A disturbing expose of the perilous state of freedom and democracy in our society, the book reveals how a culture of intolerance and cruelty has left individuals at the mercy of the security services' unverifiable accusations and punitive punishments.
Both a j'accuse and a testament to the strength and humanity of the families, Shadow Lives shows the methods of incarceration and social control being used by the British state and gives a voice to the families whose lives have been turned upside down. In doing so it raises urgent questions about civil liberties which no one can afford to ignore.
A disturbing expose of the perilous state of freedom and democracy in our society, the book reveals how a culture of intolerance and cruelty has left individuals at the mercy of the security services' unverifiable accusations and punitive punishments.
Both a j'accuse and a testament to the strength and humanity of the families, Shadow Lives shows the methods of incarceration and social control being used by the British state and gives a voice to the families whose lives have been turned upside down. In doing so it raises urgent questions about civil liberties which no one can afford to ignore.
Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror
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Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror
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Overview
A disturbing expose of the perilous state of freedom and democracy in our society, the book reveals how a culture of intolerance and cruelty has left individuals at the mercy of the security services' unverifiable accusations and punitive punishments.
Both a j'accuse and a testament to the strength and humanity of the families, Shadow Lives shows the methods of incarceration and social control being used by the British state and gives a voice to the families whose lives have been turned upside down. In doing so it raises urgent questions about civil liberties which no one can afford to ignore.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781849648523 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 522 KB |
About the Author
Victoria Brittain is a respected journalist who tirelessly fought the US government on Guantanamo Bay in articles and books. Her work on women and children in conflict has transformed war reporting; subverting tired militaristic narratives. She has been a consultant to the UN on The Impact of Conflict on Women. She is a trustee of Prisoners of Conscience and the author of The Meaning of Waiting (Oberon, 2010), Shadow Lives (Pluto, 2013) and co-author of Moazzam Begg's Enemy Combatant (2007).
John Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972) won the Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism, Ways of Seeing (Penguin, 1972), is understood to be a classic of art history. He contributed the foreword to Shadow Lives (Pluto, 2013).
Marina Warner is an award-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols, and fairytales. She contributed an introduction to Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist (Pluto, 2013) and the afterword to Shadow Lives (Pluto, 2013).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Sabah: From Palestine to Guantanamo
'Allah will never give me more pain than I can bear.'
In the spring of 2004, preparing the programme notes for the Tricycle Theatre's production of the verbatim play, Guantanamo, Honour Bound to Defend Freedom, I came across a letter written by a child from one of the families that had not wanted to be interviewed for the play, and which I had therefore been curious about. I wondered who they were and how they fitted into the jigsaw of men from Britain who had ended up in Guantanamo, and whose stories were in the play as small vignettes, unconnected to their real full lives. This family did not even have that small mark in the outside world.
The father of the child, Jamil el Banna, had been arrested in Banjul in West Africa by the Gambian intelligence services, accompanied by Americans, with his best friend, an Iraqi also living in the UK named Bisher al Rawi. An interview for the play with Bisher's brother Wahab (who had been arrested too and then released as he had a British passport whereas the others were UK residents, not citizens) had produced a story utterly incomprehensible to me. One line stuck in my mind. Wahab described asking his guards and interrogators, who included two Americans, to see the British High Commissioner, and being told that the High Commissioner didn't want to see him. His captors went on, 'who do you think ordered your arrest? The British already knew you were in this situation.'
Anas el Banna had written his letter a year before I saw it, to Prince Charles, and to the Prime Minister, asking for help to get his father home.
Dear Sir Tony Blair, I am a boy, I am seven years old ... writing to you this letter from my heart because I miss my father. I am wishing that you can help me and my father? I am always asking mother when will he come back? And my mother says I don't know. Now I have started to know that my father is in prison in a place called Cuba and I don't know the reason why and I don't know where is Cuba. Every night I think of my Dad and I cry in a very low voice so that my mother does not hear and I dream that he is coming back home, and gives me a big hug. Every Eid I wait for my father to come back ... I wish you a happy life with your children in your house.
The Prime Minister's office did not reply, though Prince Charles's did, with his private secretary writing a kind letter, saying that unfortunately the prince was not in a position to intercede.
I wrote to Anas's mother, at the address on his letter, telling her about the play and our hopes that it might help in a very small way towards the men from Britain being released from Guantanamo. The next day I got a phone call in hesitant English from Sabah, inviting me to visit them. And at the weekend I set off with a cake and some children's toys and games, to the household that would change my attitudes and understanding of more things than I could have dreamed of.
In a small north London suburban street, there was a smiling Sabah and three rather wary boys aged between seven and four, a pretty little three-year-old girl with black curls, and a baby, born after her father disappeared into Guantanamo after his business trip to Gambia in late 2002. The house was a jolt back into Palestinian homes I knew in the West Bank and Gaza, or the camps in Lebanon, with few possessions, a picture of Mecca on the wall, no sign of consumerism, a ready plying of visitors with homemade food, and presents of dried fruit and a pretty little teapot. The children were polite and shy, then more fluent in Arabic than in English. Their drawings and writing were stuck up on the kitchen walls.
Visitors were rare enough in the household to cause some excitement, and Sabah talked and talked that afternoon, mostly about her mother and five sisters in Jordan, and about her family's original homes in Jerusalem and Hebron. She spoke about her current very isolated life with just two friends in London. She spoke to them only on the phone, as she had done to Jamil's solicitor, Gareth Peirce, in the 18 months since he disappeared.
She also mentioned that before Jamil left they had two visits to their house from Special Branch, one accompanied by an American. My mind briefly replayed Wahab's words. Only later would I understand all this as part of the vast Western intelligence post-9/11 fishing net, which sent so many innocent men like Jamil to Guantanamo. That afternoon I was deeply struck by two things – how much Sabah mentioned Allah and how, amazingly, she seemed to be happy, despite having no way to understand what had happened to her family and missing her husband so much.
At the end she said shyly, 'I'm sorry, I've talked too much.' But it had been far from too much, and I came back often, to sit in the impeccably clean and tidy kitchen, play with the children and look at their homework, and to listen to Sabah talk, about Palestine mostly. In the early months she talked mainly of the past and happiness, and skirted round how she was bearing the frightening unknown behind the long absence of her husband, and the scary sadness in her son's letter to the Prime Minister, showing him trying to shelter his mother from his fears for his Dad. Similarly, Sabah talked about how she tried to shield her own mother in Jordan from knowing what she was feeling, and how on the phone to her she was always bright and optimistic that he would come home soon. It was often so very far from what she felt that desperation would seize her in the night and she would sometimes step outside the house full of sleeping children to cry.
Miraculously she had created a tiny world of happiness and security for her children, although later I would see at what a cost to herself, with her grief for her husband shut tight inside. She said constantly how she referred everything in her life to Allah, 'I can only pray. I know Allah is doing this to me for a reason. Allah knows what is best for me.' Allah was the unseen presence in everything she said, unself-consciously brought into every thought and decision. When an alarm rang in the kitchen for the prayer hour five times a day, she and the children would pray. They all prayed for their Dad, and his friend Bisher (although they didn't know him), to come back from this place called Cuba. Years later the children would ask Sabah hard questions she could not answer about where their father was and why.
Both Sabah and Jamil had known war, exile and separation from family all their lives. Both had been small children when their families fled their homes as the Israeli army occupied Palestinian territory during the 1967 war. They met in Jordan, where she lived with her parents and five sisters and was working as a school-teacher. Jamil had come home then, hoping to get married on a brief visit from Pakistan, where he was teaching Arabic in an orphanage for Afghan children. His mother and sister suggested the young teacher they knew as his bride. 'I told them to be sure to tell him I have one hand that does not work properly, I didn't want him to be disappointed in me when he saw it later', she said.
Sabah herself always wanted to marry a man who was not just an observant Muslim but, 'very special, very pure, very good'. She had been with her mother on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and Islam was absolutely central to her life. 'I always used to think about Allah and what he would want from me.' She made the decision to wear the scarf when she was fourteen, against her father's advice, as he thought she was too young and would probably change her mind. 'I knew I wouldn't, the hijab feels nice.'
A week after they met, they were married, and Sabah went with Jamil to Pakistan – a huge wrench out of her tight-knit family, which she accepted matter-of-factly. Again she taught in a school, this time to children of many nationalities, and the two of them were happily settled there until the US-backed war against the Soviets in Afghanistan came to an abrupt end when the Soviet army withdrew. The Pakistanis then wanted the Arabs living there to leave. Sabah and Jamil, who spoke only minimal words of English, came to London in 1994, following their neighbours and friends from Pakistan – the Palestinian/ Jordanian cleric Mohammed Othman, later known better as Abu Qatada, and his family. (Much later, as he was interrogated and tortured by the Americans, Jamil would realise that this friendship was probably the source of Western intelligence interest in him; see Introduction and Chapter 7.) The couple was granted political asylum in Britain on the basis of Jamil's previous opposition to the Jordanian government. 'He never spoke to me about that, I never knew', Sabah once said.
They lived a very quiet life bringing up their children and seeing little of the British world around them, but keeping in touch mainly with a few Palestinian or other Arab families. In the early days Sabah taught friends' children at home, before they found schools and settled. She never met her husband's new Iraqi friend from the mosque who proposed the business venture in Gambia to him, as a modest woman who did not meet men except family members she only peeped at him from behind a door. Jamil struggled with English, constantly forgetting the new words she taught him, and Gambia probably felt to him the possible opportunity he needed to provide for his family.
The plan was to go to West Africa for a short period and start a mobile peanut oil factory. None of the Arab men involved had experience of anything of the kind, but Wahab put $250,000 of family money into the scheme, the other partners contributed much smaller sums, and by late 2002 they were ready to go.
Sabah had misgivings – only too well-founded, as it turned out – about the planned trip to Africa to launch the project, but she decided to keep them to herself, as a respectful wife. Just before the group was due to leave in November, the police called on her husband. 'We had two visits to the house from police', she recalled, 'once, just after September 11, when there was an American with them, and a woman who spoke Arabic. The second was just before my husband was leaving for Africa. They told Jamil, 'No problem with your visit to Gambia.'
A more worldly person might have seen it as cause for alarm that the authorities already knew of his plans, and worried about leaving the UK armed only with a UN travel document. But in late 2002 probably few people outside the UK intelligence and police circles had any idea of the way Britain in the post-9/11 period had become part of a vast web of data collection on Muslims across the world and their connections to each other. Then Jamil was gone, and the few weeks without her husband became years.
The first British ex-prisoners came back from Guantanamo in the spring of 2004 and that summer, a few months after I first met Sabah, they produced a devastating report for their solicitors about their treatment by the Americans. One Sunday evening I went with her solicitor, Gareth Peirce, to show it to Sabah, and prepare her for the gruesome details of life in Guantanamo from the men who had been alongside her husband, and whose stories would be in the media, including their details of Jamil's very poor health.
A few months before, reports and pictures of torture by Americans of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had emerged to stun the world with their gross brutality. For Sabah they were a horror she could not get out of her mind. She used to wonder aloud over and over again whether something like this was also happening to Jamil at the hands of the Americans. The only possible answer to this was, 'No, I'm sure it's not the same, Iraq is different.' But now there was no disguising what this legal report reflected of her husband's reality, and there were even grim drawings of the treatment the three young men from Tipton had described. Gareth went through the report with her, away from the children playing outside on a beautiful sunny evening. Afterwards Sabah was extraordinarily quiet and calm – it was Allah's will, she repeated. But months later, she said, 'I didn't sleep that night, and for two days I sat in the park with the children so they would run about and not see my tears.'
All this time she had received only one letter from her husband, written on 14 April 2003 – unknown to him, the day after their baby was born. She received it in August 2003. Over the months she would phone the Red Cross frequently, only to be told, sorry, nothing for you. She would phone again, unable to accept it. And she was one of several Guantanamo families bitterly disappointed at the time with their experiences with the Red Cross. The next letter arrived only in February 2005. She was radiant for days. 'For each child he has written special advice so they know he thinks of them. And for me, so much thoughtfulness.' But it was obvious to her from his words that he had not then read her letters, or seen the children's drawings and messages. (Only the previous month, January 2005, was Jamil finally given 13 letters from his wife that the US authorities had been withholding for more than two years, and some written dialogue could begin between them.)
By then Sabah knew much more about her husband's situation, not only from the first group of British ex-prisoners who had come home, but from the US lawyer, Brent Mickum, who had managed to visit her husband in autumn 2004 after a long legal battle. And in January 2005, the last of the British prisoners, including Moazzam Begg, came home and spoke to her on the phone. None of what she heard was reassuring, mainly because it was all so completely illogical and contradictory. 'I think that human rights here have taken an open holiday', she said sadly, talking over what she had learned – none of it good.
The details kept her awake at night, when tears and despair came with the dark, though she could calm down by reading the Koran and repeating her firm conviction that Allah was looking after her and her husband. By day too she could never get the details out of her head, although she never let down her calm presence in front of the children.
She heard that Jamil was interrogated only five times in Guantanamo, unlike other men who had hundreds of interrogations, and that he was once told by his US interrogator, 'We're trying to get you out of here – we know you're an innocent man.' Nevertheless, a writ of habeas corpus failed, she learned – another layer of hope chipped away. The Guantanamo Combatant Status Review Tribunal – a military court – found Jamil was 'properly classified as an enemy combatant and was part of or supporting al-Qaida forces'.
Unclassified documents from the tribunal gave her a taste of the Alice-in-Wonderland style of the proceedings. For one thing, the tribunal had his name wrong – they were using his father's name, Abdul Latif, rather than his own, Jamil. Then his friendship with the cleric Abu Qatada, described as 'an al-Qaida operative', was listed as the first point in the evidence against him. Jamil told the tribunal that he was 'one of hundreds' who used to pray with Abu Qatada. 'If I were any danger, then Great Britain would have put me in prison.' Sabah was frightened by the absolute lack of logic in Guantanamo.
Another charge stated: 'The detainee was arrested in Gambia while attempting to board an airplane with equipment that resembled a homemade electronic device.' Sabah knew what had been in the public domain for two years: that the first, brief, arrest had taken place in the UK; that the battery charger was not in his luggage but in that of his Iraqi friend Bisher al Rawi – also in Guantanamo – and anyway, there was nothing suspicious about it, it was a battery charger bought from an Argos catalogue. How could the Americans not know all this, she asked? There was no answer.
Her mind could not take in the picture of her husband when she heard that Jamil had told the tribunal that in Gambia, Americans wearing black hoods kidnapped him, handcuffed him, cut off his clothes and flew him to Bagram, where he was kept underground without sight of light for two weeks. 'I was surprised that the Americans would do such a thing, it shocked me.'
By then Sabah knew enough to realise that false accusations under torture, or as a plea bargain, were routine in the system that had developed in the US prisons of the war on terror and which had taken her husband from her. She went over and over in her mind how it could have happened, who it might have been that named Jamil to the Americans. But there were no easy answers during her sleepless nights. Britain was her home, where she had come to be safe, how could she accept that some powerful part of Britain was responsible for the disaster that had overtaken her family.
One of the Tipton young men, Asif Iqbal, told Sabah that Jamil confided that the Americans had told him he would be sent back to Jordan, which made him terrified at the thought that he would be tortured or killed. Sabah's resort as always was prayer. 'I pray all the time and I know my God is there. I pray for my husband's strength.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Shadow Lives"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Victoria Brittain.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsForeword by John Berger
Introduction
1. From Palestine to Guantanamo
2. From Medina to Guantanamo
3. From Palestine and Africa to house arrest in London
4. From Jordan to Belmarsh prison
5. From Egypt to Long Lartin prison
6. The South London families
7. Daughters and Sisters
8. Families surviving the war on terror
Afterword by Marina Warner
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index