Guantanamo Bay: 'Send my son home'
The families of two Britons held at the US base on Cuba are hoping to publicise their cause this week, reveals Robert Verkaik
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Azmat Begg says he will never forget the terror of the last conversation with his son. Moazzam phoned him from the boot of a police car to say he had been arrested by Pakistani security services. Since then, almost two years ago, the only communication between Moazzam and his family has been a few precious, but heavily-censored, letters written during his detention at the American naval base in Guantanamo Bay.
The 65-year-old retired banker from Birmingham says his son's letters are as much a cause for concern as they are a source of relief. "We are concerned he is in a state of depression. There are indications from the letters that he wants to die." The family suspect that Moazzam may have been tortured.
"He said his fingernails were being treated and that he was using cream on his body. The main reason for the American authorities not to show prisoners to the public or to lawyers or relations is because their body is not in the right shape. They must have tortured them so badly it is not possible to show it to their relations."
The story of Begg, argue his family and supporters, is a case of an innocent abroad who took his wife and three young children to Afghanistan to help educate the local people.
Begg, 36, was a law student at Wolverhampton University before dropping out in his second year. After marrying a local girl he opened a bookshop in Birmingham, but started to feel the need to play a bigger part in the education of the children in poorer countries. So he took his young family to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
"The Taliban didn't allow any co-education so his wife wanted to teach the girls and he wanted to teach the boys," says his father. "But he ran into trouble with Taliban red tape. While he was waiting for clearance he took his family to a remote area of the country to make tube wells to improve their access to water."
Then the American bombardment started and the family fled to Pakistan. It was while Moazzam was waiting in Islamabad to return to teaching that he was arrested, bundled into the boot of a car, taken to the American-controlled Bagram airbase, and then on to Guantanamo Bay.
This week his lawyer, Gareth Peirce, the human rights solicitor who rose to prominence in helping to overturn miscarriages of justices including the Guildford Four, hopes to bring Moazzam Begg's case to the attention of George Bush.
Last week, Begg and Peirce joined the family of another British Guantanamo detainee, Feroz Abbasi, to talk about their concerns. Abbasi's mother, Zumrati Juma, a nurse from Croydon, south London, says she received 11 letters from her son in one batch in August. Whole blocks of paragraphs were blacked out by the American censor. But it is the allusion to unknown events during his detention that worry her most. Juma says her son has indicated there is a reason why he had not written earlier, but could not reveal it.
Her lawyer, Louise Christian, uses the newly-coined American term, "torture-lite", to refer to what she suspects Abassi may be describing. "The huge fear is that he has been pressured and coerced and subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment and this may have resulted in him making some sort of plea bargain."
Christian says there is psychiatric evidence that Abbasi has been forced to confess to his interrogators. She has seen a report by an unnamed Pentagon psychiatrist that says he has "overcome much of his mistrust in recent months and exhibited much more outgoing behaviour and cooperation with a better mood and emotional disposition". During previous examinations, the psychiatrist notes, he had "exhibited withdrawn behaviour suggestive of recurrent depression".
But Gisli Gudjonsson, professor of forensic psychology at the University of London, says it is unclear how Abbasi overcame the mistrust of his captors. He suggests one reason may be that he negotiated a deal with the authorities, or was persuaded to reveal incriminating material.
News of Gudjonsson's involvement with the campaign to secure fair treatment for the Guantanamo detainees will have reached Washington. He is well known to American authorities as the psychologist who helped debrief US soldiers captured by the communist Vietnamese and made to confess to trumped-up spying charges. In Britain we know him better as the expert who provided evidence to show that the confessions of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four were unreliable.
The troubling accounts of two of the nine British men detained without trial may not move President Bush to tears. But they add to the moral pressure. Last week the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the case for letting the courts have jurisdiction over the detention of Guantanamo detainees. Two days later, Tony Blair acknowledged that this was an issue that would not go away and was one that he was determined to tackle.
Peter Carter QC, chairman of the Bar Council's human rights committee, believes a series of negotiations between the Attorney General and the Pentagon has failed to reach agreement.
"Clearly the Attorney General believes anyone in Guantanamo Bay cannot have a fair trial - that's why he's been making such strenuous efforts on behalf of British citizens. The problem is that Lord Goldsmith is not a member of the Cabinet and it looks, sadly, as if his efforts have failed."
This week's visit by Mr Bush provides the best opportunity yet to persuade the Americans to agree to the repatriation of the British detainees so they can face justice in this country.
Christian asks what the Americans can be afraid of: "We have the most Draconian anti-terrorist laws in Europe."