WHEN IN SUDAN, criticise the Yanks. The Archbishop of Canterbury, visiting that country over the weekend, was interviewed by Sir David Frost about, among other things, the prison camp at Guantanamo. Rowan Williams told his interlocutor that “any message given that any state can just override some of the basic habeas corpus-type provisions is going to be very welcome to tyrants elsewhere in the world”. Presumably good manners dictated that his critique of the Sudanese neogenocide in Darfur will have to wait until he visits, say, America.
So far, so snippy. But even so, the unfortunate location for his critique doesn’t make the Archbishop wrong. And he certainly isn’t alone. Indeed, this week is practically Guantanamo Week in Britain. Yesterday saw the well-publicised launch of a book by Moazzam Begg, the former British Gitmo detainee, and on Thursday evening Channel 4 will screen the award-winning drama-doc The Road to Guantanamo, which purports to show the experience of three British Muslims — the so-called Tipton Three — at the hands of British and American interrogators, from Afghanistan to Cuba.
I’ll start with the Michael Winterbottom’s film, because, despite its many virtues, it exemplifies a problem in the way many have come to look at the War on Terror. Mixing dramatised sequences with interviews, and cutting to news footage, The Road to Guantanamo tells how three young Midlanders went off to Pakistan to organise a marriage, soon after 9/11. The film suggests that, after having arranged things, they were at a bit of a loose end and, walking along a Karachi road one day, were swept up by a crowd entering a mosque. There they were moved by a spirit of adventure — and a desire to eat very large naan breads — to volunteer to go to Afghanistan to help in aid projects. A few days later they departed by bus.
They make it, via Kandahar, to Kabul, where they sit around for a fortnight doing nothing, and then get a lift in a van going back to Pakistan. Except it isn’t going to Pakistan, it is heading in the exact opposite direction, and they wind up in the last remaining Taleban stronghold of Kunduz, alongside lots of foreign fighters. They are captured by the Northern Alliance, appallingly treated, then handed over to the Americans who eventually fly them to Guantanamo. There they languish until finally being released last year.
If this account is to be believed then these three are either the luckiest or unluckiest men in Britain, and certainly among the stupidest. Winterbottom, asked about their reasons for going to Afghanistan, replied: “If you’re talking about people’s motives, it’s very difficult . . . It’s very hard to pin down your motives to one thing. But what they say in the film is that they were interested to see Afghanistan, and wanted to help the people there.”
What the film doesn’t tell you is that the Karachi mosque that the three boys happened across, the Binori Mosque, had already, in 2001, been described as “the alma mater for jihadis”. The most militant elements in the battle for Kashmir studied at the Binori madrassa — a centre of the extreme Deobandi ideology — as did many members of the Taleban. It was thought to be the spiritual home of the Harkat ul-Ansar terrorist organisation, and in the autumn of 2001 the mosque and seminary were openly recruiting fighters to go to the aid of the Taleban.
There is also a curiosity in the timeline of the film. The boys left Karachi on the October 12, crossing the border on the 14th. They hadn’t, they told the film-makers, really expected that a war would actually happen. That’s how innocent they were. But the bombing of Kabul and Kandahar began at 7.45pm local time on October 7, and the battle was already five days old before they left Karachi. The film glosses over this fact, too.
Finally, though the Tipton lads are shown as having been lovable rogues back home, there are no interviews with those who have claimed that, by September 2001, they had already become religiously zealous, and anxious to listen to the preaching of men like Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal, the imam later jailed in Britain for calling upon Muslims to murder Jews.
I am emphatically not saying here that I believe that the Tipton Three took up arms in Afghanistan and fought for the Taleban. Their story may be implausible, but it isn’t impossible. What I am noting here is the way in which Winterbottom banishes ambivalence. His Guantanamo detainees are innocent, even if the facts have to be selected carefully so as to reinforce that impression.
I’ll come back to this in a moment. Meanwhile, let’s agree that Guantanamo has been a disaster for America, a disaster for America’s friends and a godsend for America’s enemies. It represents a panicky descent into arbitrary behaviour, a descent that was partly responsible for the Abu Ghraib catastrophe and wholly responsible for the United States Administration authorising the use of torture during interrogation. In August 2002 the Justice Department, in what is now known as the Torture Memo, permitted the CIA to inflict pain and suffering on detainees, and later in the year Donald Rumsfeld gave formal approval to the use of techniques such as stress positions, sleep deprivation, hooding, extra-loud music and extra-bright lights. The result of all this has been precisely as Dr Williams has argued: comfort to every tyrant, encouragement to every zealot. The Lord Chancellor has recently said that Guantanamo should be shut.
So there we are, if things go the way we say they should then it’s all done and dusted, the world set to rights, the camp closed and everyone happy except the terrible Bushites. But if that was really the case — if it was so damn simple — why would we need our Tiptonites to be so very innocent in order to make our case? Surely the argument would stand whether they were jihadis or not.
Just to recap. There are British jihadis who have killed, or planned to kill, dozens of Britons. And the problem is that their profiles are not so very different from the Tiptonites, and certainly not very different from that of Moazzam Begg. They’re always nice guys, family guys, and we simultaneously demand that the intelligence services and the police know who they are and pre-empt their possible acts of terrorism, while demanding that they only be detained if they can be brought to trial and found guilty in a court of law, and that the wrong ones are never detained.
Not all of us are such hypocrites. I have heard, in the past week, an eminent progressive lawyer argue that the threat from jihadis is no greater than that we faced from the IRA. On that basis (conveniently forgetting the extra-legal actions that actually were taken back then), you may argue that we can afford to take the risk that a few bombers escape the net, in order to safeguard our legal integrity.
What you can’t do is what, I think, Winterbottom and all too many Britons now do, which is to obliterate the dilemma, so that the problem becomes entirely one for the authorities and not for us. Guantanamo is a bad reaction to something real, but none of us quite knows what the good reaction looks like.
David Aaronovitch’s weblog is at www.timesonline.co.uk/weblogs
