Sitting alone on our hands
Mamdouh Habib's torture allegations were dismissed as outlandish, but American admissions have raised questions Australia doesn't want to ask. Deborah Snow and David Marr report.
The more information pours out of Washington, the more Australia has to face the question: what did we know about rendition and torture? Did we connive or turn a blind eye? Did we assist interrogators who were treating prisoners brutally? Did our military in Baghdad know what was going on in Abu Ghraib? And if they did, what, if anything, did Australia do about those horrors?
Next Wednesday marks the second anniversary of David Hicks's return from Guantanamo. Mamdouh Habib was released from the same prison two years earlier immediately after making accusations in US courts of torture. But their allegations of mistreatment have never been investigated by Australia.
Under John Howard, Australia left investigations to the US military, which found that "there was no evidence to support abuse allegations" in 2004 and 2005. Among other things we have learnt since is that the Bush administration redefined "abuse" to exclude beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" that the Red Cross declares are "tantamount to torture".
Following the publication by President Barack Obama last month of the US Justice Department's so-called Torture Memos, what had seemed outlandish allegations of mistreatment made by Habib now appear entirely plausible. In bureaucratic prose, the memos give permission to interrogators to commit many of the acts of cruelty Habib claims to have suffered.
Kevin Rudd used to taunt John Howard and Alexander Downer to "stand up and restate their absolute confidence that there have been no human rights abuses against Mr Hicks and Mr Habib". But when the
Herald asked the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, this week if the Rudd Government would give the same assurances now, he fell back on the 2005 inquiry by the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
"The findings of the NCIS investigation are consistent with reports by Australian officials, who regularly visited Mr Hicks and Mr Habib at Guantanamo Bay, that no evidence of maltreatment or abuse was found," McClelland said.
The Rudd Government is giving the same answers the Howard government gave to the same questions despite all we have learnt about US conduct of torture and rendition.
In Washington two congressional committees are digging down into the system. Powerful forces in the capital are calling for a South African-style truth commission. The Spanish Government is trying to find ways of prosecuting the former US attorney-general Alberto Gonzales.
Poland is investigating allegations that the CIA used one of its abandoned military bases as a "black site" to torture prisoners. The British Attorney-General has directed Scotland Yard to investigate the possible complicity of British intelligence services in the torture of Binyam Mohamed - a case with close parallels to Habib's.
But nothing is happening in Canberra. McClelland told the
Herald: "The United States is currently in the process of reviewing issues relating to Guantanamo Bay and the Australian Government awaits the outcomes of this process." Investigation of possible Australian complicity in rendition and torture is not on the agenda.
Yet the Habib case raises those questions at every turn. Why, for instance, did the Howard government conduct an elaborate charade for years, pretending not to know if Habib was imprisoned in Egypt before turning up in Guantanamo Bay?
Evidence that they knew has been emerging for years. After the fall of Howard, it emerged that the US sought the views of both ASIO and the Australian Federal Police "on the possibility of Mr Habib's transfer to Egypt" within days of his arrest in October 2001. We were forewarned of the rendition.
Last year documents emerged showing the planned rendition was discussed at a meeting in Canberra of senior officials including Dennis Richardson - then director-general of ASIO and now Australian ambassador to the US - and officials from the AFP, the Attorney-General's Department, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
They apparently decided "that the Australian Government could not agree to the transfer of Mr Habib to Egypt". But the rendition went ahead three weeks later. Habib says he was shackled, hooded and his anus plugged. These details, dismissed at first as wild allegations, turn out to be standard operating procedure for renditions.
He was held in Egypt for six months. During this period, he alleges, ASIO colluded with Egyptian interrogators by sending them information seized during raids on his Sydney home. "It's pretty damning of the Australian Government," says Habib's solicitor, Peter Erman.
"They send SIM cards, computer disks or a series of questions to the Egyptian authorities and say, 'We'd like him to be asked about these things,' knowing that Egypt uses torture. That is being complicit even if they were not present."
Allegations that Britain's MI5 provided material to assist the interrogators of Binyam Mohamed - a British resident rendered to Morocco for interrogation and, he alleges, torture - are now being investigated by Scotland Yard. "We abhor torture and never order it or condone it," said a Foreign Office spokesman "We take allegations of mistreatment seriously and investigate them when they are made."
It's not how they talk in Canberra.
For the past 3½ years, Mamdouh Habib has sought redress through the only channel left open to him - the courts. A compensation claim against the Commonwealth has dragged on in the Federal Court, bogged down by legal manoeuvring on both sides and by government obstructionism.
Last December, Justice Nye Perram of the Federal Court struck out part of Habib's claim while indicating how his lawyers might put the case on a more sound basis: by alleging that Canberra broke its obligations under the Geneva Conventions banning torture.
In an amended statement of claim partly drafted by Ian Barker, QC, Habib also accuses federal police, ASIO and the Department of Foreign Affairs of criminal conduct through their complicity in his torture at the hands of interrogators while he was detained in Pakistan, Egypt and finally Guantanamo Bay.
At each stage of this saga, his statement of claim alleges, Australian officials were broadly aware of the treatment meted out to him, did little to discourage it, and at times witnessed or participated in interrogations where it was clear he had been under extreme physical duress.
In Pakistan, for instance, he alleges he was drugged, beaten, given electric shocks, made to stand on an electrified drum, hung by chains from the ceiling and "subjected to such pain and suffering as to render him unconscious".
On at least three occasions in Pakistan, he claims, "one or more AFP officers, ASIO officers and/or a DFAT officer … conducted or participated in … interrogations in circumstances where … the Applicant [Habib] bore physical symptoms of his mistreatment in that he was bruised, unsteady on his feet, in shock and at times unable to talk without crying".
After his rendition to Egypt, the interrogation techniques grew more brutal. Habib claims fingernails were extracted, cigarettes were extinguished on his flesh, and he was kept in a flooded chamber with water up to his neck.
Eventually Habib was transferred to a US jail in Afghanistan before being flown to Guantanamo in May 2002. In his book,
My Story, released last year, Habib alleges a list of horrors he experienced while detained by the Americans.
Those claims have gained new weight from official documents released in the US last month. These are the so-called Torture Memos written by Justice Department lawyers between 2002 and 2005 to justify the "enhanced interrogation techniques" the CIA wanted to use on "high-value" al-Qaeda suspects.
Habib says he was kept shackled in a cramped box unable to stand; kept naked in the cold; was flung against the walls and floor of his cell; beaten; deprived of sleep for days on end; sometimes had the light in his cell on 24 hours a day and at other times was kept in the dark with loud music playing continuously; and subjected to various sexual humiliations.
The Torture Memos permitted similar - at times identical - practices described in minute anatomical detail. These include "walling" (throwing prisoners against a specially constructed wall); the "facial slap" and the "abdominal slap"; confinement in small, darkened spaces; "wall standing" (forcing suspects to hold stress positions which put all their body weight on their fingertips); "dietary manipulation"; forced nudity; dousing in cold water; long periods of white noise and constant bright light; and shackling during sleep deprivation to keep a detainee in a standing position.
The language is clinical. Sleep deprivation, for instance, is defined as shackling a detainee "in a standing position with his hands in front of his body, which prevents him from falling asleep but also allows him to move around within a two- to three-foot diameter. The … hands are generally positioned below his chin, although they may be raised above the head for a period not to exceed two hours".
Extraordinarily, these sessions were often overseen by US medical personnel, leading the Red Cross to comment in a report leaked last month that the medical officers involved had "committed a gross breach of medical ethics".
McClelland also cites Habib's case against the Commonwealth as a reason for no inquiries being planned by Canberra. "Allegations relating to Mr Habib's treatment overseas and the question of whether Australian officials were complicit in any mistreatment are currently before the Federal Court of Australia."
But as one Labor backbencher remarked: "Rudd is not interested in human rights. This issue is as dead as a dodo."
SMH 16-5-9
http://www.smh.com.au/national/sitting-alone-on-our-hands-20090515-b62p.html?page=-1
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