coordinated the rescue afterwards, his face streaked with blood from a gash on his forehead.

The vehicle had struck the mine as it passed a broken-down Afghan army lorry. and was thrown down a slope. Jonno, who was killed instantly, was pronounced dead by an American special forces medic.

The next morning, a helicopter finally came for his body. After the truck and the Vector were cleared of ammunition and secret technology, B Company drove a couple of miles across the desert plateau and waited until a jet had dropped a bomb on each vehicle.

“This is also about closure for everyone,” said Royal Marine Warrant Officer Neil “Brum” Warrington.

We returned to camp, where a 12-mile convoy of Afghan and Nato troops was ready for battle. The commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Simon Downey, drew the Green Howards into a huddle. It was his farewell to Jonno. “He’s a man whose death will leave a huge hole in the regiment,” he said. A two-minute silence followed, interrupted only by the sounds of warplanes.

Later, Little gathered his men around him again to test their mettle. “Whatever the situation now is, it doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be a s*** lot of fighting. Put your fear to one side � be aggressive, fellas � go for it!”

In the hours before battle on Tuesday, the men had risen from their bivouacs and cleaned their kit for the final time. Little went round and shook every man’s hand. Then the cry went up: “All on Fong.” Private Fong, a Fijian, is the company’s unofficial chaplain. His prayer was spoken in a language that no one understood, but everyone knew its purpose and all said “Amen”.

Just before we left, one of the survivors from Jonno’s vehicle, Private Lee Bellingham, came up to say he could not believe he had emerged unscathed from that twisted vehicle. He described trying to save Jonno.

“I knew in my subconscious that he was dead already,” he said, “but I just felt I ought to do something. I didn’t want to let go.”

Bellingham had said a prayer the morning of Jonno’s death. “I never normally pray,” he said, “but I said something that day. And I feel someone looked after me. I’ve said a prayer again this morning.”

Was Jonno’s sacrifice worth it? “Nothing that’s happening here makes his death worthwhile,” said one soldier that first night. Others were more philosophical: “You know, it’s a risk in what we do. We know death may happen, and there’s no way to really calculate what one man’s life is worth.”

As it turned out, the men arrived at Musa Qala to face not a bloody battle but a ghost town. After seven days of bitter fighting, the Taliban had fled.

But all know that the danger has not yet passed.

“The enemy’s still out there,” said one officer, “and the war continues.”

Terror on road to Taliban stronghold

2007-12-11T16:32:00.001Z

From The Sunday Times, December 9, 2007

Stephen Grey in Musa Qala, Helmand

First there was a loud bang; then we were enveloped in dust that descended like a shroud. “Mortars!” someone shouted.

In a panic, we scrambled for the relative shelter of our vehicle on a hill opposite Musa Qala, a Taliban stronghold under siege this weekend by Nato and Afghan forces, and dived inside.

Sand thrown up by the explosion swirled through the hatches and we reached for our helmets, keeping low in case of incoming fire.

Only when the dust had settled was the horror revealed: the blast had been caused not by a mortar, but by a mine that had been detonated when a British vehicle passed over it. One of the men with whom we were travelling was killed and two others wounded. The dead man’s next of kin were informed last night.

It happened as a British convoy passed along a wadi – a dried-out watercourse – in the desert near Musa Qala. We were standing at the top of the pass and stretching our legs as we waited for troops to recover an Afghan army truck that had got stuck in the sand 25 yards away.

The mine, probably one left by Soviet occupiers in the 1980s, exploded as the British vehicles steered past the truck.

Helplessly, we watched as British and US medics crawled across the Afghan truck to retrieve the casualties from their vehicle, its armour plating twisted by the force of the blast.

The photographer Nick Cornish and I were embedded in the biggest British-led operation staged so far in the Afghanistan war. The aim is to reconquer a swathe of territory that the Taliban has dared to call its own.

Amid heavy fighting, British, Afghan and American forces had been advancing all week towards Musa Qala, a town of 15,000- 20,000 inhabitants in Helmand. The British and Afghans advanced from the south and, on Friday night, the US 82nd Air-borne Division landed with troops to attack from the north.

Yesterday the US soldiers were closing in on the suburbs of the town, backed by Apache attack helicopters and A-10 Thunderbolt jets.

British forces were concentrated on the southern side. Warrior armoured vehicles of the Scots Guards, backed by A-10 air strikes, attacked the village of Deh Zohr-e-Sofia, southwest of Musa Qala, where we had witnessed a violent gun battle on Friday.

We had walked in silence towards the village, two columns of British and Afghan soldiers nervously wondering whether the Taliban would be lying in wait for us behind the high, mud-brick walls. They were.

A burst of gunfire erupted in front and we dived into a shallow ditch for cover. It was no protection, however, and we had little choice but to run. Bullets slammed into the ground around us as, feeling horribly exposed, we raced for the sanctuary of an armoured Humvee.

“We’d be dead by now if they could shoot straight,” said an officer from 2nd Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment, as we took cover, sweating heavily in our flak jackets.

The latest battle for Musa Qala, one of the most fiercely fought-over towns in southern Afghanistan, had begun in earnest and was about to have horrific consequences for a group of refugees attempting to drive through the maelstrom to safety.

Terrifying in its intensity, Friday’s firefight was just one engagement in what officers have described as one of the biggest British military operations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with hundreds of troops embroiled.

Held briefly last year by British forces and defended with the loss of seven soldiers, Musa Qala was recaptured by the Taliban in February after UK troops had pulled out during an ill-fated truce.

Last week, in a shift of strategy, Nato forces were moving back into the area, creating a “zone of security” to help win the hearts and minds of the locals. A British officer said: “Our aim now is to take control of no town that we cannot hold on to, unless we can deliver development for the people who live there.”

However, events in Deh Zohr-e-Sofia demonstrated how difficult it is to keep families safe, let alone make friends, in this treacherous corner of the world.

As we got our breath back behind the wheel of the Humvee, we noticed a white car, upturned on the road behind us, blood streaking one of its windows. Nearby, people had gathered around a truck, shouting and gesticulating. Two bodies lay in the dust.

British troops went forward to offer their help, but were turned back by angry bystanders shouting, “Go away,” in English.

Amid the confusion, it took some time for the sequence of events to become clear. But in the end there was no doubt that the two civilians had been killed by American gunfire.

As we had approached the village, the Taliban had fired at us from five or six positions.

Once the shooting began, the refugees in the truck and car tried desperately to escape and had driven past us at high speed. Their flight took them directly towards two US Humvees parked by the side of the road.

The Americans, thinking they were under attack from a suicide bomber, opened fire, killing the driver and a passenger in the truck. Three others were injured: a woman with a bullet wound in her face, a boy who was shot in the arm and a girl with a serious gash in her side. The children were both about five years old.

At first the families were too enraged to let Corporal Phil French, a medic with the Yorkshire Regiment, anywhere near the wounded. Eventually, he gave the woman and children first aid. The British tried to arrange a helicopter to take them for treatment. None was available.

Soldiers tried to make sense of it. “Americans have been the victims time and again of suicide attacks,” said one. Another argued that the civilians had in effect been “human shields” and had been “deliberately forced to drive towards us – probably against their will – and used as a screen to attack”.

Another felt sorry for the men who had pulled the triggers. “They will have to live with this for the rest of their lives,” he said.

The battle went on all afternoon. Later, the British would be thankful to the Americans. As a Humvee kept up a steady barrage in answer to enemy gunfire, American F16s swooped down from above to strafe the compounds in which the Taliban fighters were sheltering.

At one point, an aircraft believed to be a B1 bomber dropped a precision-targeted bomb onto an area where the enemy was gathering for an attack.

It was expected to be a long and bloody battle. For the Taliban, the British attack on Musa Qala had come as no surprise. Leaflets had been dropped on the town, warning residents that Nato forces were coming.

The movement began on Tuesday at first light when Royal Marine commandos stormed across the Helmand river in amphibious vehicles near the town of Sangin. They were soon fending off rocket and machine-gun attacks.

In a manoeuvre nearby, Trooper Jack Sadler, of the Honourable Artillery Company, was killed and two soldiers were injured when their vehicle was caught in an explosion.

British forces had been encouraged in the days before their assault by the public defection to the government side of Mullah Abdul Salaam, a key Taliban commander. He brought with him up to one-third of the fighters who had been defending Musa Qala.

On Wednesday, President Hamid Karzai, who had encouraged Salaam’s defection by pushing for negotiations, sent several dozen militia to the area to help protect the mullah from reprisals. Bizarrely, they arrived at the British lines in school buses that had brought them from Kabul, the capital.

On the same day, a British patrol was attacked near the Kajaki dam northeast of Sangin, resulting in a firefight that lasted several hours and prompted the deployment of RAF Harrier jets to push back the enemy.

To the west, near the town of Now Zad, a company of Estonians backed by Royal Marines came under sustained attack. American special forces were also involved. One heavy Taliban attack was driven back only after a bomb had been dropped on their position from an American B1 aircraft.

RAF helicopter pilots flew two rescue missions, despite heavy rocket fire, to recover two wounded Taliban fighters. “We had British and Estonian lives risked to save the life of two enemy,” said Major Alex Murray.

Danish forces under UK command were attacked in the town of Gereshk; and intelligence suggested the Taliban were trying to move two large explosive devices south to be used for suicide bombs in British-controlled towns.

On Thursday, a big Afghan army column began an advance, backed by British and American special forces, while diversionary attacks were launched on Taliban positions in other parts of Helmand.

Yesterday, as America’s 82nd Air-borne Division advanced on Musa Qala, thousands of civilians were believed to be trapped in the town. The emphasis was on trying to persuade Taliban leaders to flee Musa Qala or defect to the government.

“The prize in this insurgency is the people,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Eaton, a spokesman for the British forces in Helmand. “What we need to do in Musa Qala is persuade the people they will be better off under the government.”

British officers said the whole operation – backed by an Afghan brigade, numerous special forces and more than a battalion of American troops – was so big that some aircraft were redeployed from combat in Iraq.

The Afghan forces were said to be proving their mettle in the latest combat. “These guys have no hesitation in killing the Taliban,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Simon Downey, commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment, which is “mentoring” the Afghan troops.

The arrangement was not without frustrations. The Afghans were supposedly fighting under their own command. Yet they could barely function without Nato’s protection and Nato had to cajole them to move forward.

Another complication was the use of cannabis by Afghan soldiers. “Hashish is part of our culture,” said an Afghan officer. “It is just like whisky and wine for you.”

ends

The Guantanamo Airlift: how Europe helped transport the prisoners

2007-11-25T00:23:00.001Z

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

Abandoned by Britain, the interpreter fleeing from Iraqi death squads

2007-11-12T09:05:00.000Z

By STEPHEN GREY - first published Mail on Sunday on 11th November 2007

A senior British Army officer has hit out at the lack of protection given to his former translator after the man was forced to go on the run when Iraqi insurgents murdered his brother-in-law and kidnapped his wife.

He says the Iraqi interpreter, who also worked for the Foreign Office, was turned away by British officials and told: "Make your own way to safety."

Last night, Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Mercer, who was head of the Army's legal service in Iraq, said Britain had an obligation to help Haider Samad.

He said: "We owe this man an enormous debt – we can't abandon him and his family."

Lt Col Mercer said Samad had been crucial to his work in establishing law and order after the British took over in southern Iraq. "We couldn't have done it without him," he said.

The news comes despite Foreign Secretary David Miliband's promise to protect former employees of UK Forces in Iraq and allow them to settle in Britain.

Last night, Haider Samad was on the run in Basra and in desperate danger after he was turned away from the British base at the city's airport.

Armed militias behind a terror offensive against British troops in the region have launched a manhunt for him, and have already launched a murderous attack on his family.

Other former translators who worked for British Forces say the situation is serious. The Foreign Office's own figures suggest that 40 ex-employees of the British have been killed so far.

Many in the Army believe there has been insufficient care taken to remember those who have died a manhunt for him, and have already launched a murderous attack on his family.

Other former translators who worked for British Forces say the situation is serious. The Foreign Office's own figures suggest that 40 ex-employees of the British have been killed so far.

Many in the Army believe there has been insufficient care taken to remember those who have died.

Samad had worked for British forces since they first arrived in 2003; he had been held for the previous four years under house arrest by Saddam because of his pro-democracy work.

In March 2007, he left his final job as an interpreter for ArmorGroup, a UK firm running a Foreign Office contract to train local police, after death threats from Shia militias.

In September his brother-in-law Ali was captured and killed by the militias. They left a note on his body urging Samad to give himself up.

Samad then fled to Iran but his wife and children and his wife's uncle, Ahmed, were kidnapped last weekend.

They were all later released but Ahmed is in an intensive-care unit with four bullet wounds in his chest.

Samad said: "I appeal for anyone with a conscience to help me. This is a question of life or death for us."

A Foreign Office spokesman said officials were 'keeping closely in touch' with Samad and doing their best to help him.

Frontline World - Extraordinary Rendition -Trailer

2007-11-06T19:50:00.003Z

Frontline World - Extraordinary Rendition - Preview 2

2007-11-06T19:50:00.002Z

The agonizing truth about CIA renditions

2007-11-05T21:58:00.001Z

Published on Salon.com

The fate of prisoners secreted away under the Bush administration is in some ways worse than even Hollywood has portrayed.

By Stephen Grey

Nov. 05, 2007 At 3:44 p.m. on Jan. 24, 2004, a luxury Boeing 737 business jet operated by the Central Intelligence Agency landed at Kabul Airport in Afghanistan. Onboard were its flight crew, eight members of a CIA rendition team and a blindfolded prisoner who was shackled by his wrists and feet.

The behavior of the prisoner, a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri, concerned the CIA team leader onboard. According to an agency insider, the leader sent word to Washington that "there was something strange about el-Masri. He didn't behave like the others they'd captured. He was asking: Is he the right guy?"

Within days it emerged that el-Masri was indeed the wrong man. It was a "100 percent case of mistaken identity," said another former agency official. Yet, despite this discovery, el-Masri spent 18 weeks in solitary confinement in a CIA "black site," or secret prison used by the United States in its war on terror. He is still waiting for an apology or an explanation.

The case of el-Masri -- whose lawsuit against the CIA has been dismissed by U.S. courts on the grounds of protecting "state secrets" -- caused a huge controversy within the CIA at the time of his capture. A five-month standoff between employees at the Counterterrorism Center and others in the clandestine service led then director George Tenet to step in. "On at least this occasion, Tenet made the right choice," a source told me. "He ordered the release of a man who was clearly not a terrorist."

The current Hollywood movie "Rendition" looks at a fictional case of a wrongly identified terrorist. It calls to public attention the CIA program of "extraordinary rendition," the practice of nabbing terrorist suspects abroad and transferring them without legal process to a third country -- often one where torture is commonplace -- for detention and interrogation.

In the course of investigating the rendition program for the past four years, I have interviewed victims, CIA pilots, case officers who have actually carried out renditions, senior CIA officers who directed such operations and officials at the White House who were involved in authorizing such measures. All of these sources told me in private or on the record that repeated claims by the White House that we "don't send people to countries where they will be tortured" are plain lies.

As Tyler Drumheller, head of CIA covert operations in Europe from 2001 to 2005, said in an on-camera interview, the assurances obtained from countries like Egypt that prisoners would not be tortured were hardly treated as serious. "You can say we asked them not to do it, and they do say that, but you have to be honest with yourself and say there's no way we can guarantee they are not going to do that."

Hollywood's "Rendition" makes some mistakes. It is not true, as the movie depicts, that CIA officers stand by in some Egyptian or Syrian torture room while a prisoner is electrocuted. Most CIA officers would find that abhorrent, and it would breach the CIA's own rules and be a clear violation of U.S. law.

But in some ways the truth about rendition is worse than what is depicted in the Hollywood film. When prisoners are handed over to countries like Egypt or Syria, CIA officers keep well clear of what happens next because agency rules prevent them from witnessing any strong-arm interrogations. But keeping their eyes wide shut, in effect, allows for much darker, more immoral things to occur, and for the U.S. government to preserve plausible deniability.

Inside its own "black site" prisons, the CIA uses interrogation methods that -- while falling short of the medieval techniques used in the Arab world -- still, in the eyes of many within the agency, amount to straightforward torture. It is not only the physical methods like waterboarding (simulated drowning), but also refined techniques of sensory deprivation, that can cripple a prisoner psychologically.

One witness to such abuse was Bisher al-Rawi, a longtime British resident who was snatched by the CIA and held for more than four years, first in Afghanistan, then in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In a recent interview he told me about the "dark prison" where he was held in solitary confinement while being bombarded with strange music. It was freezing cold and so dark, he said, "you couldn't see the end of your nose." Physical torture, like the beatings he later endured, could be overcome, he said, but psychological torture "lives with you all your life."

The Bush administration now acknowledges its program of rendition and the existence of its black sites. But much remains a deep secret. Most of the terrorist suspects involved remain in custody and cannot talk. And we know the fate of just a small fraction of the thousands of prisoners captured by U.S. forces around the world since 9/11.

Recently, by refusing to hear the lawsuit of Khaled el-Masri, the U.S. Supreme Court has added to this veil of secrecy. It left standing a judgment by the circuit court that however bad el-Masri's treatment, the objectives of national security outweighed the public interest in airing the truth about his arrest and detention in a public court of law.

As long as a terror suspect remains a "ghost prisoner" whose location and fate can only be guessed at, then a prison guard or interrogator need feel little fear of the consequences of what he or she might do. Secrecy is a friend of the torturer.

-- By Stephen Grey

Frontline World - Preview

2007-10-23T19:44:00.001+01:00

Coming soon - Frontline World: Extraordinary Rendition

2007-10-21T21:00:00.001+01:00

COMING SOON - FRONTLINE WORLD -
"EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION" -

BROADCAST DATE PBS NOVEMBER 6th.

PREVIEW PROGRAM -MORE INFORMATION

PBS PRESS RELEASE:

FRONTLINE/World INVESTIGATES THE CIA'S CONTROVERSIAL"RENDITION AND TORTURE" PROGRAM

“They pushed me down onto the floor of the van. There was blood everywhere, on my hands, my knees,” Egyptian cleric Abu Omar tells FRONTLINE/World reporter Stephen Grey about being snatched off the street by the CIA.

“As we drove along, I started to choke.… It felt like I was dying. Then I disappeared from history.”

“Somebody came, removed the hood, removed the cuffs and left me in the shackles,” Bisher al-Rawi, a longtime British resident, says of his arrival at an infamous secret CIA “black site” in Afghanistan.

“And that was the ‘Dark Prison.’… It was a very, very cold place. … You had some sort of odd voices, not music, playing on speakers. … You had people coming to check you were alive—not OK, but alive. … [For] the duration of the dark prison I had shackles on. I just took it as it came."

These are among the voices of CIA “ghost prisoners” speaking for the first time on U.S. television as part of FRONTLINE/World’s Extraordinary Rendition, an international investigation by the award-winning journalist Stephen Grey of the United States government’s controversial, extralegal detention and interrogation program, airing Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007, at 9 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings).

Grey, the former head of investigations at The Sunday Times of London and the author of the acclaimed book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program (St. Martin’s, 2006), was one of the first journalists to uncover the secrets of the CIA rendition program.

In recent weeks, President Bush has publicly defended CIA interrogation methods as legal, despite charges from within his own administration that CIA treatment of “ghost prisoners” was “abhorrent.”

Initially, as Grey and others discovered, key terror suspects were transferred by the CIA to countries like Egypt and Jordan, where many believe the United States was “outsourcing torture” to foreign intelligence services. The Bush administration claims it insisted that the countries who accepted the CIA’s rendered prisoners would not use torture.

“You can say we asked them not to do it,” says Tyler Drumheller, the former head of CIA operations in Europe, about these assurances the prisoners would not be tortured.

“But when you turn someone over to another country you can’t say to them, ‘This is how we expect you to treat them.’ … If you know that this is how this country has treated people in the past, you have to be honest that that is going to be a part of it.”

As the rendition program grew, and the White House drew up controversial legal authorization for secret detention and “enhanced interrogation techniques,” such as water boarding, the CIA began maintaining its own “black sites” for “high-value” terror suspects.

One of these black sites, it was revealed this summer, was in Poland. Another was near an air strip in eastern Romania where the CIA began to interrogate prisoners themselves.

“There wasn’t a bed, just a mattress and blanket and a bucket to urinate and defecate in,” says Mohammed Bashmillah, who was tracked down by Grey in Yemen a year after his release by the CIA without charge.

“We were chained by our legs for a period of about a month after our arrival. When they called us for interrogation, they bound us by the hands and legs, and covered our heads.”

In September 2006, after a number of public disclosures and a key Supreme Court decision, President Bush was finally forced to acknowledge the existence of the secret rendition program. He announced the emptying of the CIA’s black sites and the transfer of high-value detainees to Guantanamo Bay, where they would face military tribunals.

But Grey and others have shown that dozens of known detainees, including so-called high-value prisoners, remain unaccounted for.

Then in early 2007 Grey discovered more secret flights—this time in the Horn of Africa on planes chartered by the Kenyan government. Fatma Chande, the wife of a suspected member of Al Qaeda, tells Grey she was picked up by the Kenyans, she believes, on behalf of the Americans.

“The police tried to force me to admit my husband was a member of Al Qaeda. I
told them he was just a businessman. They kept banging on the table. They
threatened to strangle me if I didn’t tell them the truth.”

The CIA says this wasn’t a U.S. operation, but Jack Cloonan, a veteran FBI officer with deep experience on terror cases before and after 9/11, told Grey:

"It’s called plausible deniability. The agency and the bureau are not going to
admit that they were witting of this at all, … but they probably were the power
brokers behind the scenes pushing this forward. … This new era of going onto the
African continent and outsourcing [interrogation], I think, is frankly new.”

Now, as the fate of many rendered men remains uncertain at Guantanamo Bay, and many others remain unaccounted for, President Bush has reportedly signed a new executive order. Its secret contents, many believe, have reauthorized the CIA to once again render terror suspects to black sites where “enhanced” interrogation techniques are applied.

“The program is back on,” Stephen Grey says. “The people in the CIA are pretty reluctant about it, but they’ve got their orders, and until America finds a way of actually bringing people to trial in a courtroom, people in the CIA have got very little alternative to holding them in these black sites secretly or rendering them to allies who will do their bidding."

Gitmo Underwear Scandal; Who Smuggled the Speedos?

2007-10-15T17:06:00.001+01:00

ABC News: The Blotter
September 24, 2007 4:09 PM
Stephen Grey and Brian Ross Report:

The discovery that two Guantanamo detainees were wearing unauthorized underwear -- Under Armour briefs and a Speedo bathing suit -- has apparently triggered a full U.S. Navy investigation.
In a letter last month to a lawyer representing the two detainees, a U.S. Navy Commander warned, "We cannot tolerate contraband being surreptitiously brought into the camp" and said, "Such activities threaten the safety" of Guantanamo staff, detainees and visiting lawyers.
The lawyer who received the letter, Clive Stafford-Smith of London, wrote back, "I have never received such an extraordinary letter in my entire career."
"I cannot imagine who would want to give my client Speedos, or why," Stafford-Smith responded about his client, Shake Aamer. He "is hardly in a position to go swimming, since the only available water is the toilet in his cell. I presume that nobody thinks that Mr. Aamer wears Speedos while paddling in his privy."
Aamer, a Saudi Arabian, has been held at Guantanamo for more than five years, according to the Associated Press.
Click Here for Full Blotter Coverage.
The U.S. Navy Commander, whose name was redacted from copies of the letters provided to ABCNews.com by Stafford-Smith, said the investigation revealed "the briefs were not issued by JTF-Guantanamo personnel, nor did they enter the camp through regular mail."
Stafford-Smith rejected any implication that he or his colleagues had smuggled in the "contraband" underwear to their clients.
"Does someone seriously suggest," he asked, that he or his colleagues "have been stripping off to deliver underpants to our clients?"
A U.S. military spokesman, Army Lt. Col. Ed Bush, told the Associated Press earlier this month the investigation was no laughing matter.
"There is no room for error when working in a dangerous environment, and constant vigilance is of the utmost importance," Bush told the AP.
Some 340 men are being held at the prison on suspicion of terrorism or links to al Qaeda.
President Bush has indicated he wants the Guantanamo prison shut down, but to date there have been no details on how or when that might happen.
Stephen Grey is a freelance journalist who contributes to ABC News.

Preacher seized by CIA tells of torture in Egypt

2007-06-14T13:52:00.001+01:00

AN EGYPTIAN preacher who was seized by the CIA in daylight on a Milan street has revealed the details of 14 months of torture to which he says he was subjected after his “extraordinary rendition” to Egypt.
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, described how Egyptian interrogators stripped him, shackled his arms and legs in a crucifixion position and then beat him and gave him electric shocks. He claimed they had twice attempted to rape him.
Now living in Alexandria, Nasr, 44, walks with a limp, is deaf in one ear and bears scars.
Last Friday the trial opened of 26 American defendants accused of kidnapping him on February 17, 2003, in an operation prosecutors say was coordinated by the CIA and Italian intelligence. None of the US defendants, a number of whom were identified by aliases, attended.
Nasr fled Egypt in 1988 after he was accused of being a member of Gama’a Islamiya, an Egyptian militant group that later carried out terrorist attacks. He denied the allegation and was granted political asylum in Italy. When he disappeared he was walking to midday prayers at a radical mosque where he was a part-time preacher.
He became a “ghost prisoner”, his arrest and detention confirmed to nobody. “I was out of history. My lawyer searched prisons all over Egypt and no one could find a trace of me,” he said.
Senior CIA officials have confirmed that Nasr was regarded by the US as an Al-Qaeda operative. A team from Langley, Virginia, was dispatched to Milan to snatch him and fly him to Egypt.
According to Nasr, his ordeal began in CIA hands after he was bundled into a white van and driven to Aviano air force base. He claimed he had been beaten while bound and gagged, and thought he would die.
“I was bleeding: bleeding from my face, bleeding from my knees, bleeding from other parts of my body,” he said. “My mouth started foaming.”
Throughout his 13-hour journey via Ramstein in Germany to Egypt, nobody spoke to him. The CIA agents had wrapped him in masking tape “like a mummy” that made his face bleed when it was ripped off later.
Nasr claimed that in Cairo he had been taken to a room and told he was meeting two “pashas”, important people. He was asked: “Do you want to be an informer for us? If you say yes then you can be back in Italy in 24 hours.” When Nasr said no, they sent him back to his cell.
For the first seven months, he said, he had been in the hands of Egyptian foreign intelligence, allies of the CIA. He alleged its operatives had stripped him and given him constant beatings with bare knuckles, sticks and electric cables. One method involved handcuffing his leg to his hands, so he was forced to stand for hours on the other leg, while being beaten.
On September 14, 2003, he was handed over to Egyptian state security at its interrogation compound in the Nasr City district of Cairo. For the next seven months, his treatment grew worse.
“Once I was thrown on the floor and my hands were cuffed to my back and they brought a security agent who mounted my back and slapped on top of me so as to rape me. That’s when I broke down and I started screaming till I passed out.”
In April 2004, he was released for 23 days but was told it was on condition he did not speak to the media, telephone his wife and family in Italy or talk to human rights groups.
When he broke the rules and phoned home, his calls were tapped. A tap in Italy alerted the police to his kidnapping and they began the investigation that eventually identified the CIA team. Another phone tap in Egypt resulted in his rearrest. He continued to be held without charge in prison until early this year. At no point was he charged with any offence.
Nasr’s allegations are hard to verify in detail. He has not been examined by a doctor; nor has he been brought before a court.
According to Amnesty International, which alleges 18,000 prisoners are held without trial in Egypt, his account is credible.
Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, an Amnesty expert on Egypt who interviewed Nasr, said: “Sending him back to Egypt, knowing that Egypt practices torture on a widespread scale and knowing that Abu Omar was wanted by the intelligence services, they knew he would be tortured.”
Egypt has acknowledged receiving 60 to 70 prisoners from the US. It denies that torture is routine and says when cases are identified, those responsible are punished.
The Egyptian interior ministry said Nasr was an unreliable character. “The information we had about him was that he was, one way or the other, an individual who embraced the ideology of jihad,” it said.
The CIA and the US government refused to discuss the case and refused to cooperate with the Italian judicial inquiry.
Stephen Grey interviewed Nasr for Dispatches, Kidnapped to Order, on Channel 4 tomorrow at 8pm

London student’s jungle war escape led to ‘rendition’ trap

2007-06-10T13:59:00.001+01:00

Sunday Times, June 10, 2007, by Stephen Grey.

A BRITISH student who was caught up in fighting in Somalia has described how he fled for his life only to be arrested as a suspected Al-Qaeda member and then rescued by a British consul from a secret operation to transfer terrorist suspects to Ethiopia for interrogation.
Reza Afsharzadagen, 25, from north London, was among hundreds of refugees forced to flee battles last December between Islamic radicals who had seized power in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and Ethiopian soldiers trying to install a rival United Nations-backed government.
After dodging bombs from American warplanes deployed in support of the Ethiopians and trekking through jungle for 13 days, Afsharzadagen reached safety in Kenya. But there he was detained as a suspected terrorist and questioned for nearly a month without being charged.
He and three other British Muslims who were arrested - Shahajan Janjua, Hamza Chent-ouf, and Mohammed Ezzoueck, all from London - were eventually returned home and cleared of any suspicion of terrorist activity after the intervention of the Foreign Office.
But more than 85 other captives who had fled Somalia were flown back to the war zone and later interrogated for weeks at a prison in Ethiopia. Among those transferred were women, and children as young as seven months old, who were alleged to be from the families of militants.
The mass transfers in East Africa were the first case to come to light of an “extraordinary rendition” - the covert transfer of terrorist suspects to other countries for interrogation - involving children.
Afsharzadagen’s account, in an interview for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme tomorrow, emerged as arguments about the rendition programme intensified. The Council of Europe reported last Friday that the CIA had run secret prisons in Poland and Romania. The CIA said such claims were biased and distorted, and insisted it had operated lawfully.
Yesterday the Association of Chief Police Officers was accused by the human rights group Liberty of “spin” after it concluded in a separate inquiry that there was no evidence that British airports had been “used to transport people by the CIA for torture in other countries”.
Afsharzadagen says he travelled to Mogadishu last September after the radical Islamic Courts Union drove out war-lords who had ruled for 15 years. The US and other governments warned that the regime was establishing an extreme form of Islamic rule, sheltering Al-Qaeda members and creating jihadist training camps.
Some preachers in British mosques were urging young Muslims to travel to Somalia to help the Islamists. Afsharzadagen, who completed a computing degree at London Metropolitan University, claimed he had gone partly in search of “adventure” and partly to do voluntary work, teaching young Somalis computer skills.
When he arrived, he said, he found people revelling in their freedom to walk around the city for the first time in years without fear. “It wasn’t like the Taliban in Afghanistan,” he said. “There were women working and walking on the streets.”
Within three months, troops from Ethiopia entered Somalia with the aim of replacing the Islamic Courts Union with a government of national unity. As the bombs began to fall near Mogadishu, Afsharzadagen and many other foreigners fled.
Travelling south with convoys of refugees, he met the other Britons for the first time and they took a boat towards the Kenyan border. “It was like a big canoe - when we arrived we had to swim ashore - that’s when I lost all my money,” he said.
For several days they hid in the jungle as they watched US helicopters and warplanes seeking out Al-Qaeda fugitives and listened to the bombing. “We felt we were being hunted down.”
One morning Afsharzadagen woke to the sound of gunfire and explosions nearby. He was separated from his friends as they fled towards the Kenyan border. “I just got up and ran. I left my passport. I left my food rations. Everything.”
By the time the gunfire had died away he was lost in the jungle with 30 people, mostly strangers. As they trudged through the bush in search of help, they drank from puddles. By the 13th day many were close to collapse. Then someone heard a cock crow, indicating a settlement nearby.
The villagers gave them honey but Kenyan soldiers who turned up lashed out with kicks. “Some were telling us, ‘You’re Al-Qaeda, we’ve finally caught you’.” From the nearby town of Kiunga, where officers from Kenya’s counter-terrorism unit were waiting, they were flown to Nairobi, where they were held in crowded communal cells.
Afsharzadagen said he was asked if he had handled weapons or trained in a terrorist camp. “I said I hadn’t. But they would tell me, ‘You’re lying’.”
Requests to see a British diplomat were refused, but eventually Afsharzadagen and the others were taken to a hotel to meet some officers from MI5. The first one called himself Richard.
“He told me he was here to help me. But it wasn’t true. I knew they were there to trap us,” he said.
After returning to their cells, the Britons’ hopes of going home rose briefly when they were moved to the airport. Then they noticed cars and lorries carrying other prisoners.
Handcuffed and blindfolded, they were flown instead to an unknown city in Somalia and handed over to Ethiopian soldiers who locked them in a dark cell teeming with cockroaches.
But after two days, an official told them they were leaving. At the top of a flight of stairs, Afsharzadagen was introduced to a British consul who had flown to Somalia to bring them out. An RAF plane took them from Kenya to Britain. No evidence was found of any terrorist connection to them.
For the other prisoners, including an American, a Frenchman and three Swedes, the ordeal was far from over. They were moved to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, for interrogation. Among the 85 transferred, according to flight manifests, were at least 11 women accompanied by 11 children.
One of them was a 25-year-old Tanzanian, Fatma Chande. After her release she alleged the police in Kenya had threatened to strangle her. “They tried to make me admit my husband was a member of Al-Qaeda,” she claimed.
“When we arrived at the airport, we were handcuffed and our headscarves were pulled down over our eyes. The men were hooded. The children were crying all the time saying, ‘We want to go home’.”
The prisoners transferred to Ethiopia were questioned by Americans. “They’ve concealed their role, but you can assume the Americans were behind all these renditions,” said a senior western diplomat in Nairobi. “By sending prisoners to Ethiopia, they had a convenient place to interrogate people.”

DISPATCHES - Monday JUNE 14, 2007

2007-06-08T18:38:00.002+01:00

"Kidnapped to Order

Channel 4, UK, Monday, June 11, 2007 at 8PM UK

Dispatches exposes a new phase in America's dirty war on al Qaeda: the rendition and detention of women and children. Last year, President Bush confirmed the existence of a CIA secret detention programme but he refused to give details and said it was over. Dispatches reveals new evidence confirming fiercely-denied reports that many of the CIA captives were held and interrogated in Europe. Those prisons may now be closed but the programme is by no means over, it's just changed. A new front has opened up in the Horn of Africa and America has outsourced its renditions to its allies.Reporter Stephen Grey (author of Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Programme) investigates America's global sweep for prisoners - obtaining exclusive interviews with former detainees who claim they have been kidnapped and flown halfway across the world to face torture by America's allies.The film opens with an examination of the most notorious rendition story to date - the kidnap of Egyptian cleric Abu Omar. This month in Italy the trial opens of twenty-five CIA officers accused of snatching Omar from the streets of Milan in broad daylight and flying him to Cairo four years ago. Grey travels to Egypt to secure an exclusive interview with Omar who defies the warnings of his interrogators not to speak publicly about his treatment. He details the torture that was inflicted upon him in his fourteen-month detention and the number of other 'ghost detainees' he encountered - people who are being held in secret, without charge.The film then turns to Pakistan - one of America's most significant allies in the 'war on terror'. Since 9/11, the state's intelligence services have apprehended over a five hundred people as terror suspects. Grey investigates what happens to the 'disappeared' amid claims that America pays Pakistan a bounty for every suspect they capture. Turning his attentions closer to home, Grey gains exclusive access to an official European investigation which has found evidence that CIA prisons housing al Qaeda suspects have also existed in Europe and reveals the interrogation techniques that have been used against such high-value prisoners. The Bush administration claim such techniques stop short of torture but Grey discovers that many in the CIA disagree and are concerned that using them may leave them open to criminal proceedings in the future and make the evidence gained inadmissible in a trial - preventing terrorists from being convicted in court.Dispatches then examines the new battleground of America's war on terror - the Horn of Africa. Grey travels to Kenya, and Ethiopia to investigate allegations of mass renditions involving women and children - where prisoners thought to have al Qaeda connections have been illegally transferred from country to country for imprisonment and interrogation. Grey uncovers evidence of secret rendition flights on which suspects were flown from Nairobi into war-torn Somalia - a state with no effective law or government. Amongst the suspects were women and children - he hears a first-hand account from one Briton who was on one of the flights who describes being beaten, interrogated and finding himself in a prison cell opposite a woman and a five-year-old boy. Another woman who was rendered to Somalia describes being flown on to Ethiopia with other women and children - where one pregnant woman gave birth to her child whilst in detention.Dispatches questions the legality and effectiveness of America's rendition programme and asks whether the way detainees have been interrogated will undermine the legal process to bring real terrorists to trial and conviction.

CIA ran secret prisons for detainees in Europe, says inquiry

2007-06-08T18:36:00.001+01:00

by Stephen Grey
Friday June 8, 2007 The Guardian
The CIA operated secret prisons in Europe where terrorism suspects could be interrogated and were allegedly tortured, an official inquiry will conclude today.
Despite denials by their governments, senior Polish and Romanian security officials have confirmed to the Council of Europe that their countries were used to hold some of America's most important prisoners captured after 9/11 in secret.
None of the prisoners had access to the Red Cross and many were subject to what George Bush has called the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation, which critics have condemned as torture. Although suspicions about the secret CIA prisons have existed for more than a year, the council's report, seen by the Guardian, appears to offer the first concrete evidence. It also details the prisons' operations and the identities of some of the prisoners.
The council has also established that within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, Nato signed an agreement with the US that allowed civilian jets used by the CIA during its so-called extraordinary rendition programme to move across member states' airspace. Its report states: "We have sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA's illegal activities on their territories." The council's investigators believe that agreement may have been illegal.
The full extent of British logistic support for the extraordinary rendition programme was first disclosed by the Guardian, which reported in September 2005 that aircraft operated by the CIA had flown in and out of UK civilian and military airports hundreds of times.
The 19-month inquiry by the council, which promotes human rights across Europe, was headed by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator and former state prosecutor. He said: "What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice."
His report says there is "now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA [existed] in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania". Mr Marty has told Channel 4's Dispatches, in a report to be broadcast on Monday, that the jails were run "directly and exclusively" by the CIA. This was only possible because of "collaboration at various institutional levels of America's many partner countries".
He succeeded in confirming details of the CIA's prisons by using his own "intelligence methods", which included tracking agents on both sides of the Atlantic, and persuading them to talk. Officials in Poland and Romania have repeatedly denied the existence of CIA facilities or the presence of detainees held by US authorities.
But Mr Marty concluded: "All the members and partners of Nato signed up to the same permissive - not to say illegal - terms that allowed CIA operations to permeate throughout the European continent and beyond ..." There was no immediate comment from Nato.
· Stephen Grey presents Dispatches - Kidnapped to Order on Monday June 11 at 8pm on Channel 4.

BBC File on Four - the Heroin Connection

2007-03-07T15:42:00.001Z

Stephen Grey tells the inside story of Britain's dirty war against drugs. Why did a policy of using major dealers as informants do little to stem the flow ....

Download audio (MP3 file)

Download transcript