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It being Six o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.
PETITIONS
Speed Restrictions
6 pm
Hugh Robertson (Faversham and Mid-Kent) (Con): I wish to present a petition on behalf of Anna Peschek, a constituent of mine and pupil at Invicta Grammar school, Maidstone, Kent, and 91 other constituents.
That reckless drivers endanger lives in rural areas where speed restrictions have not been applied.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Government to take immediate steps to effect a drastic reduction in the speed of traffic through rural villages.
To lie upon the Table.
Post Office Closure
Mr. David Amess (Southend, West) (Con): The announcement of the closure of a further five post offices in Southend, West has widespread despair in the community that I represent, which contains the greatest number of people aged between 100 and 112 in the country. The petition contains 500 signatures and was organised by Mr. R. Patel.
Many are concerned about the proposed closure of the Earls Hall Parade branch of the Post Office, Earls Hall Parade.
The Petitioners therefore request the House of Commons urge the Government to do all in its power to prevent the Post Office from closure.
To lie upon the Table.
1 Jul 2004 : Column 524
Tariq Dergoul
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Gillian Merron.]
6.1 pm
Ms Oona King (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab): I have sought to raise this issue in Parliament since my constituent, Tariq Dergoul, was released from Guantanamo Bay earlier this year. Tariq's detention took place during the war on terror, and in that context I shall quote Johan Steyn, a Lord of Appeal:
"Democracies must defend themselves. Democracies are entitled to try officers and soldiers of enemy forces for war crimes. But it is a recurring theme in history that in times of war, armed conflict or perceived national danger, even liberal democracies adopt measures infringing human rights in ways that are wholly disproportionate to the crisis."
This debate revolves around the values that the Prime Minister reaffirmed yesterday—freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Those values hinge on rights, and two of the most important rights in this country are that a person is innocent until proven guilty and that everyone has the right to a fair trial. Today is a historic day on which to hold this debate, because even Saddam Hussein, a man who murdered hundreds of thousands of people and perpetrated genocide against the Kurds, the Marsh Arabs and the Shi'a in southern Iraq, has been given the right by the new sovereign Iraqi Government to stand trial, and that trial will be fair and accord with due process. The right to trial was not accorded to my constituent, Tariq Dergoul, the Tipton three, the other ex-detainees who were released without charge or the current prisoners, who continue to languish in Guantanamo Bay.
I begin with Tariq's story. In his own words, he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He travelled to Pakistan and then Afghanistan, and admits that he had an ill-conceived entrepreneurial idea to buy property, which was falling in value after the attacks on 11 September, in the area. Whatever happened to Tariq Dergoul, everyone agrees that he had been seriously injured before the Northern Alliance, which gave him medical treatment, picked him up and sold him to American agents for $5,000. He was taken to Bagram for a month, Kandahar for three months, and then on to Cuba.
Tariq says that in Bagram, when
"they found out I was British, I was put on a stretcher bed in a room. An American interrogator in civilian clothes came and said, 'You are going to help us. I am your ticket out of here. Tell us what we want to hear and you can go home.'"
"The second day I was put in a cage. There were seven or eight cages in a row. The cages were big with about twenty people per cage and there was a toilet which was half a barrel at the back . . . The conditions were absolutely freezing and very icy and there was very loud machinery going on all the time so you could not hear people speak . . . I was interrogated five or six times in the first week and twenty or twenty-five times in all . . . I was in extreme pain from the frostbite and my other injuries. I was very weak and could barely stand . . . I kept asking for medical treatment"—
but the medics refused it. He continues:
"In the interrogation, interrogators were constantly putting to me that I was with Osama Bin Laden and that I was in Tora Bora. They put me under very great pressure and I was in pain and frightened. In the end I agreed with them that I had been in the
- Tora Bora mountains but I would not agree to say that I had been fighting or that I had met Osama Bin Laden. At this time I did not even understand the significance of the place Tora Bora."
"One of the things that frightened me very much when I was in Bagram was that I saw the way in which other people in adjoining cages were being treated. They all appeared to be Afghans. The guards with guns and baseball bats were outside the cages and were pointing guns at them and they were made to assume squatting positions for hours at a time. If they fell over out of exhaustion, the guards would go in and beat them until they lost consciousness. They called it 'Beat Down' . . . Another thing I saw in Bagram was two or three people hung by their hands with bags over their heads. They were in a room opposite the cages. There was also the noise of gunshots and people screaming . . . I really thought the guards would kill me."
"After Bagram I was taken to Kandahar . . . I was constantly taken to interrogation . . . I was hooded . . . some of the time . . . during interrogation. I was interrogated at least three or four times a week for up to seven or eight hours a day."
He says that he eventually received the medical treatment that he had been asking for. However, the operation to amputate his toe
"was done by a trainee medic who was told what to do by a doctor. I was still conscious while the operation was carried out (I had no sensation in my feet) and someone was asking me questions."
They were interrogating him while the amputation took place.
"After three months in Kandahar I was flown to Guantanamo Bay . . . I was . . . chained with the three piece suit around my arms, legs and waist. I had goggles on my eyes . . . I couldn't see or hear anything . . . There were constant flashes with people taking photographs."
"After I arrived in Guantanamo Bay I started to become religious and to put my faith in Allah which got me through the experience. I was interrogated many times".
He says that he was also interrogated by British interrogators, and says:
"I told the British interrogators on at least five times occasions every detail of what was going on in Guantanamo Bay, including the beatings.
Later the American interrogators did things that upset me. They threatened to send me to Morocco and Egypt where I would be tortured. They played US music loudly during interrogations. They brought pictures of naked women and dirty magazines and put them on the floor. One of the interrogators . . . grabbed the Qur'an with his feet up on the table and read it like . . . a magazine. He made jokes about the Qur'an."
"In later interrogations, I was . . . chained to a ring in the floor, for at least six and sometimes as long as ten hours with no access to sanitary facilities. The interrogators left the room for hours at a time. I had to go to the toilet on the ground. The guards on the other side of the mirror could be heard making jokes . . . During interrogation, if you moved from a sitting position or closed your eyes, they would take the chair away and make you bend your legs to sit cross-legged. They would then tighten the chain so there was no slack and you couldn't bend to the left or the right. This happened in very many interrogation sessions. I would get cramp and start screaming. The guards would swear at Muslims and curse Allah and the Prophet Mohammed."
The descriptions of Tariq's interrogations are extremely long and detailed, and often end with the extreme reaction force arriving.
"When the ERF were called, they were always accompanied by someone with a video camera."
People will realise the significance of that in the light of events at Abu Ghraib.
Let me summarise Tariq's situation. He was denied medical treatment for three months. His arm had already been amputated; some of his toes were amputated and he suffered many of the treatments that Amnesty International has documented. He describes many instances of that. For example, he said:
"One time they put me on the floor and jumped on me. I was knocked out and lost consciousness as a result of being beaten. When I woke up there were voices and it was dark. I was on the floor in the same cage with my head against the toilet."
"The main thing is they wouldn't let you keep clean. For months and months, they wouldn't let you have soap. These were the camp rules. They were enforced by the people in command. When they took all your stuff away, they would say, 'It's camp rules. If you don't give it to us, we will attack you.'"
Again, that is significant in the light of General Miller's involvement in running the regime at Guantanamo Bay and his subsequent transfer to Abu Ghraib. We have seen vividly recorded pictures of the torture that took place there.
My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary is well aware of the United Nations convention against torture. It is worth pointing out that we have signed it and, as signatories, we have agreed the following definition in article 1:
"'torture' means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed".
"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
That brings me to one of the British citizens who remains in Guantanamo Bay, Moazzam Begg. He has asked the United Kingdom to register a complaint on his behalf with the United Nations Committee against Torture. I know that the Under-Secretary met a delegation from the Guantanamo commission on human rights recently. Will he let me know whether the Government can register the complaint at the UN Committee against Torture? If he cannot do that now, I should be grateful if he would write to me.
The debate revolves around whether torture and detention without trial are acceptable. After reading much of the material and evidence that is currently available, I conclude that the American Administration believe that torture may be justified. Indeed, in August 2002, the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing al-Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified." That tallies with the report by General Antonio Taguba about Abu Ghraib. It states that abuse there began when General Miller arrived with 30 colleagues for a visit last September and instituted the system that he had already created at Camp Delta.
1 Jul 2004 : Column 527
General Lance Smith, deputy chief of US central command, recently told a Senate hearing that some of the 20 techniques that Miller authorised were banned in Iraq because there, unlike Guantanamo Bay, prisoners were supposedly protected by the Geneva conventions. The techniques include sleep deprivation, binding in uncomfortable positions and the use of excessive heat or cold. Tariq described them to me in vivid detail. He experienced or witnessed them all. All the evidence—including new allegations that the American Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, as the person at the top of the command structure, was aware that both physical coercion and sexual humiliation were taking place in Iraqi prisons—points to the fact that the US Administration are willing either to tolerate or actively to promote torture.
Amnesty International has called on the coalition leadership to send a clear signal that torture will not be tolerated in any circumstances, and that the Iraqi people can now live free from such brutal and degrading practices. I would hope that the same would be true for all detainees in Guantanamo Bay. Let us remember that those people have not been charged, which brings us back to the fundamental right of people to have a fair trial, to hear the evidence against them and to have access to a lawyer.
"fully independent, impartial and public investigation into all allegations of torture",
and I certainly support that. If Iraq is to be the stable country that we hope that it will be, human rights must be a central component. Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty International, has said:
"If the administration has nothing to hide, it should immediately end incommunicado detention and grant access to independent human rights monitors, including Amnesty International and the United Nations, to all detention facilities."
The letter from Amnesty, containing the request for a public investigation, was also signed by Desmond Tutu and many others, and I certainly endorse that plea.
That is pertinent to the case of Moazzam Begg. His father has requested the British Government to do everything that they can to allow him to visit his son, whose physical and mental health has deteriorated dramatically. He has also asked whether he could be accompanied by the leading forensic psychiatrist in the field, Dr. James McKeith. I know, having spoken to the Minister and to the Foreign Secretary, that the British Government are working hard on these issues, but the fact remains that our citizens are not being given the right to see a lawyer and have not had the right to medical treatment. Article 3 of the European convention on human rights bans torture and inhumane and degrading treatment.
The final issue that I want to raise is the situation facing ex-detainees who return here. As the Tipton three found out when they returned home, and as Tariq has discovered, there simply is not enough help and support available. In fact, the Tipton three believe that there has been none. They have received death threats and have passed on more than 30 of them to the police, who said that they would be investigated. However, to date, that has not happened, and I hope that the Minister will be
1 Jul 2004 : Column 528
able to pass on a request to his Home Office colleagues to ensure that it does. Instead, the Tipton three have been subjected to Richard Littlejohn writing in The Sun the day before yesterday that the "Tipton Taliban are home". So, they have received no trial from the Americans, yet they now face a trial by media here.
Tariq's situation is equally grave. He has had terrible problems finding housing because he was considered to be "intentionally homeless". It was not his intention to be detained, abused and tortured for two years. I remain extremely concerned about his situation, and I would be most grateful if the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea could use its discretion to prevent his return to Tower Hamlets, where his case is well known and where he and his family have been threatened. His disability living allowance has also been refused because he has not been resident in the UK for the requisite number of weeks in the last year, but that was because he was being held against his will in Guantanamo Bay.
The Kafkaesque nightmare for Tariq and the Tipton three continues, even though they are now, in theory, free from all that. As for Moazzam Begg and the others, their situation remains extremely grave. I thank the Minister for the work that he has done on this matter, and I thank the Foreign Secretary for the time that he has taken to discuss it with me in private. For the record, however, it seems to many people, including me, that the Americans use "torture lite". For the full-calorie version, they ship prisoners to Arab countries. None the less, what they are using is torture, and it still kills people.
My constituent's story exposes both the method and the madness. The method is sadistic, illegal and immoral, and it is mad for intelligence services to use the product, which is unreliable and inaccurate. I trust that the British Government will uphold our obligations under international conventions and end the legal and moral black hole that has wrecked Tariq Dergoul's life.
6.20 pm
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