Trial By Spin Machine

[DaSangarTalib]

The innocence of British Muslims released from Guantánamo is a story no official wants told

Victoria Brittain

The coincidental release of Michael Winterbottom's prize-winning film about the young men from Tipton, Road to Guantánamo, and Moazzam Begg's book, Enemy Combatant, predictably brought the US and British spin machines into full swing last week - so that anyone reading the book or seeing the film would have got the idea that these men may have been badly treated, but they certainly were not innocent.

Last week the Daily Telegraph flagged an exclusive on its front page. "Begg told FBI he trained with al-Qaeda," was the headline over a full-page article by Con Coughlin, the paper's security correspondent, using an FBI report which, as Begg's book explains, was written by two FBI agents. After Begg had been tortured, threatened with death, offered a job undercover by the CIA, and come to believe he would never see his family again, he signed the "confession", confident that it was so illiterate and inconsistent that no court of law would accept it as having been written by an educated man such as himself. Coughlin had a copy of the book from the publishers, so - assuming he read it - knew all this as he prepared his piece, which has so damaged Begg.

Meanwhile, Colleen Graffy, the US deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, was in London last week on a propaganda offensive. Ms Graffy had visited Guantánamo and witnessed no unpleasant interrogation, no torture and plenty of sports facilities, she told Jeremy Vine on Radio 2. The imperturbable Vine was speechless when she drew from her bag a sample tube used for force-feeding prisoners and explained to him that it had no metal edges and was therefore humane.

The force-feeding at Guantánamo has been strongly condemned in a letter signed by 250 doctors in The Lancet. However, wider British audiences will have read not that, but "How Innocent is Moazzam Begg?" over Andrew Gilligan's interview in the Evening Standard, while in the Daily Mail a rant from Richard Littlejohn linked Begg and the Tiptons, claiming their stories don't stand up to "close scrutiny".

Five years ago, in the British Journalism Review, David Leigh reported on cases of intelligence services using journalists. One was the 1995 Sunday Telegraph story about the son of Libya's Colonel Gadafy and his alleged connection to a currency-counterfeiting plan. The story was written by Mr Coughlin, the paper's then chief foreign correspondent, and was originally attributed to a "British banking official". In fact - as emerged in a libel case brought by Gadafy's son - it had been given to him by an MI6 officer, who, it transpired, had been a regular contact for years.

Whatever the intentions of Coughlin and other journalists, the innocence of Begg, the Tipton Three and the other British detainees who have come home is a part of the story of Guantánamo that no official wants people to hear. Like all major miscarriages of justice finally overturned, the officials concerned will never apologise for breaking these men's lives, no one in authority will lose their jobs, and sections of the media will continue to question their innocence. The denial of justice for these British Muslims - not to speak of the 490 men, including nine UK residents, still in Guantánamo with no legal rights - will corrode the social fabric of this country far into the future.

But the horror of Bagram, Guantánamo and other secret American detention and torture centres for Muslims, in which the UK government is scandalously complicit, is now so well known throughout the world that no propaganda offensive by western officials and their friends has any prospect of lasting success.

SOURCE: The Guardian