United States military authorities at Guantanamo Bay have not finished interrogating seven of the nine British detainees and have yet to decide whether ”they have done something wrong”, Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, said on Thursday, nearly two years after the prison camp was set up in Cuba.
Powell’s remarks, in an interview with The Guardian in his state department office, appear to dash hopes of a swift resolution to the fate of the British inmates. The US struck a deal with the Australian government this week, under which two Australian suspects would have lawyers from their own country if they faced military tribunals and might be able to serve their sentences in Australia.
Powell said there were still some legal obstacles to overcome before a deal could be reached on the two Britons, Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg, who have been named among the first group of prisoners to face a military commission.
”The specific cases of two detainees that are before our military tribunal, the British detainees, is a difficult one,” Powell said. ”There are some very complex legal issues that our lawyers are still working out. But the president is anxious to do what he can to resolve that one. And we’re trying to be very sensitive to the needs of Tony Blair’s government.”
He did not specify what the outstanding legal issues were, but his remarks about the other seven inmates — Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed, Richard Belmar, Tarek Dergoul, Martin Mubanga, and Jamal Udeen — offered even less hope that they would be freed or at least learn their fate any time soon.
”The other seven are in a different track and they have not yet gone through the entire intelligence and interrogation process that exists in Guantanamo to determine whether or not they have done something wrong and therefore should be subject to some judicial process, or whether they should be released, and what danger they present,” he said.
The comments were greeted with outrage from human rights groups and the prisoners’ lawyers. Relatives of all nine Britons, who were captured in Afghanistan, have denied they had links with terrorist groups.
Stephen Jakobi, the director of the pressure group Fair Trials Abroad and an adviser to the European parliament on the issue of Guantanamo Bay, said: ”It is necessary under international law to bring people before a court promptly. I have yet to see a definition of ‘promptly’ that means two years. The idea that intelligence can’t process people over two years in risible. What Powell has said makes no sense.”
Rights
The US Supreme Court agreed earlier this month to hear arguments from lawyers for a group of prisoners, including Iqbal and Rasul, demanding access to civilian lawyers and other rights enjoyed by defendants in civilian trials. That hearing is due in spring, but the British government will have to decide by Christmas whether to file an amicus brief, a written argument, laying out its position.
There was little in what Powell said to give much comfort to the government, which had been hoping to win concessions from the Bush administration during this month’s presidential state visit.
The secretary of state, who is due in Maastricht on Monday for a meeting of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Bush had not yet decided whether to lift US tariffs on European steel.”The president is waiting for some more information and reports,” he said.
As for the new international criminal court, the permanent war crimes tribunal supported by Britain and Europe but fiercely opposed by Washington, he said the US had not changed its policy of threatening signatories with economic reprisals if they did not pass laws excluding Americans from the court’s jurisdiction. ”We’re not going to yield on our ICC policy,” Powell said. ”We made it clear that we would not be any longer bound by any of the terms of the ICC, even though President [Bill] Clinton signed it just before he left office, knowing at the time he signed it it would never go to our Senate for ratification.”
In an unapologetic and at times heated performance, Powell also defended his presentation to the UN on February 5, in which he laid out the evidence that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. None has been found.
Asked if there were any claims in his speech that he now regretted, he mused for a few seconds before replying: ”None.” However, he put the responsibility for the speech squarely on the CIA.
”What I presented on the 5th of February was not something that I made up here in the state department,” he said. ”And it was not something that was given to me by people who are not competent to provide such information. It represented the best work of our intelligence community, and I spent several days — I think from Thursday through Monday — with the director of central intelligence, with the deputy director of central intelligence, well into the night — almost midnight every night — and all of the analysts who have responsibility, the senior analysts, and we went over every single item.” – Guardian Unlimited Â