Senior United Kingdom ministers are resigned to the prospect that the two British prisoners who face United States military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba cannot be repatriated to stand trial at home because the legal barriers to such a political compromise are insurmountable.
The stalemate has become hugely embarrassing to Prime Minister Tony Blair as he headed for Washington this week to enjoy the rare honour of addressing a joint session of Congress.
The Britons are among six designated prisoners — held incommunicado for 18 months since the Afghan campaign — facing secret justice before a military tribunal. If they plead not guilty, they could risk the death penalty for alleged terrorist offences.
The fact that two of the six are British citizens has led to speculation in Whitehall that they may have been chosen in the hope that, faced with a strong prosecution case, they will accept plea-bargaining and tell what they know in return for leniency.
But British officials deny claims by MPs who have visited Capitol Hill that a formal US offer to send back Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi was rejected by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, because he could not guarantee, as the Bush administration had demanded, that they would face trial in Britain for alleged intelligence offences.
”That offer might have been discussed among US officials, but there were the usual fissures between the State Department and the Department of Defence. It was never agreed among them,” said one Whitehall official. The US Defence Department would control a military tribunal at Guantanamo.
British lawyers say that intelligence or interrogation-based evidence would make it hard for the crown prosecution service even to try to mount a successful prosecution and that, in any case, defence lawyers would argue that lack of access to their clients for 18 months rendered a fair trial impossible.
The news that the British government was giving up hopes of repatriation came as the wife of one of the British men added to pressure on Blair by calling for her husband to be brought back to the UK.
On the first birthday of the couple’s son, Sally Begg this week asked the prime minister to intervene on Moazzam Begg’s behalf so that he might meet the baby he has never seen.
Moazzam Begg (35) was arrested in Pakistan where he had been running an Islamic school and was transferred to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan before being moved to Guantanamo Bay.
Sally Begg, who was in the family’s Islamabad home when her husband was arrested, said: ”I think he should be brought back home where I can see him, where the children can see him…”
Speaking to BBC radio she made a personal appeal to Blair: ”I would say ‘You are a father, you are a husband and you are there for your wife. I want my husband to be there for my children and for me and I need him just like your wife needs you’.”
Family and friends of Feroz Abbasi say they are extremely concerned for the mental health of the former computing student from south London. The Abbasi family’s local MP, Geraint Davies, said: ”I fear that his mental health will have been adversely affected by his treatment, and he may not be fit to face trial or brief a lawyer to mount a proper defence.”
A recent report by journalist Ted Conover claimed that one in 10 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay had attempted suicide last year. He said that in the first three months of this year there had been 14 suicide attempts by 11 individuals, most by hanging.
All prisoners are held in cells measuring 2m by 2,4m, doors and walls are made of mesh and ”each prisoner is allowed out of the cell only three times a week for 20 minutes of solitary exercise in a large concrete-floored cage, followed by a five-minute shower”, according to Conover.
British officials admit that the prospect of military justice for Guantanamo prisoners has been under private discussion between London and Washington for some time.
In reality it is all but impossible, officials admit, to see how the US demand for a trial can be squared with British legal impediments. The slim chance of any repatriation leaves Britain hoping that Blair can save face by winning the same rights as those accorded to John Walker Lindh, the American captured in the Afghan campaign, who was tried in open in a US civil court.
Yet the concessions made by the Bush administration on behalf of a US citizen with middle-class Californian credentials are unlikely to be repeated on behalf of the captives from Britain and elsewhere in Guantanamo.
Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who has represented some of the British inmates in the US, said: ”It seems unlikely the US would give a civil American trial just to the English people, because then how would they justify not doing the same for the 674 others.”
Officials close to Blunkett and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw deny there is any division between them as they struggle to ensure that Begg and Abbasi, along with any other Britons tried, get proper legal representation and as fair and open a trial as the US will accept. — Â